“Africa’s Delivery Room”: The Racialization of Italian Political Discourse on the 80th Anniversary of the Racial Laws

Abstract

On February 3, 2018, in the central Italian town of Macerata, Luca Traini, a former candidate of the Lega, the populist right-wing party led by Matteo Salvini, drove around with a gun and used black bodies as targets, in order to “avenge” the murder of Pamela Mastropietro, an 18-year-old heroin addict, allegedly killed by a Nigerian drug dealer. A week later, Beauty, a 31-year-old Nigerian refugee affected by a terminal illness and pushed back at the border between Italy and France, dies in Turin while giving birth to her premature child. These two episodes marked the tail-end of a vitriolic electoral campaign in which anti-Black racism and immigration were strategically used, with the complicity of the media, by both right- and left-wing parties in order to score votes. In this matter, the rigidity of immigration norms and xenophobic fears of invasion by ethnic ‘Others’ appear to go hand in hand with the racialisation and exploitation of women’s bodies, used a tool used to define and defend the “real Italian” from dangerous external contamination. By making explicit the nexus of race/citizenship/gender, this paper examines the resurgence of the language of race in the Italian political discourse and the reasons why terms such as the “defence of the White race” and the “extinction of our race” made their stark and transversal reappearance in the Italian political discourse to sustain an ideal of national identity strictly connected to normative whiteness.