The New Yorker Radio Hour - Black Italians Fight to Be Italian

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

In the United States, most of us take it for granted that every person born on American soil is granted citizenship; it’s been the law since 1868, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. But birthright citizenship is more the exception than the rule globally. Not one country in Europe automatically gives citizenship to children born there. Ngofeen Mputubwele, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, has been reporting on a group of Black Italians—children of African immigrants—who are working to change the citizenship laws of Italy, which they consider a system of racist exclusion. They are artists, intellectuals, and activists who use film, literature, music, and fashion to fight for the right to belong to the country in which they were born; Mputubwele compares their movement to “the start of the Harlem Renaissance.” Bellamy Ogak, a Black Italian, tells him that she was moved by the sight of white Italians carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs at protests following the killing of George Floyd but was angered that they seemed to overlook racism at home: “Why do Black American lives matter more than Black Italian lives?” she asks. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Immigration has been and remains an obsession of the Trump presidency. Asked about the pandemic, Trump inevitably points to his ban on flights from China in January. The administration is still fighting to rescind DACA, even after a Supreme Court defeat. And for years now, they've even spoken about ending birthright citizenship. A week before the midterm elections, President Trump said he could end so-called birthright citizenship with a stroke of his pen. A person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits.

It's ridiculous. That's despite the fact that it's in the Constitution. We all know what the 14th Amendment says. We all cherish the language of the 14th Amendment. But the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether or not the language of the 14th Amendment, subject to the jurisdiction, thereof applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally. But the birthright citizenship we have as Americans is the exception, not the rule. Not one country in Europe, for example, automatically grant citizenship to any child born there.

There's basically two main systems in the world, and they use Latin terms. So there's use solely law of the soil, and there's use sanguinness, law of the blood, right? We have used solely in the U.S., like law of the soil. You're born on the soil. You have the citizenship. Gophane and Putubuele is one of our producers, and he also happens to be a lawyer. So let's trust him on the Latin. In Italy, they have U.S. Sanguinis, right?

This idea of lineage, descendancy, right? Initially, that meant, like, you're descended from another Italian man. What that means is that if you're the offspring or the descendant of a Italian man, Italians anywhere on the planet, you have the right to citizenship. Bill de Blasio's kids have the right to Italian citizenship because Bill de Blasio is descended from an Italian seed. For the past two years, Gophane has been working on a story about citizenship, immigration, and race in a context that's very different from the United States.

And before we start, a note of warning. Telling the story involves a racial slur that was directed at one of the characters, and there's really no way around it. So be advised. Here's Gauphin. I studied Italian in college. I sang classical singing, opera. So I like keep up with Italy stuff.

And like there was a certain point in my life where I was like confronting the whiteness of my spaces, the spaces that I was in. And the fact that in Italy, like all my friends were white. And that bugged me. And so I remember at some point kind of being like, I actually haven't even heard a black Italian. I started following a bunch of them on YouTube, on Instagram, et cetera. And there was this one woman in particular. Her name is Bellamy O'Gak.

She has this blog and like YouTube page and stuff called Afro-Italian Souls, an aggregating site for black Italian stuff that's going on. And Bellamy is. like classically Italian. I like clothes, you know, I like doing my makeup. I like going out and being, you know, put together. Her dad was a doctor. I attended Catholic private schools from kindergarten up to high school.

This was like a very preppy, fancy Catholic school. Kids wearing Gucci belt, Louisville belts, Louisville shoes. Bellamy was only, she was like one of two or three black people at the school. When you are the only one of your kind, You are extremely visible all the time. I wanted to be as invisible as possible. But we start talking about her experience, and she tells me, like... I was so blessed to live in a place where I never faced over racism at all.

It was very, very rare. Anything that happened to subtle. What was the kind of thing that would happen to you in high school that you put in the category of, like, a racist thing about or whatever? Well, the N-word, they used to say, Negro di Mirda. Negro de merda means dirty N-word, you know. All my friends were like, oh, F African people, F black people, F immigrants. We hate them, we despise them, they're trash, but you're different because you were born in a race here.

You are eloquent. You don't act like them. I'm so curious that like that doesn't sound like that doesn't sound like subtle racism Well that to me was subtle because I've heard that word

since I was like five years old Yeah I go to a cafe With my godparents who are white And you see Other elder white Italian people coming to me caressing me and say Oh, que bella negretta

Which means Oh you're such a cute little nigger. Like, you're such a cute little nigger girl. Since I was like three, four, five years old. I realized that I wasn't a citizen when I think I was 15, 14 or 15-ish. I wanted to apply for studying holidays in England. I went to this website and you have to indicate

your nationality. That's when I realized that I was like, oh, my nationality is technically Uganda and since it's Uganda, I could see that I had to apply for a visa and then I went to the website

of the Ugandan embassy and the British embassy. And when I realized all the steps that I had to take in order to attend that course, that's when it hit me. That's when I went to my parents, I was like, wait, why are things like this? And that's when they explained to me.

And do you remember at all, like, how your parents explain things to you? Well, African parents are very particular. They're very particular. Well, first of all, no empathy at all. I feel like this is an important point where I should say, I love you, mom and dad. They were like, listen, this is the way it is. White people are trash. African people cannot go anywhere because that's just the way, that's just the way it is. And until you become an Italian citizen, that's what you have to go through. I couldn't even talk about it with anyone because I was ashamed.

I was honestly ashamed and embarrassed. Belami isn't alone. She's part of a generation of black Italians, kids of African immigrants who came in and around the 80s. So my parents are from the Democratic Republic of Congo. My parents and her parents left the African continent around the same time. My parents landed in the U.S. I was born in a hospital in Indiana. Bellamy was born near Milan.

I'm born and I'm automatically an American citizen. She's born and she's Ugandan. Because of us sanguinis, remember Law of the Blood, if you're the child of an immigrant to Italy, you have to wait until you're 18 to apply for citizenship and you have to apply between your 18th and 19th birthday. If you don't apply in that one year, you lose your right to citizenship.

You could live to be 99, Never set foot outside of Italy, but you are still a foreigner. So like two years ago, I reached out to Bellamy, and Bellamy's like, you should come a couple of my friends. We meet every once in a while and talk about these kinds of things. Testing, one, two, three. So I'm like, oh, sweet. Just walking through streets of Milan to get to this address. I go to this little meeting.

And then I show up, and it's like, the artiest art studio. apartment. It felt like a salon. We usually go for wine because we are bougie like that. They have like joloff rice and plantains or whatever, these pieces of African culture that make me feel at home. In the beginning, when I first entered this black Italian universe, it's just me, Bellamy, and about four or five of her friends. But then people start filing into this room. in Milan. Bellamy's close friend, David, walks in. And by the time everyone's there, there's like 20, 25 people. We have two more singers arriving, actually.

Cool. I'll just, like, throw out questions, and I'll move around and, like, come to you. Like, I'm trying to get at what does it look like to live as a black Italian in Italy? Anyone, feel free. There's this lull. Someone even says, like, oh, my gosh, guys, we're so timid. But as they loosen up, everyone has stories that are the various ways that white Italians have told them that they're not supposed to be here as black people in Italy. It's jokes.

Humor. That's one of their stronger weapons to let you know that you're black, that you're different. Of course my parents, they are African, but I was born here. I have both of the cultures. Whenever they see me, they try to enunciate Italian. I'm like, how do you assume that I am not Italian? I want to be straight. I don't think... They start having this kind of like back and forth where someone's like,

I don't know if Italy is a racist country. I'm trying to believe that Italy is an ignorant country. I feel like Italy is a... ignorant country. They don't want to learn. They don't want to know. And this one guy, David, this is Bellamy's friend, he's like,

fact that I am born here, I've lived my whole life here, and you don't consider me Italian, makes Italy a racist country, not an ignorant country. Because, huh?

No, it's, no, it's a fact. That's what racism is. Racism is not just about, oh, they're making me feel a certain way. Racism is about system, it's about society. So the fact that a person is born here and immediately they come out the womb, they have to live their whole life until they're 18 as an immigrant. What does it say about the country and about yourself? You're lost.

As everyone's going back and forth, I'm recording, but I'm also watching having this kind of out-of-body experience. Every single person I've ever seen as a black Italian, they're in this room, like the first black Italian to win a show like American Idol, the first black Italian musician to get signed to a major label, Universal Records, like, everyone is black, everyone is young, artists, intellectuals,

and they're debating about being black in their time. Imagine if you could get into a room with like a young Langston Hughes, Zoro Neil Hurston, Wallace Thurman. It's like the start of the Harlem Renaissance, and they haven't become famous yet. For every nation, there is a generation that is the generation to start the fight. I am in the room with all of the people.

This group, they're, like, mapping out what it is to be Black Italian for, like, the rest of that country's history. This is the generation that have to do this. Because we all, like, first Black Italian, First generation of black Italian. All of us. But like, none of them are born citizens.

They're not considered Italian. In modern Italian history, the first big wave of black immigration came from the African continent post-independence. So Bellamy is the child of immigrants of that generation. But in recent years, migrants have been arriving from Africa in boats on the Italian shores. And these boat landings are constantly in Italian news, kind of like the way we see undocumented immigration from Latin America reported here in the U.S. So in 2018, Italy's population was about 8, 9% immigrants, with about a fifth of those coming from Africa. When I was there in 2018, native-born black Italians were pushing to get a birthright citizenship, but they were losing. losing the battle. A politician named Matteo Salvini was the face of Italian politics.

And he had just pushed through a law that people in Bellamy's world were freaking out about. It severely restricted the rights of immigrants. And the language around it was all about the threat that undocumented immigrants posed to Italy. And the face of undocumented immigrants in Italy is black people. And when the law passed, I remember I started to. crying out of, out of disbelief. So you can imagine how hard it became, life became for us. Of course, when you see me, you see a black person and I do not have, you know, my ID card with Italian citizenship written on my forehead.

So you think I'm an immigrant and so you fear me. These kind of subtle things that have been boiling, a politician helps to channel that and now it becomes more explicit. Every week or so you could read in newspaper, black people being physically attacked, black people being killed. It was crazy. Like, that's when I started really being afraid of being a black person in Italy. And then, in August of 2019, a very, very big, unexpected thing happens. This Trump-like leader of Italy gets ousted.

from power. And so I'm following the news, and I see on Facebook this group of black Italians in Rome is trying to seize the moment and change Italy's laws on birthright citizenship. And I just buy a plane ticket. Gophane and Putubuele is a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

back with our producer, Gofen and Putubuehle. Just to recap for a second, the U.S. has what we call U.S. Soli birthright citizenship. It's written into the 14th Amendment, which passed after the Civil War. The 14th Amendment settled the question of how do we view all the black people who are no longer property? And the answer is citizenship. Anyone born in this country from now on is a citizen, including the children of immigrants ever after. So for a few years, I've been talking to black people in Italy, children of immigrants who don't have birthright citizenship, and they want it.

They want to be recognized as Italians in the country where they were born. So last fall, I go back to see how their fight is going. I am very sleepy. I fly to room. I just flew over from New York. To meet some black Italians who are organizing a protest to try to change Italy's. citizenship laws. And realizing that my American passport makes me, I get to go through the express line.

So I'm here to follow this political moment, but I stopped by a bookstore and in the train station, and I find this book that's come out since I was last in the country. It's got a kid who seems to be, who's like black Italian, he's got an afro, dark skin, well, dark skin for a white person. And it's written by an Italian. named Sunny Ollumati, which is a Nigerian last name. On the back it says, "'Dopo'u'a'n'Ongu'n't S'est'i.

After that night, I and Primo would never be the same.'" In that period that I'm gone, this network of Black Italians, they're making a lot of Black Italian art. One of the people that we hear from writes a novel, Someone writes a very James Baldwin-esque manifesto. They're making these things that are like articulating the contours of what it is to be black in Italy. The hair company, Pantin Provy, they approach Bellamy and they're like, will you be our hair ambassador? With my own foresee Afro hair, like, let's put that in mind.

And Bellamy's like... Never, never, never, never, ever in a million years, I would have been. imagine that the day would come, that you would see like, you know, an ambassador of Panthe with Afro hair. Stop the hair shaming, Panthen. They finally started giving us a chance to express ourselves. So I'm here to follow this political moment, but I realize that there's like two levels of work going on.

There's like this cultural work and there's this political work that these people I'm talking to in Rome are trying to do. The head guy, his name is Amin Nur. He is Somali Italian. He's a filmmaker. We talk and his friend Paulo is there. He's in government, a local government in Rome. And what they think they can pass is a tempered birthright citizenship.

Use culture. So not the law of the soil, but the law of the culture. It would grant them a path to citizenship that's way easier and people could get it long before they turn 18. At one point I asked like, how are you feeling like, do you think that this can happen? No, no, we're always, we're really hopeful. And Amin says, we don't hope, we believe and we fight, no matter of our people, we don't hope, we believe and we fight, no matter of what? They're talking to legislators and trying to get this on

the agenda. They organize a protest. A couple months later, Paolo and the group are testifying before Parliament. The nationalist Salvini government is gone. So, 2019 is over, and

the feeling was like, this thing, if it's going to happen, it's got to happen in 2020. 2020 comes in Italy. In Italy, a terrible milestone. The death toll from COVID-19 in that country now more than 3,400 surpassing the death toll in China despite Italy's much smaller. And so the moment passes. Bellamy, right, our woman in Milan, she's in isolation, right?

Quarantine like all of us. And she says this really interesting thing. She's like, even when things are getting better in that things are reopening. I literally got an anxiety attack because I was like, I did not have to face any racism at all. Oh my God, I have to face. I actually have to deal with white people again. That's March and April. May.

In May. Omer's Aubrey. American man being chased down. The story of Ahmad Arbery breaks. I remember feeling extremely, extremely overwhelmed and just defeated. Then, George Floyd. I refused to look at the video because I was like, no, I can't. I cannot.

I cannot. I can't. But it was pretty much impossible. Avoid seeing the pictures. And then, of course, you know, when you read, about how he was assassinated and him yelling, I can breathe. And it's like, it's so brutal.

I think, like, that is just like bottom, rock bottom. So when the protests start here in the U.S., very quickly in Italy, you had all these white Italians denouncing in solidarity this act of racism in the U.S. I have never, ever in my life, seen Italy as a country take a stand against racism

in such a unanimous and visible way. Never in my life. So that shocked me, but in a bad way. Why do black American lives matter more than black American lives? Italian lives. So Bellamy, all the writers and artists in that room in Milan, the folks in Rome, black Italians across the country.

When we noticed that there was an open door to discuss racism, we started yelling, this is how racism takes place in Italy. This is what we have been going through all these years. This is what you need to fight for. for with us. If you ignore us now, it means that you really are not anti-racist.

She's like, I have stuff on deck. I have a video that I had been holding about racism in Italy, that I was waiting for the right time to publish. They talked about the racism that they faced throughout their lives. I'm like, okay, let me edit this video quick. It became viral.

All this cultural work that they've been doing for the past years, the fiction book, the memoir, the novels. Like, these things are like, okay, there's this moment now. The mic was given to black people. And at these protests, you're seeing white people and black people holding signs that say, Black Lives Matter. And next to that sign, it says, you solely, birthright citizenship.

I really got emotional because hundreds of thousands, probably millions, I don't know, but hundreds of thousands of people, of white people, went in the street to fight against racism together with us, validating our injustices and our pain. And it's something that I had never seen before in my life. It made me feel seen and it made me feel like you are at least trying to understand what it feels like to be in my shoes and you want to help me dismantle the system. But at the same time, she told this story of her friend David that I mentioned at the beginning of the story. The day of a Black Lives Matter protest, these law enforcement folks came up and were like, hey. Oh, oh, oh, oh, Eul, as if it was a dog.

And they asked for his documents. They ask if he smoked, if he sold drugs. They ask, what does he do for a living? The first thing he did was give them his documents. On the ID, it states that, you know, he has Italian citizenship. And they still ask him, so where are you from? I have the paper. It says I'm born in Italy.

It says I'm a citizen. and from here. They really wanting him to say the country of his parents. They keep pushing him and they keep pushing on it. He insisted in saying, I was born in this town, in this region. I live in Italy. They only let him go when he told them that he works with one of the biggest singers in Italy. He showed them the pictures and that they let him go.

after humiliating him, after making him feel alienated, because Italian citizenship is not enough. I have this kind of theory that I come up with in my mind where it's like, there's like different buckets of belonging to a country. One, your physical presence there. You are there. Second thing, you have legal status. Like you're legitimately legally allowed to be there.

And the third thing, you're like culturally a part of the place. These are three different channels or buckets or whatever. We're constantly pushing on in a country to determine like who belongs. These things aren't linear. Like you're always constantly pushing on the different areas to try to assert your belonging to a country. For every nation, there is a generation that is the generation to start the fight. Those assets or those tools, those weapons, and then hopefully, you know, current generation, future generation. When I was in that room with Bellamy and her friends in Milan, I was like, I feel like this is the Harlem Renaissance.

And then I leave and I was like, I don't even really know what that means. But I feel it, like I feel it like it feels really young and exciting and black and art. And so I'm like looking at the Harlem Renaissance. and I'm looking at it and I'm looking at it and I'm reading what people were writing at the time. And through me, I was like, oh, this is the significance of that time. Black folks went from being a physical presence in the country

to a legal presence, to asserting our cultural presence in this country. The black artists of that generation were articulating in the face of really blatant white supremacy. This is why we belong here. This is how we belong here. This is what it looks, like for us to belong here.

We've been here. And this is us. Gophane and Putubuele is a producer for The New Yorker Radio Hour and our story was a collaboration with WNYC's The United States of Anxiety. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. I hope to join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus. of tune arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Corrieo, Riannon Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. Our story on birthright citizenship was produced with assistance from Marianne McKeown and

Berylind Williams, and music, courtesy of Hannes Brown, Matthias Dobler and Tommy Couty. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.