Racist Taunts, Death Threats Greet Appointment of Italy’s First Black Minister.

Cecile Kyenge

AFRICANGLOBE – It was hailed as a giant step forward for racial integration in a country that has long been ill at ease with its growing immigrant population. But Cecile Kyenge’s appointment as Italy’s first Black minister has instead exposed the nation’s ugly race problem, a blight that flares regularly on the football pitch with racist taunts and in the diatribes of xenophobic politicians — but has now raised its head at the center of political life.

One politician from a party that not long ago ruled in a coalition derided what he called Italy’s new “bonga bonga government.” On Wednesday, amid increasing revulsion over the reaction, the government authorized an investigation into neo-fascist websites whose members called Kyenge “Congolese monkey” and other epithets.

Kyenge, 48, was born in Congo and moved to Italy three decades ago to study medicine. An eye surgeon, she lives in Modena with her Italian husband and two children. She was active in local center-left politics before winning a seat in the lower Chamber of Deputies in February elections.

Premier Enrico Letta tapped Kyenge to be minister of integration in his hybrid center-left and center-right government that won its second vote of confidence Tuesday. In his introductory speech to Parliament, Letta touted Kyenge’s appointment as a “new concept about the confines of barriers giving way to hope, of unsurpassable limits giving way to a bridge between diverse communities.”

His praise and that of others has been almost drowned out by the racist slurs directed at Kyenge by politicians of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, an on-again, off-again ally of long-serving ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, and members of neo-fascist Internet groups.

In addition to his “bonga bonga” slur, Mario Borghezio, a European parliamentarian for the League, warned in an interview with Radio 24 that Kyenge would try to “impose tribal traditions” from her native Congo on Italy.

Kyenge on Tuesday responded to the insults, thanking those who had come to her defense and taking a veiled jab at the vulgarity of her critics. “I believe even criticism can inform if it’s done with respect,” she tweeted.

Unlike France, Germany or Britain, where second and third generations of immigrants have settled albeit uneasily, Italy is a relative newcomer to the phenomenon. France has several high-ranking government ministers with immigrant roots, and few French had a problem with the appointments: Former President Nicolas Sarkozy named a justice minister and urban policy minister, both born in France to North African parents, to his cabinet, while his minister for human rights was born in Senegal. Francois Hollande’s government spokeswoman was born in Morocco and raised in France, and his interior minister was born in Spain. He also has two Black ministers from French colonies — one from Guyana and one from Guadeloupe.

Italy is another story. Once a country of emigration to North and South America at the turn of the last century, Italy saw the first waves of migrants from Eastern Europe and Africa coming to its shores only in the 1980s. In the last decade or two, their numbers have increased exponentially, and with them anti-immigrant sentiment: Surveys show Italians blame immigrants for crime and overtaxing the already burdened public health system. Foreigners made up about 2 percent of Italy’s population in 1990; currently the figure stands at 7.5 percent, according to official statistics bureau Istat.

Some of the most blatant manifestations of racism occur in the realm of Italy’s favorite sport, soccer — which for Italians and others has shown itself to be a perfect venue for displays of pent-up emotions. In the case of a handful of Italian teams, soccer is a way for right-wing fan clubs to vent.

Mario Balotelli, the AC Milan striker born in Palermo to Ghanaian immigrants and raised by an Italian adoptive family, knows all about it. Perhaps Italy’s best player today, he has long been the subject of racist taunts on and off the field: Rival fans once hung a banner during a match saying “Black Italians don’t exist” while the vice-president of his own club once called him the household’s “little Black boy.”

Balotelli called Kyenge’s nomination “another great step forward for an Italian society that is more civil, responsible and understanding of the need for better, definitive integration.”

The race situation is almost schizophrenic in Italy. In the same week Kyenge was made a government minister and Balotelli was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, AC Milan’s cross-town rival, Juventus, was fined 30,000 euro for fans’ racist taunts during a game against Milan in which Balotelli wasn’t even playing.

“There was no racism 40 years ago because there were no non-White Italians,” said James Walston, a political science professor at American University of Rome. “You need the other in order to hate the other.”

“It will take a long time — probably there will never be a completely racism-free society — but it will take a long time for Italy to reach the sort of acceptance, multi-cultural acceptance that the rest of Europe has and North America has,” he said in an interview.

Kyenge got off to a rocky start with the Northern League when, on the day she was named minister, she said one of her top priorities would be to make it easier for children of immigrants born in Italy to obtain Italian citizenship. Currently, such children can only apply once they turn 18.

The issue has vexed Italy for years and previous center-left governments have failed to change the law even though most Italians — 72 percent according to a 2012 Istat-aided study — favor it. It’s not just a matter of a passport but has real impact on the ability of an immigrant family to integrate into Italian society: Children of non-EU immigrants born in Italy, for example, can’t take advantage of the EU citizen discounts at the Colosseum and other cultural treasures, having to pay full admission prices to get in to learn the heritage of the nation where they were born. If they were Italian citizens, they’d get in free until they were 18.

But raising an issue that so riles the Northern League — during an already tense political transition — was enough to set off Roberto Maroni, the interior minister in Berlusconi’s last center-right government and a top League official. Maroni immediately demanded that his successor as interior minister make clear his position on the law.

Other members of Maroni’s party were more blunt: Italian newspapers quoted the head of the League in Italy’s northern Lombardy region Matteo Salvini as saying that Kyenge was a “symbol of a hypocritical and do-gooding left that wants to cancel out the crime of illegal immigration and thinks only about immigrants’ rights and not their duties.”