There’s Just One Human Race’: Notions of Biological Difference in a Color-Blind Italy

Like many of their Western European neighbors, Italians eschew the term “race” (razza) and are not exposed to it in the institutionalized forms—like census questionnaires, school applications, or medical intake sheets—that are familiar to Americans. But does this mean that the notion of biologically-rooted demarcation between descent-based groups is entirely foreign in Italy? Drawing on research conducted with Prof. Marcello Maneri (Dept. of Sociology, University of Milan-Bicocca), I report on our in-depth interviews with 75 college students in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, in conjunction with interviews of 30 students in vocational schools in Milan, and for comparison, interviews of over 50 undergraduates in the north-eastern United States. In contrast to the claim of some scholars that culture-based prejudices distinguish Western European “new racism” from American biology-based racial ideology, we find that beliefs about physical difference that circulate widely in the U.S. are hardly unknown in Italy. Indeed, the relative absence of a developed constructivist view on race among our young Italian interviewees makes it harder for them than for their American peers to counter biological definitions of it, a paradoxical result given Italians’ much stronger rejection of the language of “race.”