I'm sure those are fine examples of racism. I guess I'm thinking about three things here.
1. How strong is the correlation between the examples and the racism attributable to the average Italian - the people we would ordinarily encounter if we chose to live in Italy?
There are also some structural differences in government that allow regional, extremist parties with openly nationalist or racist platforms to become part of the mainstream, but these are quibbles over cause and not effect. But I think the presence of this public group of racists and the pervasive culture that allows their continued public displays pulls the mean and the median toward that racism and/or pervasiveness.
But I am more than happy to proclaim my willingness to make some value judgments about other cultures when there are real, documented victims. I don't think that is necessarily ethnocentric.
After all, we can probably find examples of racism in other countries, yet we have singled out Italy here in this thread.
Sure. I mean, for instance India still has an estimated 14 million people in slavery
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/17/world/global-slavery-index/. But I think there is clearly a false belief that Europe in general is "not very racist at all" or maybe "less racist than the United States." I'm debating people here about that very topic.
The reason I included the examples I did, was an attempt to provide anecdotes that went beyond one-to-one interactions of the type so often parodied here regarding visiting college football fans. The examples I provided were of groups of individuals, in public, saying blatantly racist things. These examples are one of the main supports of my argument that Italy is a racist, and more racist than the United States.
Now if this argument were about drawing an analogy to American racism and use of racist iconography via the Confederate flag and Italian use of fascist/Nazi iconography via the fascist salute/Mussolini/Hitler I would agree that it is more analogous than not. The histories are different, the points of reference are different. But again, let's go back to the effect of these cultural attitudes.
Maybe I misread sys, but I found much of what he was saying to be reminiscent of things I've heard from European people who have essentially told me, "Hey, look. We don't care about the same things you do. We don't understand why you make such a big fuss over this stuff." This led me to earlier wonder about a couple of things.
2. Maybe the wrongness of casual acceptance of certain sorts of racism by the average Italian just isn't as absolute as the wrongness of, say, cold blooded murder.
I concede this point, my argument is that this pervasive atmosphere is leading to real harm. Sure, it wouldn't victimize me as a white American, but we have lots and lots of evidence of black people being harmed by public racism in Italy and other European countries. I'm not saying there is a 1:1 correlation between this sort of pervasiveness and the harm being done in these very public forums, but it would seem to logically follow. In the U.S. there is a boutique news media in part dedicated to the public shaming of public and private citizens who say or write racist things in public. Many of them, such as Gawker, document responses to the State of the Union when people get on twitter and say racist stuff. This process of public shaming seems to limit the amount of racism that gets openly spewed at people.
3. Or maybe it is, but maybe there are cases (similar in kind to the black cat example) in which people with different backgrounds view the same sets of circumstances from different perspectives and, consequently, make different judgments about them.
I'm not arguing one way or another here, but I do believe these things are worth considering - especially given our perceived tendency as Americans to be a bit egocentric.
Again. I think I've argued pretty persuasively that whatever the intent or the cultural norms that are in play here, when those social norms are interacting with black people it has lead to very public displays of in group/out group name calling. Which is a newspeak way of saying racism. I'm not sure what is really gained by examining the causes of this without first agreeing that it is absolutely racism. You've seemed a bit squishy on exactly what you are willing to label as racist which brings us full circle again.
