That's just because their unwashed masses are only familiar with economic migrants from Southern Italy. If you paid any of them a holiday to Turin or Milan they wouldn't know what befell them, they couldn't even identify the country!
There is no racism in that comment, GP is making an observation that is, to my experience, factually correct. Many (Northern) European countries have a number of economic migrant minorities (eg Turks, Moroccans, etc) and Italians (chiefly Italians whose (grand)parents came from southern Italy) are a relatively big one in some areas.
Just like the "unwashed masses" have a bad impression of eg Turkey based on racism/classism towards their local Turkish-$NATIONALITY minority, they have the idea that Italy has to be a poor backward place based on racism/classism towards the local Italian-$NATIONALY minority.
Somewhat, since they include ancient Greek and old-time islamic ancestry (as far as I know). According to Wikipedia: "There is a noticeable genetic difference between Sardinians, Northern Italians and Southern Italians. People from the North seem to be close to the French population, while those from the South overlap with Balkan and other southern European populations".
But that's beside the point. I invoked the modern use of the term "racism" that includes different ways of segregating a population and not just genetics. "Southerners are lazy, corrupt" etc. Call it cultural racism if you wish.
> since they include ancient Greek and old-time islamic ancestry (as far as I know)
AFAIK most of the genetic variation in Italy dates back from ancient times. Everyone thinks "of course, it was the Islamic invasions in Sicily and the Germanic invasions in the North", but the genetic impact of those was surprisingly small. The variation was there before.
The Greek colonization of southern Italy is the one historical migration that _did_ have significant impact, according to the article.
Actually it's the "racism must involve some tangible race" that's ignorance and a-historical. Etymology and definition doesn't define how words are actually used, one needs historical and empirical research for that.
Race is not about genetics. It's a cultural construct, which is predominantly based on historical and ethnological differences (with the inevitable, but not critical mix of genetics that comes with the latter), and has little to do with actual "races".
People from Italy and the Balkans for example where perceived as "non white" when immigrating to the US, while being caucasian. They just weren't anglosaxon, germanic, or nordic, as the dominant WASP Americans of the time. There are is lots of historical and cultural studies on this [1].
WASP Americans badmouthing Greeks or Italians were racist, even if talking about people the same race.
And it's a similar cases between Northern and Southern Italians (there are cultural, historical and ethnological differences between the two areas). The racism of north vs south comes from that -- and it even fed into actual far right / neo-fascist parties, like the Lega Nord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lega_Nord ).
Whether Southern italians are indeed "less productive" is beside the point too. Blacks in the US are also poorer and less 'productive', more likely to be convicted felons (statistically), etc, but people still consider someone badmouthing blacks to have racist motives.
[1] The immigrants from the southern part of Italy and Sicily were not considered wholly white by Anglo-Saxon standards, a notion which was reinforced by the US Immigration Department classification of northern and southern Italians as two distinct caucasian ethnic groups. In reaction to the large-scale immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Congress passed legislation (Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924) restricting immigration from those regions, but not from Northern European countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism#Anti-Italianis...
Depends whether you’re talking about the consensus among critical race theorists or population geneticists.
The latter have no problem with dividing different people into groups based on ancestry based on what continent their ancestor came from though the word race is passé.
Well, my comment was an answer to an answer to an answer. Someone complained that previous comment generalized about groups of persons from a certain region and then someone else objected that people from a certain region does not make a race. So I was trying to point that racism is a perfect term to define discrimination based on (perceived or constructed or real) groups you would belong to, including, like in this case, in where you come from.
Not technically but if you had 1000 naked northern and southern Italians in a room you could probably achieve an 85+% success rate in segmenting them into their respective class. Northern Italians generally look much more like Germans or Swiss - on average taller, lighter skin, lighter eye color, whereas southern Italians are much swarthier and slightly shorter, coming from many years of arab, greek, and north african control.
Perhaps this explains why Italian Americans don't really look like the Italians I see on Italian television shows? Seems most of them migrated from southern Italy/Sicily.
"Them" refers to the "unwashed masses", not the emigrants from Southern Italy. I'm convinced that in Southern Italy everyone is aware of Turin and Milan, but there are places in Germany where everyone thinks all Italy is like Carlo Levi's Gagliano. Thet's because their Italians were all from Gagliano and similar places.
