This post was inspired after reading about the despicable things that have happened to Italy’s first black Integration Minister, Cecile Kyenge. Since joining the Italian government, she has faced daily racial slurs and threats from her peers. Earlier this month, a senator from the anti-immigration Northern League party likened her to an orangutan and only apologized after a storm of criticism. Most recently, bananas were hurdled at her while she gave a speech. I’m infuriated, not only because of the blatant disrespect shown to Kyenge or the fact the Italian was also once considered to be an “inferior race,” but because the European wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for the African. This is a fact.

Here is an except from J.A. Roger’s Sex & Race Vol. 1 (1952) in which he discusses “race” & the Italian:

As for Mussolini he turned “race” into an even more barefaced racket than Hitler or the Klan. The Italian, as everyone knows, has long been regarded as an inferior “race.” In 1924, the United States amended its immigration laws to exclude as many Italians as possible and to have more Nordics. Consequently, the Italian, like the Negro, is on the racial defensive. Italian ethnologists have taken the lead in proving “racial purity” a myth.

No one was more emphatic on the subject than Mussolini, himself. In 1932, he said, “There are no pure races left; not even the Jews have keep their blood unmingled. Successful crossings have often promoted the energy and beauty of a nation. Race! It is a feeling, not a reality; nine-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. Amazingly enough not one of those who have proclaimed the ‘nobility’ of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton. Gobineau was a Frenchman. Chamberlain actually declared Rome was the capital of chaos. No such doctrine will ever find wide acceptance here in Italy.”

Speaking of a certain professor, evidently a German, who had been preaching the doctrine of the “noble blonds,” Mussolini said, he “is a man with more poetic imagination than science in his composition. National pride has no need for the delirium of race.”

In fact there seemed nothing else for an Italian who was not and idiot to say. Even the most casual visitor to Italy cannot help but see that it is a land of very much mixed races. Nevertheless on July 13, 1938, the Fascist Grand Council with one stroke of the pen, and without setting up a single face-bleaching or hair-straightening parlor in Sicily, Calabria, or elsewhere, transformed the Italians into “a pure Aryan race.”

Among the ten points of the manifesto were the following: That there is a such thing as race; that there is “a pure Italian race”; and that histories that speak of an influx into Italy of other than Aryan peoples are false.

In other words, Hannibal never crossed the Alps and the Latin writers who told of seeing him were liars. As for the Egyptians, the Moors, the Huns and other dark-skinned non-Aryans, they only imagined they had entered Italy. The Negro slaves of Italy from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries were white people who had blackened themselves up. So were the Italians with whom Napoleon used to fill up his Negro regiments when the French supply of blacks ran out.

The supreme concocter of human misery — the mass murderer, liar and thief of the century is the racial purist. Anyone, even the lowest moron, can always believe and declare himself to be better than anybody else.

Source: pg. 19-20.