In Italy, especially in '70s and '80s, there was a lot of racism between north and south. And my mom immigrated from the south to the north, from Puglia, the heel of Italy. But what made me feel different was society, not my family.
I am proud to be Italian because I was born in Italy, I grew up in Italy, I went to school in Italy and I have worked in Italy. I'm Italian.
I think racism is unacceptable and should not be stood for. It is not an issue just in Italy, it is around the world.
The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary's saying serves for me (When fortune's malice Lost her Calais): "Open my heart, and you will see Graved inside of it 'Italy.'"
When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.
And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist.
First there was racism. Then liberals created institutional racism and coded racism. You can only hear it with a dog whistle.
I've seen and always been extremely aware of racism... casual racism, serious racism... all of that.
There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.
I love Italy; in Italy, I grew up like a man and like a player. I felt Italy like a family.
Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn't have Rome. We wouldn't have Florence. We wouldn't have the marvel that is Venice.
Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism.
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.