Race, Ethnography and Education

Rodney Hopson, Adrienne Dixson, Rodney Hopson, Adrienne Dixson, Rodney K Hopson, Adrienne D Dixson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415854580
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134932078
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book focuses on race and ethnography, and in particular, it addresses two significant issues. Firstly, leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field explicate the complicated nature of race intersections, theories, and meanings in educational ethnography. The ethnographic accounts consider schooling, which is then extended to larger educational settings, bound by unique and peculiar histories and locations. By amalgamating this selection of papers into one issue, the book both challenges the effects of educational histories, policies and practices, by interrogating theories and meanings of race, and positions race and racism in ethnography with the hope of presenting new applications and developments in ethnographic methodologies, theories, and practices.

The volume then develops the conversation by helping to build scholarship in understanding race meanings, intersections and theories in educational and social sciences. With the escalating attention given to the study of race scholarship in recent years, there is still considerable information that scholars in the field need to know about how ethnographers and ethnography, from diverse comparative and international schools and educational settings, respond to racialized and racist practices, while challenging and developing theories about race and racism in diverse global terrains and locations.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnography and Education.

Racism, ‘race’ and ethnographic research in multicultural Italy

Francesca Gobbo

Department of Education and Training, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

This article is divided into two parts: in the first one, after mentioning episodes of violence against immigrants, the author discusses the issues of ‘race’ and racism within the debate on immigration and diversity taking place in Italy. Pointing out a number of relevant indications and reflections that qualify such debate, she argues that the concern of Italian researchers, educators and citizens about the resurgence of racism must be understood with reference to the historical, philosophical and scientific perspectives that aimed to disunite humanity, on the one hand; on the other, in the light of Italy’s history of racist ideology and its impact on education, during Fascism. Both research paths justified exclusion and exploitation of populations on the basis of a naturalistic classification whose null denotation has been definitely proved by recent biological and genetic evidence. In the second part, and with regard to contemporary times and changes brought about by immigration to Italy, the author presents and comments Italian legislation on the education of immigrant children and underlines how it views diversity as a resource and an asset that can promote mutual respect and intercultural dialogue in multicultural classrooms. However she warns about the risk of naturalising ethnic and cultural diversity and fixing the new pupils and students, as well as their families, to predetermined cultural ‘scripts’. Acknowledging that the perspective of anthropology of education and the ethnographic approach are of relevance in understanding the complexity of teacher–pupils and peer interaction in a multicultural classroom as well as the influence of the cultural rules and habits of the school on learning by immigrants’ or Roma children, she supports her view through ethnographic research conducted among Sikh youth in the North and among the Roma in a Turin school. Her conclusions stress the intellectual contribution of ethnographic research to a thorough questioning of ‘race’ and ‘racial’ theories and of naturalisation of cultures.

Qu’est-ce qu’un homme révolté? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s’il refuse, il ne renonce pas: c’est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement. Un esclave, qui a reçu des ordres toute sa vie, juge soudain inacceptable un nouveau commandement. Quel est le contenu de ce «non»? (Albert Camus, L’homme revolté, 1951, 25) ¹

Prologue

It is the morning of 8 January 2010, and on the 6 am radio news the Rosarno riots take precedence over every other information. The radio speaker sounds both concerned and surprised since what has happened in Rosarno has no precedents, so far. As the official communication of the Minister of the Interior later informs us (see stenographic report in http://www.italiarazzismo.it), on 7 January an immigrant from Togo was taken to the Gioia Tauro (a port town in the Calabria region) hospital after being wounded by a local individual who fired at him with a compressed air shotgun. As soon as the news reached the other immigrants who were temporarily living and working in the Rosarno town area to oranges, about 600 of them organised two demonstrations against the attack, respectively in the towns of Rosarno and San Ferdinando, and damaged garbage containers and cars while angrily storming down the streets. Confronted by police forces, seven of them were arrested. The next day, about 700 immigrants, primarily from Africa, stood in front of the Rosarno town hall. Again they protested – this time peacefully – against the unacceptable violence they had experienced two days earlier, then left, still peacefully. However, later that same day, and also on the following one, a number of them were either threatened or attacked and wounded by people presumably from the area, three of whom were subsequently arrested. In the following days, hundreds of immigrants were transferred to immigration reception centres away from the Rosarno area and from the rundown places where they camped when working in the orange orchards. Most of them hold work and stay permits, and thus are ‘legal’ or ‘regular’ immigrants, though during the orange season for which they come from different places in Italy, they work ‘in the black’, i.e. without a job contract, and for a miserable daily pay.

Later the same morning I find a letter in the department mailbox: it comes from Rome and the writer – an Italian woman who belongs to a local civic association – thanks me for the solidarity and material help that, together with other Italians, I thought was due to a Pakistani shopkeeper who was for what appeared to be no reason viciously attacked by five local youth. He had been in a coma for over 20 days and his pregnant wife had a miscarriage and lost their child. The letter informs me that Ali Basharat (see http://www.lazio.cittadinanzattiva.it) is trying to go on working but because he is still suffering from the consequences of the beating, he cannot do all that is needed for the shop to function. There is doubt that he can succeed in keeping it.

Introduction

In January 2010, Rosarno, its inhabitants, Calabria and the South received the dubious honour of the news front page for many days. Though violence and exploitation of immigrants are not new facts,² this time the workers’ violent reaction kindled anew the debate about immigration legislation and racism in Italy.

Avowedly, a number of Italian citizens are responsible for violent actions against immigrants and ‘others’.³ However, many more are actively confronting the question if Italians can reassure themselves about being ‘brava gente’ (good folks)⁴ and hold on to the belief that the knowledge of the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters during World War II had definitely confined racism to the past. Thus researchers, educators and citizens interrogate themselves whether violence and injustice are to be considered as senseless actions or as indicators of the resurgence/persistence of racism in Italy. While anti-Semitism is far from disappearing, the process of racialisation⁵ inscribes the historical identities of immigrants and Roma into a naturalistic discourse that transforms diverse people into hierarchically ordered ‘races’ and provides the rationale for exploitation, discrimination and exclusion. Notwithstanding what has been learned about the Shoa and the Porrajmos – the Jewish and the Roma genocides, it seems that racism is not behind us Italians as it remains both an ingredient and a product of modern times, related to processes of change and feelings of loss and insecurity that redistribution of power and resources engenders (cfr. Burgio 2009, in http://www.lunaria.org), and to the not uncommon, ‘popular’ reaction of blaming others for the worsening of socio-economic conditions. Legislation on ‘illegal’ immigration, and the earlier campaign to register Roma living in the campsites around major Italian cities (by collecting personal and family data as well as fingerprints), have been presented as policies meant to restore the security of Italian citizens in front of the growing migratory flows and the increasing number of EU citizens, such as the Roma Romanians, who have the right to move to other European countries. However, the 2009 government law proposal (later approved as Bill no. 94/15 July 2009, and also known as ‘security package’), raised serious juridical questions according to a group of distinguished jurists: they argued that to consider a crime the illegal entrance and stay of non-EU citizens in Italy ‘takes on a discriminatory connotation’ since it targets the status of immigrant per se (independently of whether a given immigrant has committed any wrongdoing) (see Una norma che criminalizza e discrimina, in http://www.italiarazzismo.it; also Caputo 2009; Faso 2009a; Ferrero 2009; Naletto 2009d, in Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia, http://www.lunaria.org).

In the summer of 2009, Lunaria – a non-profit organisation active since 1992 – asked a number of researchers and educators to write about the increasingly worrying situation. In the resulting collective endeavour, entitled Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia (The white book on racism in Italy, http://www.lunaria.org; see also Naletto 2009g), the numerous racist acts perpetrated by Italian youth and/or by low social status adults are listed and severely commented (see Andrisani 2009; Andrisani and Naletto 2009; Cortellesi 2009a; Faso 2009b, 2009c; Naletto 2009b, 2009c; Rivera 2009b, all in Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia, http://www.lunaria.org). Furthermore, in acknowledging the diffused physical violence and verbal abuse against those perceived or constructed as ‘others’, those authors argue that it is necessary and urgent to reformulate racism as an everyday, pervasive attitude, rather than an exceptional phenomenon (Naletto 2009e, 2009f; Rivera 2009a, both in Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia, http://www.lunaria.org; see also Burgio 2001). According to the Lunaria authors, political and legislative choices together with media coverage and reports share the responsibility for portraying immigration and immigrants as a threat to Italian citizens’ security and cultural identity (see Maneri 2009; Naletto 2009a, both in Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia, http://www.lunaria.org). Yet, it is well known that the Italian economy, society and demography would be in a difficult situation without the work and life projects of immigrants,⁶ and that many schools would have closed down (and teachers lost their jobs) without the growing enrolment of immigrants’ children.

Confronting and elaborating racism in today’s multicultural Italy

The concern of Italian researchers, educators and citizens for the resurgence of racism in contemporary times must be understood against the the country’s history of racist ideology and the present awareness of the risk entailed by the (re)current process of the naturalisation of diversity, especially when it is heralded in terms of a ‘cultural’ or ‘differentialist’ ideology (Burgio 2001; Rivera 2009a, in Libro bianco sul razzismo in Italia, http://www.lunaria.org) whose impact on educational environment has also been explored through school and out-of-school ethnographies (see Gobbo 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a; Gobbo and Gomes 2003).

From a historical perspective, the role played by a publication such as La Difesa della razza [The defence of race] through which the Fascism’s racist ideology was elaborated and disseminated between 1938 and 1943, and by the 1938 racial laws (partially anticipated by the 1930s racial legislation regarding the colonial subjects) in excluding Jewish citizens from work, school, the public realm, and then in herding them to their final destination (a destination where Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters were also taken), cannot, and should not, be minimised. Because of this awareness, the authors of Libro bianco warn their readers that contemporary racism has extended its role and scope beyond traditional ‘racial’ categories and hierarchies, dissimulating them as cultural and/or ethnic differences. The latter have undergone a widely unquestioned process of naturalisation (see Gobbo 2008b, 2009b) whereby others’ diversity – related to their geo-political origin as well as their gender, sexual orientation or socio-economic condition – is defined and treated as something fixed in time and incommensurable.

According to the philosopher Alberto Burgio (1998, 2000, 2001, 2010) contemporary racism – or racism as a mass phenomenon – developed within, and accompanied, the process of European modernisation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the modern European nation-states were created and strengthened, and some of them gained enormous economic and political power through colonisation. Such processes of political change and consolidation required internal cohesion and an emerging awareness of national identity, and were built on the valorisation of historical and cultural specificity that developed and thrived within a framework of unequal distribution of resources and power. Nationalism arose to sanction, and sanctify, a country’s political unity and borders, while racism became an effective ideological tool to justify discrimination, exclusion as well as slavery through the naturalisation of nationality and citizenship, and the concomitant racialisation of foreigners and colonised people. Though based on the ‘invention’ of racial traits (Burgio 2001) and on their fictional nature, racism aimed at, and succeeded in determining a ‘process of ethnicisation of hierarchies and inequalities within the global labour force’ (Burgio 1998, 15) that was crucial for masking the existence, and persistence, of social injustice and class conflicts. Burgio furthermore points out that in order to legitimise the world system of dominance, privileges and exploitation, racism operated by progressively shifting the burden and responsibility for the negatively defined physical and cultural traits of given human groups onto the immigrants, the colonised people, the Jews and the Roma.⁷ Italian contemporary anti-racism underlines a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Guest Introduction: Intersections, theories, and meanings of race, racism, and educational ethnography
• Literature reviews of race ethnography
• Substantive research projects
• New directions in methodology
• Index