As he prepares to spend a year in Bologna, an American student contemplates LGBTQ safety in Italy.
You chose: tolerance
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In order for Italian Americans to tackle head-on the discourse of race and ethnicity we should abandon the implicitly exclusionary term “tolerance,” which implies something distasteful, if not outright negative. We should embrace instead the more inclusive term “acceptance,” which underscores assent of a condition or situation—in this case, someone’s difference (e.g., race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality)—without attempting to disapprove or modify it.
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i-Italy receives and publishes an article by Chris Lambright, a 37-years old Italian-American and African-American man whose experience as mixed ethnicity kid in the 1980s had him struggle for acceptance from both sides. The article was inspired by the hurtful memories stirred up by the discriminatory treatment reserved to Mario Balotelli, the Italian soccer player, who was thrown bananas at by Croatian supporters during Euro 2012.
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"I wrote this a few weeks ago but the intolerance is growing... The most venomous blabber so far has been the Newt's equating of Moslems to NAZIs and 9/11 to the Shoah. Given his recently reported conversion to Roman Catholicism, I assume the next Newt revision is the Inquisition and the Crusades and then, I assume, there is more to come. In Europe such Newtish hate mongering gets quickly labeled neo- or not-so-neo-Fascism. Here in the USA it simply gets iterated to the point of Foxy 'fair and balanced' 'facts.' ... But a far more serious threat to the usually 'tolerant' climate of New York City is the real, but mostly imaginary, insults used by intolerance mongers to sell one or another politically partisan product such as a plethora of pandering candidates for local or statewide office..."
