Does someone here know Italian? Does Italian make a difference between Indians from India and “Indians” aka native Americans? Because for instance German does, Asian Indians are “Inder” while native Americans are “Indianer”. It would be good to know if such an ambiguity could be a cause for this blunder in the first place.
Which isn’t even getting into the fact that most Native American tribes didn’t wear feathered headdresses like that. If you actually wanted to depict someone in traditional Native American garb, you’d look up their tribe first. This is like depicting someone in a Cossack hat to celebrate their European heritage.
Oh, that’s easy, the tribe of the Jamaicans, so she should have been pictured with dreadlocks. /s
AFAICT Italian uses “indiano” (m.) or “indiana” (f.) for both categories. They can be distinguished by specifying that somebody is “indiano/a dell’India” or “indiano/a dell’America”, but the form of the adjective itself doesn’t distinguish them.
Ok, thanks, so it seems like Il Tempo could really have fucked that story up by confusing the two meanings of “Indian”, though I still doubt it and suspect that it was deliberate racism. I tried to find out where that newspaper ranks on the political and sensational spectrum, but I didn’t find anything.
I suspect it’s idiocy rather than blatant racism. Perhaps the illustrator was asked to portray her as an Indian without further specification?
I can buy that one stupid illustrator, even one journalist, could fuck that up, but a nationwide newspaper of Italy? No one in the chain to spot that error before it went to print?
ETA: FWIW, even if the paper honestly thought that Kamala Harris is Native American, it would have been blatantly racist anyway.
Wikipedia says the circulation of Il Temp is just over 7,000 copies. Now certainly many newspapers are selling fewer copies today than in decades past, but that’s still low even for today. So hardly a major national newspaper.
It’s Italy.
They’ve had numerous issues in soccer with fans chanting racist slurs at visiting players. And there’s the usual European issues with fear of immigrant/refugee movement. There is, at minimum, widespread subconscious (and often overt) racism across the country. That some of that stretches to newsrooms is not surprising at all.
Officially, of course, the ugliness of some people is denounced, but it’s just a little too common for that to be considered more than the proverbial lipstick on a pig.
Now, the mixup itself was idiocy. But it was also definitely racist.
What if Harris actually was of Native American heritage? Would the headline actually be any better for targeting the correct ethnic group?
Just think, the Roman empire used to embrace (conquer) divergent cultures and incorporate them into a singular nationality.
The aqueduct? They did give us that…
Didn’t that come with a side of lead poisoning?
It’s been around for 80 years as a voice for right wing Italians.
Well, then there’s the the roads, but they go without saying. There was also sanitation, irrigation, public order, wine.
But apart from those…
I haven’t fucked with it because I think it’s pretty much useless, but is it possible that the Italians used AI to generate the story and didn’t bother to check if AI knew the difference between Indians and Native Americans?
The only way to stop a dumb guy carrying a gun to take out garbage is a dumb guy carrying a gun to take out garbage.
I’ll wait until I see the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was before I make a judgement, but I want to know if officer Obie thinks the victim was afraid someone was going to steal his garbage.
Clearly he was justified in wanting to arm himself while taking out the garbage, because someone was shot trying to take out his garbage to the same dumpster!!!
There are soooo many human predators wandering around the (fantasy) world inhabited by the cowardly rightists, that not only must one be armed to leave your home, you need your pistol in your hand, not in your holster. Bonus points for apparently safety off and finger within the trigger loop.
So anyway, I started blasting.
