Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister thought he’d be cute and compliment our new president elect with “young, handsome, and even tanned.”.
This from a man who declared Spain has too many women in government and compared a German lawmaker to a Nazi prison guard.
Now this OP isn’t a knee-jerk call out of racism, but really a question:
Racists in America also tend to be self-described flag waving partriots. Do you guys see a rural racist tightrope along the lines of, “Our President may be Black but he’s an American dammit, no good fur nuttin’ dagos going insult us like that!”
Silvio Berlusconi is a fucking clown. He’s even worse than Bush, really, only less powerful. It’s pretty widely known that Italy has the worst politics of any of the large Western European nations.
EU (to random Eastern European Country): You can’t join the EU because your government is too corrupt, your law courts ineffective and your politicians crooks.
Random Easter European Country: Italy is in the EU.
I’m not getting the outrage here. It was just a dumb joke. It doesn’t even move the needle compared to the things that have been said about Obama in this country.
Was it a joke? I only heard a report about it, not the actual statement. Was he sort of laughing when he said it? Still, that would be a stupid joke to make.
I take it the outrage is the suggestion that Obama isn’t a “real black”? Like calling him an oreo?
Kinda offensive, but honestly, would that connotation even have occurred to an Italian (it took me a minute to work out the reason for the pitting)? So far as I know, they don’t have a recently oppressed black minority in Italy, I think he was just making a lame joke about Obama being black being unusual for western leaders, without the Uncle Tom connatation people are seeing.
I’m not even thinking any further than: why make any reference to his skin color whatsoever? If you want to congratulate the first Black president, that’s one thing, because Black (or, better yet, African-American) is more of an ethnic term than a reference to skin color (more akin to congratulating the first Italian-American on winning the presidency, had it been Giuliani).
I don’t know if the distinction translates into Italian, but in English, I would say that Obama is tan but not necessarily tanned. He has a brown complexion, but I don’t know how much is sun & how much is his baseline.
But I’m with the good-natured joke interpretation until Silvio B. indicates otherwise.
Being serious, though, I’m dubious that this was really so much about racism as a very poor leader of a very poor political system making a characteristically very poor choice. I’d tend to see this as a joke in somewhat poor taste (perhaps worse taste in the US than in Italy, but who knows?) – I don’t really see what the racist or even malicious underpinning could be. And frankly, I think there are a lot of people talking a lot more about his skin colour than Berlusconi.
There is some basis for that comment. I grew up in the rural South and many people have no problem with being flag waving Confederate sympathizers while being, at the same time, the most patriotic, pro-U.S. supporters that exist anywhere. It is basically the same thing as family. You can make fun of cousin Billy’s huge ears all you want but, when an outsider says the same, you mobilize everyone to kick that person’s ass for insulting not only Billy but the entire family.
You’re right, it’s not outrage, it was more of a question and perhaps not fitting for the Pit. Really what I’m curious about is, ‘we have racist in America, they tend to be extremely patriotic (call it xenophobic if you want), will racists end up defending the honor of a black president?’
