Black Italians Fight to Be Italian

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Books, Society & Culture, Remnick, Storytelling, Wnyc, News, David, Yorker, Arts, Politics, New

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

In the United States, most of us take it for granted that every person born on American soil is granted citizenship; it’s been the law since 1868, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. But birthright citizenship is more the exception than the rule globally. Not one country in Europe automatically gives citizenship to children born there. Ngofeen Mputubwele, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, has been reporting on a group of Black Italians—children of African immigrants—who are working to change the citizenship laws of Italy, which they consider a system of racist exclusion. They are artists, intellectuals, and activists who use film, literature, music, and fashion to fight for the right to belong to the country in which they were born; Mputubwele compares their movement to “the start of the Harlem Renaissance.” Bellamy Ogak, a Black Italian, tells him that she was moved by the sight of white Italians carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs at protests following the killing of George Floyd but was angered that they seemed to overlook racism at home: “Why do Black American lives matter more than Black Italian lives?” she asks.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.7	Immigration has been and remains an obsession of the Trump presidency.
0:18.3	Asked about the pandemic, Trump inevitably points to his ban on flights from
0:21.9	China in January. The administration is still fighting to rescind DACA, even after a Supreme Court defeat.
0:28.7	And for years now, they've even spoken about ending birthright citizenship.
0:33.0	A week before the midterm elections, President Trump said he could end so-called birthright citizenship
0:38.3	with a stroke of his pen. A person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen
0:43.7	of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits. It's ridiculous. That's despite the fact
0:49.1	that it's in the Constitution. We all know what the 14th Amendment says. We all cherish the language
0:53.7	of the 14th Amendment. But the Supreme cherish the language of the 14th Amendment.
0:55.5	But the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether or not the language of the 14th Amendment, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally.
1:07.8	But the birthright citizenship we have as Americans is the exception, not the rule.
1:12.7	Not one country in Europe, for example, automatically grants citizenship to any child born there.
1:18.5	There's basically two main systems in the world, and they use Latin terms.
1:22.4	So there's use solely law of the soil, and there's use sanguinness, law of the blood, and there's U.S. Sanguinis, Law of the Blood, right?
1:30.3	We have use solely in the U.S., like, law of the soil.
1:33.6	You're born on the soil, you have the citizenship.
1:36.1	Gophane and Putubuele is one of our producers, and he also happens to be a lawyer, so let's trust him on the Latin.
1:43.1	In Italy, they have U.S. sanguinis, right? This idea of
1:47.0	lineage, descendancy, right? Initially, that meant like you're descended from another Italian
1:53.1	man. What that means is that if you're the offspring or the descendant of Italians, anywhere on the planet, you have the right to citizenship.
	...

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