[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_06

Woman, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis, 1981

“Ah, sorry,” a friend said to me. “so, in the hierarchy of importance, who comes before white men, Blacks, or women?”

It was the end of the evening; we were friends. A drunk stranger had just stopped and commented vulgarly on the appearance of one of the women among us.

The men in the group did nothing; they did not show solidarity towards her; they pretended not to have heard or seen. The woman got angry: her indifference towards her feelings by those she considered friends more than the stranger’s words offended her. After she left, the men in the group blamed her: why was she offended? They asked themselves. And it was clear to them that they were the offended ones. “I didn't notice,” one repeated; “why would she blame us if he was drunk?” the other asked and then added, “And then he complimented her! I wouldn't be upset in her place."

I didn’t spend any words on defining "giving compliments" as "catcalling" since there is a sufficiently long bibliography on the subject and in some countries It is already considered a crime; I replied, "I wouldn't be upset in her place," with "You're not in her place," and then a chain of clichés started to flow. From perceived hypersensitivity ("you can't say anything anymore"), through the normalization of violence ("everyone receives comments") and secondary victimization ("you shouldn't be offended in that way, it makes others feel uncomfortable”), all the way to the racial reversal, according to which the real discriminated people are now Western white men (“who comes before white men, Blacks or women?”).

Intersectionality describes the overlap of different social identities and the related particular discriminations, it is not the list of finalists in the hundred-meter sprint or ranking the best grades in class. If Western white males feel targeted in the last 50 years, it is because, finally, some are starting to point out that there have been thousands of years of white male domination over everything. I wanted to say all this and “read Angela Davis!”. I wanted to say more, but I couldn't. What stopped my tongue was not wanting to fight vileness with vileness: the person who was asking me who came first in the hierarchy was a heterosexual British male who teaches English in Italy without having a degree or diploma. Who receives a teacher's salary without being qualified as such? The offended woman has two degrees and works as a secretary for him. Who comes first? I would have loved to tell him: “You, as always!” “During the first years of the twentieth century […] the intellectual climate – even in progressive circles – seemed to be fatally infected with irrational notions about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race”, wrote Angela Davis, quoting a speech about the fear of a race war: “the poor white man, embittered by his poverty and humiliated by his inferiority, finds no place for himself and his children, then will come the grapple between the races.”

The children’s train, Viola Ardone, 2019

For me, seeing a child on the cover of a book or reading some reference to childhood in the title represents a sufficient element to discourage the purchase of the book.

However, the book was given to me as a gift in this case. I didn't know whether to be happy: “The Children's Train” sounded like yet another cloying Italian melodrama about the hunger and passion of mothers in the 1950s. And at least on one part, I wasn't wrong: in Italy, people resort to the past to talk about many things that are wrong in the present; the post-war period is usually a somewhat functional set for staging current contradictions and injustices, think of Paola Cortellesi's film "There's Still Tomorrow."

Viola Ardone's book brings to mind a forgotten historical case: the deportation of children from the poor and backward South of Italy to economically prosperous families in the North. The story is built from the gaze of one of the children, Amerigo, and grows together with him. What emerges is not only the short-sightedness of the communist party, the practical limits of the "great ideals," and the betrayal of many hopes, but also the complexity of bonds, the difficulty of giving affection if one has not received it, the profound division between the family and the family one would like, loving and hating those who brought us into the world.

There are no judgments but events and emotions that develop over time into increasingly layered feelings. There is no reference to the intense racism that has distanced the South, which has remained poor, even further from the North, which feels better. There is no direct political criticism because the political history mentioned in the book speaks for itself very well. “The boy was in love and wanted to marry her after the end of the war. But he was a couple of years younger than her. And those in the communist party didn't want it. Rosa says that comrades are sometimes worse than the village wives. They only talk about freedom but don't want to give it. Especially to females."