Systemic racism in Italy
How media and politics describe violence
by Sara Tanveer
Everytime it’s the same story. For a bunch of days public debate focuses on racism, trying to find individual responsabilities, and extremes are condemned. Then everything goes back to normal, at least until the next case.
For years racism has been reported as an emergency, an exeptional fact, a deviation from the norm. But systemic racism in Italy continues to be reduced to a sum of isolated episodes, while we still struggle to recognize its deep and structural roots.
To truly comprehend it, however, we must start with a different question: what happens when discrimination is not an incident, but an everyday societal mechanism?
Analyzing Bakari Sako and Salim El Koudri’s stories help us answer this question.
Bakari Sako, a 35-year-old man from Mali, was murdered at dawn on 9 May 2026 in Taranto by a group of very young Italian boys. A week later, on 16 May 2026, Salim El Koudri, a 31-year-old second-generation Italian, ran over eight people with his car in Modena's historic centre, injuring four of them seriously.
Although these two cases differ in their dynamics, they nevertheless reveal the mechanisms how media narratives and Italian politics create meanings of violence through racial categories.
One is a victim and the other is the perpetrator, both of whom are racialised men, and yet the public has reacted to the incident in different ways. However, these reactions stem from the same racist matrix and exist within the same discursive framework. Bakari Sako, the victim, was exposed to violence that many still fail to recognise as an expression of a social context rooted in racial hierarchies. Salim El Koudri, the perpetrator, is not merely a criminal; he has become the focal point of narratives designed to fuel security-related psychosis, identity-based anxieties, and deeply xenophobic sentiments.
In both cases, race dictates how society decides who to empathise with, who to suspect, and, above all, who to punish.
Violence narration and double standards
At the heart of this racist framework that produces violence lies a double standard. Bakari Sako's death was part of a pattern of racist violence that has been seen many times in the last 30 years. Initially, people tried to portray his murder as just another case of brutality and juvenile antisocial behaviour, or as an issue of urban security.
According to this narrative, systemic racism in Italy simply doesn’t exist. No one questions the conditions that make such violence possible, nor the role that hate speech and discrimination play in legitimising it.
On the contrary, in Salim El Koudri's case, the immediate focal point of his media and political framing was his Moroccan origin. Just a few hours after the attempted massacre, his actions were transformed into irrefutable proof of “integration's failure”. Matteo Salvini, the ever-present vulture who has found fresh fodder for his Beast (that's how Lega's party elaborate digital propaganda machine is called), defined El Koudry as a “second-generation criminal”, underlining the presumed cultural incompatibility between immigration and Italian society.
For the Italian-Algerian author Tahar Lamri, the words of the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure [Salvini] represent a denial of El Koudri’s individuality, transforming his identity into a symbol of the right-wing political agenda.
El Koudri's story — shaped by his economics degree, desperate job search and life marked by mental health issues — has been stripped of its complexity to create a narrative that portrays him as a "convenient scapegoat" and fuels stereotypes and fears.
Lamri draws attention to an important fact: this double standard not only racialises Italian public discourse by framing racist violence as a product of ignorance and hate, but also misrepresents it. It also describes racism as a structural and systemic device that shapes laws, the media, and public policies. In her book “L'Italia è un paese razzista” (DeriveApprodi, 2024), the researcher Anna Curcio describes how racism is often negated in its structural dimension, with such cases being dismissed as isolated incidents.
Media and politics have assimilated right-wing categories about immigration, representing migrants as a threat, while topics such as exploitation, discrimination and human rights violations struggle to find spaces and attention.
In his book “L’ombra lunga dell’impero - Voci afrodiscendenti tra razzismo sistemico, colonialismo e resistenza globale” italian-dominican journalist Aneglo Boccato cricises the media system by using the example of “color’s barrier” and selective solidarity shown to Ukrainian refugees while denying the same to those fleeing from war-torn regions in the global south. Systemic racism in Italy does therefore exist. It’s just that people don’t want to talk about it.
Bakari Sako: the “good” migrant trope and the hierarchy of grief
Bakari Sako appears in public almost exclusively as a 'Malian farm labourer', as if his identity could only be defined by his economic role and usefulness to the Italian agricultural production system. Even after his murder, his humanity continues to emerge through his professional integrity: he was a quiet worker who didn’t cause any trouble. Instead, he lined the pockets of the production sector by doing the kind of work that Italians no longer want to do.
In her book “Lo sfruttamento della razza - Nuove gerarchie della segregazione” (Derive e Approdi, 2025) researcher Oiza Obasuyi describes the mechanisms of racial capitalism in Italy. According to her analysis, racial capitalism solidified in Italy between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, capitalising on the first mass migrations to the country. Migrant and racialised labour became essential to this economic model, being used in the most precarious and exploited sectors of the job market. “This is one of the most blatant forms of institutional racism, in which people are divided into first- and second-class citizens”
This media framing creates a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' migrants, where compassion is still bound to usefulness in production and social conformity. The racialised body is only accepted if it is productive, silent and invisible. In contrast, its death rarely sparks collective reflection on colonial legacies, racial hierarchies, and the forms of exclusion that still shape Italian society.
Not all violence is reported in the same way. When the perpetrator belongs to a racialised minority, violent behaviour is often seen as evidence of a wider problem relating to immigration, public safety or integration. On the other hand, when the perpetrator is white and Italian, attention easily shifts towards his personal history, social exclusion, or individual vulnerabilities. This difference in treatment is not neutral; it reflects the ongoing influence of racial hierarchies on how society attributes blame, fear and belonging.
Racialisation of violence: the case of El Koudri
The obsession with his Moroccan origins, religious identity and status as a second-generation Italian has overshadowed more pertinent social and clinical facts, which have almost disappeared from public debate. Tahar Lamri highlights an important fact: El Koudri stopped attending the Mental Health Centre, slipping off the radar of the public health system, the community, and the state. In 2024, 850 thousand people were assisted by public mental health services, with fewer than 5 thousand psychologists working in the public system. That's one psychologist for every 12,000 people. These figures indicate a significant welfare and mental health crisis, yet they barely make it into the news. In her newsletter, journalist Leila Belhadj Mohamed adds: 'This reflects a pattern that has become deeply ingrained in the European media landscape, whereby a name perceived as Arabic or North African is immediately treated with suspicion within a pre-existing framework of mistrust, even in the absence of basic verification'.
The hidden “biology” of systemic racism
It's been decades since science debunked the myth of the Lombrosian hierarchy of human races. Nevertheless, this same logic continues to emerge in new words and cultural and political narratives that associate certain bodies with danger and others with normality.
The 'Moroccan/violent Muslim' narrative, for example, continues to operate according to an essentialist logic where racialised subjects are implicitly predisposed to social deviance.
Family background becomes a catch-all category capable of explaining the behaviour of individuals who are deemed to be deviant.
This fits into a Lombrosian interpretation of difference, in which systemic racism perpetuates the idea that certain bodies are more closely linked to violence than others. The vocabulary has shifted; rather than resorting to pseudoscientific rhetoric, we now use emergency-style language to speak of cultural incompatibility and failed integration, while avoiding mention of the structural causes behind this failure. Belhadj Mohamed further explains in her newsletter: “It remains almost entirely beyond question that Italy is undergoing a massive public mental health crisis, and that within this context millions of racialised people experience daily conditions of marginalisation, symbolic precariousness, and systemic discrimination”.
Systemic racism in Italy constantly draws a line between those who belong fully to the national community and those who remain in a state of perpetual otherness (and suspicion), even after generations. Second-generation Italians occupy a space of constant liminality. They are formally Italian, but not unconditionally assimilated. Although born and/or raised in Italy, belonging to Italian society is not automatic; it must be earned every day.
While we may be included in so-called 'Italian pride' when we embody models of success and meritocracy, this inclusion is fragile and reversible. This was demonstrated by the case of Paola Egonu, the celebrated volleyball champion who has been the target of racist comments and controversy over her Italian identity. Recognition is only ever granted on a symbolic level and can be withdrawn the moment our racialised bodies challenge the idea of national homogeneity.
Racism and the unequal distribution of individuality
This dynamic of identity-based delegitimisation is even more evident when compared with the treatment of white people in similar circumstances. In 2017, Michele Bordoni deliberately drove into a crowd in Sondrio, declaring that he wanted to 'kill everyone'. However, he was not portrayed as the pathological product of an entire ethnic community, nor was there any debate concerning supremacist violence, Italian identity or Western Christian education. Bordoni was simply seen as an isolated case of an individual of unsound mind.
This is a central aspect of systemic racism: only certain people are considered in their entirety, with their history and psychological attributes. Others are immediately categorised, transformed into symbols of the ongoing clash of civilisations and reduced to a single dimension. Within this framework, racialisation reduces the individual’s subjectivity to a predetermined political and narrative function.
Racism as political technology
This logic cannot be understood without considering the current political context. In recent years, structural racism in Italy has become increasingly institutionalised through the discourse of security, the migration crisis, and the defence of national identity.
Concepts such as 'remigration', 'revocation of citizenship' and 'second-generation crime' do not suddenly emerge in the wake of violent incidents; rather, they are the logical outcome of years of normalising racial discourse in the public sphere.
The figure of the racialised individual increasingly serves as a symbolic receptacle for economic anxieties, social insecurity, and collective frustration generated by widespread precariousness and the progressive dismantling of the welfare state.
In this context, racism functions not only as a form of individual hatred, but also as a political mechanism for organising consensus and fear. The ongoing construction of an internal enemy allows social conflict to be shifted away from its structural causes and transforms collective discontent into a horizontal war between subaltern groups.
The racialised body thus becomes the symbolic locus onto which national insecurity is projected, whilst the political, economic and institutional responsibilities underlying these phenomena are systematically ignored in public discourse.
Therefore, the central issue is not just the presence of explicit racist stereotypes in media discourse, but also the structural inability of the Italian media system to create complex narratives when individuals from racialised groups are involved.
In Sako's case, the interplay between social racism, urban segregation, and collective indifference has been overlooked. In Modena, however, issues relating to mental health, existential insecurity, social isolation, and the marginalisation of second-generation migrants are ignored.
This narrative is not neutral. Identifying an external or internal enemy onto whom to project fears and frustrations is one of the most effective mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism manages the inequalities it itself produces.
Whilst public debate focuses on migrants, the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, the power of oligopolies, the erosion of labour rights, and cuts to welfare, healthcare and public education are pushed into the background. Social anger is thus directed towards the most vulnerable rather than towards the economic and political processes that are increasing precariousness, poverty and insecurity.
Against this backdrop, even the rise in military spending and the normalisation of war end up occupying less space in the debate than they deserve, overshadowed by the constant search for scapegoats.
