Culture of Migration and Symbolic Violence: The Mobilities of Black and Racialised Italians in the UK

Abstract

The migration trajectories and intra-European mobilities of Black and racialised Europeans have received limited scholarly attention, despite Europe’s large and diverse population of Europeans born to migrant parents and raised in Europe. Based on biographical research, this article focuses on Black and racialised Italians of African descent who migrated to the UK, examining their pre-migration experiences of racialisation and their motivation to leave Italy. Using the concept of symbolic violence, the article exposes how the association of Italian identity with whiteness and the normalisation of racism within Italian society shape participants’ experiences of growing up in Italy and their reasons to migrate. In their narratives, racial exclusion becomes a key driver of mobility, adding a racialised dimension to the established ‘Italian culture of migration’. The analysis illustrates how participants respond to this exclusion and actively reshape Italy’s evolving national culture, offering critical insights into the intersection of race, migration, citizenship and belonging.

Introduction

The number of Black and racialised Europeans – born to migrant parents and raised in Europe – is steadily growing, including in certain Southern European countries, such as Italy, which have more recently become prominent migration destinations. Yet, the intra-European mobility of young Europeans is still regarded as a predominantly white phenomenon, reflecting an enduring connection between Europeanness and whiteness; therefore, as Bonnett (1998: 1030) puts it: ‘the development of whiteness as a racialised, fetishised and exclusively European attribute’. This thinking marginalises the stories and contributions of racialised Europeans.

With its histories of fascism, colonialism and now a far-right government, Italy offers a crucial context for examining how racialised conceptions of national identity and citizenship shape the mobility prospects of the so-called ‘second generations’. This article draws on biographical interviews with Black and racialised Italians who were born or grew up in Italy and later migrated to the UK, examining their lives before migration and the motivations behind their departure. Participants – Italians of African descent from diverse backgrounds, from Algeria to Ghana – reflect the heterogeneity of Africans in Italy, comprising particularly North and West Africans, and smaller communities from former colonies such as Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea (Ciocca, 2019). Not all Italians of African or North African descent may identify as Black; therefore in this article we intentionally use the term Black and racialised Italians (Varriale, 2026; Varriale and Franceschelli, 2025). This wording aligns with the work of Black Italian cultural and political activists (e.g. Igiaba Scego and Djarah Kan) while also contributing to the development of the ‘intellectual project of Black Italia’ (Hawthorne and Pesarini, 2025: 3).

As the prominence of Black and racialised Italians in the Italian public sphere increases, their social and political struggles (e.g. Baser, 2024) are being documented, showing how they are redefining national identity and belonging through acts of resistance and everyday negotiations with structural and cultural racism. Activist networks such as Rete G2 have mobilised against restrictive citizenship laws (Hawthorne, 2022; Zinn, 2011), while second-generation Muslim and Afro-Italian women contest gendered ideals of womanhood and beauty, linking these struggles to broader anti-racist activism (Frisina and Hawthorne, 2018). These movements are increasingly intertwined with transnational campaigns such as Black Lives Matter (della Porta et al., 2023). In line with this literature, we understand blackness as a social and political category rooted in Italy’s histories of colonialism, fascism and racialisation – marking non-white minoritised individuals as non-Italian, regardless of their citizenship or self-identification. This framing recognises the specific forms of racism and exclusion that define the Italian context (Ghebremariam & Picker 2021), while also positioning it within wider transnational and diasporic debates on race, belonging and mobility. Building on this perspective, we situate the Italian case within emerging scholarship on Black experiences in Southern Europe, including work on the Black Mediterranean (The Black Mediterranean Collective, 2021), Afro-Spanishness (Cornejo-Parriego and León-Távora, 2024), and Afro-Greek visibility (Papailias, 2025) and alongside Eastern contexts such as Poland (Balogun, 2020), which collectively interrogate how blackness and belonging are negotiated across Europe’s southern and eastern borderlands.

In this article, we argue that the specific history and configuration of Italian whiteness and Italy’s long-standing tendency to downplay the role of racism in Italian society, operate as a form of symbolic violence with implications for the mobility decisions of Black and racialised Italians. Bourdieu (1998: 22) defines symbolic violence as the ‘embodiment of domination’ in everyday practices and dispositions. Through this form of violence, social structures exert power over individuals without overt force, producing tangible injuries even though they are not physically inflicted (Huc-Hepher, 2021).

These embodied and normalised forms of violence shape experiences of exclusion and aspirations, influencing how racialised minorities navigate discrimination and imagine futures beyond Italy, thereby transforming the Italian culture of migration: the long-standing bodies of cultural narratives and imaginaries that underlie spatial mobility in Italy (Franceschelli, 2022). The analysis exposes a new racialised dimension of this culture, opening space for alternative understandings of belonging and mobility.

The article proceeds by linking the history behind contemporary conceptions of Italian whiteness, including the role of colonialism and post-war revisionism, to the concept of symbolic violence. It then presents findings about how symbolic violence operates: first, it emerges through cultural narratives of Italian whiteness that hinder the inclusion of Black and racialised Italians; second, it is reinforced by colour-blind ideas about Italian culture and society. The final reflections focus on how Black and racialised Italians contribute to shifting the Italian culture of migration by introducing new imaginaries, perspectives, and ways of belonging that challenge dominant cultural norms and narratives.

The Forgotten Legacy of Colonialism and the Defining Features of Italian Whiteness

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, the Italian women’s volleyball team won gold against the USA. The victory sparked a controversy initiated by a member of the far-right Lega party who questioned the ‘Italianness’ of Paola Egonu, the Italian Olympic champion of Nigerian descent (Giuffrida, 2024). This case is an example of a well-established trend in Italian culture about locating blackness outside Italian identity.

Similar to other Southern European countries (e.g. Spain, in Fra-Molinero, 2009), Italy occupies an ambiguous position in racial hierarchies. Whiteness, in Italy, carries specific complexities due to shifting constructions of citizenship and identity, shaped by broader historical and political processes of Italian identity construction and the related nation-building project (Franceschelli, 2024). Massimo d’Azeglio’s famous post-unification statement: ‘We have made Italy. We must now make Italians’ (Ammaturo, 2019: 549), reflects the historical journey behind the development of a national narrative. As Angelica Pesarini (2021) points out, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Italians were associated with a form of ‘fragile whiteness’ which derived from Italy’s long entanglement with Africa, the racialisation of southern Italians, Italian emigration and the country’s semi-peripheral position within European racial hierarchies (Franceschelli, 2024). In response to this perceived fragility, Italian whiteness was ‘strengthened’ during the fascist and colonial eras, in which the notion of a hardened white national identity was promoted in ways that, we argue, remain relevant today. During the post-war period, revisionist narratives recast Italians as inherently ‘good people’ (brava gente) and downplayed Italians’ complicity in fascism, colonial violence and the Shoah (Burgio, 2010). These narratives neglected the historical and structural nature of discrimination, and so they obscured its true extent. Starting in the 1960s, the historian Angelo Del Boca exposed the reality of Italian colonial violence and the subsequent erasure of ‘historical truths’ from public discourses through planned cultural revisionism (Del Boca 2002: 114, in Pesarini, 2021). Drawing on his work, Italian post-colonial scholars (e.g. Lombardi-Diop, 2021; Lombardi-Diop, 2012) have proposed a new critical framework for contextualising the evolution of racial meanings and hierarchies within Italy’s national narrative. By showing that these dynamics cannot be explained solely through recent demographic changes associated with the so-called ‘migration crisis’, recent critical scholarship (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2014) situates the development of racialised structures within Italy’s modern history (Mellino, 2012).

Therefore, emerging representations of Italians and Italianness – oscillating between fragile whiteness and revisionist stereotypes of virtuous people – ‘brava gente’ – have evolved and led to support colour-blind public discourses, which deny the persistence of racism in Italian society (Varriale and Franceschelli, 2025) and also blur its intersection with class distinction and coloniality (Varriale, 2021). These complex processes of evolving cultural narratives help to understand questions of identity and racialization in contemporary Italy.

In 2025, the Council of Europe condemned racist behaviour among Italian police and called for an independent inquiry, which the government dismissed as ‘shameful’ (Reuters, 2025). This institutional denial exemplifies what Abdelmalek Sayad terms state thought—a mode of reasoning through which racial discrimination is dismissed by invoking the presumed national self-image of Italians as brava gente (good people, Favero, 2010).

Symbolic Violence, Italian Whiteness and the Downplaying of Discrimination

We argue that the historically rooted cultural narratives that associate whiteness with the normative ideal of ‘fully Italian’ – while minimising the role of racial discrimination – operate as a form of symbolic violence. Bourdieu defines symbolic violence as ‘a violence exercised upon social agents with their complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007 [1992]: 166). As such, this violence conceals underlying power relations and imposes meanings that lead to the subconscious adaptation of those subjected to the violence. Scholars have applied the concept of symbolic violence to a variety of contexts – from the harmful effects of migration law (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012) to the microaggressions caused by anti-French sentiment in the UK (Huc-Hepher, 2021) and the racialised hierarchies shaping the lives of Slovak Roma (Grill, 2018) – to show how norms and structures become deeply embedded in everyday life. If symbolic violence refers to the subtle ways social structures impose themselves on individuals, ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007 [1992]) occurs when their effects become normalised within dominant discourses and societal practices, even if actively contested and not universally accepted.

In this article, we examine how cultural narratives of Italian whiteness and structural racism operate as forms of symbolic violence that legitimise systemic inequalities by normalising the marginalisation of racialised individuals, with effects on their mobility and motivations to migrate. Put differently, racism and racialisation are embedded in dominant discourses of Italian citizenship and national identity – defined through whiteness – and are thereby rendered hidden within them. Therefore, as we shall see, for the Black and racialised Italians in the study, migration emerges – though not always explicitly – as a viable strategy offering an escape not only from economic stagnation but also from the weight of racial oppression.

Symbolic violence is a contested concept: while it provides a valuable lens for revealing how social structures operate through dominant discourses and shape individual and collective practices, some argue it risks portraying those subjected to it as involved in reproducing their own oppression, limiting recognition of their agency (e.g. Thapar-Björkert, et al 2016; Burawoy 2019). Yet, acknowledging an unconscious complicity, resulting from the effects of social structures on individuals, does not preclude the possibility of subjective and collective resistance. Our analysis suggests that any apparent complicity occurs primarily at a discursive level, shaping how participants speak about structural discrimination rather than how they experience or respond to it.

In our reading, symbolic violence is a tool to explain how social and racial structures filter down to the individual level. While studying the Dalit women’s movement in India, Chakraborty (2023:160) presents symbolic violence as the ‘missing link between subjective experiences and invisibilized forms of structural violence’. Hence, symbolic violence, does not erase the possibility of subjective responses. Rather, it is a way to ‘theorise the unsaid’ (Huc-Hepher, 2021:18-19), which reveals how power operates subtly and tacitly beneath the individual’s consciousness through the habitus. Bourdieu (2001), in revisiting his ‘Masculine Domination’, argued that to understand the mechanisms through which symbolic violence operates, we need to rethink the relationship between constraint and resistance:

Indeed, the case of gender domination shows better than any other that symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of mis-recognition which lies beyond – or beneath – the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once gendered and gendering. It demonstrates that we cannot adequately understand masculine domination (and symbolic violence more generally) without first jettisoning the scholastic opposition between coercion and consent, external imposition and internal desire, and constraint and resistance. (Bourdieu, 1996: 199)

Regardless of how closely subjective adaptation mirrors external imposition, ‘there is always room for cognitive struggle (which is the most profoundly political form of struggle)’ (Ibid). Hence, as we shall see, participants downplaying the role of racism in their pre-migration narratives should not be read as the absence of critique, but as evidence of the cognitive struggle and the negotiations between constraint and resistance within racialised structures. Similarly to what Fanon (1970) describes in Black Skin, White Masks as a ‘fractured consciousness’, symbolic violence operates at the psychic level of the colonised (the oppressed), producing internal conflicts and self-doubt.

In our case, the cognitive struggle reflects how objective structures and symbolic violence relate to subjective migration practices. It serves to make sense and problematise how our participants actively manage and respond to negative experiences – for example, by choosing to migrate (Varriale, 2026) – as a way of negotiating, resisting, and reshaping the structural constraints they encounter.

Contemporary Italian Emigration and a Shifting Italian Culture of Migration

Scholars argue that migration decisions are shaped by both structural and cultural factors, operating through the dynamics of a ‘culture of migration’ (Horváth, 2008; Kandel and Massey, 2002). A culture of migration is perpetuated through stories, media, and personal testimonies, which collectively reinforce the notion that migration is not just a physical movement, but a transformative journey towards a reimagined future that influences individual and collective aspirations (Cohen and Sirkeci, 2011).

Italy has a long history of emigration that continues today. Over the past 20 years, approximately 1.6 million Italians have emigrated, and there are currently around 6.4 million Italians living outside Italy (Migrantes, 2025: 13). For the first time, the main data source on Italian emigration (AIRE, the register of Italians living abroad) highlights a significant tendency to emigrate among recently naturalised Italians. In particular, data show that around 146,000 individuals who acquired Italian citizenship between 2014 and 2023 subsequently left Italy, pointing to further migration after naturalisation (Ibid 2025:23-24). Although these figures do not distinguish between migrants’ parents and second-generation children, they are indicative of the mobility of minoritised Italians.

Italy’s economic stagnation, declining wages, and high unemployment (Colombo et al., 2018) has fuelled uncertainty and a sense of limited opportunities (Leccardi, 2021), while concerns about nepotism and provincialism among younger generations contrast with their aspirations for multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism (Franceschelli, 2022). These structural and symbolic factors shape imaginaries of meritocratic opportunity, making migration appear a more attainable path to work, careers and self-realisation (Varriale, 2023a, 2023b). However, we still lack statistical evidence and possess only limited knowledge about the demographic characteristics, as well as the deeper motivations and experiences of minoritised Italians within the broader landscape of contemporary Italian emigration.

In one of the first studies on Italians of African descent in Italy, Jaqueline Andall identified patterns that remain relevant today, providing important context for this study. Andall (2002) found that Afro-Italian participants articulated a strong desire to migrate and leave Italy. This desire was the consequence of their general social experiences in the country, their awareness through their diasporic networks of greater opportunities elsewhere, and the ‘nature of their physical visibility as Black Italians’ and their simultaneous ‘invisibility’ as racialised and marginalised individuals: ‘[T]hey were simply looking elsewhere to secure access to the opportunities they felt they deserved in Italy’ (Andall, 2002: 401). In the same article, Andall reported a ‘palpable hostility towards immigrants’, leading to feelings of non-belonging and an increased desire to leave. This desire was not connected to advocating a return to the parents’ countries of origin but towards migration to other European countries, with the UK – and particularly London – being central to these destinations.

We argue that, as the migration of racialised Italians shifts from aspirational to practical, it starts to actively reshape the Italian culture of migration.

Methodology

This article draws on 21 biographical interviews conducted with Black and racialised Italians who moved to the UK in the last decade or so. The participants are a sub-sample of a wider data collection project, including more than 50 interviews with minoritised Italian migrants in the UK of different descent. The research also builds on a previous study based on a narrative-biographical approach (Riessman, 2008; Rosenthal, 1993) examining Italian migrants in London, which primarily involved white participants (N=51; Franceschelli, 2022, 2024).

All participants were recruited via social media and snowballing, particularly targeting groups by posting advertisements for the research. The sample included 11 women and 10 men whose parents were originally from Congo, Ghana, Eritrea, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt and one from an Afro-Caribbean background. They were all born in Italy and naturalised after turning 18 (apart from two of them, whose fathers were Italian and had Italian citizenship from birth). Since Italian citizenship law follows jus sanguinis, children of migrants inherit their parents’ nationality and can apply for naturalisation as Italian citizens only within a year after turning 18. The process is often protracted and uncertain (Hawthorne, 2022), meaning not all the applications are successful, which deepens internal inequalities amongst Black and racialised Italians.

The majority of participants were aged between 25 and 35, with one participant aged 40 and another aged 45. Most of them, apart from five, were qualified at a degree level or above, and several completed their postgraduate studies in the UK. None of the parents, instead, had a degree, and they were all employed in factories or sectors such as care, construction or hospitality. Some of the parents were unemployed, particularly mothers.

During the interviews, participants recounted their life stories before migration, how the decision to migrate came to be, the reasons for moving and their settlement experiences. The final section explored issues of identity and self-perception in relation to migration. To support the biographical approach, we used ‘life maps’ – visual tools in the form of pre-designed charts from which respondents could select the one that best represented their migration trajectories or create their own (Miles et al., 2011).

Even though direct questions about racism and discrimination were not asked, participants recounted their experiences as part of their narrative about leaving Italy and planning migration. This open-ended approach allowed them to control the narration without requiring direct questions on potentially sensitive topics. Instead of explicitly probing issues of discrimination, the biographical nature of the interviews and the life maps enabled personal stories to be framed from the respondents’ own terms, revealing how they made sense of their migration and social positioning. However, the biographical approach did not fully mitigate the racialised dynamics of the interview/encounter. The positionality of white Italian researchers interviewing Italians from racialised backgrounds may indeed have shaped both what participants felt able to disclose and how they framed their experiences. Attending reflexively to these asymmetries, as highlighted in scholarship on researcher positionality and race (e.g. Gunaratnam, 2003; Phoenix, 2014), was essential for interpreting participants’ narratives critically and ethically.

All the interviews were conducted in Italian, and the transcripts were analysed and then translated by the authors, an approach that has been successfully used in previous publications (e.g. Varriale and Franceschelli, 2025). Different from the in-person interviews with white Italian migrants in London, all the interviews with Black and minoritised Italians were conducted online. Since COVID-19, which saw an increasing number of studies relying on online data collection, there has been growing scholarship focusing on the pros and cons of the so-called ‘virtual methodologies’ (Lobe et al., 2022). It is well established that a main limitation of virtual interviewing is its lack of social context cues, particularly aspects of the physical environment and nonverbal behaviours that constitute important context data. However, our case has shown some of the benefits attached to online data collection, which were relevant to this specific sample (young adults with often busy working lives or living in isolation). These benefits included the ability to reach wider geographical areas and higher flexibility in the interview timing. Finally, the interviews were fully transcribed and analysed using a thematic narrative approach (Riessman, 2008). Through inductive and deductive coding, we identified three main themes: (1) pre-migration experiences and a shifting Italian culture of migration; (2) whiteness, symbolic violence and Italian identity; and (3) symbolic violence and the downplay of discrimination.

A Shifting Italian Culture of Migration: The Symbolic Violence of Whiteness and Early Experiences of Racialisation

The experiences of the Black and racialised Italians – how they decided, planned and ultimately navigated their departure and settlement – mirror those of white Italian migrants in London (Franceschelli, 2022). However, their stories also illuminate the distinct inequalities they encountered. This section will explore how participants reconfigure and alter the national culture of migration by shedding light on how the intersection of racialised social structures operates as a form of symbolic violence. The findings highlight multiple narratives used to describe the different experiences of discrimination and othering, with effects on both personal biographies and the broader culture of migration. These experiences were shaped by the participants’ racialised and gendered identities, which positioned them as outsiders within the Italian national imaginary and subjected them to heightened scrutiny and marginalisation. Thus, while the culture of migration exerts similar structural pressures on both white and racialised Italians, the lived realities of the latter were uniquely shaped by the intersection of migration and racialisation.

The experiences of the women participants add a further intersectional element to the analysis of migration and racialisation (Bonu Rosenkranz and della Porta, 2025). Nathalie, a young woman in her early 30s born on the outskirts of Milan to Congolese parents, reflected on gender-specific forms of racism, such as being stereotyped as a prostitute. In her accounts, she highlights the ‘dark paths’ her experiences of racial discrimination led her to, along with the emotional toll they carried:

Not to mention actual racism, like, I don’t know, being followed by a car, waiting for the bus, people honking. Why? Because they assume you’re a prostitute or something? This is taking us down some rather dark paths, but on a purely day-to-day level.

Another participant, Rita – a 24-year-old from Lombardy whose parents migrated from Ghana – drew attention to a different, yet widely shared, form of structural discrimination: the pervasive racism embedded in Italian schools. While she had supportive teachers in primary school, she became increasingly exposed to racial discrimination during secondary school while gaining greater independence as a teenager:

A teacher even advised my parents to enrol me in a vocational school and often denigrated me in front of the class, saying that my aspirations to become a lawyer and study law were too high for someone like me. I particularly remember this one episode where we had to write an essay about our future professions. I wrote about wanting to become a lawyer, and she said in front of the entire class, ‘People like you are lucky if they become hairdressers, thanks God’.

Rita’s account was far from isolated, and her experience resonated as a broader emerging pattern. Following Rita’s account, Nilufer – a Muslim woman of Algerian descent, born and raised in Umbria, central Italy – offered yet another perspective on discrimination. Now a successful scientist, she reflected in the interview on her educational journey and the persistent, religion-based discrimination she encountered at school. In particular, she described her primary school years as especially challenging due to the ‘hostility and ignorance’ displayed by some teachers:

I mean, I had a lot of love in my family, but when I stepped outside, I found a completely different world – a world full of ignorant people. For example, at school [. . .] My school was near a church, so Christianity was very dominant there [. . .] I could feel it when people would say things like, ‘Oh, but you don’t celebrate Christmas’, or things like that. It was as if I were the black sheep, the different one. I was asked about the hijab regularly [. . .] by the teachers, also ‘Do you ever take it off? We won’t tell your family. Do you wash your hair?’ ‘Do you have lice?’ This was regularly, every day as a child.

When she discussed her willingness to study science, similarly to Rita, Nilufer was reminded by teachers to lower her aspirations, and ‘be realistic’.

These early life experiences shaped the adult lives of Black and racialised Italians: on the one hand, they undermined their self-confidence and sense of self-worth, producing a ‘fractured consciousness’ (Fanon, 1970); on the other hand, they intensified the sense of having grown up in hostile environments, contributing to their desire to migrate:

I remember growing up desiring and planning to leave since ever; it was always on the table. Staying has never been an option. (Rita)

As Andall (2002:402) observed in her study, ‘there was thus a historic understanding that Italy did not offer the same possibilities as other countries.’ Yet, our findings show that what Andall identified two decades ago as the Afro-Italians’ aspiration to leave Italy continues to resonate today and has since then materialised into the concrete reality of migration. Here, Nathalie, Rita and Nilufer reveal how their migration journey related to the intersectional nature of the inequalities that they experienced (Romeo and Fabbri, 2022; Samnick and Michelis, 2024) adding a racialised and gendered dimension to the Italian culture of migration. In so doing, these women demonstrate how decisions to migrate are shaped not only by economic stagnation or by the desire for personal growth, but also by the lived realities of structural discrimination. Their early experiences and socialisation in Italy reframe migration as both a search for opportunity and a response to systemic racial and gendered injustice, thereby contributing to the ongoing transformation of the Italian culture of migration.

Whiteness as Symbolic Violence: Structural Exclusion and Feelings of Non-belonging

The Black and racialised Italians in this study disclosed a sense of ‘partial belonging’ and ‘ambiguous assimilation,’ echoing what Gilroy (1993) identified among Black Caribbeans and Black Africans in Britain. Building on these insights, we also found that participants felt their belonging to an Italian national identity was denied because they were seen and made to feel like ‘perpetual foreigners’ (e.g. Huynh et al., 2011; Tuan, 1998), deemed incompatible with being Italian even when born and raised in Italy and holding Italian citizenship. The denial of belonging was an important marker of the symbolic violence of Italian culture, which acted upon participants with injurious effects. Feelings of exclusion – regardless of nationality or self-identification as Italians – stem from racialised assumptions that conflate European or Italian identity with whiteness, using race as a visible marker of difference to question or deny someone’s inclusion in Italian society (Patriarca and Deplano, 2018). Such experiences were widely shared among participants but were not unique to this sample. A recent survey of second-generation young people in Italy (Censis, 2024) found that more than half the respondents (52.2%) perceived a climate of racial hatred, and 64.4% reported experiencing racism. Existing qualitative and quantitative evidence reveals how systemic racism shapes both personal and broader perceptions of belonging and their connection with complex and intersecting power dynamics related to cultural identity, migration and societal attitudes.

Isaac particularly exemplifies feelings of perpetual exclusion on intersectional grounds, including disability. Born in Sicily to Ghanaian parents and growing up in a small town in Friuli, in the north of Italy, he also had a permanent physical condition, which was poorly understood by the African community. While growing up, he experienced a persistent sense of otherness, enduring racial discrimination and bullying at school, while also struggling to find a place amongst Ghanaians and Africans. His complex relations with Black communities in Italy brought him to try and form friendships with white Italians:

My situation is a bit more peculiar compared to other people, so I tried to integrate more into the, so to speak, ‘Italian fabric’ because I felt Italian, and I still feel Italian. So, I interacted much more with the local guys [. . ..] from the neighbourhood.

The move to the North of Italy as a teenager complicated things further as racial exclusion became more prominent with implications for his forming identity. Yet, in his accounts, he did not directly connect migration to these experiences of racialisation and exclusion. Unable to complete university, the story of his departure from Italy was presented as the desire to support his family, and a need for change, adventure and more independence. He recounted a narrative of progression, moving from factory work to a successful public-facing role and eventually to self-employment.

[. . .] in the 21 years I spent in Italy, I always felt like that different person, the one who couldn’t fit into the so-called norms of society. This was one of my constant thoughts. You’re different, so you have to try to fit into this society. But here in England, I’ve had the opportunity to focus on something else. I’ve had the chance to focus on my abilities and the way I interact with people, to be more curious and want to learn more. So, overall, I can tell you that, yes, I feel changed. This change came mostly in these last two years, specifically, and I see life from different perspectives now. So, I have a clearer vision, I know what I want, I know what I want to do, and who I want to help.

Isaac’s story of settling in the UK is framed as a journey of personal and professional growth, in which the emotional labour he once invested in adapting to Italian society was redirected towards finding a career path within the broader opportunities available in the UK.

While Isaac’s case was more complex and unique, Nathalie, of Congolese descent, expressed a sentiment more widely shared: a persistent sense of exclusion from belonging to Italy. Many respondents described being routinely questioned about their ‘genuine’ Italianness, often having to explain their identity and origins. While recounting an evening out in London with an Italian (White) friend, Nathalie offers an example of how encounters with Italians in the UK continued to reproduce these discourses:

I’ll give you an example. I went out to eat with an Italian friend. We went to this Italian restaurant – she lives here, like me. To her, they answered her in Italian and spoke in Italian. When I spoke in Italian, instead, they kept answering me in English while they continued to speak to her in Italian. I insisted, like, ‘I understand Italian’, but they just kept talking to me in English.

I mean, in 2023, you can’t ask someone who grew up in Italy, ‘[Wow] how well you speak Italian’. It’s like not even seeing me as Italian. You wouldn’t say to an Italian [white] person, ‘You speak Italian so well.’ So, you understand these things [. . .] No, it’s not like being attacked or anything like that, but it makes you realize how differently you are perceived. It’s like you can feel Italian up to a certain point, but there will always be someone who doesn’t see you as such and maybe doesn’t consider you fully suitable.

The exclusion experienced by Nathalie acts as a form of symbolic violence, reinforcing through everyday interactions her representations and subjective perceptions of otherness, regardless of their deep connection to Italy and Italian identity. Even when they’ve been fully socialised within Italian society, the pressures of symbolic violence reveal how racial and cultural biases undermine many participants’ sense of belonging to Italy and mark them as perpetually not quite Italian while cultivating their desire to migrate.

Similarly, the interview with Rita highlights how, in Italy, she faced the constant pressure to prove her ‘Italianness’ with a significant impact on her mental health - even though - since migration, she has found ‘peace with herself’:

Today, if I go to Italy and someone tells me, ‘Rita you’re not Italian’, I’d say, ‘Fine, I don’t even feel fully Italian anymore.’ I no longer have the energy to prove it – it’s something that has changed over time [. . .] Now, I feel at peace with myself. I feel like a bit of ‘One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand’, like Pirandello, you know? I feel like Rita fully, in all my facets, accepting myself without needing to prove that I’m more Ghanaian than Italian or more Italian than Ghanaian. I’ve found that peace. At 16, however, it was a constant struggle to prove that I was Italian.

This emotional work of navigating a hybrid identity in a context where belonging is still constantly questioned (e.g. Cicognani et al., 2018) characterises Rita’s case. Her journey – from struggling to assert her Italian identity to embracing the multiplicity of her selfhood – reflects a broader process of self-identity construction shared by many racialised Italians (e.g. Rizzo et al., 2020).

Relatedly, Nilufer also distanced herself from questions of identity and belonging, rejecting imposed categories and refusing to conform to national or cultural labels:

For me, identity has never been an issue because I don’t give a **** about being anything, not even being Italian. You’re supposed to be Algerian. What annoys me is that there are two types of people: those in Italy who say, ‘You’re not Italian’, and I didn’t care because I didn’t want to be Italian. Then there are those here in London who say, ‘But you’re Italian?’ I’m not Italian because I’ve never cared about being Italian.

Although participants identified as Italian, as Nilufer suggests, they often struggled to assert this identity, ending up questioning their belonging to Italy. For some of them, being Italian remained both an aspiration and a contested status. In summary, the analysis suggests that the rigidity of identity categories and the marginalisation of those who do not fit them made exclusion feel natural and inevitable. As a result, migration appeared as the response to this exclusion and to the symbolic violence that comes with it.

Symbolic Violence as ‘Theorising the Unsaid’: Narratives of ‘Racialised Provincialism’ and Decreasing Opportunities

Recently, critical scholarship has challenged the tendency to diminish the role of racialised social structures, emphasising their deep historical roots and influence on the construction of national identity – processes that deliberately obscure the central role of racial thinking, particularly in the case of Italian society (Patriarca, 2022). Yet, together with the explicit acknowledgement of discrimination and violence described earlier, there were also examples of narratives which minimised experiences of discrimination and downplayed its role. This is not an unusual trend, as research suggests that racialised minorities and migrant groups do not always explicitly acknowledge being subjected to racial discrimination for reasons of status protection and status enhancement (Fox et al., 2015).

The downplaying of discrimination could be attributed to various factors, such as the dynamics of interacting with a white researcher, which may have influenced how participants framed their experiences or their desire to focus on the more positive aspects of their life histories. Moreover, the colour-blind nature of dominant public and political discourses, which diminishes the role of racial discrimination (Varriale and Franceschelli, 2025), shaped how some Black Italians in the study articulated their experiences. This points to the complexities of discussing racialised experiences in contemporary Italy and highlights the nuanced ways individuals navigate, interpret, and make sense of encounters with discrimination.

Syrie, of East African origins, presents a case of social distinction by placing herself away from experiences of racial discrimination and highlighting achievement, resilience and success as markers of her personal biography. Raised in a single-parent household, she grew up alongside the children of her mother’s employer. This wealthy family gave Syrie access to cultural capital, a higher standard of living and various opportunities, shielding her from many challenges faced by other women in migrant communities. Her mother, who had ambitious plans for her future, was concerned about her daughter’s moving abroad, but – under the influence of her employers – understood the possibilities that would open:

I was very lucky. I grew up in a bubble. Even though I knew I was different from them, they didn’t make us feel like the housekeeper and the daughter [. . .] I don’t think things are so inclusive anymore. [Growing up in Italy] for me was easy. It was them [the family] that instilled in us the idea of studying abroad.

Syrie framed her story and subsequent success as a mixture of ‘luck’, hard work and self-reliance. After moving to London, she graduated with a first in business while working on several part-time jobs to support herself. The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a job interview that changed her story, came almost by chance and from there, she then progressed rapidly in her career to a senior director role. While she did not directly cite racism or discrimination, her interview suggests that such barriers may have hindered her opportunities in Italy, making her move to London crucial for her achievements:

[Moving to London] has been everything, 100% of the explanation; otherwise, [in Italy] I would not have got what I got.

Even if not personally affected and despite the social distinction based on upward mobility, Syrie still implicitly recognises that life in Italy, for Black and racialised Italians, is not ‘inclusive’ outside the family ‘bubble’ that protected her.

The tendency to downplay the role of discrimination is neither specific to this sample nor unique. Andall’s (2002: 398) work on second-generation Afro-Italians found that they often attributed incidents of racial discrimination to general ‘ignorance’ as one participant puts it:

Most people [here] maybe don’t feel superior, but they will say, you’re black, you’re dirty, things like that. I don’t know how to explain, but the racism here is not like the racism of white French people or white English people who really feel superior . . . I don’t think that Italians feel superior. I think that for historical reasons, the English and the French feel superior, even the Americans. The Italians, no, they have no real reason to feel superior. (22-year-old male)

In this context, we identified two ways by which discrimination was discussed with a reduced emphasis on the underlying racialised social structures: its framing as provincialism and its minimisation as a general ‘societal and economic issue’ unrelated to race.

Participants’ accounts in the study suggest that the notion of ‘ignorance’ was associated with a broader form of ‘provincialism’ (Franceschelli, 2022), reflecting a perception of Italians as not overtly or formally racist, but rather lacking the awareness and competencies to navigate issues related to race and diversity. Previous findings (Franceschelli, 2022) suggest that career progression and even job opportunities were undermined by the precarious economic circumstances of the country but also hindered by aspects of Italian culture and lifestyle described as ‘provincial’, even in large urban areas. ‘Provincialism’ was mostly associated with parochial and narrow-minded understandings of the world and a lack of cosmopolitan and multicultural outlooks (Franceschelli, 2022).

Andrea, whose family was originally from Eritrea, was born and grew up on the outskirts of Rome and spoke about his experience of a ‘racialised provincialism’. His migration history is connected to the history of Italian colonialism, as Eritrea was part of ‘the Italian East Africa’, the colony formed under Mussolini in 1936. During that time, interracial relationships between Italian settlers and local East Africans became quite common, leading to a growing number of mixed-race Italians. Yet, having Italian ancestry did not shield them from feelings of being ‘not quite Italian’ or from racialisation, particularly in so-called provincial contexts:

It was my grandparents – on Sundays, my grandmother, who didn’t speak Italian very well, would slaughter a chicken and prepare Eritrean food for the whole family. There was a lot of ritual in it. My grandmother would walk around [the town] wearing Ethiopian Coptic clothing. When we eventually opened a family restaurant, an Eritrean restaurant in [town], at first it was seen as exotic for a while, but then we faced a lot of opposition and resistance. You know, [town] isn’t Rome or Milan. [Town] is about 35,000 people, famous for having been pro-Mussolini.

While rooted in similar concerns, the specific idea of ‘provincialism’ described by participants partly differs from that presented by white Italian migrants (Franceschelli, 2022). Despite attempts to frame their observations more broadly, Black and racialised Italians articulate provincialism with a distinctly racialised dimension, reflecting cultural, racial stereotyping and coloniality, as Andrea’s accounts suggest. Therefore, the reference to a provincial mindset was shaped by and reinforced by racial prejudice, which hindered aspirations and motivated migration.

Similar to some of their white peers from different socio-economic backgrounds, Black and racialised Italians also expressed strong economic motivations to migrate, driven by aspirations for a better lifestyle and opportunities. Andrea’s experience in Italy as a young adult was marked by a work environment which, as he says, lacked professionalism, job security and hindered career progression. Here is how he described his first proper job as a graduate:

[It was all] very provincial. Provincial in terms of services, in terms of mentality, in terms of the fact that – I worked in [name of the company and city] for six or seven years, – and for six years, I would hear people say was, ‘But listen to this f**** and then the n-word, like [it] is something you can joke about in the workplace. OK, they were not directed at me, but it gives you an idea of the [environment].

Participants’ stories about jobs are embedded in personal experiences of the 2008 global crisis, featuring a strong sense of declining opportunities (Colombo et al., 2018; Liotti, 2020), but also a parochial working culture which incentivised a desire for migration. Nathalie embodies these concerns while speaking of her failure to get any type of work in Italy after the end of secondary school, regardless of her numerous attempts:

The idea of leaving only started to take shape when I began looking for work and realised how difficult it was – not just difficult, but even impossible for some of us. [. . .] It’s something that affects everyone – Italians of all backgrounds, all colours – the economic crisis, you know. But even more so for people like me [. . .] I was looking for anything at first. I wasn’t very picky because I didn’t have much experience. So, working in a shop, a restaurant, anything really, but, well, nothing ever came up, they never called back.

Interestingly, Nathalie makes sense of unemployment as a ‘social issue’ shared with white Italians, before exploring its implications along racial lines:

At first, I didn’t see it solely as a racial issue but more as a social problem. I mean, in Italy, there’s a crisis. Young people can’t find work, there are no opportunities, no future – this is something that affects everyone to some extent. However, for these very reasons, I decided that I wanted to go abroad.

While these accounts acknowledge shared experiences of economic struggle, the specific reference to ‘people like me’ draws attention to the heightened challenges faced by racialised individuals.

The case of Amir, a young man in his mid-20s who recently completed a degree in London while working in hospitality, offers insight into how discrimination is perceived. Amir suggested that ‘Italians are not racist in the traditional sense of the word’. While he downplayed childhood experiences of discrimination – such as being stereotyped as a thug or criminal due to his Moroccan origins – his account emphasises a broader critique of Italy’s lack of meritocracy, which he identified as the country’s primary social issue: ‘in Italy, racism is a problem, not the problem’ and explained Italian emigration as the result of lacking job opportunities and the impossibility for career progression.

In sum, our analysis extends Andall’s insights into the cultural dimensions of ‘Italian provincialism’ and highlights the nuanced versions of its racialised aspects. Black and racialised Italians used different narratives to explain their motivation to migrate. Even when not explicitly stated, it appeared that experiences of racialisation and exclusion played a role in our participants’ migration decisions, reflecting the deep entrenchment of systemic inequalities, the exercise of subjective agency, and the direct reshaping of the Italian culture of migration.

Conclusion

This article has examined the migration journeys of Black and racialised Italian migrants in the UK to illuminate broader questions of race and migration in intra-European mobility. Their experiences reflect how Italian mobility patterns and systemic racism are entwined with cultural narratives about identity and whiteness rooted in Italy’s colonial and fascist past, but still relevant to the racial exclusion of Italian minoritised groups today. In this sense, the study aligns with Italian postcolonial literature (Lombardi-Diop, 2012; Patriarca and Deplano, 2018), situating racism in Italy within its fascist and colonial history rather than considering it the product of recent demographic change. Therefore, the article shows how these legacies continue to shape attitudes, policies, and the lived experiences of Black and racialised Italians.

Participants acknowledged their experiences of discrimination and exclusion, but some – particularly those with histories of upward mobility (e.g. Syrie) – were reluctant to name them as racism. We interpret this reluctance as a consequence of symbolic violence as the unsaid reproduction of racialised exclusion (Huc-Hepher, 2021). We argue that this violence is historically embedded into the construction of Italians as ‘white brava gente’, perpetuating colour-blinded discourses which minimise racism with implications for how migration, Italian identity and race are discussed and experienced in Italy. As a result, Black and racialised Italians in the study often find themselves navigating a context in which racism is widespread but subtly denied and treated as insignificant.

Crucially, the research suggests that if in their discourses, they minimised discrimination and so acted as ‘complicit’ in reproducing the social structure that oppresses them, in practice they actively responded to racial injustice most notably through migration. In line with Brah’s (2005) idea that a diasporic space transforms national cultures and meanings, the mobility of Black and minoritised Italians reshapes the Italian culture of migration by inscribing it with their experiences and their new imaginaries while also highlighting its racialised dimensions. By foregrounding the voices of participants, the article shows how symbolic violence constrains but does not erase resistance, resonating with literature on Black Italian activism. In this context, migration itself appears as an embodied critique of racial structures and how they intersect with other axes of inequality, such as gender (e.g. Rita and Nathalie), religion (Nadia) or disability (Isaac) acting as a counter-move to symbolic violence: a response that turns constraint into mobility and a reconfiguration of life possibilities, even if it exposes migrants to new exclusions elsewhere.

Finally, the analysis shows how exclusion travels transnationally: abroad, participants encountered echoes of microaggressions, while still identifying with Italian culture. The violence they are subject to also lies in this contradiction: the feeling of being Italian, but the inability to fully claim an Italian identity. Building on this tension between belonging and exclusion, and in complementing research on economic and lifestyle migration, this article underscores the racialised dynamics shaping Black Europeans’ mobilities and calls for greater attention to racial injustice in analyses of migration within Europe.