Tourism is one of the world’s biggest businesses, and each year, millions of people travel to different parts of the world. But instead of bringing people from different cultures together, it can sometimes make discrimination worse.
Mahnoor Euceph, a filmmaker who is half-Pakistani and half-Chinese, and her boyfriend, who is also half-Chinese, as well as his parents, were on a train trip through Italy with his parents when they had a disturbing experience with three Italian women.
Euceph filmed part of what happened and shared it on Tik-Tok, asking for help to find out who the people were. The women were found in the end, and Euceph had a short conversation with one of them.
The Pakistani-American director Mahnoor Euceph was on a train in Italy with her half-Chinese boyfriend and his parents.
Image credits:Â eucephÂ
When the group met three local women, Euceph said it was “dehumanizing.”
Image credits: mahnooreu
Image credits:Â mahnooreu
It was so bad that Euceph started filming the women.
Image credits:Â mahnooreu
More than half of the Italians polled in a 2019 poll said that racist acts were sometimes or always “justifiable.” This was found after a series of high-profile racist and anti-semitic incidents across the country.
The research company SWG talked to 1,500 people. Ten percent of them said racist acts were always okay, and 45 percent said it depended on the situation.
The other 45% think that any kind of racist behavior is totally wrong.
Enzo Risso, scientific director at SWG, told The Guardian that this shows that people’s views toward racism have changed. “This doesn’t mean that people have become racist, but rather that they are becoming more accepting of racist acts and don’t find them so shocking.”
After the video got viral, the internet found them on social media.
Image credits:Â mahnooreu
When one of the women realized what had happened, she went to Euceph.
Image credits:Â mahnooreu
But she didn’t like being gaslighted, so she wrote the following response:
Last year, several thousand black-clad fascist sympathizers sang hymns to Benito Mussolini as they marched to the late dictator’s grave. It comes 100 years after Mussolini invaded Rome and ended a bloodless coup that led to two decades of fascist rule.
The crowd of 2,000 to 4,000 demonstrators, many wearing fascist symbols and singing songs from the Italian colonial era, was larger than in previous years.
The crowds that gathered in Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace and resting place in northern Emilia-Romagna, may have been heartened by the fact that, for the first times in since World War II, a party with neo-fascist roots is leading Italy’s government.
Image credits:Â mahnooreu
In a second video, Euceph thanks everyone who had helped her and urged people to speak out against racist behavior.
So that’s that. I just want to thank you guys for all of your support. I also want to say, you know, we don’t need to bully them or stoop to their level or make comments about their appearances. You know, women have enough body image issues as it is. I think let’s just stick to the topic at hand, which is their racist behavior, and let’s try to make them take accountability for that. But thank you so much. You guys have been really, really supportive and it felt at least like a little bit of justice to get the support from the global community and a lot of really nice Italian people have reached out and apologized for these girls’ behaviors, so I really appreciate that as well.
But Italian haters often don’t worry about being seen in public. For example, fans of the Roman team Lazio threw things at Samuel Umtiti, a French defender who plays for Lecce and won the world championship in 2018. This was just one of many new and regular things that happened during a game between the two teams on January 4.
Umtiti has been on loan to Lecce from Barcelona since 2022. He won the game, but he was crying at the end. He turned down a break from the game when racist chants from Lazio fans were directed at him and his Zambian partner, Lameck Banda.
Extremists who follow a lifestyle that was inspired by fascism are known to be fans of the Roman Club. But the problem is much bigger than that and hasn’t been fixed in decades.
Image credits:Â wikipedia.or
There are also effects on other games in the country. Paola Egonu, an Italian professional volleyball player who was constantly harassed because of her race, gender, or sexual orientation, even thought about leaving the national team.
More recently, Chérif Traoré, an Italian rugby player for Benetton Rugby in Treviso, chose to talk about the latest racist bullying he had to deal with on social media. Before Christmas, one of his friends gave him a rotten banana without his knowledge.
But the great majority of discriminatory acts do happen in the world of football, which is Italy’s national pride. In its report on the 2021–2022 sports season, an Italian agency against racial discrimination said that 78.7% of the recorded cases involved football.
Image credits:Â cherif_traore
People have been very shocked by what the Italian women have done.
The universities where the women study have also said they will look into the matter.
Image credits: unimib
