Turin’s Claudio Tocchi on how cities can foster belonging during Covid-19

Claudio Tocchi is a chief of staff for the deputy mayor of Turin for human rights and youth policies, working specifically on issues related to human rights, youth policy, intercultural activities, and related topics. Much of his work centers around fostering anti-racism and interculturalism in Italy. Toward Belonging’s Sara Grossman recently spoke with him about his work towards belonging and how it has shifted during the time of Covid-19.

What have been some of the biggest challenges for the communities you work with in terms of accessing city resources during the pandemic and how do you go about proactively reaching those communities?

In March, the government mandated a lockdown. And it was really chaotic at the beginning, like every second day there was a new norm or new law. Then every second day there was a new kind of benefit you could access depending on where you were working, what kind of employee you were, etc. It was very complicated to get access to all of this, and even just to figure out what was going on. So we started by reaching out to all of the community leaders and presidents of associations that we had worked with over the past years. The intercultural policy of the city of Torino is built on relationships with associations because grassroots associations have been very strong over the past one and a half centuries. So it really is within the institutional culture of the city, and we translated that to our work with minority communities.

We started out by asking about the needs of these communities to deal with this crisis. The first thing these associations and communities mentioned was the fact they didn't really understand what they could do and what they couldn't and how they could help. So we set up a webpage where we provided first-class information and we translated it into an accessible Italian. We weren’t able to translate it into other languages because everything was changing so fast, we couldn't really make it in 25 languages, every day. But we asked the community leaders and the community associations to translate and explain the information to their communities as we knew that linguistic, but also cultural, translations were very important.

What do you mean by “cultural translations”? 

By cultural translations, I mean that we don’t use WeChat, for example, as the city of Torino, but other communities do. We don't have all of the possible social networks that different communities would use. Even when the city provides services, the problem is still that you have a share of people who don't get access to those services, for different reasons. For example, some don't know who to ask for help or they're suspicious of social welfare for whatever reason. Bureaucracy could be an obstacle, as well as institutional discrimination and single public officers’ racist unconscious biases. The amount of people that do not have access to services within migrant / minority communities is so much higher than in white or Italian communities. In some cases, you have undocumented migrants who are not eligible for benefits or you have persons who are suspicious because they believe if you let the government know you're poor, they take away your children. That's a very big fake news item that is strong within our communities. Sometimes, people don't speak Italian and give up in trying to access services. Others are unsure that their documents are okay—even if they are—but they feel, “You never know.” Among many other reasons. So we started working with the community associations because they knew their own communities best. They know where help is needed for whom.

So ultimately we worked in parallel. We had the big bulk of the official help from social services, providing help for maybe 80 percent of those who needed it. And then you had these community associations finding specific situations and needs for all those outside of our system. We provided permits for association volunteers to go around, even during the lockdown, to bring help and food, and we put them in touch with social services, like food banks.

I also want to ask about narratives around migrants and other minority communities in Italy, before this pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about some of the narratives that you're working against in the long term? Relatedly, is there anything specific to the language of Italian that informs how people interpret or understand these narratives as opposed to English?

I think an important thing to begin with is that Italy has a very recent migration history. It's something that is probably weird to understand for Americans or Britons, but we are just now having the first generations of non-white Italians. We are now at the second or third generation for some of the oldest communities and at the first generation for some of the most recent. This sort of migration broadly started at the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s. So compared to the UK or France, it is really, really young. That means they are more likely to have problems with language, problems with dealing with Italian bureaucracy, they didn't go to school in this country, and so on. That means a lot of things are very unfamiliar. 

And this is producing massive reactions amongst white Italians. One of the most common racist slogans is sung by hooligans in the stadium during football. They sing, “There are no Black Italians”—but they don't say Black. At the same time, this is not just a reaction to migration—it’s a reaction to a changing Italian identity. There is a refusal by a big proportion portion of society to accept the fact that you can be Italian but also Muslim: Italian but also Black or Asian or non white. Your last name may not end with a vowel and your first name could be Mohammed. All of this happening in a decade of deep economic crisis in Italy, which never fully recovered from the 2008 crisis and where “nativism” looks like a valid alternative to get back to some sort of economic golden age.

At nearly every level of society, Italians, when thinking about when meeting someone who's not white, automatically think they are a migrant, not an Italian. And this is the main change I think that our society is going through right now—to understand that you might be Italian but not white or not Christian.

There has been the beginning of a movement in the media and by intellectuals, to try to work this out. But this is at the very very beginning, it's not mainstream yet and policies are basically non existent.

Are there discussions now in the public sphere about how to deal with these narratives and beliefs through structural or policy changes? 

We have stressed so much about this in so many ways. First of all, we set up an office for anti-racism, because that was the easiest way to underline the fact that the discrimination that one suffers has nothing to do with their legal status—it is because of race and the creation of “otherness.” Then we set up a system to work with associations, we try to change the wording, calling it “intercultural” work not “integration” work—we work with minorities, not just with migrants.

Our challenge moving forward is that we have to develop a way of speaking about diversity that could exclude the words “migration” and “refugees.” Of course they are there. I mean, I don't want to downplay that and of course they have specific needs, but if you keep focusing on migration and refugees, it's easy to just blame paper status and linguistic barriers to inclusion and social success. It’s easy to blame “them” for failing to reach some legal or integration standard, whereas it is the society as a whole that must rethink itself and start recognizing the fact that we now have a diverse society, and stop excluding non-white Italians.

Is this something that you talk about with these minority communities? Do you engage them in combating these narratives?

We just started something new. We’ve created an urban commons around antiracism. The concept of an urban commons allows for an equal cooperation between institutions and citizens to take care of something that is neither public or private, but common. It is a very new way of understanding goods, like a garden. It's not public. It's not private. It's a common and the management is equally shared between institutions and citizens. 

So we declared antiracism an “urban common.” And then we started a process where we collected applications from civil society associations to work with us, the municipality, to write a pact on how to implement and defend antiracism initiatives. We could have had an open grant for associations that wanted to do activities, but we didn’t want to do that, we wanted a cooperative approach. Grants tend to replicate a pattern of competition among civil society associations. So if you open it up to migrant communities, then either the Romanian association wins it or the Moroccan wins it. And that's what we didn’t want. We wanted to create a cooperative system where the words and needs of minority communities were taken into consideration and where the white associations are allied but not front liners. 

So when we started this project, 59 associations applied to be part of this process. We’ve met a couple of times between July and September and it is so interesting to see how these different organizations work together. Within the working groups you have stereotypes and you have racist approaches, because we all have those biases. It’s an ongoing mutual learning process. 

It's also interesting to see the public offices deal with this kind of thing, not being in the palace locked in. Taking the risk of participating in horizontal dialogues with civil society, it's interesting to see how the white and non-white migrant background associations are dealing among themselves and with each other's different needs. The white organizations will always say “we need education and data collection and this and this,” but then you get to associations from the minority communities, they're like, well, we need access to services. So we're all learning from each other a lot. Hopefully this will produce changes.

Given the enormity of the challenges you described around fully integrating migrants and nonwhite Italians into both the public consciousness and public systems in Italy, do you see any hopeful signs that show the nation moving toward belonging in this area?

I think in general there is hope, definitely. You just need to go to a primary school at recess: kids playing around together have all sorts of possible heritages. Interculture is happening everyday at every level and tomorrow's young adults will have experienced it from a very early age, which means it will be totally normal. In this aspect, I think Italy is in a good position, because—contrary to other countries—data seems to show a smaller degree of "ethnic concentration" in ghetto districts. The majority of immigrants live outside big cities (57 percent in towns under 50,000 inhabitants), for instance, and this should make ethnic and religious diversity a common thing in the entire country, not only in big cities (which seems to be one of the major cleavages in the UK and France). In my view, the question is not so much whether we will have a diverse society (we will), but how much time (and struggles, and suffering) it will take before that happens. So, I see my work on the challenges as a way of smoothing the friction of the process.