“I want to learn Italian”, elementary school book with racist cartoon: controversial Then the editor’s apology: “We reprint everything.”



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A few hours of tweets and posts were enough for the news to jump nationwide. “We have changed the page, which is available immediately for those who use the text in this school year,” said the Raffaello Editorial Group, from Monte San Vito (Ancona), which published the volume on its Facebook page. We apologize for the illustration subject to so much criticism, which has offended sensitivity and offended, it was certainly not our intention. We want to emphasize that the book in question is a project of more than six hundred pages and the message that is transmitted is one of total inclusion. “, it reads.

“Italian school publications still suffer from fairly strong stereotypical legacies, and we are not surprised that there is a primary school book where the foreign child is depicted as illiterate, unable to speak Italian and with a still strong colonial heritage. Unfortunately it is part of a part of the identity of the Italian school. Not entirely, but partly “. Giulia Selmi, vice president of the National Network Educating for Differences, says it when commenting on the cartoon considered racist.

And it was precisely the Educar por las differences association that made the case uncovered. “The book enters intercultural classes in which girls and boys born and raised in Italy have different colors, mixed, adoptive families, parents who come from other countries but have lived here for years or who were born and raised here. But also recently arrived children who bring their cultures of origin with them and who build new mestizo identities in those classes made of reciprocal encounters and contaminations. Children that we follow through representations like this to point out as foreigners, as something more than a supposed italic normality. and imitating with a shameful language that seems to be taken from a bad movie of the 30s “.

The case turns political – And obviously the controversy could not leave politics indifferent. “There is no excuse to hide from the publisher Raffaello. School is serious business and a textbook for second grade children cannot have a racist and vulgar phrase like this: that book should not only be withdrawn, that the publisher should not can take care of our children’s education, we do not apologize.



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