0
A provocative “joke” was recently made, comparing award-winning actor Samuel L Jackson and former basketball star Magic Johnson to illegal African migrants, prompting anger about racism in Italy.
The American stars were pictured last weekend chilling out on a bench in the coastal resort of Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany.
The Pulp Fiction and Snakes On a Plane star and ex-NBA Champion had just finishing shopping and had their bags next to them.
The image was innocent, but ended up sparking a row about prejudice and racism when Italian journalist and radio presenter Luca Bottura, posted it to Facebook and likened the stars to the waves of African migrants that have arrived in Italy in recent years.
“Government funds at Forte dei Marmi…they go shopping at Prada with their daily allowance of 35 euros,” he wrote in a Facebook post, alongside the photo of Jackson and Johnson on the bench. “Share this if you are indignant!”
The social media post, that Bottura claims that was ironic, attracted tens of thousands of comments, shares and likes when it was picked up by model and singer Nina Moric.
She wrote: “To see migrants lounging around on benches in places like Forte dei Marmi, living off the 35 euros a day that they get from us, is really too much.” Ms Moric, who was born in what is now Croatia and supports a far-Right, anti-immigration movement called Casa Pound, insisted that her post was also a joke.
Moric, says that she would never have mistaken Jackson and Johnson for African migrants, many people on Facebook however, took the image at face value, apparently thinking that the two men in the image were actual migrants that somehow had enough money to shop at designer outlets in one of the country’s smartest resorts.
“This is the Italy where we prefer to give 35 euros a day to Communist cooperatives in order to support layabouts rather than make them work and produce wealth,” one Italian man wrote. A woman called Roberta wrote: “Immigrants go home”, while another wrote: “Don’t tell me these people are fleeing from war, because I don’t believe it.”
Sam & I chilling out on a bench yesterday in Forte dei Marmi, Italy. The fans started lining up to take pictures with us. pic.twitter.com/uzXx698PiN
— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) August 16, 2017
Others pointed out, however, that the photo and accompanying words were “ironic” and “deliberately provocative”.
Italy has growing exasperation over the huge numbers of economic migrants, many of them being young African men, who are rescued in the Mediterranean after being launched from Libya beaches by smuggling gangs. 181,000 were brought to Italy last year. The number for this year so far, is 98,000.
Ms Moric, a former showgirl, said her Facebook post had been “a social experiment” and it had succeeded in exposing “how we really are in Italy”.
“I want to clarify – it was an ironic joke,” she told Corriere della Sera newspaper. “I lived for 10 years between New York and Los Angeles and I recognised those two (Johnson and Jackson) immediately. I’m a citizen of the world who loves Italy, but not the way the country is governed.”
But her Facebook post – whether ironic or not – was criticised by some politicians, including Emanuele Fiano, an MP with the governing, centre-Left Democratic Party.
Describing Ms Moric as “an exponent of the neo-Fascist, extreme Right”, he accused her of an “obtuse ideology” which judged people on the colour of their skin. “I didn’t find it funny at all. There are plenty of people who think the same way that she does,” the MP said.
One of Hollywood’s most prolific and acclaimed actors, Samuel L Jackson has appeared in more than 100 films, from Star Wars and Jackie Brown to Die Hard with a Vengeance and the aforementioned Snakes On a Plane.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson is regarded as one of the world’s greatest ever basketball players and spent his 13-year NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers. He was a member of the US men’s basketball team, known as The Dream Team, that won a gold medal at the 1992 Olympics.