There is quite a nice park on the other side of the city and next to the park there is a little gelateria, Vaniglia, with the best gelato that can be found here. I had two more bus tickets left so I decided to head that way to enjoy the sunny day outside.
Somewhere along the way two guys got on the bus but refused to pay the bus fare. The bus driver asked them to leave the bus, which they wouldn't do. After some arguing one of the guys started to get quite heated so the bus driver decided to calm the situation a little and continued driving, but the guy would not calm down. At this point the other passengers started to tell him to shut his mouth, which just aggravated him even further. These two guys were black, and I'm sure you can imagine how the argument went. The passengers were telling the aggressive guy "if you live in our country you have to follow our rules" - which is fair enough - to which the guy said they were Italian. Of course this provoked someone to say "yeah, you look so Italian too". This went on for a good ten, fifteen minutes, and at some point it really looked as though the aggressive guy was ready stab someone on the bus, he was running back and forth picking a fight and shouting.
To cut the long story short, eventually the police arrived, at which point the culprit had already left the scene and his friend, who most of this time had stayed quiet only occasionally defending his friend, but always in a civilised and calm manner. The police searched him and took him away. The aggressive guy got away with it, and I know it because I later saw him in the park.
I wanted to defend the friend, the guy who stayed calm, because at the end of the day he hadn't done anything else wrong apart from not having a ticket. It was hardly worth being taken away in a police car. But he was black and regardless of his words or the way he said them, he was guilty by proxy.
But here is the twist: as I looked around the bus, I saw one Asian woman, commenting to the woman in front of her (from some East-European country) how the guys got what they deserved. I saw three black women, one wearing a traditional African costume and speaking French (I will not start guessing which ex-colony she was from because my African knowledge is not quite up to scratch), and the two others dressed in a western way. There was also a woman who spoke Italian with a heavy Russian accent, she was the one telling the boys they were "not welcome in our country" if they couldn't respect the rules. And then there were two Italian men, two old Italian women, and me.
Even with my rusty maths skills I can tell that the majority of the passengers were immigrants. And they were very keen to tell these guys they didn't have a right to be there. At one point the more quiet guy, who spoke perfect Italian, unlike the Russian lady, said "do you think I would want to be there if I could have stayed in my own country?". The old Italian man told the young man he was not welcome and no one wanted him here because apparently they it was obvious he was not a good person. I wonder how this was obvious. The guy was dressed smartly and spoke in a very educated way. Don't white Italian boys ever travel without a bus ticket? I can assure you: they do.
Who's country is this in the end? We, the other immigrants, are prejudiced even though also we have come here probably in search of a better life, whether it be because there is an economic, cultural or political crisis in our home countries.
I agree, if you live in a country you have to follow the rules, but I can't help but feel bad for the guy in the white t-shirt. It seemed to me that the main reason he got dragged into this mess was that he knew the other man, and that he was black.
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