The first time I saw a Lega Nord (“Northern League”) advertisement was in an Italian seminar during my junior year of college. My mother, a southern Italian woman, rarely discusses the politics of her homeland, so I wasn’t very familiar with the right-wing party. Lega Nord is a small northern party whose support has fluctuated since its conception in the 1990s. I later learned that its platform was meant to promote more regional autonomy among Italy’s states. Some even demanded that Northern Italy secede from the rest of the country.

This ideology wasn’t reflected in the actual advertisement, which was literally a line of racist caricatures standing in front of a closed door. The first was an East Asian man with buck teeth. The next was a weary Roma woman (the politically correct term for what many know as gypsies) with a kerchief on her head. She is followed by an African man with massive lips dressed in a purple tunic. Finally, a bearded Arab man dressed in white carrying a curved sword is at the end, and he pushes an elderly white Italian man behind him. The headline above their heads reads, “Indovina chi è l’ultimo? [Guess who’s the last one?]”

It’s a ridiculous ad, one that is clearly playing on the fear of foreigners taking jobs, and the racism within it was so over the top that a viewer could easily wonder if it was fake (it wasn’t). That ad and the mentality surrounding it truly captures Italians’ peculiar views on race. Italians are very capable of being racist, just like anybody else. But their brand of racism is inextricably tied up with nationality and fear of a changing Italy.

Part of the reason that the ad was so surprising to me was the fact that the experience my father had in Italy was so different. My dad, who is a black American, described Italy as the first place where he felt comfortable in his own skin. It was the first place where he wasn’t followed around in stores, and he still recounts the story of an old woman who left him alone in her shop. He ends with, “I just couldn’t believe it. That had never happened to me before.”

However, this is because it doesn’t have to do with blackness, or at least not entirely. Italians don’t have the same racial history as Americans. They don’t have the same hang-ups or stereotypes because their history evolved differently. Italians don’t follow black people around stores because they never learned to be wary of black people.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t suspicion of Africans though, and that is the key distinction. For Italians, black people from the States are cool because they’re American. If you examine the Lega Nord advertisement, the point isn’t that the person is black, even though the artist took great care to capitalize on certain African features to make a point. The viewer is meant to look at the tunic and realize that he is African and hate him for the fact that he is African, not because he is black. In other words, if a shopkeeper is following around a black person in a store, it’s not because he’s black, but because he’s African and therefore “foreign.”

Many Italians view foreigners with a great deal of suspicion, and a lot of this fear has to do with cultural and lifestyle changes due to modernization. Before the 60s, Italians had been more divided by region because fewer people had cars and reliable transportation to travel. More women stayed at home as housewives while men went out to work, and the country was largely divided along the lines of Catholics and communists. In short, Italian society had distinct divisions in place that Italians could easily adhere to. But after the 1960s, more Italians had cars, women gained more independence and education, regional dialects began to die out, and the country imported much of its culture from the States. As regionalism gave way to nationalism, Italy started to look an awful lot like the U.S. and eventually the question arose of what exactly it meant to be Italian.

Naturally, the problem with that question is that it’s nearly impossible to answer. On the other hand, immigrants provide an easy answer of what an Italian is not simply due to their place of birth. The wild caricatures that Italians associate with immigrants serve as convenient examples of what it means to not be Italian. An Italian doesn’t wear tunics. An Italian isn’t black. An Italian doesn’t wear turbans. Certain features are a convenient way to decide what an Italian is not, and the conclusion that many Italians have come to is that an Italian is is white and Catholic.

That definition is narrow-minded and harmful for the future of Italy. In order for this issue to be addressed, Italians need to start focusing on the more complicated question of what an Italian is in the modern era. Immigrants to Italy have shown us that Italians can be Muslim, can be black, can be Asian. But it’s time for Italians to recognize this new diversity and start to focus on what it actually means to be Italian. History has shown us that Italians can be poetic, revolutionary, ambitious, and deeply patriotic. There’s a rich and beautiful history to be written once the country lets new Italians become a part of it.