My husband and I will be married ten years next year, and I wanted to go to Italy.

I know that sounds super priveleged, and I know that I am (at least financially I am) seeing how I’m able to even consider it, but Europe has always been a bucket list continent for me. It has Paris, and London, and Malta, and Monaco, and a bunch of other places I’ll probably never be able to afford to visit because I had kids and that’s like dumping my entire life savings into the sea.

But Italy was at least kind of possible, and I really, really wanted to go. I was dying to see Venice, to stare at the Vatican in Rome, to stare out over the hills of Tuscany and think about how much wine I wanted to fill my stomach with. And, I guess take in the beauty of it, too or whatever blah blah blah.

I mean…it’s ok I guess.

To be fair, I also wanted to visit Spain. But, I already speak Spanish, so I sat my ass down and earlier this year, I began putting real time towards learning Italian. After all, if I think I can, I prefer to learn the language of a place I’m visiting, rather than running around yelling “DOES ANYONE SPEAK-A ENGLISH?” or “SPA-GHET-TI AND A VEEEENO!” Those are the people they make fun of online, and no one gets to make fun of me online but me.

Thing is, as a Black woman, there were things I had to try to ignore about Italy, the biggest of which was the fact that they’re horribly racist towards people of African heritage there. I’d seen the warnings, read about the time that Black footballers had bananas thrown at them during a game, or when the first Black minister got to go through the same thing.I saw the accounts of non-white people being harrassed on trains. But I wanted to believe that this was just a “watch where you stay” kind of thing. That, maybe, if I was smart about where I went, I could hope to be treated like a human being and have a grand ol’ time in a beautiful foreign country. I know. I ask for a lot.

It was this TikTok that finally shattered my notion. In it, a guy talks about how a woman literally stiff-arms him out of an elevator, and how it isn’t until he forces his way in anyway and yells at her in his obviously American accent that she and the others around him begin to apologize and insist “that’s not Italia.” He tells the story in a very entertaining and surprisingly funny way and I suggest watching it.

The story itself, though, haunted me. So did the comments on the Reddit post where I originally saw the video. So many of them insisted that this is Italy, that there’s nothing particularly different or out of the ordinary about what this guy went through. Some even shared their own stories, the worst of which being when someone went with a white friend in hopes of circumventing things, and the waitstaff simply gave their white friend a menu and food, and ignored them completely.

It hurt. A lot.

See, this is the kind of shit that used to piss me off when I’d talk about White Privelege, back when I really bothered to try to talk about antiracism. People always equated “privelege” with “wealth” or “unearned gifts,” and that’s not what it is.

It’s the fact that a white person can go anywhere and immediately be seen as smarter, more trustworthy, and more elegant. It’s the fact that a white person can go to fucking Italy and get on an elevator. It’s the fact that a person with white skin doesn’t have to mourn the death of a dream simply because they’ve realized that, because of the way they look, they’re not going to ever be fully welcome anywhere.

Like…I’m not stupid. I know there are racist people in Paris, in London, in Ireland, in Spain. I know that I’ll need to have a thick skin if and when I ever go to Tokyo. I did keep a thick skin when I had a layover in Seoul and was stared at super hard as I washed my hands in the women’s bathroom. It’s not like Italy is the only place where racism is possible.

It is the first I’ve heard in a while, though, that may throw bananas at me or shove me out of an elevator, which would also make it the first country I’d be deported and banned from for punching someone or shoving a banana up someone’s ass.

So I spent some time crying, and then I deleted all Italian lessons from my phone. I love learning languages in general, so I’m learning French at the moment, and I may return to Italian someday, when the pain subsides a bit.

It hurts to be reminded that you’ll never be enough, just because of how you were born.

I wish people got that.