iwillholdyouwhentheskyfallsdown:

I wanted to write this to be very clear about the Skam Italia situation. And yes, I’m going to crosstag this post so everyone can see this and hopefully understand where we’re coming from. Not necessarily accepting it, but at least understanding it. This post is probably going to turn out pretty long, but I hope you’ll stick until the end.

I’m going to start by saying that I do agree with what most of you are saying. I agree on the fact that Sana should have been played by a non-white actress, because what they did is in fact whitewashing. What I don’t agree on is the part about the actress not being muslim, because religion is not something you can see on someone’s face. There are many non-christians that have played christian characters, there are many non-jews that have played jewish characters and so on. So I don’t feel it should me mandatory for characters and actors to have the same religion, just as much as it shouldn’t for what concerns sexuality. That being said, I’m not trying to make up an excuse for choosing a non-POC actress to play a half arabic person, because like I said before I don’t think that was a right move. But what I do want to say is that that happened because of ignorance and not because the people working in the show are racists. They just didn’t think it was going to be a problem, they thought it was somehow normal. They’re definitely not racists because they wouldn’t be fighting this hard right now to have the show back if they didn’t care about the muslim character. Now, they know they made a mistake and Bessegato apologized for it and he said that the next time they’re going to do better. Because now the damage is done and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But if there’s no turning back it doesn’t mean you should just give up and don’t care about what the character in itself means. Sana is a half-Tunisian teenager living in Italy, a country that has many racism problems. And most of these problems that the country has come from ignorance. So, showing on a tv show a whole 10 episodes about a muslim girl in Italy, struggling with racism and discrimination would be so important for a country like ours. For a country that is this close to bringing the Mussolini period back to life (yes, the situation is this serious). It is important to show it because it’s the only way for people to understand that there’s nothing wrong about muslims, that they’re just people like all of us and they’re not here to steal our jobs or to take the power and make Italy a muslim country or something (yes pt.2, these are real arguments that people in italy use). And it will hopefully make people understand that they don’t need to trust anything that comes out of the mouths of those motherf****s that we have in our government. So all of you that are happy that our show has been cancelled should really start to understand how important it would be for us to have this kind of representation. 

So for me, to see all of you cheering because SkamIt has been cancelled, it really hurt me and it’s frustrating to see people hoping that the show isn’t picked up for another season. Because over here we’re fighting so hard for it to be renewed because we want to prove a point to many people, we want to share the love, you know. 

I saw many people on tumblr and twitter who keep on talking about how much they hate SkamIt, how much they hate the cast, how much they hate the actress that they chose for Sana, how much they hate this, how much they hate that. And they don’t talk about anything else, literally. They just rant about how much they hate everything that concerns Skam Italia. They have so much hate inside of them for the wrong reasons, because if you only tried to understand us, even just a little, then maybe you would be able to live a life without that much hate in it and we would all just live better and we would all be happier.

Hope you understand now and remember, share the love.