Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [20]
Hence, perhaps, some of the embarrassment about the Roman dialect, an attitude that once led a former Communist, a man one might have expected to delight in using working-class speech, to apologize to me for letting dialect color his criticism of the present left-wing leadership. Another man, describing a Chinese immigrant who had accused him of Fascism and racism, remarked, "Excuse me if I express myself in Roman style," even though the expression he seemed particularly embarrassed to have used- morto di fame dying of hunger, evidently in reference to the Chinese man's state when he first arrived as an immigrant-was perhaps impolite but certainly not dialect-inflected; his squirming embarrassment seems rather to exemplify the view that Romanesco is more a matter of attitude than language.
Such discomfort exhibits a pervasive awareness of the notably low status of Romanesco and its country cousins. Using dialect in a moment of anger is a sharing of intimacy that a Roman may suddenly, and retrospectively, feel is inappropriate when speaking with outsiders.32 For my part, I take such usages as a sign of trust and friendship. But the growing influence of bourgeois and nationalist values becomes apparent when inadvertently slipping into Romanesco embarrasses a working-class leftist, even though some leftist politicians still use the dialect in media appearances. My interlocutor's voluble discomfort at being accused of racism reflects the same bourgeois fear of the disreputable, a fear also expressed in the frequent disclaimer, "I'm not a racist, but ...." (Non Sono razzista, pero .... )33
These disclaimers are highly significant. Many Italians view openly racist attitudes as incompatible with current ideals of civic harmony. Redo lent of the discredited Fascist past, such attitudes conflict with the new cosmopolitanism and its norms of political correctness as well, for those who genuinely care about such things hand they are many, as with the pursuit of social justice. But accusing minority groups especially Gypsies34~ and immigrants of failing to adhere to local standards of law, hygiene, honesty, and the like provides a framework of self-justification for those who continue to espouse racist views; one resident claimed that people became racists by being "too civil" ~troppo civili~ and being rewarded only with rudeness, but this, again, seemed to be a version of the disclaimer just mentioned and to indicate how far people instrumentalized the ideal of civility to exclude the unwanted. A carpenter offered a slightly more elaborate version of the same self-exculpating device, acknowledging that some of the immigrants work for "the cost of earning themselves a piece of bread" der costo der guadag- nasse un pezzo de pane), but then immediately invoking the stereotype of the criminal immigrant.
In short, new and globally diffused forms of civility provide a means of undermining the civic project of including the newcomers in the social mainstream. The politically correct courtesies, a variety of cultural capital that also marks a certain level of affluence and education, favor the emergence of a polite discourse of subliminally Fascist orientation.31 What is more, they absorb forms of politeness and reserve already available in the Italian language. I shall return later to the contrast between civil and civic, a distinction that can illuminate emergent forms of social conflict and cooperation. For the moment, however, I simply want to signal its value for challenging models of globalization as the unequivocally beneficial spread of liberal, democratic values.
The relationship between language use and ideals of civility is complex and is grounded in class formations. For many bourgeois Romans, the use of the dialect is associated with a horrific image of incivility, while their working-class fellow citizens, by contrast, engage in much more localized