When we were in South Carolina, we got coupons for a restaurant called Tar Baby’s Pancakes. The coupons were in a booklet that we received for free. We never actually found the eatery, but we thought that the entire restaurant itself was a tad bit racist. It kind of blew our minds that something this racist, especially in the south, was allowed to stay in business. I wanted to go to the area to see what kind of people ate there, but as I said before, we didn’t know where the building was. I’m writing about it because things like this are mind-boggling. Do places like this exist in Italy, or is it too taboo for their culture? I know America can be pretty racy at times, but this blew the lid off of anything that I’ve ever witnessed before. It makes me wonder whether other countries have things like this and people actually accept it as a working business.
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icklebodiekins 
well i think it all depends on what you consider racist.
i could tell you that in my personal opinion the answer is no, in italy we don’t have places like this because slavery ended during the roman empire and italy is not a racist country as the US. I am sure though that talking with you as talking with many other Americans, we wouldn’t agree on many points.
to give you an example without getting into politics, take the way the census is organized in the US and the so called “demographic information” collected by public employers (those surveys where they ask for your race and ethnicity).
do you get outraged by this? as a european i do. i personally think it is an open sign or racism yet nobody complains.
in Italy nobody cares if you are white or black, a native american or a native alaskan, because no matter what you are, you are a person. unfortunately, last time in history we heard the word “race” was during WWII…
so when you live in a country where the color of the skin makes such a big difference, don’t get surprised to have a place this. instead take it as a picturesque place for tourists with an historical guise.
by this i don’t mean that italians are not racists. we are! like everybody else, we are just honest and admit it without pretending to be politically correct.
politically correctness doesn’t exist in italy or in europe in general. not as it exists over here at least.
in italy we have a form of internal racism and it is interesting to observe that it is multi-direction phenomenon. it is not just those from the north who hate those down the south but it is also those down the south not standing those up north and those living in the north-east having something to say about those living in other parts of the country and vice versa.
we have immigrants and naturally complain about them all, because they are different, because they are poor, they smell, they eat weird stuff ect…
just like over here…
but at the end of the day, when you call a landlord to rent a place, nobody asks for the color of your skin. when you apply for a job or to a school nobody asks for your race… if the landlord decides he doesn’t want to rent his apt to a Romanian or a Tunisian nobody can force him to. so it is a dual reality on one hand there are no anti-discrimination laws because at the same time there is not that much need of them.
… you make a big fuss out of something when you realize that there is something wrong deep down… if you know what i mean… but then again, you need an educated society to understand it and we could go on for hours about this.