A few days ago in Milan I met Khaby Lame. And in a way, I met the over 100 million followers he has between TikTok and Instagram, the billion likes that his wordless videos have totaled in just over a year, since they fired him from the Chivasso factory where he worked on a numerically controlled machine for air filters and started living on social media with the idea of making us smile.
He manages to make us smile Khaby Lame in these few second skits where he shows you that the secret of a happy life is simplicity. And yet its history must also make us reflect. Khaby Lame is arrived in Italy from Senegal when he was one year old, twenty years ago: he grew up here, in social housing on the outskirts of Turin, integrated, went to school, did various jobs, tried layoffs and layoffs. He is one of us. But he is not Italian.
Even if for the whole world he is “the Italian tiktoker”, he has no citizenship. He says: I don’t need a piece of paper to make me feel Italian. But that “piece of paper”, citizenship, carries your rights with it. And for example, you need it if you have to go to New York because you are now a celebrity (he had to postpone the trip to the USA). Khaby Lame will have citizenship: he will have it because he is famous, he will have it because he is successful, he will have it because we talk about him. Like the athletes we hurry to make Italians hoping they will win some medals.
But in their situation there are hundreds of thousands of boys and girls who were born here to immigrant parents or who arrived very young, who grow up with our children, who work, maybe they bring home the pizza we order through the app or the package ordered on Amazon. And they are not Italian, they have no rights. It’s right? It makes sense to remember citizenship only when someone like Khaby Lame is successful and to turn away when it can save life as in the case of Patrick Zaki, the student from Bologna for over a year unjustly detained in Egypt?
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