The Horror of Racism

Giovanni's last visit to Santa Croce

by Wally Goldfrank

For many years I had read and admired, and then known and befriended Giovanni.  Once I sent him a paper I had published comparing 1920s & 30s Japan and Italy, which he rather liked, he wrote, but where, he asked, was some analysis of the banks.  Ouch.  On one visit to Santa Cruz, in the late 1990s, he stayed with us, and I prepared some grilled halibut with a sauce more typically served on bronzino.  He smiled as he ate.  He didn't get sick.  He said he enjoyed it. But I was never quite sure whether "it" was the fish or the gesture.   We came to have yearly discussions and even one exchange in print.  He was always meticulous, elegant, gracious,

Giovanni was a wonderful teacher and mentor to the several former undergraduate students I encouraged to study with him and his Binghamton or Hopkins colleagues.  I never heard an unkind or unflattering word about him from any of them.

In the spring of 2008 he made his last visit here.  For several hours before his public talk on Adam Smith in Beijing, we were able to sit with three students from my seminar in a shady courtyard drinking coffee, nibbling on lunch, discussing his lifework.  After quite a while discussing the present conjuncture, the conversation turned to the African sojourn early in Giovanni's career.  Eloquently Giovannni spoke about what he had seen and learned and come to feel about the horrors (rather than the geometry) of imperialism, about the humiliations of racial oppression.  Then why, pressed the students in this Mecca of political correctness, why, why have you never written more about Africa, why are race and racism virtually absent from your books?  "Because it is too painful for me," was his reply.   This sentiment lay at the root of all his scholarship and pedagogy, and it must be remembered.