WW2 Internment Was No Big Deal

Some people like to make a big deal out of the internment of Italian American "enemy aliens" during World War 2 and claim that it's been unfairly ignored by history (German American internment gets ignored too, but whatever). The reality though, is that it was simply nothing worth mentioning compared to what the Japanese suffered, because Italians benefited from white privilege.

The contrast between treatment of the Italian Americans and the Japanese, the other non-Nordic group subject to being linked by ancestry to the fascist war effort, was stark. As 120,000 Japanese Americans — 40,000 of them classed as enemy aliens — went to detention camps, Italian American aliens suffered only relatively brief harassment, especially directed against Pacific Coast fisherman and waterfront residents. With a congressional committee holding that evacuation policies for Italian Americans were "out of the question if we intend to win this war," Roosevelt urged caution. In May 1942, almost two-thirds of all enemy aliens were Italian Americans but less than one-seventh of enemy aliens in federal custody were. The following month New York City's Italian American mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, led the New York at War procession, which banned Japanese Americans. In the context of the 1942 election, Roosevelt rescinded the enemy alien designation against Italian Americans and expedited naturalization processes for them. Japanese aliens, who unlike Italians had never had the opportunity to naturalize, stayed in custody. Earl Warren, a supporter of Japanese internment who later served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, explained that Italians were "just like everybody else" and therefore should not be held. A remarkable article published by the NAACP found the Japanese to be victims of "barbarous treatment [as a] result of the color line" and Italians able to escape such treatment because they were "white."

Even the most notorious racist in U.S. politics, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, seemed to reluctantly agree that Italian Americans could not be racially attacked. Bilbo had responded to an Italian American supporter of fair employment practices by addressing her as "My Dear Dago." When [Congressman Vito] Marcantonio rebuked him, the Mississippian additionally called his adversary a "political mongrel." However, as the controversy garnered press attention, Bilbo reigned in his tendency to demean "racial" and "ethnic" minorities in the same screeds. He assured all that he acted out of "the respect and love I have for the Caucasian blood that flows not only in my veins but in the veins of Jews, Italians, Poles and other nationalities of the White race [whom] I would not want to see contaminated with Negro blood."

David R. Roediger. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Rudolph Valentino's Alleged "Otherness"

There are a lot of annoying things in the new PBS documentary "The Italian Americans", like the claim that Sacco and Vanzetti faced anti-Italian prejudice, which I've argued against before. Another is this similar claim that silent movie icon Rudolph Valentino faced prejudice in Hollywood because there were no Italian roles and he was too much of a dark "other" to get any "mainstream" roles, so he was forced to play only "exotic" non-European characters.

To make this questionable argument, the writers and "experts" get a lot of information wrong — maybe on purpose. First of all, Valentino was only half Italian. He had a French mother, so his looks were not only Italian. And he didn't play an Arab in The Sheik either. It was revealed at the end of the movie that the sheik was in fact a European of British and Spanish descent, which was meant to erase the character's exotic "otherness" so that his forbidden romance with the English heiress would become socially acceptable. It's true he was supposed to "pass" for Arab until that reveal, but the other Arabs in the film were played by American actors of Northern European descent. That wasn't at all unusual.

If you look at his filmography, contrary to what the documentary implies, he played mostly Europeans like himself: Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, a Russian Cossack, and even several "all-American" characters with Anglo/Celtic names. He also played some Latin Americans, but they can be fully Spanish. As far as I can tell, the only clearly non-European he ever played was an Indian Rajah, but in that movie, as in The Sheik and its sequel, as well as the movies with Latinos, the other "exotic" characters were also played by white actors, mostly of Northern European descent.

The fact that Rudolph Valentino was openly loved by women all over America, and imitated by a lot of jealous men, argues against any kind of extreme "otherness" or anti-Italian prejudice. That could never have happened if he was really considered so dark and foreign, or if there was such a stigma to being Italian. He was "exotic" as an ethnic non-British European and a "Latin Lover", which American audiences weren't used to seeing, but not so exotic that he wasn't still seen simply as a white man.

White on Arrival

There's a claim by "whiteness studies" enthusiasts that when Italians first immigrated to America they were considered "non-white" or "in-between black and white" and denied privileges as a result. American historian Thomas Guglielmo disproves this by showing that whatever ethnic prejudice Italians faced was based on their "race" (e.g. South Italian, Latin, Mediterranean etc.) but not their "color", which was always classified as white/Caucasian, even by anti-immigrant racialists.

In January 1942, Ed Peterson, an African American from Chicago, wrote a letter to the Chicago Defender. With America's wartime propaganda machine glorifying the nation's past, Peterson was irritated that this past so often ignored African Americans. Instead, thrifty, hard-working European immigrants supposedly made America—settling its untamed wilderness, laboring in its factories, and farming and peopling its vast frontier. "One would imagine," wrote Peterson, "that the colored race never did any thing to build up the country." Moreover, he argued, European immigrants arrived in the United States with privileges that most African Americans could only dream of.

[...]

All of this said, however, Ed Peterson's remarks contained more than a kernel of truth. In the end, Italians' many perceived racial inadequacies aside, they were still largely accepted as white by the widest variety of people and institutions—naturalization laws and courts, the U.S. census, race science, anti-immigrant racialisms, newspapers, unions, employers, neighbors, realtors, settlement houses, politicians, and political parties. This widespread acceptance was reflected most concretely in Italians' ability to naturalize as U.S. citizens, apply for certain jobs, live in certain neighborhoods, marry certain partners, and patronize certain movie theaters, restaurants, saloons, hospitals, summer camps, parks, beaches, and settlement houses. In so many of these situations, as Peterson and the Defender well recognized, one color line existed separating "whites" from the "colored races"—groups such as "Negroes," "Orientals," and sometimes "Mexicans." And from the moment they arrived in Chicago—and forever after—Italians were consistently and unambiguously placed on the side of the former. If Italians were racially undesirable in the eyes of many Americans, they were white just the same.

They were so securely white, in fact, that Italians themselves rarely had to aggressively assert the point. Indeed, not until World War II did many Italians identify openly and mobilize politically as white. After the early years of migration and settlement, when Italy remained merely an abstraction to many newcomers, their strongest allegiance was to the Italian race, not the white one. Indeed, one of the central concerns of this book is to understand how Italianita', as both a racial and national consciousness, came to occupy such a central part of many Italians' self-understandings. For much of the turn-of-the-century and interwar years, then, Italians were white on arrival not so much because of the way they viewed themselves, but because of the way others viewed and treated them.

[...]

To understand fully these consequences, one more conceptual tool is critical: the distinction between race and color. Initially, I conceived of my project as a "wop to white" study, an Italian version of Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White. I quickly realized, however, that Italians did not need to become white; they always were in numerous, critical ways. Furthermore, race was more than black and white. If Italians' status as whites was relatively secure, they still suffered, as noted above, from extensive racial discrimination and prejudice as Italians, South Italians, Latins, and so on. [...] I argue that between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries there were primarily two ways of categorizing people based on supposedly inborn physical, mental, moral, and cultural traits. The first is color (which roughly coincides with today's census categories): the black, brown, red, white, and yellow races. Color, as I use it, is a social category and not a physical description. "White" Italians, for instance, could be darker than "black" Americans. Second is race, which could mean many things: large groups like Nordics and Mediterraneans, medium-sized ones like the Celts and Hebrews, or smaller ones like the North or South Italians. [...] For example, the federal government's naturalization applications throughout much of the early twentieth century asked applicants to provide their race and color. For Italians, the only acceptable answers were North or South Italian for [race] and white for [color].

[...]

Finally, this study is deeply indebted to whiteness historiography and the indispensable work of David Roediger, James Barrett, Theodore Allen, Alexander Saxton, and many others. Nonetheless, I challenge several key arguments in much (though not all) of this historiography, especially the claim that European immigrants arrived in the United States as "inbetween peoples" and only became fully white over time and after a great deal of struggle. Numerous scholars in a wide range of disciplines have uncritically accepted this argument. I contend that challenges to Italian immigrants' color status were never sustained or systematic and, therefore, Italians never occupied a social position "in between" "colored" and "white." Often failing to understand the distinctions between race and color, some scholars have assumed that challenges to a group's racial desirability as, say, Latins or Alpines, necessarily called into question their color status as whites. This was not the case. Italians, for instance, could be considered racially inferior "Dagoes" and privileged whites simultaneously. This point is vividly apparent when one compares their experiences with those of groups whose whiteness was either really in question (e.g., Mexican Americans) or entirely out of the question (e.g., African Americans and Asian Americans).

[...]

Rising [anti-immigrant racialism and restriction], however, never challenged Italians' whiteness in any consequential way. According to virtually all racialists at both the national and local Chicago levels, if Italians were a national peril, they were a "white peril" just the same. [...] Taken together, whether one spoke about physical stature, intellectual endowments, social customs, or other hereditary characteristics, one thing was certain to racialists: southern Italians (and sometimes northern ones as well) were racially inferior to the Nordic, "the white man par excellence." Interestingly, this racialist assault on Italians and other "new" immigrants stopped well short of questioning their color status as whites. It seems that most racialists—even as they did their best to emphasize racial difference—took the whiteness of "new" European immigrants for granted. As Henry Pratt Fairchild explained casually in his book Immigration, "the new immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock, representing the Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian race." Madison Grant included southern and eastern Europeans within the white/Caucasian category, even while questioning its overall usefulness: "The term 'Caucasian race' has ceased to have any meaning except where it is used, in the United States, to contrast white populations with Negroes or Indians or in the Old World with Mongols. It is, however, a convenient term to include the three European subspecies [Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean] when considered as divisions of one of the primary branches or species of mankind." Racialists, then, like many other Americans, made an important distinction between race and color—even if they failed to use these exact terms.

[...]

Scientific racialists, then, placed Italians (and other "new" European immigrants) in an ambiguous social position. After devoting years of research and writing to "demonstrating" the racial inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans, they still viewed these groups as white. The message seemed to be that "new" European immigrants were inferior—but not that inferior. For all their dangerous inadequacies, they still occupied a place within the "superior" color division of mankind, even if they were relegated to an "inferior" racial branch.

Thomas A. Guglielmo. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2003.

Organized Crime and Upward Mobility

"A Family Business" was the real-life version of "The Godfather," the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. But [anthropologist Francis] Ianni's portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. There were no blood oaths in Ianni's account, or national commissions or dark conspiracies. There was no splashy gunplay. No one downed sambuca shots at Jilly's, on West Fifty-second Street, with Frank Sinatra. The Lupollos lived modestly. Ianni gives little evidence, in fact, that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from Giuseppe's earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

By 1970, Ianni calculated, there were forty-two fourth-generation members of the Lupollo-Salemi-Alcamo-Tucci family—of which only four were involved in the family's crime businesses. The rest were firmly planted in the American upper middle class. A handful of the younger members of that generation were in private schools or in college. One was married to a judge's son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master's degree in psychology; another was a member of the English department at a liberal-arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, and a stockbroker. Uncle Phil's son Basil was an accountant, who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island's North Shore. "His daughter rides and shows her own horses," Ianni wrote, "and his son has some reputation as an up-and-coming young yachtsman." Uncle Phil, meanwhile, lived in Manhattan, collected art, and frequented the opera. "The Lupollos love to tell of old Giuseppe's wife Annunziata visiting Phil's apartment," Ianni wrote. "Her comment on the lavish collection of paintings was 'manga nu Santa' ('not even one saint's picture')."

The moral of the "Godfather" movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. "Just when I thought I was out," Michael Corleone says, "they pull me back in." The moral of "A Family Business" was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O'Kane put it, the "crooked ladder" of social mobility.

Six decades ago, Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was "conformity": accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). The second strategy was "ritualism": accept the means (work hard and obey the law) but reject the goal. That's the approach of the Quakers or the Amish or of any other religious group that substitutes its own moral agenda for that of the broader society. There was also "retreatism" and "rebellion"—rejecting both the goal and the means. It was the fourth adaptation, however, that Merton found most interesting: "innovation." Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn't want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn't conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated. Irish gangsters dominated organized crime in the urban Northeast in the mid to late nineteenth century, followed by the Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Dutch Schultz, among others. Then it was the Italians' turn. They were among the poorest and the least skilled of the immigrants of that era. Crime was one of the few options available for advancement. The point of the crooked-ladder argument and "A Family Business" was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion; it wasn't a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in.

[...]

Ianni didn't romanticize what he saw. He didn't pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal means of economic mobility in America, or the most efficient. It was simply a fact of American life. He saw the pattern being repeated in New York City during the nineteen-seventies, as the city's demographics changed. [...] The newcomers, he predicted, would climb the ladder to respectability just as their predecessors had done. "It was toward the end of the Lupollo study that I became convinced that organized crime was a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end," Ianni wrote.

[...]

That's why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left her gangster grandfather alone.

The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. [...] The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia's evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that, over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated.

Malcolm Gladwell. "The Crooked Ladder: The criminal's guide to upward mobility". The New Yorker | Urban Chronicles | August 11, 2014 Issue.

Pope Francis: Just Another Italian

The media is calling him the first "non-European" Pope in 1300 years and the first "Latin American" Pope ever, and Latinos and Hispanics in the U.S. are starting to identify with him as a fellow "minority" and "one of us". His name may be Jorge, he may speak Spanish, and he may have been born in South America, but his ancestry is 100% Italian and the country he's from isn't very representative of the region.

But the first Latin American pope also represents a cultural bridge between two worlds — the son of Italian immigrants in a country regarded by some as the New World colony Italy never had. For many Italians, his heritage makes him the next best thing to the return of an Italian pope.

[...]

It remains unclear whether even Latin Americans will respond with newfound energy to Bergoglio's ascension to the throne of St. Peter. Among many of its neighbors, Argentina is seen as a nation apart — a country that fancies itself more European than Latin American, with many likely to see the rise of an Italian Argentine as largely unrepresentative of the region as a whole.

"Argentina is so secular today, a more Eurocentric Latin country," said Joseph M. Palacios, a specialist in religion and society in Latin America at Georgetown University. "They are Catholic by culture but not by practice. Geopolitically it makes sense in terms of bridging Europe to Latin America or the Third World, but Argentines don't see themselves as being Third World."

Anthony Faiola. "Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, known for simplicity and conservatism". The Washington Post, March 13, 2013.

Pope Francis

Parents Regina Maria Sivori and Mario Jose Bergoglio

Back: brother Alberto Horacio, Francis, brother Oscar Adrian, and sister Marta Regina. Front: sister Maria Elena, mother, and father.

Jersey Shore: Before They Were Guidos

Here are some childhood photos of the (fully) Italian cast members of MTV's reality show Jersey Shore when they still looked normal, prior to the harmful effects of steroids, tanning beds, hair gel and hip-hop.

Mike Sorrentino:

Paul DelVecchio:

Sammi Giancola:

Vinny Guadagnino:

Deena Nicole Cortese:

New York's Little Italy Is Disappearing

People have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it feels like the end of an era and a sort of Asian takeover, but on the other, it's an indication that Italians have made it in America and moved beyond the "old neighborhood".

In 1950, nearly half of the more than 10,000 New Yorkers living in the heart of Little Italy identified as Italian-American. The narrow streets teemed with children and resonated with melodic exchanges in Italian among the one in five residents born in Italy and their second- and third-generation neighbors.

By 2000, the census found that the Italian-American population had dwindled to 6 percent. Only 44 were Italian-born, compared with 2,149 a half-century earlier.

A census survey released in December determined that the proportion of Italian-Americans among the 8,600 residents in the same two-dozen-square-block area of Lower Manhattan had shrunk to about 5 percent.

And, incredibly, the census could not find a single resident who had been born in Italy.

Little Italy is becoming Littler Italy. The encroachment that began decades ago as Chinatown bulged north, SoHo expanded from the west, and other tracts were rebranded more fashionably as NoLIta (for north of Little Italy) and NoHo seems almost complete.

The Little Italy that was once the heart of Italian-American life in the city exists mostly as a nostalgic memory or in the minds of tourists who still make it a must-see on their New York itinerary.

[...]

Last year, the National Park Service designated a Chinatown and Little Italy Historic District with no geographic distinction between the neighborhoods. The two neighborhoods have begun organizing a Marco Polo Day and an East Meets West Christmas Parade.

City Hall will soon further erase the boundaries.

Following the lead of three local community boards, the City Planning Commission is expected in March to approve the creation of a Chinatown Business Improvement District, which would engulf all but about two square blocks of a haven that once spanned almost 50 square blocks and had the largest concentration of Italian immigrants in the United States.

"It's really all Chinatown now," said John A. Zaccaro Sr., owner of the Little Italy real estate company, founded by his father in 1935.

Even the Feast of San Gennaro, which still draws giant crowds to Mulberry Street, may be abbreviated in size this year at the behest of inconvenienced NoLIta merchants.

The number of residents of Italian descent in the neighborhood has been declining since the 1960s, as immigration from Italy ebbed and Italian-Americans prospered and moved to other parts of the city and to the suburbs.

"When the Italians made money they moved to Queens and New Jersey, they sold to the Chinese, who are now selling to the Vietnamese and Malaysians," said Ernest Lepore, 46, who, with his brother and mother, owns Ferrara, an espresso and pastry shop his family opened 119 years ago.

[...]

Of the 8,600 residents counted by the census's American Community Survey in the heart of Little Italy in 2009, nearly 4,400 were foreign-born. Of those, 89 percent were born in Asia. In 2009, a Korean immigrant won a tenor competition sponsored by the Little Italy Merchants Association. That same year, a Chinese immigrant, Margaret S. Chin, was elected to represent the district in the City Council.

Sam Roberts. "New York's Little Italy, Littler by the Year". The New York Times, February 21, 2011.

Sacco and Vanzetti Revisited

This infamous criminal case is one of the most cited examples of "anti-Italianism" in America. In 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for the murders of a paymaster and a security guard during an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. There's still debate about whether they were guilty or innocent, and it's possible that one was guilty and the other wasn't, but I haven't studied the case closely, so I don't really have an opinion either way. However, few people deny that they received an unfair trial compromised by tainted evidence, and there were worldwide protests over their convictions and executions, including by prominent figures of the day like Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

While it's possible that their status as immigrants from Southern Europe could have been a factor, since it was a time in American history when foreigners and non-Northern Europeans were looked at suspiciously and unfavorably, I've seen no credible evidence of that, let alone that specifically anti-Italian prejudice played any part. What's certain is that they were anarchists and followers of Luigi Galleani, a notorious revolutionary who advocated violence, assassination and bombing. Militant anarchists were a big problem back then, kind of like militant Islamists today. President William McKinley had been assassinated by Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, and the Department of Justice had arrested and deported 500 anarchists and other alien radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, including Galleani and eight of his followers. So any prejudice against Sacco and Vanzetti would have been based on their political affiliations and activities more than anything else. Indeed, the judge at the trial, Webster Thayer, was an outspoken opponent of anarchism and bolshevism who made several inappropriate off-the-bench comments to that effect, for which he was criticized by the press and his peers.

But that attitude was common at the time, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case in fact has a historical precedent that's almost identical in every detail, except that everyone involved was of Northern European descent. In 1886, there was a bombing during a demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago, and eight anarchists (five German immigrants, a German-American, an Englishman, and a Southerner) were tried and convicted as conspirators in the death of a police officer, despite a lack of evidence against them. Four of the men were hanged, and a fifth committed suicide in prison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Their unfair treatment also generated worldwide protests, and it's thought by most that they were likely innocent. To this day, no one knows for sure who the bomber was, but speculation revolves around a number of other people, including many who weren't involved in the anarchist movement.

When you look at these parallels and the historical context, it's difficult to imagine that there was anything anti-Italian at play with Sacco and Vanzetti, but some people see only what they want to see.

Spike Lee's Italian Obsession

African-American filmmaker Spike Lee seems to really have it in for Italians. The question is why? For starters, he grew up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn in the 1960s and 70s, a predominantly Italian neighborhood where his was the only black family in town. Then in the 1980s, there was a string of racially motivated attacks in other New York Italian neighborhoods (though not all of the assailants were Italian) in which three black people were killed: Willie Turks, Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins.

Lee dealt directly with these incidents in his 1989 movie Do the Right Thing, but he took it a step farther by injecting Afrocentric pseudohistory and pseudoscience directed at Italian heritage and ancestry. Since then, he seems to have been trying to "get back" at Italians in many of his films, stereotyping them as dumb bigoted degenerates, and even showing hostility with his latest effort, Miracle at St. Anna, whose story is far removed from the racism of NYC Italian neighborhoods.

Italian-American groups are finally getting fed up and have begun calling him out on it. I don't agree with their protest against his public appearance. He has the right to deal with racism in his movies and portray whatever kinds of characters he wants, even to the point of distortion and obsession. What I take issue with is the argument he uses to defend himself and justify his actions:

During his speech, Lee read racist quotations from movies made by Italian-American directors such as The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino and Saturday Night Fever — many which used the N-word. These films, Lee said, portrayed stereotypes or used racial slurs against African Americans. [...] Lee asked why it was acceptable for these Italian-American directors to have their characters portray race and racism in America while he is criticized for doing so.

That's a false analogy. Blacks barely figure in those movies at all, and the filmmakers don't stereotype them or have any anti-black, pro-Italian agenda. They merely include a few racist Italian characters, which means their criticism, like Lee's, is directed at Italians. They're acknowledging Italian racism, beating him to the punch by almost twenty years. The only difference is that those movies are actually good because the characterizations are much more subtle, whereas he hits you over the head with it.

Lee complains about "a double-standard being used against him", but he has that backwards. The simple fact is, Italian filmmakers would never be able to get away with doing to blacks what he does to Italians, and that's the only double standard here:

Italian American advocates are also justified in pointing out a double standard when it comes to the stereotyping of Italian Americans and other groups, particularly racial minorities, who have far greater purchase on the sympathies of good liberal people than do Italians. As The New York Times' Clyde Haberman observed, had a white director portrayed black residents of Harlem as drug- and sex-crazed louts and gangsters — which is exactly how Spike Lee depicted a working-class Italian American community in his egregious Summer of Sam — the outrage would have been immediate and unequivocal.

George De Stefano. An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America. New York: Faber & Faber, Inc., 2007.

Affirmative Action Idiocy

Vincenzo Milione, a researcher at the Calandra Italian American Institute, is leading a group of professors and staff members accusing the City University of New York (CUNY) of discrimination because they feel Italian-Americans are not represented well enough among its employees, invoking everything from historical mistreatment to modern media stereotypes to bolster their case. An article in the New York Times covered the story and reveals what's really going on here:

In the presentation, Dr. Milione argued that Italian-American representation on the faculty and the staff had remained flat — between 5 percent and 6 percent — over three decades, while that of groups like blacks, Latinos and Asians had climbed.

"Did affirmative action work at CUNY?" he asked in a recent interview. "Yes. But it did not work for Italian-Americans." The New York office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that his suit had merit.

CUNY officials said that Dr. Tamburri would not comment, but they defended the university's record. As of last fall, they said, Italian-Americans represented about 7 percent of the full-time instructional staff of 11,000, up from 5.8 percent in 1981. While the increase was modest, it occurred while the proportion of white employees fell sharply, to 54 percent from 74 percent, as the university strove to hire blacks and Latinos.

"Were CUNY not proactively engaging in affirmative action for Italian-Americans, one would expect to see Italian-American representation in CUNY fall at the same rate as that of whites," Jennifer S. Rubain, university dean for recruitment and diversity, said in a statement. "That has not happened."

Like other research universities that receive federal money, CUNY must extend affirmative action hiring protections to a variety of government-designated groups, including blacks and Latinos. University officials say the Department of Labor reviews its progress periodically, but not its efforts for Italian-Americans, because those are voluntary.

Obviously, there's no anti-Italian bias. This is a standard case of mandatory affirmative action for minorities causing an overall drop in white employees. (And Italians are actually faring better than others, as their numbers have increased slightly in spite of that, thanks to voluntary efforts by CUNY.) But instead of faulting the unjust quota policy that passes European-Americans over for jobs, Milione et al. are trying to blame CUNY for the fact that Italians aren't one of the "government-designated groups" who receive affirmative action. A commenter on the NY Times website injects some sanity into the discussion:

I don't see how Italian Americans can qualify for affirmative action programs since Italians are white. Perhaps a claim of reverse discrimination would be more appropriate here.

Indeed. Yet in the article, one of the plaintiffs insists that the problem is specific to CUNY by noting the following:

Joseph V. Scelsa, who was one of the institute's first directors and led the legal fight that resulted in the settlement, said Italian-Americans seemed to be well represented on the staffs of other New York-area colleges, but had long been mistreated at CUNY.

For those unfamiliar, CUNY is New York's public university system, with 70% minority enrollment, and another commenter, himself a CUNY academic, provides a more likely explanation for the observed disparity:

I'm a first-generation Italian-American, a CUNY graduate, and a CUNY faculty member. Italian-Americans may be under-represented at CUNY because, on average, as students, they can afford to go elsewhere and, as adult professionals, they may choose jobs that pay much more and that have more prestige among their upwardly-mobile peers.

So Italian-Americans are doing fine at more prestigious universities without affirmative action, and steering clear of CUNY by choice. Conclusion: Milione and his gang should crawl back into the hole they crawled out of...or at least get a clue and take a page from the New Haven firefighters' playbook.

Italian Immigrant Stereotypes Dispelled

The following is an excerpt from an article written around the turn of the 20th century by the Director of the Immigration Publication Society in New York. It's noteworthy because of the statistics it contains that dispel stereotypes about Italian criminality and poverty compared to other European ethnic groups in the Greater New York area (mostly Irish, but also Jews, Germans and Anglos).

Lies have short legs, the Florentine tag has it, but the Italian is still accused of being a degenerate, a lazy fellow and a pauper, half a criminal, a present danger, and a serious menace to our civilization. If there is a substantial basis of truth in these charges, it must appear very clearly in Greater New York, which is now disputing Rome's place as the third largest Italian city in the world. Moreover, New York contains nearly two fifths of all the Italians in the United States, and in proportion to its size it is the least prosperous Italian colony in the country, and shelters a considerable part of our immigrant failures — those who cannot fall into step with the march of American life.

First, as to the paupers. The Italian inhabitants of New York City number nearly 450,000; the Irish, somewhat over 300,000. In males — the criminal sex — the Italians outnumber the Irish about two to one. Yet by a visit to the great almshouse on Blackwell's Island and an examination of the unpublished record for 1904, I found that during that year 1564 Irish had been admitted, and only 16 Italians. Mr. James Forbes, the chief of the Mendicancy Department of the Charity Organization Society, tells me that he has never seen or heard of an Italian tramp. As for begging, between July 1, 1904, and September 30, 1905, the Mendicancy Police took into custody 519 Irish and only 92 Italians. Pauperism has a close relation with suicide, and of such deaths during the year the record counts 89 Irish and 23 Italians. The Irish have always supplied much more than their share of our paupers; but Irish brawn has contributed its full part to the prosperity of the country; and the comparatively large proportion of Irish inmates in all our penal institutions never justified the charge that the Irish are a criminal race, or Irish immigration undesirable. That was the final answer to the Know-Nothing argument!

Nor do court records show that Italians are the professional criminals they are said to be. Take the city magistrates' reports for the year ending December 31, 1901 — the latest date for which all the necessary data are available. At that time, using Dr. Laidlaw's estimate of additions by immigration to the population of the city to May 1, 1902, there were about 282,804 Irish and 200,549 Italians in Greater New York. If the proportion of the sexes remained unchanged from the taking of the census, there were 117,599 Irish males, and 114,673 Italian. This near equality of the criminal sex in the two nationalities makes possible a rough measure of Italian criminality.

In these columns of crime the most striking fact in the Italian's favor is a remarkable showing of sobriety. During the year, 7281 Irish were hauled into court accused of "intoxication" and "intoxication and disorderly conduct," while the Italians arrested on the same charge numbered only 513. With the exception of the Russian Jews, Italians are by far the most sober of all nationalities in New York, including the native born. Next, noticing only offenses committed with particular frequency, the Italians again appear at a pronounced advantage in: Assaults (misdemeanor), 284 Irish and 139 Italians; disorderly conduct, 3278 Irish and 1454 Italians; larceny (misdemeanor), 297 Irish and 174 Italians; vagrancy, 1031 Irish and 80 Italians. Insanity is here listed with crime, and there are 146 Irish commitments to 35 Italian. Irish and Italians are nearly at an equality in: Burglaries, 63 Irish and 57 Italians; and larceny (felony), 122 Irish and 94 Italians. On the other hand, Italians show at the worst in: Violation of corporation ordinance (chiefly peddling without a license), 196 Irish and 1169 Italians; and assault (felony), 75 Irish and 155 Italians. In homicides, quite contrary to the popular impression, the Italians are only charged with the ratio exactly normal to their numbers after taking the average per 100,000 for the whole city, while the Irish are accused of nearly two and one half times their quota: Irish 50, Italians 14. The report for 1903, the last published, after important changes effected by almost two years of immigration, shows an unchanged proportional variation: Irish 59, Italians 21.

The one serious crime to which Italians are prone more than other men is an unpremeditated crime of violence. This is mostly charged, and probably with entire justice, upon the men of four provinces, and Girgenti in Sicily is particularly specified. It is generally the outcome of quarrels among themselves, prompted by jealousy and suspected treachery. The Sicilians' code of honor is an antiquated and repellent one, but even his vendetta is less ruthless than the Kentucky mountaineer's. It stops at the grave. Judged in the mass, Italians are peaceable, as they are law-abiding. The exceptions make up the national criminal record; and as there is a French or English type of criminal, so there is a Sicilian type, who has succeeded in impressing our imaginations with some fear and terror.

[...]

It is important that two or three other truths about the Italian should be known. Like all their immigrant predecessors, Italians profess no special cult of soap and water; and here, too, there are differences, for some Italians are cleaner than others. Still, cleanliness is the rule and dirt the exception. The inspectors of the New York Tenement-House Department report that the tenements in the Italian quarters are in the best condition of all, and that they are infinitely cleaner than those in the Jewish and Irish districts. And the same with overcrowding. One of New York's typical "Little Italies" is inhabited by 1075 Italian families — so poor that only twenty-six of them pay over $19 monthly rent — and yet, when a complete canvass was made by the Federation of Churches, the average allotment of space was found to be one room to 1.7 persons. Like the Germans and Irish of the fifties, our Italians are largely poor, ignorant peasants when they come to us. But by the enforcement of the recent law our present immigrants are greatly superior physically and morally to those of the Know-Nothing days. The difference in criminal records is partly the proof of a better law. The worst of the newer tenements are better than the best of the old kind, and every surrounding is more sanitary. Better schools, recreation piers, public baths, playgrounds, and new parks are helping the Italian children of the tenements to develop into healthy and useful men and women.

[...]

They are honest, saving, industrious, temperate, and so exceptionally moral that two years ago the Secretary of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco was able to boast that the police of that city had never yet found an Italian woman of evil character. Even in New York (and I have my information from Mr. Forbes, of the Charity Organization Society) Italian prostitution was entirely unknown until by our corrupt police it was colonized as scientifically as a culture of bacteria made by a biologist; and to-day it is less proportionately than that of any other nationality within the limits of the greater city. More than 750,000 Italian immigrants have come to us within the last four years, and during that entire time only a single woman of them has been ordered deported charged with prostitution.

[...]

From the very bottom, Italians are climbing up the same rungs of the same social and industrial ladder [as the Irish and the Germans]. But it is still a secret that they are being gradually turned into Americans; and, for all its evils, the city colony is a wonderful help in the process. The close contact of American surroundings eventually destroys the foreign life and spirit, and of this New York gives proof. Only two poor fragments remain of the numerous important German and Irish colonies that were flourishing in the city twenty-five or thirty years ago; while the ancient settled Pennsylvania Dutch, thanks to their isolation, are not yet fully merged in the great citizen body. And so, in the city colony, Italians are becoming Americans. Legions of them, who never intended to remain here when they landed, have cast in their lot definitely with us; and those who have already become Americanized, but no others, are beginning to intermarry with our people. The mass of them are still laborers, toiling like ants in adding to the wealth of the country; but thousands are succeeding in many branches of trade and manufacture. The names of Italians engaged in business in the United States fill a special directory of over five hundred pages. Their real estate holdings and bank deposits aggregate enormous totals. Their second generation is already crowding into all the professions, and we have Italian teachers, dentists, architects, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and judges.

John Foster Carr. "The Coming of the Italian". The Outlook, February 24, 1906. (Quoted from: Immigration and Americanization: selected readings. Compiled and edited by Philip Davis and Bertha Schwartz. New York: Ginn and Company, 1920.)

Italian-American Billionaires

As far as I can tell, 16 out of the 400 billionaires on Forbes' 2010 list of the richest people in America are Italian or have Italian ancestry. That puts them at 4% of the total, which is not too far from the 5.6% of Americans who report Italian ancestry. Here they are in order of wealth (click each name for a bio):

Rank	Photo	Name	Net Worth	Age	Home	Source of Wealth
#55		Ray Dalio	$5 B	61	CT	hedge funds
#66		John Paul DeJoria	$4.2 B	66	TX	hair products, tequila
#95		John Sobrato & family	$3.3 B	71	CA	real estate
#124		Philip Falcone	$2.8 B	47	NY	hedge funds
#136		James Leprino	$2.6 B	72	CO	cheese
#164		A. Jerrold Perenchio	$2.2 B	79	CA	Univision
#182		Daniel D'Aniello	$2 B	64	VA	leveraged buyouts
#221		Fred DeLuca	$1.8 B	63	FL	Subway
#252		Leandro Rizzuto	$1.6 B	72	WY	Conair
#269		Edward DeBartolo	$1.5 B	63	FL	shopping centers
#308		Stephen Bisciotti	$1.3 B	50	MD	outsourcing, football
#332		Joseph Mansueto	$1.2 B	54	IL	Morningstar
#332		Tom Golisano	$1.2 B	68	FL	Paychex
#365		Frank Fertitta	$1.1 B	48	NV	casinos, UFC
#365		Kenneth Langone	$1.1 B	75	NY	investments
#385		Lorenzo Fertitta	$1 B	41	NV	casinos, UFC

"Guido" Isn't an Ethnic Slur

Usually, "anti-defamation" stuff comes from whiny democrats, so I was surprised to find this article by Fox News republican Tommy De Seno. Apparently, he was at the boardwalk in New Jersey one day and saw an amusement stand with a game called "Shoot the Guido". It offended him, even more so when he discovered that the guy running it was Italian too. He argues that there's a double standard because there could never be a game called "Shoot the nigger", "Shoot the spic", "Shoot the chink" or "Shoot the kike".

But his entire premise is false. "Guido" isn't an ethnic slur like those others. First of all, it originated among Italians, not as a derogatory name used against them by outsiders; and secondly, it describes a youth subculture within an ethnic group, not the ethnic group itself, and different ethnicities can and do join in. So whereas a game like "Shoot the chink" would equate to "Shoot the Chinese person", "Shoot the Guido" does not equate to "Shoot the Italian person"; it's more like "Shoot the chav" or "Shoot the cholo" (all really fun-sounding games). An equivalent to De Seno's examples would be "Shoot the wop", and no amusement stand would ever have a game like that.

He then takes aim at MTV for enforcing Guido stereotypes, and manages to work in Mafia stereotypes too (blaming HBO for The Sopranos, a critical darling created by an Italian-American). But his anger is misdirected. He should be targeting the source: the Guido subculture itself. Cancelling shows like Jersey Shore won't make Guidos go away. Shooting them would, and pretending to shoot them might be the next best thing, because it conveys very strong disdain. The fact that a game like "Shoot the Guido" exists, and that it's run by a NJ Italian, is encouraging, not offensive.

Time Magazine recently ran an article about the whole Guido controversy, and it contains some informative history that refutes De Seno's nonsense:

There's no date stamp on when the term Guido came into play, but [sociology professor at City University of New York/Queensborough Donald] Tricarico theorizes that it very well may have originated as an insult from within the Italian-American community, conferring inferior status on immigrants who are "just off the boat." It clearly references non-assimilation in its use of a name more at home in the old homeland. In fact, in different locales, the same slur isn't Guido: in Chicago the term is "Mario" and in Toronto it goes by "Gino." Guido is far less offensive, among Italian-Americans, than another G word, which is also used in the names of countries in equatorial west Africa.

[...]

"It's a way to be a part of popular culture for kids who aren't invited to the party," Tricarico says. "It is defiant. It's identity politics," he explains. "It's a cultural movement, but it's about consumption, not ethnicity."

"'Guido' has become the name of a lifestyle," says Fred Gardaphè, Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College. "Guido itself is not a derogatory name." He explains its origins from a stereotype: "It's a real handsome, uneducated kid who gets by on his charm and his looks and doesn't really have much going for him." But, says Gardaphè, the wave of negative response to Jersey Shore come from what he calls "irony deficiency" in the Italian-American community. These peacocking kids, he says, come from a long history of exaggerated characterizations in Italian culture.

"The major key to Italian-American culture is something called 'bella figura,'" says Gardaphè. "It basically means, to put on a show so people don't know the real you. If you're poor, you make them think you're rich. If you're rich, you make them think you're poor." For an immigrant people emerging from a history of foreign conquerors and a lack of a nation-state (till 1870), says Gardaphè, "It's all about protection."

Caryn Brooks. "Italian Americans and the 'G' Word: Embrace or Reject?". Time Magazine, December 2009.