Message Board Archives
Immigration:How Italians became White in America
Casper
2019-10-14 03:25:02
Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.
Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners particularly Sicilians were an uncivilized and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.
Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect. They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as swarthy, kinky haired members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like dago, guinea a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants and more familiarly racist insults like white nigger and nigger wop.
The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus celebrated on Monday was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record.
Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbuss voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.
Read this article and you'll see history repeating itself in the way the White Supremacist, Donald Trump, has gone after Hispanic immigrants, people from "shit-hole" countries, and even black or non-white members of Congress. You cannot but wonder
how Kool-Aid drunks, like Nitro continue to support this vulgar and dangerous man to American democracy and the rights of
"others", not of his hue.
Casper
2019-10-14 03:34:24
The mob of the 1890s are today known as MAGA Red Hatters and Trump, with his words are "sic 'em" them up for the day he's impeached.
Casper
2019-10-14 03:37:43
President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals though not black Americans from mob violence.
Harrisons Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in Whom We Shall Welcome, they rewrote history by casting Columbus as the first immigrant even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologizing, carried out over many decades, granted Italian-Americans a formative role in the nation-building narrative. It also tied Italian-Americans closely to the paternalistic assertion, still heard today, that Columbus discovered a continent that was already inhabited by Native Americans.
Norm
2019-10-14 07:27:57
Very informative.
The scourge of division afflicts all of humanity and every race - black, white and everything in between. It has to be addressed willingly as a single problem, for the benefit of all humanity. Nature has a way of forcing resolution on us when we do not resolve our problems willingly.
BeatDball
2019-10-14 17:13:56
Southern Italians have African strains, didnt you know that?
camos
2019-10-14 17:24:22
White guy told me a story in the mid 80s, said he was told by the victim himself, this Italian guy was working at a big industrial plant in NJ; if you have been here you likely drove by , anyways the boss of the Italian guy said to him one day, "hey Toney you know you not doing too badly for an Italian"
the thing with immigrants is how quickly they forget the shit they went through.
Emir
2019-10-14 18:13:52
In reply to BeatDball
Southern Italians have African strains, didnt you know that?
evil
No jackass. Not true.
Chrissy
2019-10-14 19:08:46
BeatDball
2019-10-14 19:16:09
In reply to Emir Ok jackrass. You are correct - not! But, I wonder why an Italian American told me that I could pass for an Italian! Why do some of them...their phenotype are that of mulattos, eh jackrass? Just gwallang - keep kissing PNM's batty.
BeatDball
2019-10-14 19:23:52
I do Drivers' Education on Saturdays. A group of 4 teenagers in the driving school car & for 20 minutes each, they get the fundamentals of driving. Last fall, there were 4 teenage boys, all Italian Americans. Know what they acknowledged, eh jackrass? That Sicilians are black! I edified them that Sicilians aren't black, but have African strains. Again, gwallang.
Ps. 4 sets of 4 teenagers - 7am thru 1pm. Each gets 22.5 minutes. 16 weeks.
Emir
2019-10-14 22:47:19
In reply to BeatDball
You are much much sicker than I had believed.
DukeStreet
2019-10-15 17:24:54
VIX
2019-10-15 17:27:58
In reply to DukeStreet
international superstar? I must be getting old, I have no idea who she is
Drapsey
2019-10-15 17:40:12
In reply to BeatDball
In reply to Emir Ok jackrass. You are correct - not! But, I wonder why an Italian American told me that I could pass for an Italian! Why do some of them...their phenotype are that of mulattos, eh jackrass? Just gwallang - keep kissing PNM's batty.
Mmmmmmmm, that answers a lot of unasked questions.
camos
2019-10-15 18:18:54
In reply to Drapsey
DukeStreet
2019-10-15 19:32:06
In reply to VIX
international superstar? I must be getting old, I have no idea who she is
She is not as big as Taylor Swift or Beyonce but I would argue that most young folks across the globe know who she is, in some capacity.