Happy in Your Own Skin
I always say that if I could come back as anyone – I’d want to come back as me.  Not any taller, not in any other country, not any smarter, not any faster, not at any other time in history, not any stronger, and certainly not any whiter.  I’m white enough to get by – and that’s more than enough for me … no need for blue eyes or blonde hair on this guy.

Prejudice
I’ve been around all kinds of prejudice in my life, but, fortunately, I haven’t had to personally deal with slavery, car bombs, religious terrorism, or ethnic cleansing.  And while the Sicilian story in America was built on being the South’s ‘white nigger’ and the second most lynched group in America, I can safely say that the occasional prejudice I have been subjected to has mostly been social and usually manifested by either a sneer or exclusion [although I was always careful to use the name ‘Tony Walker’ when I was doing business with anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line].

And, other than the fact that Marine Midland didn’t like to do business with Italians [a reason why I’m still with the dysfunctional M&T Bank after all these years], I can’t really point to being directly compromised financially at any time by prejudice.  In the consumer electronics business, the Japanese manufacturers pulling the strings were condescending to all Americans, so it really didn’t matter what you were because to them we were all simply inferior.  And now that I am in the data/IT world, there is a certain comfort in the fact that it has enough Indians and Asians running things to render the old standard of whiteness irrelevant.

Comfort Zone
Life in America, however, has been considerably more daunting for my Jewish and minority friends.  Over the years, I have found more common ground with them than I have with the elite white establishment – and this has led to an innate prejudice of my own.

The foundation of my prejudice started when we moved to the suburbs from our Italian neighborhood on the West Side of Buffalo.  At age 5, I was thrust into a white Irish-Catholic elementary school.  First grade was a nightmare, but my next-door neighbor was Jewish and we became best friends.  From there, I made it to an Irish-Catholic High School … and then I capped it off by going to Boston College [a place that wasn’t exactly calling for many Italians, Jews, or minorities].  By the time I started in business in 1978, I had learned to not trust whitey.

Northern Italians
When Alison and I went to the Italian Consulate several years ago to apply for our Italian citizenship, the bureaucrat handling our case looked down on us with his Milanese blue eyes as he visibly scorned us for our Sicilian heritage.  To Northern Italians, Sicily is to Italy what Puerto Rico is to the United States of America.  Our request for citizenship [and access to the EU as citizens of Europe] was summarily rejected for lack of an inconsequential document that we had been assured wasn’t necessary.  Alison and I had known we were finished as soon as he said ‘Sicily’ like we would say ‘scum.’  Somewhere down the road, I’m sure we will reapply, but, for now, adding EU citizenship isn’t looking as attractive as it once did.

The most hurtful prejudice I can remember, however, was back in the ’80s when I was busy building a thriving business and growing young family.  An Italian doctor [who had been like a second father to me and fancied himself Roman aristocracy] denigrated my accomplishments at that time by telling me I was simply cunning – not smart.  It cut deep.  It was a contemptuous Northern Italian slur that had followed Sicilians [my father] and Southern Italians [my mother] to America – and it landed hard.

Genius vs Clever [Smart vs Cunning]
Recently, I have been looking for true genius.  I have said that I think the Beatles were merely clever, as was Steve Jobs [along with being a sociopath], whereas I think Mozart and Tim Berners-Lee define genius.  But that’s an argument for another posting.  Suffice it to say that clever is a cousin to cunning – and I embrace both [as genius apparently remains well out of my reach].

My Grandchildren
As I’ve said, I write my blog postings for my grandchildren, and this one is no exception.  Nothing is startling here, but it is a glimpse into what makes me twitch.  I’ve also included a great article from today’s NY Times about Italians in America.

I read the Sunday Times because I read the Wall Street Journal all week long – and I need the balance.

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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.

As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated.  Journalists, politicians, social scientists, and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.”  Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable.  The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.

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.”

Italian-Americans were often used as cheap labor on the docks of New Orleans at the turn of the last century.

Mulberry Street in the Little Italy section of New York around 1900.

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South.  Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans.  This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women, and children across the South.

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 Columbus’s 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.

Historians have recently shown that America’s dishonorable response to this barbaric event was partly conditioned by racist stereotypes about Italians promulgated in Northern newspapers like The Times.  A striking analysis by Charles Seguin, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, and Sabrina Nardin, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, shows that the protests lodged by the Italian government inspired something that had failed to coalesce around the brave African-American newspaper editor and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells — a broad anti-lynching effort.

The lynchings of Italians came at a time when newspapers in the South had established the gory convention of advertising the far more numerous public murders of African-Americans in advance — to attract large crowds — and justifying the killings by labeling the victims “brutes,” “fiends,” “ravishers,” “born criminals” or “troublesome Negroes.”  Even high-minded news organizations that claimed to abhor the practice legitimized lynching by trafficking in racist stereotypes about its victims.

As Mr. Seguin recently showed, many Northern newspapers were “just as complicit” in justifying mob violence as their Southern counterparts.  For its part, The Times made repeated use of the headline “A Brutal Negro Lynched,” presuming the victims’ guilt and branding them as congenital criminals.  Lynchings of black men in the South were often based on fabricated accusations of sexual assault.  As the Equal Justice Initiative explained in its 2015 report on lynching in America, a rape charge could occur in the absence of an actual victim and might arise from minor violations of the social code — like complimenting a white woman on her appearance or even bumping into her on the street.

The Times was not owned by the family that controls it today when it dismissed Ida B. Wells as a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress” for rightly describing rape allegations as “a threadbare lie” that Southerners used against black men who had consensual sexual relationships with white women.  Nevertheless, as a Times editorialist of nearly 30 years standing — and a student of the institution’s history — I am outraged and appalled by the nakedly racist treatment my 19th-century predecessors displayed in writing about African-Americans and Italian immigrants.

When Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England in the 1890s, Times editors rebuked her for representing “black brutes” abroad in an editorial that joked about what they described as “the practice of roasting Negro ravishers alive and boring out their eyes with red-hot pokers.”  The editorial slandered African-Americans generally, referring to rape as “a crime to which Negroes are particularly prone.”  The Times editors may have lodged objections to lynching — but they did so in a rhetoric firmly rooted in white supremacy.

Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War when the planter class was in desperate need of cheap labor to replace newly emancipated black people, who were leaving backbreaking jobs in the fields for more gainful employment.

These Italians seemed at first to be the answer to both the labor shortage and the increasingly pressing quest for settlers who would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state.  Louisiana’s romance with Italian labor began to sour when the new immigrants balked at low wages and dismal working conditions.

The newcomers also chose to live together in Italian neighborhoods, where they spoke their native tongue, preserved Italian customs and developed successful businesses that catered to African-Americans, with whom they fraternized and intermarried.  In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been imposed on African-Americans.

Clams being sold from a cart in Little Italy.

Nevertheless, as the historian Jessica Barbata Jackson showed recently in the journal Louisiana History, Italian newcomers were still well thought of in New Orleans in the 1870s when negative stereotypes were being established in the Northern press.

The Times, for instance, described them as bandits and members of the criminal classes who were “wretchedly poor and unskilled,” “starving and wholly destitute.”  The stereotype about inborn criminality is plainly evident in an 1874 story about Italian immigrants seeking vaccinations that refers to one immigrant as a “burly fellow, whose appearance was like that of the traditional brigand of the Abruzzi.”

A Times story in 1880 described immigrants, including Italians, as “links in a descending chain of evolution.”  These characterizations reached a defamatory crescendo in an 1882 editorial that appeared under the headline “Our Future Citizens.” The editors wrote:

“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”

The editors reserved their worst invective for Italian immigrant children, whom they described as “utterly unfit — ragged, filthy, and verminous as they were — to be placed in the public primary schools among the decent children of American mechanics.”

The racist myth that African-Americans and Sicilians were both innately criminal drove an 1887 Times story about a lynching victim in Mississippi whose name was given as “Dago Joe” — “dago” being a slur directed at Italian and Spanish-speaking immigrants.  The victim was described as a “half breed” who “was the son of a Sicilian father and a mulatto mother and had the worst characteristics of both races in his makeup.  He was cunning, treacherous and cruel, and was regarded in the community where he lived as an assassin by nature.”

Many Italian-Americans lived in a section of New Orleans that became known as Little Palermo.

The carnage in New Orleans was set in motion in the fall of 1890, when the city’s popular police chief, David Hennessy, was assassinated on his way home one evening. Hennessy had no shortage of enemies.  The historian John V. Baiamonte Jr. writes that he had once been tried for murder in connection with the killing of a professional rival.  He is also said to have been involved in a feud between two Italian businessmen.  On the strength of a clearly suspect witness who claimed to hear Mr. Hennessy say that “dagoes” had shot him, the city charged 19 Italians with complicity in the chief’s murder.

The monument to David Hennessy rises above nearly all the other tombs in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.

That the evidence was distressingly weak was evident from the verdicts that were swiftly handed down: Of the first nine to be tried, six were acquitted; three others were granted mistrials.  The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city’s elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans — would never seek justice for the dead.  After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as “possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.”

The blood of the New Orleans victims was scarcely dry when The Times published a cheerleading news story — “Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob” — that reveled in the bloody details.  It reported that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society.  The following day, a scabrous Times editorial justified the lynching — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations.  Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they.  Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.”  The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”

Lynchers in 1891 storming the New Orleans city jail, where they killed 11 Italian-Americans accused in the fatal shooting of Chief Hennessy.

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.

Harrison’s 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.

The “Monument to the Immigrant,” commissioned by the Italian American Marching Club of New Orleans, stands along the Mississippi River in Woldenberg Park.

But in the late 19th century, the full-blown Columbus myth was yet to come.  The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation.  The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event.  He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans.  “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration.  Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed.

The Italian-Americans who labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built up around Columbus to political advantage.  This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicized myth-making.