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.

More Criticism of Richard Lynn

Italian researchers have really stepped up to publish refutations of Lynn's bogus IQ study. This one follows two papers last year as well as my own critique.

In his article "In Italy, North-South differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy," Richard Lynn claims to have found the reason causing the divergence between the Northern and the Southern regions of Italy. This article identifies the four main hypotheses formulated in his paper and presents significant evidence against each one of them. We claim that the evidence presented by the author is not sufficient to say that the IQ of Southern Italians is lower than the one of Northern Italians; that his analysis does not prove that there is any causal link between what he defines as IQ and any of the variables mentioned; that there is no evidence that the alleged differences in IQ are persistent in time and, therefore, attributable to genetic factors.

Felice and Giugliano. "Myth and reality: A response to Lynn on the determinants of Italy's North-South imbalances". Intelligence, 2011.

Ötzi the Iceman Reconstruction

This is the latest, and supposedly most accurate, reconstruction of Ötzi, a natural mummy from the Stone Age discovered 20 years ago frozen in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border. Based on new research and the latest technology, it shows that he looked much older than his age and that his eyes were brown.

Brown-eyed, bearded, furrow faced, and tired: this is how Ötzi the Iceman might have looked, according to the latest reconstruction based on 20 years of research and investigations.

Realized by two Dutch experts, Alfons and Adrie Kennis, the model was produced with the latest in forensic mapping technology that uses three-dimensional images of the mummy's skull as well as infrared and tomographic images.

The new reconstruction shows a prematurely old man, with deep-set eyes, sunken cheeks, a furrowed face and ungroomed beard and hair.

Although he looks tired, Ötzi has vivid brown eyes. Indeed, recent research on the 5,300-year-old mummy has shown that the Stone Age man did not have blue eyes as previously thought.

Believed to have died around the age of 45, Ötzi was about 1.60 meters (5 foot, 3 inches) tall and weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

The model will go on display beginning March 1 to Jan. 15, 2012, at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

Called "Ötzi 20," the exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the mummy's discovery. The Iceman's frozen body was found in a melting glacier in the Ötzal Alps — hence the Ötzi name — on Sept. 19, 1991.

Rossella Lorenzi. "The Iceman Mummy: Finally Face to Face". Discovery News, February 25, 2011.

Related: Affinity of Ancient and Modern Italians

Clarifying Bauchet et al. (2007)

This was among the first in the recent spate of genome-wide population structure studies, and better ones have been done since then that paint a clearer picture. Here, the sampled populations are divided into broad "northern" and "southern" clusters, and the authors conclude the following about Italians:

Conversely, Italy appears to be a zone of sharp differentiation over small distances. Some Italians cluster with the northern Europeans, whereas others fall into the southeastern grouping (fig. 4A).

Even though the text says no such thing, everyone automatically assumes that it's Northern Italians who are clustering with Northern Europeans, and that the observed pattern is representative of Italy's genetic structure. But in fact, the three individuals in question are Southern Italians, and the North-Central Italians (two Tuscans from the Coriell database) cluster even farther to the "south" than Sicilians:


Either way, the authors' conclusion is unfounded, because those few individuals are outliers that don't represent the average. In subsequent studies that have used larger sample populations and more genetic markers, all Italians cluster with other Southern Europeans according to geographical location, and are clearly distinguished from both Northern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. Even in a similar study from the year before, Seldin et al. (2006), there was no overlap between a sample of 86 Northern, Central and Southern Italians and various samples from farther north in Europe.

Although it is a bit surprising to find so many outliers in such a small sample, they're not unusual in and of themselves, and more often than not they're Northern and Central Europeans. In fact, in Bauchet's Figure 4A, you can see a German individual in the "southern" cluster, and different studies have shown similar outliers from Britain, France, Belgium, Scandinavia and Austria, among other places.

On a side note, it's also worth mentioning that non-Caucasoid admixture from Africa (Negroid) and Asia (Mongoloid) is as negligible in Bauchet's Italian samples as it is in the other European samples.

---------------
Bauchet et al. "Measuring European Population Stratification with Microarray Genotype Data". Am J Hum Genet, 2007.

Italian Beauty: Elisabetta Canalis

Model and actress from Sassari, Sardinia. AKA George Clooney's ex-girlfriend. AKA a contestant on Dancing with the Stars.

Climate and the Fall of Rome

After centuries of speculation about why Rome fell, including stupid racial theories, could the explanation be, not human, but environmental? A new study suggests that climate instability played a central role in the collapse:

Climate variations have influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution palaeoclimatic evidence. Here, we present tree ring-based reconstructions of Central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~AD 250 to 600 coincided with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Historical circumstances may challenge recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.

[...]

Exceptional climate variability is reconstructed for AD ~250-550, and coincides with some of the most severe challenges in Europe's political, social and economic history, the MP [Migration Period]. Distinct drying in the 3rd century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the WRE [Western Roman Empire] marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces of Gaul, including Belgica, Germania superior and Rhaetia. Precipitation increased during the recovery of the WRE in the 300s under the dynasties of Constantine and Valentinian, while temperatures were below average. Precipitation surpassed early imperial levels during the demise of the WRE in the 5th century before dropping sharply in the first half of the 6th century. At the same time, falling lake levels in Europe and Africa accompanied hemispheric-scale cooling that has been linked with an explosive, near equatorial volcanic eruption in AD 536, followed by the first pandemic of Justinian plague that spread from the Eastern Mediterranean in AD 542/543. Rapid climate changes together with frequent epidemics had the overall capacity to disrupt the food production of agrarian societies.

Büntgen et al. "2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility". Science, 2011.

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.

Tenney Frank's "Orientalization" Refuted

In 1916, American historian Tenney Frank published an article called "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire", which is quoted all over the web by Nordicists. Like them, he was concerned about what he called the "race suicide" of America's "native stock", and he needed a historical parallel to help sound the alarm. So he claimed that Ancient Rome fell because of mixing with freed slaves from the East (mainly Syria, Asia Minor and Egypt) that led to a process of racial and cultural "Orientalization".

Recently, old notions about the demographic impact of Roman slavery in Italy have been completely overturned, and evidence has shown that the foreign population of Rome was very small and mostly European. But even in his own time, Frank's work was criticized by other historians who argued that the Eastern origin of the slaves could not be established, and that the sample he used was not representative.

Professor Tenney Frank, of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has approached the problem from another angle. From an elaborate statistical study of the Corpus of Latin inscriptions he concludes that Rome and the Latin West were flooded by an invasion of Greek and Oriental slaves: as these were emancipated and thus secured Roman citizenship the whole character of the citizen body was changed: on the basis of a consideration of some 13,900 sepulchral inscriptions he argues that nearly 90 per cent of the Roman-born inhabitants of the Western capital were of foreign extraction. What lay behind and constantly reacted on those economic factors which have generally been adduced to explain the decline of the Roman power was the fact that those who had built Rome had given way to a different race. "The whole of Italy as well as the Romanized portions of Gaul and Spain were during the Empire dominated in blood by the East." In this fact Tenney Frank would find an explanation of the development from the Principate to the Dominate — the triumph of absolutism, of the spread of Oriental religions, the decline in Latin literature and the growing failure in that gift for the government of men which had built up the Empire.

But the foundations on which this far-reaching theory rests are not above suspicion. The nationality of Roman slaves is but rarely expressly stated in the sepulchral inscriptions, and thus it is upon the appearance of a Greek name for slave or freedman that Tenney Frank has inferred an Oriental origin. The legitimacy of this inference has been questioned by Miss Mary Gordon in her able study of the "Nationality of Slaves under the early Roman Empire", JRS xiv, 1924. A slave was a personal chattel, and slave-dealer or slave-owner could give to the slave any name which in his unfettered choice he might select: the slave dealers with whom Romans first came in contact were Greeks and thus, as Miss Gordon says, "Greek was the original language of the slave trade and this is reflected in servile nomenclature much as the use of French on modern menus and in the names affected by dressmakers suggests the history and associations of particular trades." In fact the nomenclature of the slave in the ancient world was scarcely less arbitrary than are the modern names given to our houses, our puddings, our horses or our dogs. An attempt to determine the domicile of origin of our cats or dogs solely by the names which their owners have given them would hardly be likely to produce results of high scientific value. The outlandish names of barbarian captives reduced to slavery would naturally be changed to more familiar forms, and Latin nomenclature was singularly poor and unimaginative: the Greek names were well-known and resort to these was easy. It may be said that this reasoning is largely a priori and of little cogency. But Ettore Cicotti in a recent paper on "Motivi demografici e biologici nella rovina della civiltà antica" in Nuova Rivista Storica, Anno xiv, fasc. i-ii, has adduced an interesting historical parallel. L. Livi (La schiavitù domestica nei tempi di mezzo e nei moderni, Ricerche storiche di un antropologo, Roma, 1928) in 1928 published documents which his father copied from the State Archives of Florence. These documents record 357 sales of slaves: the transactions date from the years 1366 to 1390 — for the most part from the years 1366 to 1370. The majority of the slaves were of Tartar origin, though some were Greeks, Roumanians, etc. In these records the slave's original name is generally given and then follows the Italian name by which the slave is known. Thus the name of Lucia occurs forty-two times and represents such original names as Marchecta, Gingona, Erina, Minglacha, Saragosa, Casabai, Alterona and many others. Similarly the name of Caterina is given to slaves of Greek, Tartar, Turkish, Circassian, and Russian origin and has taken the place of such barbarous names as Coraghessan, Chrittias, Colcatalo, Tagaton, and Melich. The parallel is very instructive.

But this is not all: the sepulchral inscriptions studied by Tenney Frank extend over a period of three centuries: suppose that Rome had during the early Empire a population of some 800,000 with an annual mortality of 20 per cent: in those three centuries the deaths would number 4,800,000. Tenney Frank has examined 13,900 inscriptions and those are derived from imperial and aristocratic columbaria: here the slaves would be better off and the percentage of accomplished foreign slaves would be higher: what of the nameless dead whom no record preserved, whose bodies lay in the vast common burial pits of the slave proletariat? These 13,900 dead who left permanent memorials behind them cannot be regarded as really representative of the general servile population of the city: we are not justified in using the percentage obtained from these records and applying it as though it were applicable to the whole class of slaves and of freedmen.

In the light of this criticism Tenney Frank's statistics are vitiated, and it must be admitted that the nationality of the slaves of Rome under the early Empire remains a matter of conjecture. There must have been a far greater number derived from Western Europe than are allowed for on Tenney Frank's calculations.

Norman H. Baynes. "The Decline of the Roman Power in Western Europe. Some Modern Explanations". Journal of Roman Studies, 1943.

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.