Al Capone: From "Dark" to "Fair"

Recently I posted about how fairly light-skinned Italian criminals were often falsely stereotyped as "dark" or "swarthy" in the media. Because Al Capone is so famous, a lot of his rap sheets and wanted posters are uploaded online, and I was surprised to find that they don't all describe him the same way.

His hair is always Dark Brown or Black, and on his wanted poster it was assumed that his eyes would be Brown, but on his rap sheets they're described as either Blue, Grey or Green (his relatives have said that they were blue). But his complexion ranges from Dark all the way to Fair:

Dark

Dark Ruddy

Medium Dark

Medium Fair

Fair

Of course, this inconsistency doesn't reflect any kind of "questionable racial status" for Italians because, first of all, complexion and color (i.e. race) are two different things, and whenever a file mentions Capone's color, it's always White:

White

White

White

And second of all, this kind of thing wasn't limited to Italians and other "ethnics". I also found that criminals of Northern European descent were not always described as stereotypically Fair, but often also as Medium and even Dark:

John Dillinger: Medium

Willie Sutton: Medium Dark

Fred Barker: Dark

Harvey Bailey: Dark

Homer Van Meter: Dark

"Dark" and "Swarthy" Italians Are Still Light

We've seen how olive skin is misunderstood by people to mean "tan" or "non-white", now let's look at the same thing with words like "dark" and "swarthy" used to describe the complexions of Europeans. Applied mostly (but not exclusively) to Southern Europeans, people treat them as evidence against "whiteness", but they're really just exaggerations of reality, like in this passage from White on Arrival about how Italian gangsters were portrayed in the media:

Al Capone was constantly portrayed in books, magazine articles, pulps, and movies as having a "dark" or "swarthy" complexion. When he appeared in court in 1929 in Philadelphia on charges of having concealed a weapon, the Chicago Daily News noticed that his "face, which is rather dark, assumed a dull reddish hue." No one emphasized Italians' dark features more than popular writer and former newsman Walter Burns. In his book, The One-Way Ride, Johnny Torrio was "a slight, dapper, dark young man"; gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi had "dark faces"; the Genna brothers were "swarthy, black haired, black eyed, looked not unlike Arabs, and probably had in their ancestral strain a strong dash of Saracenic [North African] blood".

From these descriptions you'd probably picture really dark Saudi Arabians or maybe even mixed-race Berbers, but here's what those people actually looked like (the rare mugshot of Capone has been skillfully colorized to show his blue eyes):

Al Capone

Genna Brothers

Johnny Torrio

John Scalise and Albert Anselmi

This kind of exaggeration is similar to English ideas about the so-called "Black Irish". They're really just white people from the British Isles (not just Ireland) who have dark hair and eyes and a Mediterranean appearance — like Colin Farrell, Catherine Zeta Jones, Sean Connery, Mr. Bean, Russell Brand and many others — but old school Nordicists used to claim that part of the Celtic physiognomy was "black-tinted skin".

Benjamin Franklin was even more extreme, basically lumping all whites who weren't Anglo-Saxon into a "swarthy" group with non-whites, including some who are probably lighter than English people:

All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

So the lesson is to not take descriptions like that literally or as meaning something "non-white". Europeans (including Southern Europeans) actually have the lightest untanned skin in the world, so even when they're "dark" or "swarthy", they're still lighter than everyone else.

Related: Al Capone: From "Dark" to "Fair"

Clinal Differences in Pigmentation

People often mention the fact that Southern Italians are darker than Northern Italians like it proves something about "racial differences" in Italy, but clinal north-south or east-west differences in pigmentation (and other traits) are normal and can be seen in other European countries too, like Germany, France and the British Isles:

Italy

Germany

France

British Isles

Looking at Europe as a whole, the differences within Italy are small compared to differences between Italy and North-Central Europe:


This can also be seen within the border nation of Switzerland, between the Italian-speaking south and the German-speaking parts in the north:


Despite stereotypes of Northern Italians looking "Germanic" or "Celtic" compared to "dark" Southerners, and dumb movies claiming that they all have blond hair and blue eyes, people with that combination are only ~3-6% of the population in the North, compared to ~1-3% in the South, and red hair is <1% (~0.3-0.9) everywhere:

Blond Hair and Blue Eyes

Red Hair (per 1000 people)

You can see in the large random samples from all regions here and here that most Italians are in the medium pigmentation range. And you can see how similar they all are on average in these facial composites.

Myth of North-South Racial Differences

Many people today think that Northern and Southern Italians are racially different, but that isn't based on reality or any kind of evidence, which all shows that they're genetically and phenotypically similar. It's a myth that was shaped within Italy itself by some very ignorant people with inferiority complexes, who brought it wherever they immigrated, where it was copied by even dumber Nordicists and Afrocentrists.

From the 17th c. Northern and Western European "barbarians" started surpassing Southern Europe and denigrating Italy as backwards, so insecure Northern Italians tried to win their acceptance by separating from the Mediterranean and making Southern Italians the new barbarians:

Over the course of the seventeenth century, a radical inversion in the relations of force and cultural prestige between Italy and western Europe took place. Model to and "master" of Europe since the fourteenth century (Le Goff 2074), during the 1600s Italy was dramatically upstaged by countries to the north and west of the Alps: Holland, England, and France. What was taking place in fact was a massive shift of geopolitical and economic power away from the Mediterranean world as a whole. [...] The Italians had lorded their economic power and cultural supremacy over the rest of Europe since the fourteenth century. Italian intellectuals referred to those beyond the Alps as barbarians, using a conceit dating back to the days of Petrarch and central to the consciousness of Italian elites right through the Risorgimento. Now the tables were turning.

[...]

The tendency to denigrate contemporary Italy and the Italians had thus become commonplace in the culture of western Europe by the mid-1700s and would continue well through the next century. These accusations, repeatedly voiced by the English, French, and increasingly by the Germans as well, would have a significant impact on Italian representations of Italy in the Risorgimento. [...] One of the key aspects of the national consciousness that developed in Italy in the century before unification was the necessity of confronting its inferiority vis-à-vis western Europe, both as it was expressed in foreign denunciations and as it manifested itself in the political, economic, and cultural domains more generally.

[...]

But throughout the century before unification, and especially in the decades leading up to 1860, the dominant emphasis was nevertheless on Italy's need to rise to the economic and cultural levels attained by western Europe. The problem of political independence could itself be posed in comparative terms. [...] Notwithstanding Italian claims to parity, if not primacy, it would not be the Mediterranean models that prevailed in the making of modern Italy but rather those of western Europe. As we shall see later in this study, this pressure to conform mounted in the middle of the nineteenth century, helping to split Italy into two parts, a European north and a south that deviated from the European model. [1]

The idea of the South as "not European" came from the ignorance of Northerners — including the unified country's first Prime Minister — who had made assumptions or heard rumors about the South but never traveled there or even bothered to learn about it honestly:

There was remarkably little travel and commerce between northern and southern portions of the peninsula and almost no effort to bridge the gulf of mutual ignorance between the two. [...] Prime Minister Cavour was a great admirer of Britain, France, and northern Europe. He had never been south of Florence, where he once spent a few restless days. His ignorance of what northerners called "Lower Italy" was astonishing. He believed, for example, that the people of Naples spoke Arabic as a legacy of African invasions. No wonder Cavour was horrified to learn in May 1860 that Garibaldi and a volunteer army of one thousand Italians, mostly from the North, were planning to carry the Risorgimento south. They planned to invade Sicily, ally with peasant uprisings there, and liberate the South from the rule of Ferdinand II, the Bourbon king. [2]

This false picture of the South led to the people there being "racialized" by Northerners, but also by an elite Southerner who threw his own under the bus. Their pseudo-scientific theories, and the stereotypes and prejudices that grew out of them, then spread through the culture and around the world, lasting to this day:

The cultural and political discourses that, post-unification, proceeded to represent a binarized relation between North and South would increasingly assume racializing and racist dimensions. An entire school of intellectuals devoted to the study of the South, as a "question" or "problem" to be analyzed and solved, was launched with the publication of Pasquale Villari's Lettere Meridionali (1875) (see Teti; Schneider; Petrusewicz; and Dickie). In 1876, Constantino Nigra, in his study of glottology and dialects in the context of popular Italian poetry, claimed to have identified an "ethnic substratum" which he believed explained the difference between "superior" and "inferior" Italy (Teti 15). This "ethnic substratum" was, argued Nigra, constituted by two "distinct races": the "Italici and the Arians, the Mediterraneans and the Celts" (qtd. in Teti 16). By the 1890s, Nigra's linguistic theory was elaborated and consolidated in the writings of the influential school of positivist anthropologists known as the Meridionalisti (Southernists). The important point to note was that the Meridionalisti, who were to exert an inordinate influence in the consolidation of negative Southern stereotypes in Northern Italian politics and culture, were not exclusively Northerners. One of the most influential, and racist, Meridionalisti was in fact a Sicilian, Alfredo Niceforo. Niceforo can be seen as a super-assimilated Southerner who exemplifies the paradoxical and convoluted logic of assimilation. In writing the most vilifying and condemnatory "scientific" and "rational" accounts of Southern barbarism, savagery and backwardness, Niceforo strove to efface his own Southern status and to secure a Northern identity coextensive with civility and reason.

Drawing on the work of the positivist anthropologist and craniologist Giuseppe Sergi, who argued that the difference between Southerners and Northerners lay in the existence of two distinct races, Niceforo proceeds to name these two distinct races and to articulate their respective attributes: "Today Italy is divided into two zones, inhabited by two different races, the Arians in the North, delimited by the Tuscan border (Celts and Slavs), and the Mediterraneans in the South" (78). Niceforo invokes another racial theorist, A. Mosso, in order further to differentiate Northerners from Southerners: "The population of Northern Italy is little different from the Anglo-Saxon race" (79). As the contemporary Calabrian historian, Vito Teti, illustrates in his The Damned Race: The Origins of Anti-Southern Prejudice, the racist theories of Niceforo and fellow Meridionalisti were quickly taken up and reproduced at the levels of both popular and high culture. They continue to shape contemporary perceptions of the South.

The racial theories of the Meridionalisti supply the foundations for the anti-Southern xenophobia of such contemporary political parties as the Northern League. One of the pamphlets circulated by the Northern League in the early 1990s consisted of a map of Italy titled "The Integral Solution to All Our Problems" (see Dickie 136 for a reproduction of this map). The map shows an Italy divided by a "Liberation Canal" that neatly divides the Italian peninsula into two parts: Northern Italy is constituted by the Northern provinces of Lombardy, Piedmont and Veneto; adjacent to Northern Italy is "Southern Italy," constituted by the (Northern) provinces of Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. All the provinces south of Florence are gathered under the title of the "Island of New Africa." The Island of New Africa is separated from "New Italy" by a sea-channel termed the "Liberation Canal," which effectively splits the country in half. The "Liberation Canal" is bordered by a "2 km. high protective laser barrier." This map graphically illustrates the vigor and resilience of the racist theories that have shaped the political and cultural landscape of Italy since so-called "unification." The imagining of Southern Italy as Northern Italy's "Africa," first enunciated in the nineteenth-century, finds its logical culmination in a type of spatial apartheid that finally severs the peninsula into two different nations: "New Italy" and "New Africa."

What I have offered so far is really only a synoptic mapping of the complex and entrenched history of anti-Southern racism in the Italian context. The important point that the historian Vito Teti makes in his history of anti-Southern racism is that these racist theories and prejudices were exported outside Italy and proceeded to inform the attitudes towards Southern Italians in other parts of the world, including Europe, the UK, the USA and Australia (all destinations for Southern Italian immigrants). [3]

Niceforo was an immature idiot who attempted to use things like poverty, crime, illiteracy etc. to support his racial theories — a lot like what happened with the Irish and what modern idiots like Richard Lynn are bringing back:

Alfredo Niceforo published L'Italia barbara contemporanea at the age of only twenty-two; it was to be the beginning of a distinguished academic career. Niceforo's hypothesis is that Sicily, Sardinia, and the southern mainland are stagnating at an inferior level of social evolution to the northern and central provinces. In support of his case, Niceforo invokes what he calls the "magical power" of statistical evidence in those fields (crime, education, birth rates, mortality, suicide, and the economy), which for the Italian school of positivist social anthropology were the key measures of the state of civilization of a society (Niceforo 15). For example, whereas the North is characterized by crimes of fraud, southern crime is predominantly violent, like brigandage; or, like the mafia, it is the result of an Arabic or medieval spirit of independence and rebellion against the principle of authority (Niceforo 45). Low literacy rates and the prevalence of superstitious practices, such as those surrounding the lottery, betray the "state of crass and primitive ignorance" in the population of Naples in particular (Niceforo 80).

Having set out the statistical basis of his contention, Niceforo proceeds to give a more detailed portrait of the "collective psyche" of the populations of Sardinia, Sicily, and the mainland Mezzogiorno (Niceforo 179, 184). In the Sicilian countryside, for example, he observes a "hatred for the spread of culture of a kind characteristic of societies that are not just inferior, but truly barbaric" (Niceforo 197). Outside of the cities, the Sicilian character "reminds one of the Orient and of out-and-out feudalism." In their "morbid conception of their own dignity" and their overbearing pride and love of pomp, the Sicilian aristocracy in particular present the scientific onlooker with "a stratification of the past which is still tenacious" (Niceforo 203–209). The wild lower orders of Sicily's urban population are capable of acts of "cannibalistic ferocity" and of scenes "that an African tribe would hardly have committed" (Niceforo 210–211). Sicilians in general display a love of weapons and aggression—"an essential characteristic of primitive and almost savage peoples," according to Niceforo (Niceforo 212).

L'Italia barbara contemporanea concludes that the backwardness of the South is in part determined by the fact that its population of "Mediterraneans" is a different race to the "Aryans" of the North (Niceforo 288ff). Niceforo follows Giuseppe Sergi in seeing the supposedly distinctive cranial form of Southern Italians as proof of this difference, which is the root cause of the greater individualism of the South and superior sense of social organization of the North. Niceforo maintains that Italy's hopes for the future rest on its becoming a federal state, since specific forms of government are necessary to deal with the distinct characteristics of each region. Government must be authoritarian in the South and liberal in the North (Niceforo 297). [4]

Another influential but surprising anti-Southerner was Cesare Lombroso. He was from Northern Italy, but he was Jewish, and he projected anti-Semitic racial prejudices against Jews onto Southern Italians to make himself accepted by Northerners and other Europeans:

When Lombroso discussed the relation of race to current issues of his day, he seemed less concerned with inhabitants of non-Western lands than with those of the Italian south. Like other northern Italians, Lombroso was perplexed by the so-called Southern Question, the debate about the supposed backwardness of southern Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Home to brigandage and criminal organizations like the Mafia and Camorra, the south seemed violent and lawless to northern observers. Lombroso offered a complex answer to the Southern Question, one that included a social critique of southern elites for monopolizing landownership and a political condemnation of the national government for failing to alleviate southern poverty, disease, and illiteracy. Despite his recognition of these environmental barriers to prosperity in the south, Lombroso nevertheless emphasized the importance of race for explaining high rates of violent crime. Having been conquered over the centuries by a number of foreign peoples — including North African Arabs — the south was inhabited by a racially mixed people, who, in Lombroso's view, shared a propensity for murder with their nonwhite ancestors.

Lombroso offered a more subtle analysis of the behavior of Jews, another group included in his chapter on race. His own Jewish ancestry partially accounts for his refusal to characterize Jewish behavior in simple biological rather than more complex sociological terms. Aware of the frightening rise during the last decades of the nineteenth century of racial anti-Semitism in northern Europe, Lombroso argued that Jewish patterns of behavior derived from the historical legacy of persecution rather than from innate racial characteristics. He contended that Jews have high arrest rates for property crimes like fraud and receiving stolen goods because legislation in most European nations traditionally forbade them to follow any professions besides peddling or commerce. As proof that atavism is not intrinsic to the Jewish character, Lombroso cites the rapid movement of Jews into important positions in politics, the army, and academia once they gained the same civil rights as their Christian compatriots. [5]

Lombroso was so self-hating and delusional that while he was claiming that Southern Italians were mostly Semitic and alien to Europe, he believed that Jews were mostly Aryan and could easily assimilate:

Though Lombroso considered the Jews to be more Aryan than Semitic, he was highly critical of some Jewish religious rites, including circumcision. While Lombroso invoked notions of racial science in his research, he ultimately held that the so-called Jewish Problem would disappear as Jews modernized and became more assimilated into European society. [6]

Lombroso and Niceforo were both motivated by embarrassment over Italy's recent military loss to an Ethiopian army, and they tried to blame it on Southern Italians:

Both Lombroso's In Calabria, 1862-1897 and Niceforo's L'Italia barbara contemporanea drew upon the new science of race to explain Italy's economic and military problems, which they attributed to the backwardness of southern Italy. Not surprisingly, Lombroso's and Niceforo's books appeared in the aftermath of Italy's startling military defeat at the hands of Abyssinian forces at Adowa. [6]

Like in the early days, today the idea of "the South" is an exaggeration needed by the North to deal with its insecurities and make it feel more Northwestern European:

The early impressions of this "other Italy" exaggerated the alien qualities of the South and reassured northern Italians of their own European affinities. Africa began below Rome. "Christ stopped at Eboli," according to one local expression. Above "lower Italy" was a Christian, European civilization; below it existed something else indeed. [...] One Italian cartoon [made by northern separatists] that circulated clandestinely in the 1990s illustrates "the complete solution to all our problems" with a map showing Italy cut in two by a wide "liberation channel" that divides the peninsula just below Florence. To the south the map shows the "Island of New Africa" and "Mafioso Realm." Each side of the channel has protective barriers two kilometers high, one side electrified, the other armed with laser sensors to keep southern migrants out of the North. The channel is filled with "terrone-eating" sharks and piranhas. North of the channel is Northern Italy and, significantly, a new "Southern Italy" below the Po Valley. Even a separate Northern Italy might need its South. [2]

References

1. Nelson Moe. The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: The University of California Press, 2002.
2. Don H. Doyle. Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2002.
3. Joseph Pugliese. "Diasporic Architecture, Whiteness and the Cultural Politics of Space: In the Footsteps of the Italian Forum". Thamyris/Intersecting, No. 14, 23-50, 2007.
4. John Dickie. Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
5. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. "Editors' Introduction" to Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006.
6. William Brustein. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Italians Aren't That Emotional

Italians are often stereotyped as overly emotional (always yelling, sobbing or singing), but a recent Gallup poll that surveyed people around the world about their emotions found that Italian levels are about average and don't stand out as unusual. An article in the Washington Post added a color-coded map to better visualize the results (click here for the original data).

Gallup measures daily emotions in more than 150 countries and areas by asking residents whether they experienced five positive and five negative emotions a lot the previous day. Negative experiences include anger, stress, sadness, physical pain, and worry. Positive emotions include feeling well-rested, being treated with respect, enjoyment, smiling and laughing a lot, and learning or doing something interesting.

To measure the presence or absence of emotions, Gallup averaged together the percentage of residents in each country who said they experienced each of the 10 positive and negative emotions.

[...]

Results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, in each country each year between 2009 and 2011.

Russell Peters' Comedy Routine

I don't know how much of stand-up comedians' material is based on real experiences and how much is just made up, but in this routine Canadian Desi comic Russell Peters claims that he was mistaken for a native when he traveled to Italy. He says a guy approached him on the street and spoke to him in Italian, and then was shocked to find out that he's Indian. Based on this, he invites all "brown people" to go to Italy and be "freaked out" like he was when they're mistaken for Italians. There are several problems with his story that point to it being at least partly untrue, and to him not being very good at interpreting situations.

• Russell Peters is of Anglo-Indian descent, but he still looks very South Asian. I'm not sure I'd even buy him as West Asian, much less Southern European. His brown skin and quasi-Australoid facial features would make for a very tanned and odd-looking Italian who, if anything, would be viewed with suspicion by locals. But the story works for American audiences because it panders to stereotypes they have about the "darkness" of Italians, and I think Peters is well aware of that.
• When you're in a foreign country, being spoken to in the official language of that country instead of your own is totally normal and in itself not evidence of anything. What language did Peters expect the Italian guy in Italy to speak? English? Hindi? Unless you're booking a hotel room or strolling around town in khaki shorts taking pictures of the Colosseum, locals would have no reason to speak to you in any language other than Italian, and even then there's no guarantee.
• South Asians are actually one of the largest immigrant groups in Italy, numbering in the 500,000s (not to mention the ~300,000 Gypsies, who are of Indian descent), so I doubt that any Italian would be shocked to see one, or as unacquainted with their appearance as Peters suggests. It sounds like a scenario made up by someone unfamiliar with Italy's demographics who just assumes that the country is homogenous and has no foreign population, which again plays well with equally clueless American audiences.

Regardless of whether or not that incident really happened the way Peters describes it, any "brown people" following his advice are going to be very disappointed when they're immediately recognized as foreigners in Italy (or possibly mistaken for Gypsies), since only a tiny fraction of South Asians can dream of ever convincingly passing as Italian, and even then only via cosmetic and surgical enhancement.

Here's a little test that should be nearly impossible if Peters is to be believed. Try to spot the South Asian individual in each of these photos of Italians:


Really tough, huh?

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.

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.)

"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.