Rosanne Cash's "Passing" Mother?

Rosanne Cash is the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto, whose parents were Thomas Liberto, a Sicilian American, and Irene Robinson from Texas. In some photos Vivian could almost be an exotic European type, like Sophia Loren, Victoria Beckham or Sarah Hyland, but most of the time she looks more ambiguous and mixed-race, like Rosie Perez or Eartha Kitt.

Ken Burns' recent documentary on Country Music talks about an incident in the 60s when a racist group in Alabama with links to the KKK questioned Vivian's whiteness, saying she looked like a "negro", but in an interview Rosanne claims that she was just very exotic looking because "her people were Italian", without even mentioning the Robinson side of the family.

Not everyone's buying it, like in this popular blog thread where many commenters believe she was black passing for white. There are the usual idiots repeating refuted lies about Sicilians being "African" and North Africans being "black", but one comment focusing on the Robinson line (if accurate) solves the case:

I dug around into her genealogy a bit out of curiosity – the commenters who stated that her parents (and maybe grandparents too) are white according to the census etc just didn’t dig far back enough. Also, regarding the census, it does have mistakes at time and people would just tell the census taker their info – so if they say so and so is from a certain place, or that they’re white then that’s what will be put down. Anyhow, Vivian’s mom was Irene Robinson. Irene’s mom was Dora Minnie, and Dora’s dad was Lafayette Robinson, born 1844. In the 1880 census he is listed as “mulatto” and by the 1910 census he is listed as “white,” so I’d assume that somewhere in that time he decided to start passing as white. His mother, Sarah, born about 1830 was also listed as “mulatto.” You can see various photos and family trees of the family on ancestry.com and one of them has Sarah’s mother listed as an unknown black slave and her father looks to be a slave owner by the name of William Shields. Sarah is listed in the 1870 census as “mulatto” and then in 1880 she is listed as “white.”

Anyway, here's a photo of Johnny Cash with Irene Robinson and Tom Liberto:


Which parent do you think Vivian gets her "exotic" looks from?

UPDATE: Genealogical research and genetic testing done on the show Finding Your Roots has confirmed that the Robinson line was mulatto passing for white.

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

Green Book's Made-Up Scene

The movie Green Book is "inspired by a true story" about an Italian American bouncer who takes a job driving a black pianist (Don Shirley) on a tour through the Deep South in 1962. But as always it doesn't stick closely to the facts. In one scene, Tony "Lip" Vallelonga punches a cop who accuses Italians of being part black:

PATROLMAN #1
What's this last name say?

LIP
Vallelonga.

PATROLMAN #1
'Hell kind of name is that?

LIP
Italian.

PATROLMAN #1
Oh, now I get it. That's why you driving this boy around... you half a nigger yourself.

Since that sounds more like something that would be in a dumb Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino movie, or posted online by some Afrocentrist or Nordicist troll, I decided to check if it really happened. That scene is actually based on two separate events:

There were a lot more things that happened with the cops, and we combined two, when my father punched out a cop and that was one time they got arrested. They also got arrested when they were going 25 mph and a cop said they were doing 75. It was a shakedown and the cops were pissed my father was driving this black man.

The one where the cop is mad about a white man driving a black man around was only about that and had no violence and no mention of any name-calling:

Tony and the Mississippi policeman argue about the fact that Tony is driving a black man. The policeman calls Tony a racial slur, and Tony punches him. The camera pans to the two men in a jail cell. [...] In Shirley's own telling, Tony didn't throw blows, Shirley was not arrested, and they were driving through West Virginia.

"What happened was they stopped us and charged us for speeding in a 35 mile (per hour) zone we were going 25, okay, but they said we were going 75, and it was all pure racism," Shirley said in an interview with Astor. "They got pissed because he was white, driving me. That's what it was about. They made us turn around and come back 50 miles to McMechen, West Virginia, okay?"

The one where Tony punches the cop happened later and it was because he was called an ethnic slur for Italians, not blacks:

Did Tony Lip and Don Shirley really end up in jail due to Lip punching a police officer?

Yes. Lip became enraged at the officer for calling him a derogatory name for Italians. Lip did punch the officer and they ended up in jail, but it happened a year later, in the fall of 1963.

So there's no evidence that any cop ever made that claim. It was very likely invented by the writers and put in the movie to make a point about racism and "whiteness":

The point of the film is, to a certain extent, that because Tony is experiencing these prejudicial encounters with Don, that they slowly chip away at his conditioned hostility and he begins to view people of colour as something approaching equal. At one point, a police officer pulls over their car and seems intent on humiliating both Tony and Don, and calls Tony 'half a nigger.' To which Tony responds in the only way he knows with a swift one to the jaw. This is presented as pivotal by Farrelly, a Damascus moment where Tony experiences life as a member of the oppressed. But in actuality, Farrelly is showcasing a kind of inverse Uplift Suasion, where instead of a high achieving person of colour changing a racist mind via the sheer will of their achievement, a white person literally has to be called a 'nigger' before they begin to contemplate racial equality.

"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"

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

Olive Skin and Other Undertones

Many people think "olive" is a skin color like white, black or brown and refers to a separate or "mixed" ethnicity with some kind of "tan" complexion, usually in the Mediterranean region. But it's actually just one of several skin undertones that are found in all races, light and dark. The 4 undertones are: Cool (blue/pink), Neutral (yellow/beige), Olive (green/gray) and Warm (red/gold). And Southern Europe, including Italy, has the same variation as anywhere else in Europe or the world.

Here's what an untanned Italian woman would look like with each undertone:


And here are some other examples of Italians with different undertones:


You can see more, including some very tanned individuals, in these random samples of Big Brother and talent show contestants.

WW2 Internment Was No Big Deal

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

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

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

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

Rudolph Valentino's Alleged "Otherness"

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

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

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

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

White on Arrival

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

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.