Is there any hold over in the US with north south prejudice in Italy? I love Italy’s fierce regionalism when it comes to food but it can get s little over the top.
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Because you’re of Italian descent? Is it that evident in your appearance? And what sort of evil has befallen you so far as a result?
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It’s actually very little to do with food, it’s mostly about (like in the US) farmers versus “educated” people, the term the northern italians use is terrone, which is basically saying people of the earth. or peasants. The northerners call the southerns lazy, and corrupt… you know, like in the US. It’s mostly BS, the biggest proponenets of dividing country, the Lega Nord, are just as corrupt, there’s just more industry and work there. The mafia (or more specifially, the N’drangheta and Camorra) are as infiltrated in the north as they are in the south, possibly more now as the north is where the real money is.
Oh I’m aware. Uneducated peasant criminals is the prejudice.
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Yeah, the regionalism is just a holdover from when Italy was a bunch of tiny kingdoms, heck, I lived in a town, and worked in one 5 miles away who were always talking crap about one another… and claiming that their version of a particular dish was better (especially fisherman’s soup… brodetto), the north south issue is more acrimonious, and actually mirrors the northern europe vs southern europe divide quite well (Germany and Holland complaining about Greece, etc)
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Are you forgetting that not too few Irish Catholics fought for the confederacy, were part of the “copperhead” Democratic contingent in the north, and many Irish catholics participated in the NYC in 1863 rather than be drafted into the Union army? A few “No Irish Need apply” doesn’t change that they were active participants in crafting of white supremacy in America.
I know the history of my people in America, and it’s not one of wholesale oppression. Irish Catholics, even when facing some discrimination in Boston and NYC, eventually came to dominate politics in both cities, pushed out Chinese laborers on the railroads, and were not being denied basic rights like back home. Irish Catholics most definitely stepped up in status when moving to the US.
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Indeed! One might even say, as Thomas Guglielmo does of Italian immigrants, that they were already “white on arrival.”
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Right? It’s not that there were not some forms of discrimination against some who were classified as “white”… just that it’s not the same kind of systemic discrimination that continues to be aimed at the non-white population of the US. And in the Irish Catholic example, the difference between being in Ireland during the 19th century and being in the US at the same time is literally night and day. The Irish Catholic community could vote, worship, enjoyed freedoms that their counterparts back home just did not. I mean, sure, there is still some people who call Catholics “Papists” here and don’t consider them “real” Christians, but members of my family who are Catholic aren’t going to get shot on some random day…
Here are some stats on lynchings from the NAACP, which notes that over 70% of lynchings were Black people, with just under 30% of the victims were white, often for supporting their Black neighbors. Sometimes it was for petty crimes, such as the case out west (most happened in the south), where a higher percentage of victims were white than in the south:
One of the more high profile lynchings in GA that was aimed at a white person was Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of raping a teenaged girl who worked in the factory he managed in Marietta (an Atlanta suburb). Even here, it’s about racial hierarchy, and the perceived “attack” on white womanhood, which most likely was really about the growing Jewish population in Atlanta, and the success of a Jewish man in what was considered a white privilege (being in a position of power).
There was also a bombing of a Synagogue during the civil rights era, but explicitly because of the support the Jewish community was expressing for civil rights for Black Americans.
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We definitely fully agree on the racial hierarchy. There were first class whites (primarily English and other northern and western European immigrants) and a second class white, some Irish, Italians, other eastern and southern European immigrants.
I’m clearly more white than my grandfather was, so the perception difference is, did second class white really count? I see two book references above arguing both sides from other commenters. (No idea how good they are relative to each other. I’m likely to go pick up White On Arrival.)
To be clear: There was no way in which any discrimination against second class white groups was ever anything like the oppression and violence experienced by BIPOC groups. And I do not have time to get into how Jews fit into all this (other than that is the spot where there’s a good argument they are still not considered white).
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For navigating Boston, I would have to carefully not say or disclose my last name. It’s very obviously Italian. Elsewhere, I periodically encounter slurs and racist depictions in early 20th century media. Also on more European centric boards where you get British users griping about Spain/Italy/Greece. Never anything directed specifically at me (edit: because I just look like a white dude).
Honestly, trying to imagine that scaled up to what Black Americans experience is nauseating and I know I will never understand that level of abuse.
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If you think of race in the States as a continuum, with white on one side and Black on the other, there has always been a buffer in the middle, with the cumulative population of who were considered part of that buffer changing over time.
This means that yes, there were European populations and others who for a long time (including during my childhood growing up in Chicago, so not just a ‘Southern thing’) were not considered truly white and thus experienced discrimination. However, they were also always perceived as not-Black either. And that makes all the difference.
Just like indentured servitude was bad, but it wasn’t slavery, the bigotry against those from Ireland or the Mediterranean was real and dangerous, up to and including being killed for it, but it was a pale (heh) imitation of the severity of prejudice against those with sub-Saharan ancestry. And now that even East Asians are starting to be considered ‘white’ for purposes of increasing the ranks of the dwindling Northern European stock in the U.S., the buffer is smaller than it has ever been, but the same fundamental prejudice against Blacks is still there, unchanged over hundreds of years.
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Was bad?? Listen, have you been to Boston lately?!
/s
Okay, but I’m honestly trying to imagine what could happen to you there. I mean seriously, what could happen that’s so bad that you’d keep your name hidden to avoid it?
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Which really is a remnant of tensions between the Irish and Italian criminal syndicates that emerged into greater prominence during prohibition, which worked to elevate the relative status of both Irish and Italian Americans. I don’t think this is really evidence of general discrimination against either group, though.
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But why Irish and Italian crime syndicates? Why not British or Swedish crime syndicates?
I know why not Chinese crime syndicates: they have a long storied history in the US, but didn’t get the same prestige boost due to being further down the racial hierarchy. (This also applies broadly to most other organized crime.)
Maybe it’s mostly classism, but it really looks like there’s always some measure of racism mixed in with classism in the US. In some cases, there’s just a little, and in others, it dominates.
You do know about the Triads, right?
There are lots of different organized crime groups who organize around their ethnicity. Russians are another example. There were Jewish American organized crime.
The reason why Italian (and to a lesser extent, Irish) gangs are so often focused on (and to some degree celebrated and lionized) is because the popular media has created a mystique around them via films and TV shows since the popularity of the Godfather book and films. Many Italian Americans rightfully feel irritated that it’s one of the more higher profile depictions of Italian americans in popular culture, but of course Mario Puzo himself was Italian american, so… 
At least some mythologizing of the Italian mob in popular culture comes from Italian Americans themselves, for good or ill.
But again, I don’t think any of that has much to do with systemic discrimination aimed at those communities. The conflict you speak of between those communities is of course real, but more about the dynamic between those communities seeking to keep older traditions alive, rather than them being entirely restricted from the mainstream of American society.
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Same can be said for the Irish, romanticizing themselves as standing up against the English, as being protectors of the same communities they victimized. The English constantly performing stunts that reinforced that image didn’t help, but the mythologizing of Irish organized crime and the Irish gangs came a lot from within the community itself, especially within the context of the American mythology of rebellion against the English. If hating the English made you American, who could be more American than the Irish?
But it was in vying for whiteness that the divisions between folks of Irish, Italian, Polish and other backgrounds existed. Black and Indigenous people have never (and never will) been offered that opportunity. They will never be eligible for even the slightest of perks offered by inclusion in the whiteness club. Which is why any movement that seeks to create equality and inclusion using the terms and measures of whiteness will fail. Because the entire experience of Black and Indigenous people’s relationship to whiteness is not inclusion, but erasure of their right to exist.
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Very much this. Italians getting into the whiteness club wasn’t a good project, and doesn’t represent progress. Instead, it just gave me privilege and furthered the erasure of Black and Indigenous people.
My personal take away from that history (and personal family history: my grandpa was an anchor baby) and the experience of seeing things like depictions of Italian stereotypes in Vaudeville and other media is how much worse it is for others, and that the better common cause is fixing racial equality for everyone.
Maybe early on, very early on. But pretty quickly, what made one especially (white) American was the opposite, loving the English, in the form of one’s “Anglo Saxon” heritage (cf. Remnants of this in Marjorie Taylor Greene and that rotten lot), if one had it. WASPs soon touted themselves as being the cream of the racial crop, and as far as I know, any Irish American who thought that hating the English would earn them whiteness points in the U.S. was sorely mistaken.
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Apparently their super special anglo-saxon caucus isn’t going to happen afterall
One boxing isn’t helpful here, so the take home is that Paul Gosar, Greene, Gaetz and others are discussing forming the “America First” caucus with the stated goal of promoting Anglo-Saxon values, but the republican brass wants to remain less honest and open about the white supremacy aspect of the platform
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When it comes to education, the document says the group opposes teaching children history that undermines “America’s great history” and decries education that is “actively hostile to the civic and cultural assimilation necessary for a strong nation.”
And they complain about “indoctrination” from the Left… 
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