«A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of...»
Fred Gardaphé, “We Weren't Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian American Literature,” Literature Interpretation
«A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of...»
Fred Gardaphé, “We Weren't Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian American Literature,” Literature Interpretation Theory 13, no. 3 (July – Sept 2002): 187 Gardaphé goes on to say that by embracing “whiteness” Italians are not only left out of these discussions of ethnicity, but that they are forgetting their history. He implies that Americans of Italian descent are fooling themselves if they believe that they are white, and that the renunciation of their language, food, culture, and other important facets of their identity contributes to this mistaken notion of “whiteness.” Though Italians may have been considered, as several critics maintain, “white on arrival,” they nonetheless remained racially suspect in the eyes of many white Americans.
Like African Americans, Italian immigrants were subject to violence and hostility, including forced segregation, unfair wage labor, and even lynching. Italian immigration in the South was fertile ground for this type of reaction. On Southern plantations, Italian immigrants worked alongside blacks, and according to what few articles are published on this subject, there was little hostility between the two groups. In Louisiana in particular, Italian Americans and African Americans worked and lived among each other, which put Italians in the unusual position of being not white, not black, but somewhere in the middle. They had the right to vote and to become citizens, yet their proximity and closeness to blacks incited anger in Southern whites. Additionally, even then Italian Americans were associated with criminality and organized crime, and white Americans used this as a justification for violence against them. 25 Despite this collective history, the tragedy is that today many Italian Americans are regarded as extremely racist against African Americans. Many critics attribute this response to the acquired knowledge of the color line witnessed by Italian Americans after For more information on Italian immigrants in the South, see Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press) and Vincenza Scarpaci’s essay “Walking the Color Line: Italian Immigrants in Louisiana,” in Are
Italians White? How Race is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 60 – 79.
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