October 12, 2023

For the last sixty or so years the media-education complex has established a rule that only ethnic groups of color are permitted to have grievances. Indeed, since the emergence of Barack Obama, these groups have formed something of a grievance-industrial complex.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

Italian-Americans apparently don’t pass the color test. Although they come from roughly the same Mediterranean stock as people from Spain, Americans of Spanish descent get a bump up the swag wagon. Italians get niente.

People of Spanish descent even get a designated month, National Hispanic Heritage Month. In that month begins on September 15, it overlaps and overshadows the one day historically allotted to Italians, the second Monday of October, as well as the real Columbus Day, October 12, the actual anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America.

Italians, in any case, are less inclined to dwell on past injustices than most other ethnic groups. They have not, for instance, pounded into our consciousness the events that took place in New Orleans in 1891. They could have. That year the city’s popular police chief was shot down on a city street. As the chief lay dying, he was asked who shot him. He reportedly whispered, “Dagoes.” Nine Italians were promptly rounded up for trial.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

In a tribute to American justice, the jury found six of the accused innocent and could not reach a verdict on the guilt of the other three. As happens even today, unpopular verdicts provoke mobs to violence. In this case, on March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the jail and lynched the nine accused, plus two of their paisanos who got in the way.

Although the CRT crowd is mum on the subject, this attack represented the most deadly mass lynching in American history. That said, rather than fret about systemic anti-Italianism, just a year after the New Orleans lynchings Italians proudly celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

In Newark, New Jersey — the city at the center of my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities — some 32 Italian societies joined in the festivities. For Italians, no historical figure solidified their status as real Americans the way Columbus did.

Italians celebrated despite the decidedly mixed reception they received from the native born. A late-century Newark publication, the Sentinel of Freedom, said of these newly minted Americans, “Though the Italians form a very small part of the population of Newark, they are steadily growing in numbers and, as a rule, are quiet, inoffensive people, and many of them are industrious and thrifty and are steadily making money.” So far, so good, then this unfiltered gem: “They come chiefly from Naples and a more ragged, dirty set of people it would be hard to imagine.”

Ignoring the contempt from the Anglo establishment, Italians increasingly identified themselves as Americans. In 1927, with the cooperation of the city, Newark’s Italians chipped in to place an epic statue of Christopher Columbus in downtown’s Washington Park. Some fifty thousand people showed up for a parade and the unveiling.

Newark’s Italian population was centered in the First Ward, known affectionately as “Little Italy,” a thriving neighborhood filled with shops, restaurants, nightclubs, and the occasional street festival. In 1952, the progressive “housers” of the federal government declared the neighborhood a “slum” and set about to level it.