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We Didn’t Come Over on the Mayflower!
(January 27, 2012)
The ignorance of our history has cast some of our “paesani” into the hinterlands of bigotry and prejudice, and thus led them to their coincidental and shameful consequences of non-acceptance of those who are not like us! I can arrive at no other conclusion as I offer up the three incidents below.
In a NY Times article of January 20, 2012, we read the following about different loan practices that were selected that depended on the applicant’s race/ethnicity:
From 2000 to 2008, Angelo Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide, received total compensation estimated at $521.5 million; in 2010, without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, he paid $67.5 million to settle civil fraud charges brought by the S.E.C. The Justice Department, for its part, decided not to pursue a possible criminal case against Mr. Mozilo (my emphasis).
This is in reference to a company that practiced “steering black and Hispanic borrowers to subprime loans while similarly qualified white borrowers got better terms.” This from a company whose CEO is descended from Italians who suffered indignities at the turn of the twentieth century analogous to those that Blacks and Hispanics have and continue to suffer. Between this, Capt. Schettino of the Costa Concordia, the East Haven (CT) Mayor’s reference to his seeming predilection toward “tacos,” and some of our antisemitic paesani, it has not been a good week for Italians/Italian Americans. Po’eri noi!
While I find all of the above despicable, I am further disturbed by the anonymous letter I received this morning, on the eve of the “Giorno della Memoria” (Day of Remembrance), from someone, given its postmark, from my home town, someone, we might also presume from its closing, is, at the very least, of Italian descent.
The West Side of Stamford, Connecticut was the working-class Italian section of town where I lived through 1973, when I left a high-school teaching position in order to pursue a Ph.D. in Italian. Stamford was where many Italian immigrants settled, be they the ones “right off the boat,” be they the others who moved to Connecticut in order to escape having to pay the “pizzo” in New York City because, as in one instance, they had a dress shop and were visited regularly by the local racketeers. That there were epithets thrown about over the years, especially in Italian, this, one cannot deny. But what I can state from my own experience is that there were never any fundamentally inhuman articulations of hate, as this cowardly anonymous letter expresses. Such hate is born out of fear and ignorance of the “other,” as most of us know. That anyone from our Italian/American community (for I can only assume this person is Italian) to engage in such hateful bigotry and prejudice only underscores how absolutely ignorant this person is of his/her history. Italians themselves at the turn of the twentieth century were treated in a most dehumanized manner, as the Judge magazine cartoon here attached illustrates. In US cinema, one of the first images, if not the first, of the Italian was a small-town crook by the name of “Dago Pete” flashed in big letters on the silver screen. Further still during this period, Italians inhabited the lowest rung on the social latter, being paid the lowest salary among immigrants and members of other ethnic groups. All this to say that a greater knowledge—indeed any knowledge at all—might very well make us more understanding of the plight of the more recent as well as current groups of people who are now undergoing their own trials and tribulations with bigotry and racism, be it here (e.g., in the form of residue bigotry vis-à-vis the Jews) or in Italy, where current immigration issues continue to challenge the Italians in this regard.
We surely should pause and take a good look in the mirror before we engage in that age-old critical act of denigration and dismissal. I have indeed underscored in various venues the need for a more profound discussion of the issues at hand; one that allows for dialogue and debate. Instead, it seems ever more present the tendency toward an outright facile discharge of other people’s arguments when, on the other hand, we might all better benefit from a more in-depth analysis of the issues at hand. Instead, it seems we often fall into that ready-made, all too fallibly human defense of the “us-against-them” when, once more on the other hand, it should be the “us-and-them,” seeking out the commonalities, historical and/or current, that bind us. Only in this manner, by ridding ourselves of those obscuring, and at times obdurate, “pre-judices,” as labeled within the philosophical realm, will we create greater and more productive synergy.
In a similar fashion, we should not back down from re-considering past praise we may have lavished on someone to then find out that s/he indeed was not the individual we thought s/he was. The same is equally valid for those whom we, or others, might have misjudged and thus placed them in category of infamy. In either case, we should have the ethical rectitude to admit our initial misreading and offer up a re-constituted interpretation.
Until I received the above-mentioned letter this morning, there were two issues that had been gnawing at me during these past few weeks. One has to do with the above-mentioned revelations that Countrywide Financial, while under the direction of an Italian American, had engaged in activities that, put generously, might be labeled bigoted. They were, instead, I would contend, more racist than bigoted, by the very fact that they targeted minorities with loans that were more costly, as the NY Times had already stated back in December: “A department investigation concluded that Countrywide loan officers and brokers charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk. Countrywide also steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into costly subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit profiles received regular loans, it found.” This behavior was allowed, according to the same NY Times article, because it originated “from a Countrywide policy that gave loan officers and brokers the discretion to alter the terms for which a particular applicant qualified without setting up any system to comply with fair-lending rules, the department said. Lending data showed that Countrywide ended up charging Hispanics and African-Americans more, on average, than white applicants with similar credit histories.” Again, all this was done while an Italian American was “the former chief executive of Countrywide.”
Now, what is wrong with this situation, in addition to the blatant bigotry/racism involved? This was done under the leadership of an Italian American who, we might readily assume, worked his way up the ladder, pulled himself by his bootstraps. Yet, as the CEO of Countrywide, an obvious deduction may be that it was okay for him for such a policy to exist. Is it possible that he did not know of the policy? Who knows? I would remain somewhat incredulous at hearing such a statement articulated in such a categorical manner. Surprising, to boot, is the clamorous silence from the Italian/American community; for if we complain about what we consider to be nefarious acts that others do to us, we surely need to complain about those opprobrious acts our own may perpetrate on others.
The second of the initial two issues I found problematic is related to the despicable letter I received this morning. There is an Italian/American organization that believes that the Italian/American community should not have to “put on the hair shirt [of the Shoah], as the Italian government has done so in “exceed[ing] other governments” in Europe, as one of its officers stated in an editorial. The questioning of such a commemoration boggles the mind; after all, we are dealing with one people’s experience of 2,000-plus years of forced diaspora and a mid-twentieth-century killing spree that exceeded 6,000,000 Jewish children and adults. As one might say in Italian, how does such a thought even approach—let alone enter—the ante-chambers of one’s mind? Further still, this editorial continues to ponder if this may not be all part of “Italian politicians … looking for more influence in the U.S. Congress via the Jewish lobby.” The editorial continues with a harsh criticism of the Primo Levi Center, only to be followed by a closing exhortation to Italy: “I say this to the Italian leaders and its people: Cut your ties to the Primo Levi Center. Separate yourselves from self-serving academics. Stop darkening your past while others whitewash theirs. There are plenty of hair shirts to go around. We are still a good people—una brava gente.”
Well, the “we” of this editorial may be “una brava gente”; we just can’t tell in what way they are so “brava” of a “gente”—unless, of course, we are looking at how one can succeed in the re-writing of history and its coincidental devaluation of a people, each of which—I can only assume according to the articulated thought process of said organization—this officer and his ilk wish to propagate.
Now, at the outset I said there were three horridly problematic issues of bigotry and racism. Well, there is an inevitable, consequential fourth. Given the tragic history of the Italian experience in the United States, especially from approximately the 1870s to the 1940s, how can any Italian American engage in any of the behavioral patterns described above, if ever so briefly? How can an Italian American, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were regularly characterized as non-white, indiscriminately allow his company to exploit financially other minorities? How can an officer of an organization that rationalizes its existence as a platform in order to promote Italian language, culture, and history desecrate so viscerally, I would submit, the tragic history—even in spite of the many individuals who did indeed save Jews in Italy—of the Jewish experience under Fascism? How does an Italian American send such a despicably racially charged letter without even identifying who he is?
My only answer to all of the above is that their blinded “pre-judices” are born out of the fact that they simply do not know their history, regardless of the plethora of facts they may spew forth about the Roman Empire and afterward. I am, therefore, reminded of something that Richard Gambino recently stated during an interview in this regard: “… Italian Americans have an urgent and necessary need to understand the story—in scholarly accounts (my emphasis)—of their 500-year history on this continent because the dominant culture’s view has it that the Rinascimento culture is not Italian Americans’ defining culture….” Indeed, as the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola stated in his Oration on the Dignity of Man:
We, emulating the Cherubic life on Earth, curbing the drive of the emotions through moral science, dispersing the darkness of reason through dialectic, as if washing away the squalor of ignorance and vices, therefore purge our souls lest our emotions run amok or our reason imprudently run off course at any time.
If only through the pathways of “moral science, dialectic, and reason,” then, perhaps, actions and notions that emulate something similar to Cherubic life would wash “away the squalor of ignorance and vices” and keep people’s “reason [on] course at [all] time.”
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I agree
Yes, I, too, wonder why a group that faced horrible discrimination as did the Italians 100 years ago turn around and discriminate equally so against others. Who knows! Maybe they just want to be white!
Thinking the author makes a lot of sense
I think the author makes a lot of valid points...I have never understood why a group, any group, which has in the past faced discrimination discriminates against another......
l'odio nel cuore
It was obvious to me as I was reading Anthony Tamburri's comments that this has nothing to do with "liberal" or "conservative" or any terms like this that seek to "dividersi," that is divide Italian-Americans into different camps. The anonymous letter that was received shows the cowardice of the sender who does not want to be identified but enjoys spreading hatred. Comments received after publication also point to division. Southern Italians are really no more conservative or liberal than their Northern counterparts. Just go and speak to young Italians and this will be made evident. The older contingent may be more traditional, and some of those in their 80s are still monarchists, but that had nothing to do with anti-semitism. Some of them even talk about the good things like compulsory education that was instituted under Mussolini, but that doesn't mean that they supported the racial laws. Actually, in the South, they were not really enforced until the Germans took over after l943. Regarding Mozilo, well there is nothing to be proud of here, but through the 30 years of my career selling residential real estate, I'll tell you that there were other banks and other people doing the same things, that is, feeding on the aspirations and hopes of people that are striving to do better. This is, of course, despicable. Politics in general has become too divisive. It is time for us, the Italian-Americans in this country to look towards the good in all of us, look towards what unites us. This is what makes good citizens, good Italian-Americans, good Jews and good Christians. Patricia Rubino Sandler
Grazie!
Dear Patricia Rubino Sandler,
Thank you for a nicely articulated, thoughtful, and well informed response.
Infinite grazie, AJT
Response to Tamburri article of Jan. 27.
I think Anthony T article of Jan, 27, 2012 "We didn't Come Over on the Mayflower" is just another example of leftist indoctrination and even anger over why the vast majority of Italian Americans continue to identify themselves as culturally conservative. Tamburri, in the typical fashion of elitist academia places blame on the stubborn clinging of Italian Americans to the political/cultural right on the discrimination that was unleashed on our ancestors by then Nativity WASP in turn of the twentieth century America, along with the desire to assimilate and be accepted as 100% "white" by their fellow Americans as the reason so many of our Paesani have embraced the American right (And with a passion as well).
In the midst of his tirade of guilt and depression over the current state of Italian American politics, nowhere does Tamburri mention that this conservative nature so inherent in Italian Americans (Over 80% of whom came from the south and Sicily) Is a common staple of those southern roots. The south of Italy has always been a bastion of conservative. rightist ideology and this trend continues today in Italian politics as well as culturally (Just look at the results of any recent Italian election to see how the south of Italy and Sicily have voted and what political parties they have cast their ballots for and you will see). The south of Italy has and continues to be a stronghold for the countries right wing (Including those parties which support separatism and monarchism). The fact that those Americans of Italian heritage continue to follow those same political/cultural patterns is proof positive of their deep connection to the land of their ancestors and maintenance of those deep traditions of rightist thought, despite decades having passed since the time of their immigration.
I am deeply insulted that Anthony Tamburri would seek to use his academic concept of "white guilt" as a weapon in which to manipulate the Italian American people to embrace his bleeding heart liberal agenda. All I can say to Mr. Tamburri is "good luck with that one". We Italo Americans are a strong people, ones who are not easily manipulated by academia lunched guilt trips and social engineering (As is the case with the entire "whiteness studies" movement and its agenda to divide and conquer the loyalties of Italian and other white ethnic Americans from their natural place within America's right wing).
Nice try Tamburri!
Robert Di Santo-Kearney
Tamburri comment
Nice rebuttal Robert. Well thought out and I whole heartedly agree with your commentary and truly believe every independent thinking Italian and Italian-American agrees as well.
South bastion of conservatism?
Dear Mr.Di Santo-Kearney, just a little note of history that maybe could change your ideas about the South. Do you know the expression "e successe un '48"? In Italian it means ("what a mess") and it's referring to those "1848 revolutions" all over Europe. Well, those clearly not conservative revolutions started not in Paris, but in Sicily and from the South went North... Today is again the South with "i forconi" (of Sicily and Sardegna) starting all over again...
Mr. Di Santo-Kearney: Yours
Mr. Di Santo-Kearney: Yours is really an unfortunate comment that doesn't promote any level of understanding, any level of intellectual and moral advancement. First, a conservative position is NOT the same as a racist position, and no where does Prof. Tamburri suggest that. The fact that you seem to equate conservatism and racism is perhaps a Freudian slip on your part, Mr. Di Santo-Kearney! Second, no where is white guilt (Italians are white?! No way! I'm a nice shade of brown myself.) an issue in Prof. Tamburri's comments either; in fact, quite the opposite... His comments suggest, rightly, I believe, that if Italian Americans understood better their history they would better understand their position in this country as minorities (and in doing so, actually preserve and advance their ethnic culture instead of annihilating it). Third, I think your understanding of southern Italian culture -- both current and past -- needs more refining; and you also need to be a little more generous toward Italian Americans: we are not all cut from the same cloth, as any thoughtful reading of our history will show... it's a lot more complex, liberal, conservative, indifferent, and otherwise than for which you give it credit! The few racists in our midst are generally the ones who hate themselves and remain clueless about their culture and its origins. But, maybe it's all for naught: the Italian American community is almost dead anyway!
Mr. Di Santo-Kearney: Yours
Mr. Di Santo-Kearney: Yours is really an unfortunate comment that doesn't promote any level of understanding, any level of intellectual and moral advancement. First, a conservative position is NOT the same as a racist position, and no where does Prof. Tamburri suggest that. The fact that you seem to equate conservatism and racism is perhaps a Freudian slip on your part, Mr. Di Santo-Kearney! Second, no where is white guilt (Italians are white?! No way! I'm a nice shade of brown myself.) an issue in Prof. Tamburri's comments either; in fact, quite the opposite... His comments suggest, rightly, I believe, that if Italian Americans understood better their history they would better understand their position in this country as minorities (and in doing so, actually preserve and advance their ethnic culture instead of annihilating it). Third, I think your understanding of southern Italian culture -- both current and past -- needs more refining; and you also need to be a little more generous toward Italian Americans: we are not all cut from the same cloth, as any thoughtful reading of our history will show... it's a lot more complex, liberal, conservative, indifferent, and otherwise than for which you give it credit! The few racists in our midst are generally the ones who hate themselves and remain clueless about their culture and its origins. But, maybe it's all for naught: the Italian American community is almost dead anyway! Santo Pellegino
At least he signed his name....
I, too, wonder what he read. White guilt? If one is against racism one has a "bleeding heart liberal agenda"? In the end, however, at least he signed his name...
Are Souther Italians really right wingers?
Dear Mr. Di Santo, as a university professor of political science in Naples (I beg your pardon for being in the academia), and one who has published a few studies on Italian electoral behavior (sorry again), I'd like to inform you that your idea of Southern Italy being a traditional bastion of the rigth is at best misinformed. It was so decades ago, it is not so today. Naples has been governed by the cenetr-left since the early 1990s; the same for the Campania region in the pas decade; the Governor of Puglia is a leftist (and openly gay), Mr. Nichi Vendola since 2005; and the Basilicata Region has been considered a center-left stronghond since the late 1990s. Long-standing center-left govenments have been in place in cities and provinces of Abruzzo, Molise, Calabria, and Sardinia in the past two decades. The one right-wing stronghold in the South has been, not surprisingly perhaps, Sicily (and even there, with some exceptions). In short, if Americans of southern Italian heritage really to followed the political/cultural patterns found in Southern Italy today, they would definitely vote for the Democrats. But many (and definitely not all) of them follow political/cultural patterns reminiscent of an Italy that does not exist any longer. There is nothing wrong in this, of course: we're all entitled to our nostalgia. But you should not mischaracterize contemporary Italian voting behavior. Even if you despise the "intelligentsia," asking a scholar about the data before you write would be a good practice. Ottorino Cappelli
The necessities of re-reading!
Dear Mr. Di Santo-Kearney,
First, there is a difference between being conservative and racist. Nowhere did I equate the two. Second, I am sincerely puzzled by the bulk of your reply, for the simple reason that you seem to be reacting to things I did not write, nor imply. On the other hand, we infer much according to what Hans-Georg Gadamer would call our "fore-understanding" of the matters at hand, or, what he also called our "pre-judices." I mention this now so that after a possible second reading, you might better understand my "pre-judices" as I wrote them.
Buona [ri]lettura, Santo-Kearney! AJT
Thanks Dean Tamburri!
thanks for speaking up! thanks for speaking clearly! thanks for speaking early! thanks for speaking for all of us who, coming from a history of discrimination and injustice cannot tolerate discrimination and injustice for anybody.
It is only by singling out and condemning racism every time we recognize it in our midst that we can fight it and defeat it. Thanks again!
Grazie, Direttore!
Indeed! And you have made NYU's Casa Italiana a wonderful locale of praise, dialogue, and debate about so many things of our Italian and Italian/American cultures.