Italian Americans and Race

Race has long been a factor in Italian identity. After national unification in 1861, northern Italians racialized the South as a land of lazy, violent, criminal inferior people. "Africa begins at Rome," is an old adage still heard today in Italy.

Southern Italians' racial ambiguity has been championed by the Italian group Almamegretta, in their hit "Hannibal's Children :

That's why many Italians have dark skin
That's why many Italians have dark hair
That's why many Italians have dark eyes
That's why many Italians have dark skin

Some of Hannibal's blood remained in everybody's veins (2x)
Nobody can say I'm lying (2x)
If you know your history, you know where the color of the blood that runs in your veins comes from (2x)

Italian immigrants encountered a racist system based on socially marked categories of "white" and "black." Italians often found themselves in an in-between position of not quite black and not quite white, while always receiving the benefits of whiteness from the federal government. In wasn't until the 1930s and 1940s that Italian Americans began to assert a "white" identity, and sometimes with a vengeance.

This is an exteremly superfical recap of a complicated history that scholars, artists, and others are exploring with increased attention. Here are some sites, publicatiions, and films worth checking out:

• Robert Orsi, "The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990," in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape.
  

  Orsi's seminal article explores how "swarty" Italian Americans became white in racist America.

• Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945
  

  "Immigrating to the United States, Italians, like all others arriving on America's shores, were made to fill out a standardized immigration form. In the box for race, they faced two choices: North Italian or South Italian. On the line requesting information on color, they wrote simply "white." By World War II, the only option they had for race and color questions was "white." This identification is suggestive of the many ways in which Italians became white on arrival in the United States, as Thomas A. Guglielmo demonstrates in this prize-winning book. While many suffered from racial prejudice and discrimination, they were nonetheless viewed as white, with all the privileges this color classification bestowed, in the corridors of American power--from judges to journalists, from organized labor to politicians, from race scientists to realtors. "

• Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America
  

  "This collection of original essays asks the question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity." Director Spike Lee wrote This book cuts to the heart of the similarities and the differences between Italian Americans and African Americans, which historically has been a volatile mix....I applaud this insightful scrutiny."

  Adesso anche in italiano: Gli italiani sono bianchi?: Come l'America ha costruito la razza

• David Richards, Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
  

  "Delving into the political and legal context of flawed liberal nationalism both in Italy (the Risorgimento) and the United States (Reconstruction Amendments), Richards examines why Italian Americans were so reluctant to influence depictions of themselves and their own collective identity. He argues that American racism could not have had the durability or political power it has had either in the popular understanding or in the corruption of constitutional ideals unless many new immigrants, themselves often regarded as racially inferior, had been drawn into accepting and supporting many of the terms of American racism."

• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

  "... Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants 'race' has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian."

• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America

• David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White

• Andrea Dottolo's "Situating Whiteness in Italian Identity."

• Prof. Natasha Chang's class "Race, Ethnicity, and Italian American Identity" at Middlebury College.

• Father James Groppi, civil rights activist.

• Spike Lee has paid special attention to the relationship between Italian American and African Americans in his two films Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever.

Here's a sampling of some famous Italo-African Americans:

• Philly's spoken word recording artist Ursula Rucker
  
• R&B singer Alicia Keys
  
• "Interdisciplinary" artist and culture critic Coco Fusco's parents are black Cuban and Italian American.
• Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella
  
• Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris
  
• actor Giancarlo Esposito
  
• poet Nikki Giovanni
  
• Legendary graffiti pioneer Dondi's (1961-1998) mom was Sicilian.
  
• DJ Kid Capri aka David Anthony Love.
• Prince — believe it!
• while he ain't saying, the word is that actor Vin Diesel is part Italian.