People who have been here a while tend to want to pull the drawbridge up after them. As you point out, each new wave of immigration from a different region faces awful treatment, while those who are already here often join the side of the "majority" in helping discriminate, I guess because that "proves" they've really assimilated or something.

US History is chock full of ugly bullshit like that, it ain't really pretty.

The peoples who inhabited North America 15,000 years ago may have not trusted the newcomers but they sure-as-shit didn't have a chance to voice their preferences before the onslaught of peoples from other places.

There has been no population in the US (or the rest of the Americas) that has been more discriminated against.

Most of my known ancestors came from european stock. I just hope I have a lot of other interminglings in there too! Mutts are the strongest breeds.

Like Wounded Bear said, people who have "become American" tend to look down their noses at 1. other groups and 2. later immigrants from their own group who are not assimilating as quickly as they did.

I happens with immigrants from Latin America too. Those who have been here awhile will call others "illegals" even though they came him without documentation and only got in through the Amnesty in the 1980's. It is frustrating, but it is actually how some of the psychology works. People want to belong to the in group and sometimes that means excluding people who even came from similar circumstances as yourself.

my great grandparents on my mom's side came here from Italy and Sicily around 1900. (Sicily, or "up north" if you heard the Sicilian side talk about it - even though "up north" was only in Naples, still considered very much Southern Italy)

All of my great grandparents passed away before I was born, except for one great grandmother, who passed away some time in the mid 1970s. However, even though she had lived here for a good 70 years, she barely spoke any English that entire time - she lived in a Sicilian community within Middletown, Connecticut that allowed her to do her grocery shopping (at the still existing Public Market on Main Street), get her haircut, go to the Pharmacy, etc without ever having to deal with people that spoke anything but Sicilian. And, this was in a small city/large town of only 30,000 to 40,000 or so people. So, she never really assimilated into American culture and I've always considered at least some of those stories about how grandma or grandpa came to this country and worked hard to learn perfect English while working 5 jobs to make ends meet to be BS. (In some cases, I said, not all)

representing Irish-Americans (my people) makes me sick to my stomach. The demonizing of Irish people in the 1800's, blaming them for their horrible poverty, the British government's knowingly letting them starve and the Americans treating them like dirt should have made every Irish-American sympathetic to the plight of refugees from other countries. Instead, they discriminated against Italians and other immigrants and today, they are some of the biggest anti-black racists in this country.

Kelly, Pence... the list goes on. People are always talking about how Boston is such a racist city, but the truth is we are a very liberal progressive city. The racism mainly comes from our Irish-American blue collar neighborhoods - Charlestown, South Boston, Dorchester, the South Shore (Irish Riviera) etc. I remember when I lived here after college if you got into a taxi with a black cab driver and asked them to take you to one of these neighborhoods, they would tell you to get out of the cab. They wouldn't go there for fear of being robbed and beaten or worse.

There are also many Irish champions of the poor and oppressed, but I just wonder why so many of them have gone to the dark side. There are some real problems amongst the Irish with racism and a lack of concern for the less fortunate. I am not quite sure why it is so prevalent given what their experiences have been. I can understand the heartlessness of the English because they have always been that way.

Moynihan abetted backlash politics by blaming black women for black poverty and black crime-as if those things happened solely because some women who raised kids on their own, as if all women raising kids on their own were black-most were and are white-, and as if those women who were raising those kids on their own as a deliberate choice rather than because the ban on public assistance for two-parent families forced families to choose between keeping two parents in the home or keeping the kids fed.

Moynihan then made that worse by calling for "benign neglect" of poverty, including child poverty, on the part of the federal government.

Moynihan helped cause what is now fifty years of uninterrupted racist demagogy and social brutality.

It remains a major tragedy for this party and this country that this smug, dismissive, objectively conservative figure beat Bella Abzug for the 1976 Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in New York.

I remember Guaranteed Annual Income. Moynihan may have been from Hell's Kitchen but only after his family went broke and he knew what it was like to be privileged.

The January 16, 1970 memo that the phrase comes from calls for a ratcheting down of racial rhetoric in the context of ferocious press and police attacks against Black Panthers and other groups in an effort to make continuing economic progress possible. Moynihan's point is that the conversation, not the policies, might benefit from a change of subject:

And you are correct, he was one of the good guys.

We don't need to start pretending that every post-1932 Democratic officeholder was infallible, and there was no way what I said about a long-dead former Democratic senator is somehow going to help Trump.

I'll concede that I should have offered a source, but there are plenty of sources that back up my interpretation of the effect of Moynihan's remark: Nixon used that quote as intellectual cover to slash spending for anti-poverty programs and to cripple efforts to enforce laws against racial discrimination.

Whatever Moynihan's intent may have been(if he had REALLY intended to reduce poverty when he issued the Moynihan Report in the mid-60s, he would have argued for getting rid of the ban on aid to two-parent families and for federal funding for day care centers, not put the blame on black women for black poverty), he KNEW he was abetting backlash politics and working against efforts to save the anti-poverty programs by taking a job in the Nixon Administration, and he knew it was demagogic to single out people of color for "racial rhetoric", when the problem was with the rhetoric used by people like Nixon, Wallace, Frank Rizzo and later Ed Koch(after Koch stopped being a liberal and started campaigning for people like Reagan and D'Amato).

What I said was fair comment, and we don't need to turn this into a site in which nothing any Dem, even any past Dem ever did can be questioned just to fight the Right.

Why would you think it would be? You admit that Nixon distorted Moynihan's words and yet that's the interpretation you want to dredge up here? And you still haven't provided any links.

Link 1:

http://what-when-how.com/social-sciences/benign-neglect-social-science/

You've already admitted that Nixon intentionally distorted Moynihan's memo to suit his own purposes. I supplied a link to the actual memo which I'd advise you to read. Moynihan is not proposing "a laissez-faire approach to racial problems," as your first quotation suggests, even if his memo was used to support such a policy. And his assessments were not "dire." What Moynihan is suggesting is that the issue take a lower profile in Nixon's communications. Of course, since Nixon ran on urban unrest, that would be the last thing he'd actually want to do, so naturally he found a way to distort Moynihan's intentions. But no one is served by presenting Nixonian distortions as some kind of truth except Nixonians. Here again is a link to Moynihan's memo:

https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/releases/jul10/53.pdf

It was Nixon. He KNEW what Nixon was about. He KNEW that Nixon hated the idea of antipoverty programs and that Nixon was the sort of guy who wished the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid had never happened.

Moynihan would have to have known that there was no other way that could ever have played out.

Moynihan should simply never have taken a position in the Nixon Administration. No Democrat should have. There was never any possibility that Nixon would listen to reason and NOT move to kill the War on Poverty.

The interpretation I take of the consequences of Moynihan's remarks is essentially the consensus position of the African-American community and the community of people involved in anti-poverty work.

I assume you'll concede my point about the consequences of his demonization of single black mothers and his sweeping moral condemnation of urban peoples of color in his Report from the mid-Sixties.

BTW, don't ever accuse me of being a Nixonian. Nixon was the first national political figure I ever hated. My political involvement has been defined, since my teenage years, by a determination to eradicate all the ugliness Nixon and his mob brought to this country.

Moynihan is dead, and whatever the intent, the effect of his words has been proved. Nobody's going to vote for or against us based on what we say about him now. We can only lose OR win votes based on who we are now and what we propose for the future.

He's simply not worth your loyalty.

I don't know exactly what Moynihan thought of Nixon but he couldn't have known everything we know now. Nixon in his second year might have been making a show of reaching out to Dems. I do know that Moynihan had a reputation as a liberal, and frankly I never heard your tale of woe until you posted it. Doesn't surprise me in the least because I've seen similar tales of similar Democrats here that turn out on inspection to be similarly full of cr@p. Biden is a good example. And no, I don't concede your insinuations about single black mothers. Moynihan thought that children were more successful and less prone to anti-social behavior if they were raised in two-parent households. He also thought that illegitimacy was an indicator of future criminality. Well, we've come a long way but those were the assumptions he was working from and to his way of thinking the LBJ legislation was producing unintended consequences by consigning underclass fathers to prison while stepping in to support their families. I don't think he knew exactly how evil Nixon was, or that he welcomed the very consequences he deplored. So he was naive. So were a lot of Democrats. Most still are. Nevertheless Moynihan worked intelligently to alleviate poverty and I don't hold him responsible for Nixon's failures or sins. And I don't think it's a good idea to uncritically pass along RW versions of history.

Moynihan knew that Nixon had based his entire career on implacable hostility to the very idea of federal social programs.

He knew that his Report slandering black mothers had been playing a major role in the conservative arguments against the Great Society programs.

He would also have been aware that the major part of Nixon's re-election strategy was an all-out effort to win over the people who voted for George Wallace in 1968.

My posts were not "full of crap", and I said and did nothing to merit personal abuse from you. You asked for sources, I provided them.

Ask any older, politically involved African-American person about Moynihan and his effects on black community and on the poor of all races. The black community was calling out Moynihan's findings as flawed and damaging when they were released.

If the problem was single-parent families, the cause of the problem was the ban on assistance to two-parent families, not the existence of social programs. And it was obvious even at the time that illegitimacy was never caused by anti--poverty programs.. People of color were pointing those things out at the time, but nobody would listen to them.

What I'm working from is NOT a RW version of 1960s-1970s history. The RW didn't criticize Moynihan's findings, it embraced them, and it used those findings to underpin what has now been half-a-century of collectively dehumanizing the poor, racializing poverty-equating it with blackness and blaming it on the black community, despite the fact the largest single group of poor people are poor Southern whites and despite the fact that there is nothing solely intrinsic to black culture about the causes of poverty-and using those flawed, discredited findings to justify what has now been half-a-century of unending budgetary war against the poor of all races in this country.

I'm not using RW talking points-I'm following humbly and respectfully in the tradition of people like(in no order of prominence)Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden in his Newark years, Dr. King, Jesse Jackson, RFK, and Barack Obama in his time as a community organizer.

It's never RW to point out any situation in which the poor and people of color are treated unjustly.

writing in the pages of BAR for example, then yes, this is the distorted nonsense one is likely to encounter. But it's vile and untruthful and one really should think twice before dragging it over here.

I was talking, instead, about the long-standing traditions of solidarity and allyship with the poor and of calling out any and all unfair attacks on the poor.

In blaming single black mothers for black poverty; in implying that black women raising their kids by themselves was a deliberate act of personal irresponsibility somehow caused BY the very existence of social programs rather than a desperate collective choice imposed on millions of people by the senseless ban on federal assistance for two parent families-a ban kept in place even though decades of redlining had wiped out employment in poor neighborhoods across the country and left huge numbers of poor families with no alternative but to have the fathers leave those households simply to make sure the kids had food to eat; in all of that, the Report was a vicious and unfounded attack on some of the most dispossessed, oppressed people in this country.

It would have been one thing to say poverty could not be wiped out by money alone-the poor and the activists who stand with the poor have been pointing that out from the start. Better education was and is needed; jobs programs were and are needed-Bobby Kennedy helped create a wonderful model for that in Bed-Stuy which did massive good until Reagan's funding cuts killed it in the Eighties. More than anything else, rehumanization of the poor...a general societal commitment to the belief that the poor are basically good people, with the same natural wish to live the best, fullest life possible that most of us have and the same capacity to act on that wish as anyone else if given a real chance, the benefit of the doubt and the basic level of human respect those who aren't axe murderers or Trump staffers are entitled to.

Moynihan's report did none of that-it treated the poor as intrinsically criminal and antisocial, blamed them for the suffering and oppression they did nothing to deserve. And it attacked black women simply for being a strong presence in the life of the black community, as if those women rather than the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow, were singlehandedly responsible for the sense of humiliation and powerlessness felt by African-American men.

Many if not African-American intellectuals, policy analysts and (Democratic) officeholders categorically rejected the Moynihan Report from the outset, and continue to do so to this day, as this link points out:

(go to the "Reception and Following Debate" section of the entry)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action

Among the few African-American figures to endorse the Report's conclusions were Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell(its bogus conclusions may have partially informed Bill Cosby's infamous "poundcake speech" as well). And the phrase "blaming the victim" was actually coined, by the psychologist William Ryan, as a justified attack on the Report.

It's not enough to say that Moynihan's now-totally discredited findings were a "mistake". Thoagse findings are the intellectual underpinnings of the Republican Party's fifty-year-long scorched-earth campaign against the poor.

If we have any reason to exist as a party, if there's one thing we are supposed to be about no matter what, it's solidarity and allyship with the poor and the powerless. There is no reason we should devote any more time to defending Moynihan for writing it than we would spend defending Andrew Jackson, the first person elected president as a Democrat, for owning slaves and sending Native Americans on the Trail of Tears. In both cases, it's an example of something we as Democrats should never be about again.
Moynihan's

from the PDF edition, page 151:

I simply said that my comments about the Report were grounded in a progressive tradition of human solidarity in which Obama can generally be situated rather than being, as you claim with no logical or rhetorical justification, some sort of RW attack(again, the right wing LOVED what Moynihan wrote and has used what he wrote to bash the poor for half a century now. It can't be a RW attack to disagree with the RW, for Goddess(es) sake(s)).

In the quote you posted, Obama said there was some minor validity in small parts of the Reports conclusions, specifically, the one part everyone basically agrees with, which is that out-of wedlock births, in ANY community, are not generally a good thing(btw, you do realize no one EVER actually said that out-of-wedlock births were a good thing, right? That's one reason most progressives are pro-choice and support easy access to contraception). He did NOT say the Report was correct in its conclusion that the actions of black women and the role played by black women in black played a greater role in poverty in that community than all other factors, NOR did he go along with the Report's complete lack of proposals for addressing poverty in the black community. Barack Obama never joined Moynihan in blaming the black community's alleged lack of "personal responsibility" for poverty and other all other issues affecting that community.

Virtually everyone agrees that values, in some sense, should be part of everyone's life and the upbringing of all children. Nobody was seriously arguing against that. And nobody is against self-help or the idea of people trying to live basically responsible lives.

It has simply never been the case that black women, in large numbers(or at least in any larger numbers than women of any other race), made a deliberate, conscious choice to get pregnant and raise children on their own, with the intent of depending on social benefits to support those kids. Nor has it been the case that black men left their families because black women were strong, or that black families would have been just fine if only black women had been subservient to black men.

The problems in the black family derive more from the heritage of segregation, and in urban areas more from the economic pressures the heritage of redlining imposed on poor families of all races, as well as the damage done by the ban on public assistance for intact families in areas where redlining had created job deserts, leaving families with no alternative but at least temporary recourse to public assistance.

Moynihan removed any proposals for jobs programs(and the poor and the New Left, in addition to people like Dr. King and RFK, had always called for jobs programs rather than emphasizing social benefits) or any other conclusions other than the demonization of black women from his Report. The Report never led to any positive changes in public policy. It did nothing but give aid and comfort to every spiteful, vindictive poorbasher from Reagan to Ryan.

Why on earth would you defend something whose effects were that categorically negative?

Nothing Democrats would ever really support ever came of the reports conclusions.

It did, however, inform-or rather misinform-the mass incarceration approach to crime and the 1996 welfare bill, a brutal measure that did nothing but make life worse for the poor.

For a final demolition of the Report, read THIS link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

And I've already pointed out whose tradition you are following in. So I'll stick with Barack's interpretation, thanks, which he took the trouble to print in a book I'd recommend reading.



https://ia801203.us.archive.org/5/items/TheAudacityOfHope_201607/The%20Audacity%20of%20Hope.pdf

He simply agreed with the one thing that virtually everybody has always everywhere agreed with: that out of wedlock births are not a good thing. He did not accept Moynihan's racist, sexist conclusion that black women are almost exclusively to blame for black poverty and black crime.

And my views here are those of Ta-Nehisi Coates, not Cornel West. You have no reason to try and associate me with Dr. West.

It's not damaging to the Democratic Party simply to critique bad choices by Democratic public figures, and certainly not of those made by deceased Democratic public figures. Doing so has nothing in common with the personal slanders thrown at Democratic public figures by the Right.

They don't refuse to vote for us simply because some of us point out that DEAD Democratic public figures were wrong about something.

For example, they don't vote against us because some Dems rightly critique the segregation in the New Deal, or Truman's loyalty oaths, or LBJ's escalation in Vietnam.

Critique is a necessary part of learning from past mistakes.

Bill Clinton's policy offer in 1992 was a fairly savage critique of what the party had stood for after 1968-in fact, it could be taken as a call for a complete repudiation of everything progressive(other than the defense of reproductive choice)we stood for after that year.

As to things for which there is no factual basis...that covers your accusation that my sourced posts about the Moynihan Report, a report beloved by racists and conservatives, a report that did nothing but damage to the African-American community represented RW propaganda, when what I was doing there was challenging the RW view OF the Report.

On a level of simple logic, it can't be RW propaganda to challenge a document that UNDERPINS decades of RW propaganda.

And you yourself admitted upthread that Moynihan worked from flawed assumptions, so what's the POINT of defending the conclusions he arrived at after starting from flawed assumptions?

Black poverty and black crime were and are largely caused by the historic effects of racism, redlining, and corporate greed-NOT by the way black women live their lives.

I'm also aware of the discrimination that they faced - but I'm gratified to know that they're Democrats - from my grandfather on down. I worked on two campaigns for my Democratic congressman - and was pleased to find my second cousins (kids of my Dad's first cousins) on my GOTV phone list! I didn't just give them the standard speech when I reached them, but told them who I was, and we had a nice conversation. And these were cousins I'd never spoken to before.

The majority of my family remain so. (There are a few gun nut, RW cousins, but they are mostly apolitical.)

They met here and married - and raised 11(!) children, five boys and six girls. My grandfather was the eldest boy. I never met him, he died young, at 48, when my Dad was only 12. But I was fortunate to know those of his sisters who lived during my lifetime, one great aunt in particular who lived not far from us, and the closest sister in age to my grandfather. She lived to 97.

And my Dad's generation of cousins appear to have carried on the Democratic tradition and also their kids, since some turned up on my GOTV phone list. Since I'm acquainted with a lot of my Dad's closest cousins, I made a point of sending my regards when I talked to their kids. And I remember one of them said that his Mom would vote for anyone as long as it was a Democrat...

and something I say myself often-being mostly Italian-American. I will share a story that I posted on DU several years ago. I was just a kid. My grandfather was living in the house he brought my dad up in. The neighborhood where his house was located was experiencing a shift from being predominantly an Italian-American neighborhood to an African-American neighborhood. It was Father's Day and we were having a barbecue in my grandfather's backyard. My dad made a comment to my grandfather that the neighborhood was changing and he should consider moving out.

I very rarely saw my grandfather get mad, and hardly ever at my dad, but this pissed him off. He looked at my dad and said "I know these people, they just want to buy a house and raise their families just like I did. When I moved in, the people who lived here said 'there goes the neighborhood, the Italians are moving in' and they all sold their houses. If I move out, I'm no better than they were." He lived in that house until he died. I was 8 or 9 years old at the time, but that made a big impression on me-and on my dad.

It's bad enough when we can't look at our fellow human beings as just other people. It's worse when we forget what it was like when we weren't afforded that simple consideration and didn't learn from it.

My grandfather was a builder. He built his house, and one each for his sons. Simple houses, probably $15K or so in the 1950's. But all in the same area. They actually abutted each other. This was my Mother's Father, so my dad came from a neighboring city, but we also had a modest home.

My Grandmother came to this country after my Grandfather made a stake. My Grandfather came in 1918, my Grandmother a few years later.

Anyway, every Sunday all the grandchildren and parents would visit. 1950's and 60's. We had adjoining yards and 4 houses and my grandmother would cook for everyone. My grandmother didn't speak a word of English for her whole life. I would always need an Aunt or my Mother to translate. Not a word, mind you.

So, fast forward a half century. My cousin, Billy, who was the son of her son, so he lived very near by my Grandmother, in one of the houses my Grandfather built for his father, says to me during an immigration discussion, "They shouldn't let anyone in this country who can't speak English." I was flabbergasted. I said "Billy, good thing nobody passed that law before Grandma came here."

What a dope.

I had to go look up your profile...I would have sworn you were my cousin. We sure share a lot of heritage, but I think if you ask any one of Italian background, we probably all have the same stories. EVERY Sunday everyone was at Grandma's with a million cousins everywhere. We lived "across the river" in South Jersey, so picnics and summer parties were at our place. Bocce games that transversed the neighborhood. And what the hell was the name of that version of "Rock-Paper-Scissors" my uncles played? They were SO serious!

Two guys would throw their hands out with a certain number of fingers, extended.

Then, in Italian, they would try to guess the total number of both players. They would call the number out in Italian. Guessing 5 and 5, for the total of ten, one would shout "boom".

After Bocce, they would then play boss and underboss in a beer drinking game, with the captain of the winning team the boss, the losing team underboss. You couldn't drink unless both agreed, and deals were made on who could have a drink and who couldn't.

That's what I remember. I also remember that my father and uncles were much more tolerant of minorities than their children.

And the "Boss and Underboss" game! I remember the "pysche" game that went with Morta...the staring, the game face, the timing. It was awesome.

Wow I am impressed with your grandfather. My father was Sicilian. Off the boat Sicilian and he made terrible terrible racist remarks all the time. The Irish were all drunks, the English did not bathe etc. etc. but I never ever saw him act racist. I know this sounds crazy. To my father, being Italian, was like the best thing in the world and he went out of his way to help all people of all races and religions all the time till the day he died because as a good Italian, it was his obligation, but his horrible comments, I could never understand why he made them as they didn't jive with his actions. I want to attribute this to his ignorance and lack of education.

grandfather, Laxman!

That made me smile with pride and we're not even related.

She married a full blooded Italian when she grew up, as did two of her sisters and many, many, many of her nieces and nephews.

I married the daughter of a first generation Italian.

I gave my sons their mother's Italian last name, a beautiful name, much more honorable than my own.

None of my sisters-in-law, all half Italian, are bigots. They have their faults, but they are not bigots. I personally don't know any bigots of Italian extraction, although truth be told, I knew some when I was growing up, which was a long time ago.

There is no ethnic group in the American melting pot in which bigotry is acceptable, not Irish, not Italian, not African American, not Jews, Slavs, Arabic, Native American, no one.

After all we are not "Germans" or "Irish" or "Chinese." We are Americans, brought together in the most ethnically diverse country in the world.

The great strength of the United States is that we have had the honor of incorporating the best and brightest and bravest from all cultures all around the world. This may be eroded under the temporary dictatorship of the ignorant, bigoted and lazy, the last gasps of the Republican party, but I believe because of our strength and cultural richness we will restore decency to our country in short order.

A democrat, a very decent democrat who has led an honorable life was elected to the Senate from Alabama of all places after all, a democrat who prosecuted the criminals in a great historical hate crime.

This awful experience of the orange idiot and his puerile Ayn Rand worshipping collaborators will have a silver lining, inasmuch as the reaction to these cretins will be to reaffirm and expand decency in this country. This process is just beginning, but it will get there.

I have faith.

but they would never admit to it.

I haven't noticed that at all among my wife's cousins, aunts and uncles, but then again, I can't say that I'm intimate with them.

When I see them at family functions they mostly seem quite nice and from what I know, I like them.

I do know of two on the Italian-American side who I can imagine being Trumpers and who are almost surely Republicans, but not every person who voted for Trump did so because they share his bigotry. Some probably voted that way because being a Republican is a bad habit they have and they don't reflect all that deeply.

I'd guess there are 30 or 40 people in that group.

My wife is only half Italian-American. The other half of her family originated in Germany and Ireland. I don't like that side as much as her Italian relatives, but with one exception - who is certainly a cryptoracist - I'd say they're all probably hostile to Trump.

One side of family from Panateria near Reggio, the other half from northeast Sicily, near Messina.
They were LATE immigrants escaping Mussolini who was purging Sicilians, even those as insignificant as my grandfather, who was a hreakman on the railroad
They got exemptions due to flight status.
Don't know how any first, second, third, or fourth gen IA can be a bigot!
Makes ZERO sense!

I'm half Sicilian. My parents and grandparents Americanized their name during WWII. I'm ashamed to say my father became one of those anti-black bigots when Blacks started moving into his old neighborhood in Chicago. Fortunately, I didn't get the gene. Many of my relatives are very anti immigrant and racist, however.

A well known member here calls us "goombas" and gets 100 recs while he explains its not a racial slur cause he meant it as a mafia reference not Italian...

Mafia references are encouraged.

Antonin Scalia is called "Fat Tony" as if he were Anthony Salerno, noted mobster and it's all cool.

It's DU, none of that history matters here

Italy is the most, most, most, most beautiful country outside the US quite possibly.

But there are so many tourists . . . . .

So anything that keeps tourists away from the beautiful buildings, art, landscapes, people, food, everything that is Italy should be encouraged.

I hope YOU get to go there one day since you appreciate things Italian.

Obviously, I love Italy. I also love the language and MOST of the people. Scalia is one of the exceptions. He was not worthy of my affection.

Is bigoted and Skinner let that shit stay...

We are from Canavesse in the north at the head of the Po.

in Italy in the 1960s. I will never forget it.

I have utterly no Italian ancestry. Unfortunately. Considering how I love the country.

Maybe in a future life . . . if there is one.

And watch it vanish. This is just ugly. Not you. The op who wrote this.

When Scarramucci was appointed it was horrible. I even asked an admin why they we're not squelching it, but they did not answer it.

We made fun of ourselves over that stuff!
It has not been a genuine slur in 50 years

Exists for just this reason.

Okay!

The Sons if Italy is a political organization that fights Italian stereotypes, like the one you just put out there. The Columbo family played a Texas Two Card poker at a hall in Long Island back in 2008, which was illegal since the establishment had a liquor license. What an awful nasty slur you just made alluding that the national order is tied to organized crime. It was an isolated incident and hardly noteworthy.

We have already established in several posts that you are woefully uninformed. This is over the top.

I went there many years ago on a High School trip, plus living in Rhode Island where the population was of Italian and Irish descent, you couldn't help being accepting of both cultures.

Italians are a very proud people, like so of many other nationalities. It is really unfortunate and rather sick thinking that the bigotry of others towards other cultures and races are tarnishing and dividing the country. Being diverse is what makes us so special.

I don't know that I would catch those slurs if you had not said something.

media standing silent as immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims to be precise, at subject to the very same vilification.
How to fight the media narrative is one thing, to fight the concurrent silence is another.

and have no clue as to what you are referring to as "recs"

You can recommend a post

n/t

That's a most creative allegation. I'd use three instances of anecdotal evidence out of 76 million posts as well if I had absolutely no objective evidence to support my premise... just like you.

But that's merely a deconstruction of logic... it doesn't matter here (six of one, half a dozen of the other-- and each as blinded by bias as the other).




But I get it... it's trendy and fashionable to pretend oppression where none exists. Bless your little heart.

One called him a goombas.

Plenty others called him mafioso.

Why? He's italian. He had no known ties to organized crime. He's scum, but he's not mafia.

Here on DU calling a person a thug is racist but calling Scarramucci a goombas is cool.

Bless your own heart.

because Italians!!!

BTW, I'm full blooded and the OP has a point. Many of us forgot where we came from.

Oh, and fuck Giuliani, Scalia, and Scarramucci! Stronzi. Ognuno di loro.

And then disparage Columbus Day.

The fact that you put that hypocrisy out there says it all...

and he was a mass murderer that never stepped foot in the Continental United States.

It was houses. Napoli, Savoy, Sienna, etc.

In one of the scenes between George Bailey and Mr. Potter, George is talking about the houses his Building & Loan financed for people who couldn't get a loan from Mr. Potter's bank, because they didn't meet the bank's written and unwritten requirements (one of the unwritten rules was not being Italian). George says the families in those houses are good, decent, hard-working people. Mr. Potter dismisses them with a sneer as "garlic eaters."

Newcomers meet a mixture of welcome and unwelcome. Some of them grow a tender heart, others grow a tough skin.

People were very upset with those "dirty EYE-talians who didn't even speak our language". In fact from I've been told that Italian immigration after the war was how the derogatory term "WOP" came about, there were so many immigrants from Europe and Italy that they were admitted "WithOut Papers".

Disclaimer - that's not MY feeling, but just commenting on the atmosphere in NYC in the late 1940s and 1950s.

After Italians were assimilated by the late 1950s it was time for the bigots to turn their attention to Puerto Ricans.

There's always a target in some peoples' minds.

Very well said.

Hope you like Irish!
Actually I just hate republicans.....nationality and religion are not important.....

I can stand Republicans, but not bigots.

and anyone who voted for Trump and still supports him is a bigot to me.

I can just see some German in 1935 saying to his liberal neighbor, "Just because I voted for and support Hitler, that doesn't make me anti-Semitic. I just don't like Otto Wels and the Social Democrats."

I like to remind them of what the Irish went through when they immigrated like signs in store windows for jobs that said "No Irish need apply"
Grow up and accept people.

and I have a couple cousins who have had that thrown in their faces by me and several other family members - including their mothers.

Thanks for posting this.

nt

all children of immigrants, themselves as racist as David Duke.

Many "Ethnos" changed their politics as time passed, and they became more affluent.
It is an American Tradition to pull up the ladder to keep others down.

I get people wanting to explore their ancestry, but in the end, what's it going to tell you? 100% of your DNA is from Planet Earth. Now if you got an answer different from THAT it would be worth checking out.

We're getting it done to figure out what allele combination is responsible for my mother's, and likely my sister's, eye color comes from, and to see if my carrier status for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency came from my mom or dad. The three of us having profiles run will essentially let us compare to Mom's and isolate which alleles were from her, or our different biological fathers.

But I have seen people freak because the report links all your mapped alleles to SNPedia, which has research links. I've had the real genetic counseling regarding alpha-1, and if there's a really major genetic result a person should get it validated with a real doctor. But we're looking forward to seeing why Mom, born to two blue-eyed parents, had gold eyes.... and perhaps why my sister's eyes turned green at 5. I also have some additional amber pigment in my eyes compared to my dark-eyed father, but my sister's dad also was blue-eyed.

"I found out I'm one-quarter Snargbloopian. I had no idea! But it totally explains my cousin Carl. Now I look at the sky every night to feel more in touch with my roots."

I would love to see that commercial. That would make a great SNL skit.

who find out they're not as "pure" as they thought they were and get thrown out of their own white supremacist community.

When the anti-education crowd gets their history from confederate statues instead of books, they can miss how much mixing went on hundreds of years ago. There's not a damn thing they can do about it. It's wonderful.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/16/white-nationalists-genetic-ancestry-test/

....with a guy of Sicilian descent. He threw the N word around a lot and made a LOT of racist jokes about many ethnicities. I think I escaped his scorn because I have considerable Scandinavian heritage and look it, and Swedish is so boring and uncommon in my area that he couldn’t think of a suitably derogatory nickname for me. Anyway, he did not see the irony of throwing N bombs, when he could have passed for a light skinned black person. Finally I got tired of his diatribes and said “Hey Joe, do you know the name of the first African who learned to swim?” When he said no, I said “Guido”. He thought about it for a minute, and then was not very happy at all.

You have to have fun with these people.

...that other people now have it just as bad or even worse. It needs to be taught in every school in every generation -- but we teach our children legends instead.

It's a convenient, politically self-serving false etymology. Like those proposed for "squaw" and "picnic" and numerous other such offending words, the hypothesis-as-fact turns out to be just another counterfactual hypothesis that critical thinking didn't squash before it became widespread. Now we call them "fake news"; a decade ago they were "truthy"; and a decade before that, in less polarized times, they were just "wrong" or "deceitful".

Here are the problems:

"Wop" was attested for years before immigration papers were issued. The etymology is anachronistic.

Only Italians--primarily southern Italians--got that particular epithet applied to them. When "wop" was already widespread, Poles, Irish, Jews, Germans, Serbs, Greeks were also just like Italians and every other immigrant, that is, "without papers." The usage is too narrow, without any consideration as to why it should be so narrow.

In other words, "wop = without papers" predicts that Irish and Jews and Poles and Scots and English would also have the same slur used against them. Nobody ever called Drzewiecki or Tomaszewski, kids I knew in high school, "wop." And to call McCardell one would have just elicited stares of disbelief.

I learned a lot from your post.

Thanks!

Last edited Fri Dec 29, 2017, 12:06 AM - Edit history (11)

other things. My Dad is all Italian (supposedly) and my stepmother is English and German (supposedly). My Dad tends to be pretty racist and a big Fox news fan. I think it's going to be pretty funny to find out what his real background is. His parents came from southern Italy and he is very dark. I think it will be interesting to find out if he has northern African or Arabic ancestry in his line. Which will of course mean that I and my siblings will as well.

My late father in law's maternal great grandmother was from Eritrea.

He was a blonde haired blue eyed Calabrese but like my husband's two younger siblings - had the high forehead and eye shape/set. Very good looking man.

Italian colonies. My dad is dark but half his father's siblings were light haired and light eyed. I am blonde and blue eyed, but I look like my mother, but even so, if my father has African ancestry then so do I. My Grandmother was Calabrese.

What few immigrated to America back in the day "left" from Cosenza but we're from small towns up on the mountain!

from a town called Barile in the region of Basilicata, province of Potenza.

According to my DNA test, I have Arab and North African blood - about 3%. Some Italians are quite dark.

FWIW, all my Italian relatives were active in the Democratic Party. My grandfather hated Reagan - he used to say that everytime the Democrats were in power, there was prosperity.

My husband is an "off the plane" from Calabria - Acri.

He finds the prejudice amongst some in the Italian descendants community appalling.

He's not an American - and doesn't own descendants anyways.

That you can smirk at. . BTW - never been anything but welcomed in his family from day one. They lived here when he was a little guy in the Bronx in the 1970's then went home in 81.

No one was shocked when I walked in. He almost flunked kindergarten because he was teaching the Brazilian and Haitian little girls Italian. They expected a mixed race woman from the time he was five and the cleft in his chin was balanced by his dimples.

they wish they could have banned Europeans

but I am from northern Italy. It's quite sad, but I've been discriminated against by Italian-Americans when I lived in NYC for not being a southern Italian. I'm from northern Italy with pale complexion and blonde hair. Though these traits are common throughout Italy (you can find blondes and red heads throughout Italy), for some reason the stereotype of the dark skinned Italian still permeates the Italian American community.

I was also discriminated against because I speak standard Italian and not a dialect. I found many in the Italian-American community to be very insular and racist. They advertised they spoke Italian, when actually they spoke a dialect. Believe it or not, I as an Italian need to have subtitles during The Godfather I and II because Sicilian dialect is a completely different story from standard Italian. There was a nice guy who was interested in dating me, but he couldn't because (1) I am not Sicilian or southern Italian; (2) I am not Catholic; and (3) I am too liberal. Go figure.

I grew up in the Berkeley of Italy, a place where multiculturalism is standard and where gay rights have been human rights for a long time, so to me or my parents interacting with people from all races, religions and backgrounds was never something to even think about.

I think in general groups of immigrants who feel they did it the 'right way' (meaning, following whatever rules and regulations were in place at the time of their emigration) feel antipathy towards those they perceive not to follow the rules.

I freely admit I am very conflicted on the topic. Immigration law is how I earn my living. I write and speak about the subject. I'm fairly well known among my small group of peers in a very narrow area of specialization. I also went through the immigration system and did things by the book. It still took me 14 years to obtain a permanent resident card (a/k/a green card). In the meantime, I was not able to work except under my student visa (which at the time I was in college was more restrictive than it is now).

What city is the Berkeley of Italy?

the oldest university in Europe, early 11th c., has been a prominent intellectual and cultural center for centuries known for its school of painting, tradition of music, opera and theaters, literature and some notable political leaders. I could also be entirely off about the city referenced.

I'm not Italian, but have traveled to Florence and Rome and grew up and went to school in a medium size city with many kids and people whose ancestry was from Britain and Germany, also Italy, Hungary, Lebanon and Syria, others with Jewish, Polish, Irish and Swiss background and a good number of black folks. Nobody even talked about heritage and ethnic issues that I recall, and we got along fine. That was in the late 50s-70s, pre-Reagan when my hometown benefitted from the growth of liberalism in the nation, the prosperity especially for whites, the strong economic base and middle class, very solid educational systems and some fine cultural centers. All in common with a number of places in the the US at the time. But it was a very different era in America then to say the least. Our parents, family and grandparents were also major influences and they mostly held progressive, tolerant views which contributed to the outlook and life direction of my generation and beyond.

This thread raises important and sensitive issues which I find interesting. Usually I keep my head down, especially given my handle, and try to tolerate the long held perceptions, also the ugly truths, the well known decline and growing ignorance of the region that is my home area. No easy feat since I have brain damage from lead and chemical exposure according to many on DU, am inherently backward, prone to violence, bigoted, ignorant and suspicious. Half kidding here!

EllisIsland.org would likely know. Ellis Island dates from about 1893, and Castle Garden
near the Bowery preceded Ellis Island as an immigration point. Both have websites, and indexes
of immigrants. Beware, your ancestors names could have been transcribed in ANY possible way.
Try every vowel in each syllable, hard consonant, 's' 'z' 'ss'. And European spellings of first names, and Americanized
versions. Many ditched their names on arrival. 'Luigi' became Louis, or Fred if he felt like it.
PLUS those original records have been transcribed several times since - to the original often Irish
or German customs official who didn't speak English well, to the paper in a scrawl with a fountain pen,
to the government records, to the microfilm, and then to digital often by older volunteers committed to
their ancestors and the project, but who perhaps didn't interpret the handwriting correctly, or had a microfilm
that was scratched by years of use.

So for immigration records, try everything.

But many ethnics entered the US from other ports as well.

The Nazis took power by dividing people against each other. As if people are going to escape by sacrificing their neighbors. If they get dark skinned people in round one, they will get tan people in round two, and then Anglo-Saxon liberals, and so on.

Without a hint of irony, Italian Trumpers have said in news interviews that since their grandparents faced discrimination it means they have paid their dues and it's time for others to suffer. When I compared the stories of the worst of a group to scare people, like stories of terrorists now were like stories of mafia murderers back in the day, an Italian friend said that people were right to be afraid of Italians and it was kind of cool to be associated with it because it would discourage the Anglo-Saxons from bullying Italian kids because you never know who may have an uncle who breaks kneecaps...

My grandparents were fluent in English before they immigrated here from India. And I bet the "Speak English" crowd will be really surprised if we got a lot more immigrants from India, Nigeria, Kenya, Hong Kong, and other former British colonies. And a German heritaged friend recently told me that many more Americans have German ancestry than English so maybe we should all speak German. Also Trump's family lied and told people they were Swedish after WWII because supposedly even Germans got some discrimination back then.

So far as I know, all of my ancestors (within the past millennium, at least) are from west of the Danube and north of the Alps. But I still found this offensive -

One of my mentors in grad school was an elderly professor from Oklahoma. I will defend to the death his academic legacy, and his impact on my early career cannot be understated. I still miss him. But he did have a bigoted streak.

He continually referred to a colleague as a ‘damn Yankee eye-talian.’ I don’t know if there was more scorn directed at this person’s northeastern origin (which I share) or his Italian heritage.

That this particular eye-talian was (a) a jerk and (b) a lousy scientist dulled my unease at the bigotry expressed - but only a little.

I returned to the northeast for my grandmother’s funeral in October. We went past a section of the cemetery with a lot of Italian names on the headstones. A distant relative - a retired state trooper i’d never met - said, ‘yeah - bunch of gangsters. I probably put some of them there.’ I was too stunned to respond, which I regret.

Dilly Dilly..

Child of Italian immigrants and when she started school she didn't speak English. Teachers and other children were terrible to her. She still got emotional talking about it 60 years later.

As a result she was fiercely anti any kind of bigot and she made sure her kids and grandchildren learned that we are all the same and deserve respect and opportunity. I miss her, she made us all better people. And, she was a good democrat, naturally.

I don't know why that is, but it happens, no matter the ethnicity, race, religion, or gender. Some people forget the past struggles of their own, and hold the same bias towards others. Instead of compassion there is disdain. It's truly sad.

I'm half Italian on my fathers side, my grandfather came to America in 1922 from Calabria and my grandmothers family from Abruzzi though she was born in Ohio. Both have shared plenty of instances where they were discriminated and shunned by WASPS and primarily the KKK that was in the area where I live.

Grandpa and his best friend, an African-American of the same age would tell of many times when the KKK would meet and burn crosses on a large hill overlooking the city I live in and how the Italians and African-Americans would gather outside of my grandparents home arming themselves with tomato sticks in case the Klan would come down from the hill to make trouble.

He also would say, due to La Cosa Nostra (mafia), that Sicilians were not Italians and tossed those that attempted to recruit him out of his home. He simply wanted nothing to do with that group due to the stigma that the mafia gave all Italians. I do though know that Sicilians are indeed Italian but could understand his reasoning.

Thankfully, I learned at an early age through them that there is good and bad in all groups and have always lived by what the Reverend Martin Luther King said in his "I have a dream" speech; That he dreamt of a time when all people would be "...judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin."

Not only is the Italian accent of Mr. Martini exaggerated (reminiscent of Chico Marx), the family owns a goat as a pet, and Old Man Potter refers to new residents of Bailey Park as "garlic eaters". No doubt the bigotry existed in big cities as well as small towns.

Italy was one of the few places in Europe that attempted non-aristocratic governance in the middle ages. The Framers of the Constitution paid particular attention to the examples of Florence and Venice in trying to understand why running a government by the choices of the voters was so difficult and so fraught with pitfalls--experiment that we as a people are still struggling with. Figuring out democracy is still a work in progress. There's a direct chain between what humanity learned in Italy and what we've learned in North America. You ancestors were pioneers in more ways than one.

writers of the Italian Enlightenment were hugely influential on the Founding Fathers. Phillip Mazzei was a neighbor of Thomas Jefferson in Monticello. His writings were the origin of the phrase "all men are created equal". Cesare Baccaria was the source of the American principals of criminal justice, including the provisions of the Eighth Amendment and its prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. (in fact, Baccaria's work was considered the origin of the movement to ban capital punishment) Gaetano Filangieri's treatise The Science of Legislation was a huge influence on Benjamin Franklin-with whom he corresponded over its contents. Luigi Castiglioni toured the newly formed United States and met with all of the major US political thinkers just before the Constitutional Convention of 1787 much like de Tocqueville would do several decades later. (de Tocqueville's original intent on visiting the US was to see the influence of Baccaria on criminal justice) The impacts of French Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu are widely recognized, but the Italian influence has been largely forgotten-even though the French writers themselves were directly influenced by their Italian counterparts. In the days of Trump, it's important to remember the noble origins of our principals of governance and what were the foundations for the creation of a just, free and humane society-lest we allow them to slip away.

until too many of us became the very people our ancestors detested.

of American society. Having become assimilated, it's easy to forget the road that brought you here. Just as Americans at-large have forgotten the true roots of our nation and the journey that has led us to where we find ourselves now. We need to remember the values that made this country strong very soon or it will be too late.

My father was a Holocaust survivor, my Jewish mother of Eastern European descent, was born in Mexico City where her parents arrived fleeing pervasive and life threatening anti-Semitism. They could not come to the United States because of immigration quotas.
My father came here in 1949, after living in a DP camp and finding his only surviving family member, his brother.
My mom came as a very young child, with her parents, through the Port of Laredo and eventually moved to the motherland, Brooklyn, where she met my dad.
Both came here legally, though I am quite sure that had my father escaped Nazi Germany and managed to find his way here illegally, he would have been sent back to be slaughtered.
So I have empathy for people who do what they have to to feed their children. And I give no shelter or quarter to racists of any stripe.
I'm glad my dad didn't live to see Trump. It would have killed him. At least he died at peace.

came from Lazio around 1911 and moved to northern Indiana. My grandparents were married in 1920 in Italy and she came over 8 yrs later. I can't imagine not living with my spouse for 8 years. Anyway, my father was full blooded Italian and my Mother's ancestors came from England and lived in the south. She was born to share croppers who worked along side blacks in the cotton fields. She doesn't have a racist bone in her body and moved up to northern Indiana after the war and met my father. But my father died in 1975 at age 42 of heart failure so a lot of my Italian ancestry knowledge died with him. I've had to do research about it from his relatives that I've befriended since. My grand father died 4 yrs later and my grandmother died 11 yrs later. Grandpa was a carpenter and spoke great English and said, we're in America, you speak English! My grandmother didn't speak much English at all. She worked at a factory with other Italians so didn't learn as much English. She would speak half a sentence in English and half Italian. My father and his twin sister didn't speak English when they started school and my Aunt is, to this day, ashamed of being Italian. She's 86.

My grandparents didn't bring their Italian customs with them to America. They totally integrated and even though they went to the catholic church, they didn't do all of things that Italians did. We did go to their house on Sundays when they lived in town. They kept an amazing garden. They would not teach us Italian, they would not teach us their 'customs'. They didn't drink or smoke. In fact, they had many friends and relatives that moved from Italy to my home town because of jobs that they really didn't care to hang out with. They were drinkers and from what I learned since, obnoxious drunks so my grandparents didn't see them often.

What I've learned in my 50+ yrs is that each Italian story is different. Politics was not something our families discussed at all. I had no idea my Mother was a liberal until I started paying attention to politics 10 yrs ago. I have no idea if my father was liberal or a conservative. I don't know if he voted. I just know that both of my brothers are racists, one is a liberal, one is a fox spews watcher and Limbaugh listener. We're not close.

My spouse is from London and he is now a citizen. I've been through the immigration process and know how stressful and expensive it is for someone married to an American. Nobody understands what is involved. Nobody, unless they've been through it.

Racism is the fabric of America and the world.

then eventually we have to bring back Obama's war on Christmas and whatever nonsense paranoid Trumpsters are worried about.

I'm sure some of them are terrified of becoming minorities, because they know how minorities are treated in this country.

Maybe they would be less afraid of becoming minorities if they treated minorities better.

Italian, Greek, Polish and German. In the late 1800s and early 1900s that is who came here to work in the
steel mills and coal mines, many of them spoke their native language among themselves. Today I hear descendants
of those same people being the most outspoken about the Mexican immigrants that are here now. How short peoples
memories are.

to have several of his sons turn into fox news, racist, anti-immigrant republicans.

He and my mother via their respective families came over thru Ellis Island from Sicily when they were young children - took up tenement residence on the lower east side where they met as teenagers.

My grandfather worked as hard as a man could to feed his family during the depression.
My father would shine shoes as a young boy on the streets of the Bowery just to make a dime for a day's work - so he could give it to my grandmother to buy bread.

My father also worked hard all his life - became the first of his entire family to go to college, get his masters, become a university professor - a Union president (engineers) - a city planner - a community leader.

And thru it all - he felt the sting of discrimination and made sure we understood what a great country we had the privilege to be born in - not because it was perfect - but because it was always striving to be better. That there was hope for the down-trodden, hope for the new immigrants, pride in heritage.

Only to have to live just long enough to see half his sons turn into the very thing he fought against his whole life. I'm only glad that he never lived to see the days of Trump. He actually knew Trump from his city planning days in the 80's and always felt he was the biggest blowhard conman on the planet. What would he say now if he were still with us?

Now 3 of his boys worship the fat, slovenly fuck and call him the greatest president ever.
And they just can't wait to pull up the ladder behind them. Makes them all giddy inside.

I just will never understand it - how can they wantonly disparage our multi-generational family struggle as if it were meaningless - as if there is no history, no legacy, nothing before us. And no empathy for the next generation.

Rest in Peace, Pops. Better that you don't have to be around it. It would break your heart.

...I just LOVE Italian people. One thing I learned growing up in a largely Italian neighborhood is that you never even THINK of saying no when your friend's mom offers you something to eat. The Italian family homes of my childhood friends were known for lots of love, lots of laughter and too much food. I swear that if you weighed 983 pounds you'd be told that you were too skinny when the dinner was ready!

Some of my fondest memories were in Italian homes.

PEACE!

A Letter To Italian Americans

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-letter-to-italian-americans_us_588a295fe4b01ea6978989a5