| An Open Letter
To All Italian Americans:
Growing up in the 40s and 50s, I can vividly remember Italian Americans
being referred to as "guinea," "wop," "greaseball," by non-Italians,
people my parents called "gli Americani." Despite smiling when they
spoke these slurs, they were nonetheless insulting. I cannot count the
times I took issue with offensive classmates to the point where we'd
fist fight on the playground. It didn't stop their name calling, but my
father sent me to the Police Athletic League in Brooklyn to learn how to
box so that I'd win more fights than I was losing.
Back then I thought the calling of ethnic slurs was a kid's sport. I
would grow up and not hear that kind of low-class verbal meanness
anymore. I was wrong. And it got irreparably worse when Hollywood
jumped on the Mafia bandwagon with The Godfather film. Some
idiotic Italian Americans, like those who fell in love with The
Sopranos years later, took pride in their ethnic association with
mafioso murderers. In a perverse twist, they were feeling this wiseguy
pride, a response perhaps to the name-calling. "Take a look at us,"
they seem to be telling the world. "We're tough Italian Americans.
Don't mess with us or we'll whack ya!" At last, according to these
village idiots, they were getting their due respect.
As I see it now, the name callers are the least concern. Where once
they called us wops or
guineas or greaseballs because we were Italians or Italian Americans,
now they hear our surnames and wonder to which mafia family we belong!
That is my strongest resentment for which I blame the media's books,
newspapers, films, and TV shows, as well as the Italian Americans who
don't unite as a strong block and fight down the rampant
anti-Italian-American bias. I blame those fools of my ethnicity who
find acceptable this one-sided violent representation of what we are all
about. They sit on their living room couches slapping their thighs,
laughing their fool heads off, because Don So-and-So used the F-word in
two sentences in as many parts of speech as one thought possible. Don
So-and-So is a dumb killing machine. He wears expensive suits, slaps
women, kneels at the altar of Evil where he swears total allegiance at
any cost. He will murder his own brother, if this be his assigned
contract. Paradoxically, he will commit the vilest of felonies in order
to earn respectability!
At what point have we arrived? Anti-Italian sentiment is everywhere.
In Colorado a Native American tribe attempts each year to end the
national celebration of Columbus Day, claiming Columbus was a mass
murderer of their people. In New York City Mayor Bloomberg told the
Italian American organizations who were opposed to some of the Sopranos
actors marching in their Columbus Day Parade that not only were these TV
heroes welcomed to march, but that Mr. Mayor would march alongside
them! On TV, commercials use the venue of Italian put-downs to sell
their products.
And what will happen soon enough, if we don't grow wise and all of us
IA's come together as ONE, is that it will only get worse. We failed to
nip this nonsense in the bud. Our IA brothers and sisters left the fold
to join the opposition and consider us ridiculous because we don't know
how to enjoy a good laugh. They are too confused to realize those good
laughs are directed at all of us. Remember your schooldays when someone
would tape a sign on the back of a student that might have read
something like "I'm a Moron," or worse, and while everyone laughed
uproariously, the sign wearer laughed the loudest? This is how I see
you IA's out there who find media misbehavior worth patronizing.
When we learn the wisdom of the African Americans, the Jews, the
Hispanics, all of whom know how to stick together and fight back, we
will see an end to "Let's Make Fools of The Wops" mentality. Maybe the
world out there will then remember what all the Italian Americans did
for our country: those immigrants who in their broken tongues tried so
hard to learn English, who proudly built the roads, the bridges, the
tunnels; those soldiers who gave their lives to keep America free and
fair to all; those sons and daughters of those immigrants who went on to
make honest names for themselves in so many diverse walks of life. When
that day comes, we'll put away our resentment, our anger, our
disappointment, and bask in the respect America will rightfully give us.
Lodi, NJ
Teacher and Writer
Used with permission of the author.
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