A friend of mine who knows more about Italian surnames than I do pointed out to me that the issue mentioned below carries even more irony than I'd realized because the surname "Isgro" is a Southern Italian-Sicilian name, exactly the group of non-Jewish Europeans most targeted by nativist racists and scientific racists of the late 19th and early 20th century with racist invective. Being Italian, she pointed out to me that the largest official lynching in the United States was in New Orleans when 19 Italians were lynched by a mob that included future mayors of New Orleans and a future Governor of Louisiana. I haven't had time to fact check that, yet, but she's enough of a scholar that I trust her word. I did find this at History.com (not my first go to for fact checking, but I'm rushed)
The act of vigilante justice was decried by the Italian government, which demanded the lynch mob be punished. But many Americans, swept up on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, applauded the killings. An editorial in the New York Times called the victims “desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins…are to us a pest without mitigations.”
The lynch mob—composed of some of New Orleans’ most prominent residents, including future mayors and governors—went unpunished. Though the grand jury said the crowd included some of “the first, best, and even the most law-abiding, of the citizens of this city,” it claimed that none of the killers could be identified.
I wonder if Nick Isgro knows that history, I wonder if he'd care about it if he did.
It didn't show up as much in the Atlantic article by Adam Serwer on race in America (at least I didn't notice it), but in his NPR interview he made the point that Madison Grant was singling out a particular class of immigrant as a danger to American society: Italians. Italians and people from Eastern Europe, but mostly Italians, who were the large immigrant class at the time (think of the opening of "Godfather 2," if you need a movie reference. Amazing how many people do.).
ReplyDeleteToday we think of them as "white," which is just how flexible a term "white" has been in American history. Nowadays "white" is becoming "white like me," meaning people who think like Trump and Congressman King, and white supremacists in general. They really do think some people are "white," and some are not, and it doesn't have anything to do with general categories of European/Caucasian v. Asian v. African v. "brown". It's much narrower than that. Which is another part of the problem.