How Italians became ‘white’

An airplane flies past a statue of Christopher Columbus in central Madrid August 3, 2011. REUTERS/Paul Hanna

Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only "free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States" were eligible to become naturalised citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.

As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history "Whiteness of a Different Color," the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicised view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into "races." Some were designated "whiter" — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialised pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.

Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an "uncivilized" and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that "bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect." They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labour unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as "swarthy," "kinky haired" members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like "dago," "guinea" — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like "white nigger" and "nigger wop."

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South. Italians who had come to the country as "free white persons" were often marked as black because they accepted "black" jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African Americans. This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women and children across the South.

The federal holiday honouring Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated Oct 14 — was central to the process through which Italian Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record.

Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus' voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Historians have recently showed that America's dishonourable response to this barbaric event was partly conditioned by racist stereotypes about Italians promulgated in Northern newspapers like The New York Times. A striking analysis by Charles Seguin, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, and Sabrina Nardin, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, shows that the protests lodged by the Italian government inspired something that had failed to coalesce around the brave African American newspaper editor and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells — a broad anti-lynching effort.

'ASSASSINS BY NATURE'

Italian immigrants were welcomed into Louisiana after the Civil War, when the planter class was in desperate need of cheap labour to replace newly emancipated black people, who were leaving backbreaking jobs in the fields for more gainful employment.

These Italians seemed at first to be the answer to both the labour shortage and the increasingly pressing quest for settlers who would support white domination in the emerging Jim Crow state. Louisiana's romance with Italian labour began to sour when the new immigrants balked at low wages and dismal working conditions.

The newcomers also chose to live together in Italian neighbourhoods, where they spoke their native tongue, preserved Italian customs and developed successful businesses that catered to African Americans, with whom they fraternised and intermarried. In time, this proximity to blackness would lead white Southerners to view Sicilians, in particular, as not fully white and to see them as eligible for persecution — including lynching — that had customarily been imposed on African Americans.

Nevertheless, as historian Jessica Barbata Jackson showed recently in the journal Louisiana History, Italian newcomers were still well thought of in New Orleans in the 1870s when negative stereotypes were being established in the Northern press.

SICILIANS AS 'RATTLESNAKES'

The carnage in New Orleans was set in motion in the fall of 1890, when the city's popular police chief, David Hennessy, was assassinated on his way home one evening. Hennessy had no shortage of enemies. Historian John V. Baiamonte Jr. writes that he had once been tried for murder in connection with the killing of a professional rival. He is also said to have been involved in a feud between two Italian businessmen. On the strength of a clearly suspect witness who claimed to hear Hennessy say that "dagoes" had shot him, the city charged 19 Italians with complicity in the chief's murder.

That the evidence was distressingly weak was evident from the verdicts that were swiftly handed down: Of the first nine to be tried, six were acquitted; three others were granted mistrials. The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city's elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternising with African Americans — would never seek justice for the dead. After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as "possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history."

Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

Harrison's Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As historian Danielle Battisti shows in "Whom We Shall Welcome," they rewrote history by casting Columbus as "the first immigrant" — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologising, carried out over many decades, granted Italian Americans "a formative role in the nation-building narrative." It also tied Italian Americans closely to the paternalistic assertion, still heard today, that Columbus "discovered" a continent that was already inhabited by Native Americans.

But in the late 19th century, the full-blown Columbus myth was yet to come. The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the US Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. "Lawlessness and lynching are evil things," he wrote, "but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse."

Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed.

The Italian Americans who laboured in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built up around Columbus to political advantage. This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicised mythmaking.

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