Crimes of Identity

I’m imagining how much worse life would have been for my grandparents and mother’s people in the first half of 20th century, if Donald Trump had been around insisting that the Mafia be called Organized Italian Crime and calling for the resignation of a president who wouldn’t use the word “Italian” as the adjective.

It was bad enough. Italians were subjected to the kinds of bigotry and hate reserved for today’s Muslims.

From CNN contributor Ed Falco:

[T]he largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn’t African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.

After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.

I was born in the late 50’s and grew up in the ’60’s and ’70’s. Nobody was lynching Italians anymore, but by my youth, the American lingua franca had accumulated an overabundance of hateful words for my people. Wops, greasers, dagos, goombas, greaseballs, and on the Jewish side, kikes, yids, hebes, lampshades  … and one precious mashup, a slur tailored to my particular mixed heritage: Jewop. Like black people who I think are rather progressive in this regard, I think it’s time to reclaim, to own the words that were used to slander your people, to drag them out and throw a big 10k spotlight on them. You don’t have to use them in a sentence, but roll them quietly on your tongue. Imagine what they sound like when spat out with derision, hate and anger. Imagine your six-year old kid being called one of these names.

There was a time when many Italians knew suspected Mafiosos but unsurprisingly most Italians were law-abiding citizens whose impact on American society is overwhelmingly positive. Italian Americans found themselves having to say that a lot when I was growing up, apologizing for an entire heritage that was implicated for lack of a better term, in organized terror. Another half-Italian friend posted a message about the ISDA, (the Italian Sons and Daughters of America), an organization ostensibly formed to combat ethnic prejudice against Italians.  All I knew was that the ISDA had cool picnics at Kennywood Park and I got to hang out with my cousins and eat the soul food of my people.

By the time I became an adult and the Godfather movies came out, there was a perverse “coolness” attached to La Cosa Nostra. Italians weren’t apologizing anymore. Italians and non-Italians went to Halloween parties dressed as gangsters, talking with mock Italian accents. “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” became a meme two decades before the internet.

I doubt jihadi costumes will ever be the rage at parties.  Nobody will ever don a cardboard cutout of the Twin Towers with jets flying into them. But there was a time before my time when the newspapers screamed of illicit alcohol, murders, explosions, arrests and shootouts on the mean streets of urban America. Haters would touch a finger to the side of their noses. Everybody knew what type of people were responsible.  There was a time when we were them.

Hillary Clinton is wise to cautiously approach the labels demanded by Republican demagogues. Even when they’re accurate. Especially when they’re accurate. Imagine the hurt that comes with labels.  For many of us, you don’t have to go back that far in your own ethnic history to feel the pain.  To paraphrase Secretary Clinton, solutions are not about making labels — it’s what you do about the problems that create the labels that matter. And that will take a leader who is far more nuanced and experienced than Donald Trump. He is categorical proof that the people who obsess over the labels have no idea what to do but call people names. We call those people bigots and they offer us nothing more than focused hate.