Anti-Italian prejudice is found in the oddest places.
A new local business opened up in my Chicago neighborhood a few summers ago: Local Goods, a simple little storefront place that specializes in knick-knacks highlighting the Windy City, both inexpensive (key chains, coffee mugs, postcards) and artsy-fartsy (mosaics, paintings, sculptures). As a proud Chicagoan, I had always intended to visit the place, which I finally did two weeks ago.
Also: As a proud Chicagoan of Italian descent, someone who co-produced a 2007 PBS special (local Channel 11) on the history of Italian Americans in the Second City (And They Came to Chicago), I was equally eager to see which members of our community were highlighted, if at all.
I came across two sets of “Chicago” playing cards, which did indeed mention Chicagoans of Italian heritage. There were only two: a gangster (Al Capone, of course) and a baseball player (the Chicago Cubs’ Ron Santo). There was also baseball broadcaster Harry Caray; however, as discovered while researching the 2007 film, he was Albanian, adopted by Italic parents. And all three of these “Chicagoans” weren’t even natives: Capone was from Brooklyn, Santo from Seattle, and Caray from St. Louis. (Note: Many non-Italians in the card decks weren’t, either, but that’s no strike against them; I am alluding to the numerous Italian Americans who were).
There were two decks of cards, red and blue. Here is the red deck: KINGS–Mayor Richard Daley; basketball’s Michael Jordan; Bears coach Mike Ditka; and former president Barack Obama. QUEENS–Social reformer Jane Addams; singer Chaka Khan; the late female mayor Jane Byrne; and TV superstar Oprah Winfrey. JACKS–Al Capone; former mayor Harold Washington; bluesman Muddy Waters; and broadcaster Harry Caray. The JOKER in the deck? Comedian Bill Murray (can’t argue with that choice).
Here is the blue deck: KINGS–City founder Jean Baptiste Point DuSable; Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton; architect and city planner Daniel Burnham; and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. QUEENS–Journalist Ida B. Wells; writer Sandra Cisneros; poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and former First Lady Michelle Obama. JACKS–Chicago Defender founder Robert Abbott; Cubs outfielder Ron Santo; aviator Bessie Coleman; and Sox player legend Frank Thomas. And the JOKER in the blue deck? The late comedian Bernie Mac.
Side-note: Out of the 26 illustrious Chicagoans listed, fifteen of them are African American. That’s more than half. This shows you two things: a) the media is highly sensitized to actively promoting Black culture and, b) conversely, Italian Americans have done an over-all lousy job of promoting our own.
But, a happy ending to this story: I went to the website address listed on the card decks and directly contacted its producer, an illustrator named Joe Mills. After politely pointing out that a murderer and pimp (my words) like Capone shouldn’t be honored anywhere, even in a deck of cards, I supplied him with a list of names of other Chicago Italians far more note-worthy than Big Al, to wit: Mother Francis Cabrini; scientist Enrico Fermi; Radio Flyer Red Wagon creator Antonio Pasin; and – since Mr. Mills seems to love baseball players – Filomena Gianfrancisco Zale, a 1940s star in the traveling Women’s League. He said he will replace Capone in his next printing. All we can do right now is hold him at his word, and to follow-up as necessary. But, this just goes to show you: Something as innocuous as a deck of playing cards is used to reinforce crude stereotypes of the Italian community.
Mr. Mills didn’t highlight Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, the Polish Jew who became Capone’s mentor. He didn’t reference African American crime boss Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples, recently described by Cook County judge Harry Leinenweber as “one of the most notorious criminals in Illinois history.” He didn’t highlight Willie Moy, the “mayor of Chinatown,” convicted in 1991 of income tax invasion via his money-laundering of Chinese gang monies. Instead, Mills chose a thug with an Italian surname whom everyone knows largely through endless media repetition, a man who wasn’t even the top bootlegger of his day (that honor goes to George Remus, the German American from Cincinnati, Ohio).
When it comes to history, Italian Americans are still relegated to playing solitaire. -BDC
I recently had a similar experience. I saw anti-Italian prejudice in an unlikely place.
I went to a theatre representation of a world famous Italian book for children. The book was written in 1883 and has no references whatsoever to organized crime.
The representation was held in a very liberal city at a a non-for-profit institution. The show was for families with children.
During the show, there was a reference to an infamous joke from the fictional racist movie The Godfather. The author went out of his way to inject a Godfather reference in a show for kids! Why?
I contacted the institution about the joke. They politely apologized and said that they were going to speak with the author about it. They also appreciated the learning opportunities as their original reaction to the joke had been different (they laughed, I guess). They did not assure me that the joke was going to be removed or said what I would have expected (“Sorry for injecting negative ethnic stereotypes in a show for children. The joke needs to go. It is racism 101!”).
This is clearly prejudice toward Italians. Nobody would ever inject ethnic crime references to Dora The Explorer, Moana, etc.
Excellent point. I don’t watch Dora the Explorer, but I’m sure she (or the writers) have never mentioned drug cartels, even indirectly. And Moana certainly didn’t reference the very real problems of drug abuse, domestic violence, and homelessness in South Pacific enclaves.
Only the Italians/Italian Americans have to put up with this casual prejudice—and it’s the “casual” part which makes it so much more insidious than blatant racist insults.
Thank you for following up with that institution. If only more of us would do so!
Couldn’t agree more. Thank you both for this. We need to learn our own positive history. I do believe that a large part of this is due not only to the indifference and prejudice on the part of non-Italians but ignorance of our own heroes.
The psychological genocide continues.
Nice article Bill.
Vince Romano
http://www.TaylorStreetArchives.com
In 1992, I attended the hit Broadway play Conversations With My Father by Herb Gardner. At the end of Act One, an Italian-American character is told by an Irish-American “The worst mistake we ever made was letting you Dagos out of the church basement into the main hall.” A Jewish character played by Judd Hirsch then chased the Italian-American off the stage with a baseball bat to the cheers and laughter of the Wednesday Matinee audience.
The Brooklyn Three crime trilogy series by Thomas Boyle, a professor of English at Brooklyn College in the 1990’s, contained numerous slurs about Italian-Americans, including two of their neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens and Bensonhurst, both safe, well maintained areas that Boyle described as high crime Italian slums inhabited by pathetic losers. Indeed, Carroll Gardens became gentrified at the time due to its low crime rate and tree lined streets lined with brownstones. Yet in the last book of the series, the main character, an Italian-American detective, tells his girlfriend, who is afraid to move into Carroll Gardens with him that “The bad Dagos are all gone. Only the good Dagos are left.” He then adds “I would like to bomb the Dagos on 18th Avenue out of existence!” That is the main avenue that runs through Bensonhurst!
Imagine if Herb Gardener or Thomas Boyle smeared any other ethnic, religious or racial group in such a manner! They would be run out of town on a rail!
Don’t forget Spike Lee’s cinematic con job in Summer of Sam. What was supposed to be an expose on Sam Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, was bizarrely turned into a revolting caricature of an entire Bronx neighborhood. It was so blatant that even Steve Dunleavy of the New York Daily News wrote: “(Lee) caricatures Italians in a most disgusting fashion.”
Clyde Haberman of the New York Times, writing about the same film, put it even more bluntly (July 30, 1999): “What do you think would happen if a white director went to Harlem and shot a film portraying Blacks exclusively as gangsters, dopers, and sex-obsessed stupes? ” “The implied answer: A white director who did such a thing would be publicly shamed, and rightly so. But when it comes to caricaturing Italians? Nothing. And nothing has changed in 22 years.”