For Christmas Day, the IFC Channel on cable is offering “Christmas with the Family,” broadcasting a string of Mafia movies: Godfather I & II, GoodFellas, and A Bronx Tale. The family alluded to is, of course, any [Italian] crime family.
In this trying age of political correctness, fictional Italic gangster movies are a balm for the soul. Five decades of saturating our multi-cultural nation with stock Italian stereotypes – those unique goombahs from the old neighborhood – never gets old. The rest of America’s crooked ethnic groups can breathe a sigh of relief that there, but for the grace of Hollywood, go they.
Not only Hollywood shies away from tarring minorities with their true-to-life sins, but the Mainstream media, Madison Avenue, and Social media also give them the kid-glove treatment – understandably. Provoking boycotts, getting “canceled,” or being labeled racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, or misogynist, don’t make good headlines for corporations. Steven Spielberg learned to his regret that the story of Mossad hitmen in Munich (2005) was a subject best avoided. Jewish groups called for a boycott of the film. You rarely see it broadcast.
So it goes with any group deemed untouchable by media, of which Italian Americans are excluded. Recently, the Anglos of Appalachia found themselves also outside this circle of godliness. J.D. Vance’s autobiographical film Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix, a disturbing tale of a dysfunctional White family almost destroyed by drug addiction, had some critics up in arms. White folks cannot be victims, nor succeed by bootstraps, in a woke America.
I have written before that we risk becoming a Lebanon – that bankrupt country of 18 ethnic and religious groups that has resorted to rule by quota. For the past few years, as political correctness has inculcated guilt into Euro-Americans, minorities here have seized new opportunities to remold America. An example is Black Lives Matter (BLM), founded by three Marxist-inspired African American women in 2013, which has grown with each police shooting. It is now a multi-million dollar organization funded mainly by White liberal foundations. It joins other “progressive” factions – from illegal aliens to Sanders socialists, from gays to feminists – in demanding a piece of the Biden Administration.
There is no defense against this factionalizing of our republic, so long as minorities are portrayed as immaculate. I am always comparing them to the way Italian Americans have been portrayed. We are loaded with sins, from being anarchist bombers in the 1920s, Fascists in the 1930s, and crime families from the 1950s to the present.
Sexually “straight” Americans, too, are being stoked with every imaginable sin necessary to fuel the rise of minorities. Homosexuals are no longer tarred for the AIDS epidemic. Nor are pedophile priests labeled homosexuals. It would stain LGBTQ purity.
In the climb to power, minorities have few roadblocks. Their cultures are lauded or excused, depending on the agreed narrative. Their history is sanitized, both here and back to their continents of origin. Their every racial shortcoming is blamed on White exploitation. It is no use for Euro-Americans to question an immaculate minority, for that is racist. So how do we bring these minorities back to earth and reality?
It wasn’t until I began watching FOX News that I discovered the existence of Black conservatives. You rarely see them, if at all, on mainstream news or liberal cable. Larry Elder, Candace Owens, Leo Terrell, Thomas Sowell, and others have lambasted BLM and the collapse of the Black nuclear family. In many ways, they are the Black version of our Institute. Like them, we blame our own kind for our distorted image.
It would aid national unity if all minorities were more self-reflective. Instead, they foist whitewashed versions of their checkered cultures throughout the media. They neglect to admit their centuries-old degradation of women, their obscene caste systems, the institutionalized intolerance of their religions. How about revealing and condemning the ethnic and religious hatreds in their ancestral lands – whether in the Orient, the Middle East, or Africa? Admit you come from flawed roots!
Our Western Civilization is not without sin. But, according to Kathleen Brush, author of the new book, Racism and Anti-Racism in the World, African Americans are the most prosperous and educated of all Blacks on earth. Hispanics have greater per capita wealth than any nation in Latin America. East Asian and Indian Americans have between 25% – 60% higher incomes than Whites.
Do we owe them still more? -JLM
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