“We are all brothers under the skin…” has been attributed to Russian Jewish libertarian Ayn Rand. The rest of that quote is not so altruistic: “…and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.”
For the past few years, the ‘elite’ utopians in American society are on a quest to flay the rest of us in their quest for universal brotherhood. They call it equity or social justice, but the goal is to redistribute Euro-American middle class wealth and to replace merit with ‘diversity’.
California is seriously considering reparations for Blacks based partly on real estate suffering, i.e., housing discrimination and racist infrastructure. One example is how Black neighborhoods were exploited when highways were built in the 1950s, bringing noise and pollution to otherwise stable neighborhoods. Here on Long Island, New York State’s master builder of those days Robert Moses is being accused of racism for building low-clearance bridges on our parkways to eliminate bus traffic from Brooklyn to Long Island beaches. In short, the bridges were designed to limit poor Blacks and Latinos to city beaches like Coney Island and Rockaway. But those beaches weren’t (and still aren’t) so bad. Unlike Coney and Rockaway, Long Island beaches have no rides and amusements to fill a kid’s day.
My family made Brooklyn their first home back in the early 1900s. Between 1937 and 1964, Moses condemned blocks of Italian American row houses to build the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Growing up in the 1950s I spent part of my life listening to the BQE’s endless din of traffic – day and night – right in front of our apartment, and no doubt I breathe the leaded gasoline fumes that rose from that highway. Little has changed racially in the old neighborhood since then, and Euro-Americans still live with the BQE, including my cousins and at least one reader of this weekly blog. Approximately 130,000 vehicles use the BQE daily – 13,000 of them trucks. Shouldn’t we be on that reparations list!
Relatives still own a home on the right side of the BQE, just up the block from here.
As for the low bridges, in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, Brooklyn was heavily Euro-American. If Moses wanted to keep the city riffraff from Jones Beach, those beachgoers were my family and a million Euro-Americans, not Blacks and Latinos.
It must be nice to have a convenient ‘history’ to back up the utopian narrative. Block-busting is another one of those fuzzy remembrances that paints Italian Americans as villains in Black history. I was one of the Italian families who left the row houses of Brooklyn for the green lawns of Queens in an area known as Springfield Gardens. Within three decades, with the construction of nearby subsidized hi-rise housing and the deterioration of public schools and the once thriving Jamaica business district, Euro-Americans sold off their Queens homes. Call it “white flight” or “block busting” it was caused by a cultural, and certainly an economic, degradation of communities. Are there reparations for packing up half a lifetime and starting over?
Blacks blame Whites for leaving them to their own devices. They blame Euro- and Asian-Americans for operating liquor stores in Black neighborhoods but few groceries, pharmacies, and department stores. Wonder why? Just look at parts of Manhattan, Chicago, and San Francisco today. They excuse their own paucity of entrepreneurs and shopkeepers by blaming discriminatory banks and even antebellum slavery. How do these explain the much-ballyhooed “Black Wall St.” in 1921 Tulsa?
The California proposal for reparations is being estimated at $223,000 per recipient. The ‘who, how, and how much’ of reparations is a brain teaser that will never be solved to anyone’s satisfaction. One suggestion is to move the offending roads and industrial sites. Another is subsidizing Black mortgages so they can buy more real estate. But maybe the problem goes deeper and within. Family wealth and quality of life also depend on cultural values and strong families, both of which are questionable in the Black community.
As I learned these many years, even for Whites, there are few places left to live to avoid planes, trains, and automobiles. -JLM
just one piece of information to add to the article, a classic book on redevelopment and Italian Americans was the Urban Villagers . It was a description of the redevelopment of Boston’s North end and the damage it did to a very vibrant Italian American scene..I think the book was written in the late ’60s-’70s…..when there was less regard for the impact of redevelopment on an urban community….and in those days many Italian American communities still had vibrant urban cores which were very underappreciated and disposable(which happened in San Jose too)…..as for reparations, its an insanely slippery slope….and will label the recipients “victims or life.” from my perspective it will do more harm than good…if someone one is 1/4 a given minority they get 1/4 restitution ….just insane.. Recently read an article that some African Americans want to get gambling royalties since they were held slaves…by some Native American tribes…but not given tribal status…..i think people should get back to basics…E Pluribus Unum, If we lose sight of that vision then we are heading towards an utterly fragmented society.
Today it seems what is up is down. If reparations are going to be given, then as a grandson of Italian immigrants I want to be up front in the line. I want reparations from society for the way they treated my grandparents. For the discrimination and the prejudice. All the money they took away in one way or another. I am very sorry what happen to the American Indians and African Americans, but it was not my family that did horrible things to them.
The govt will never compensate us for what America has done to the Italian immigrants and they just proved we are still in the tiny little box that doesn’t fit their narrative. We need to pull together and make this fair bc they’re trying to hand out billions to blacks for slavery that was decades before many were even born.
Exactly! Where is the Italian American voice!? Italians were displaced, had their businesses taken away by the US government and [some community leaders] put in relocation camps in other states. Many are still alive to tell about it and their children and grandchildren surely should collect reparations, yet blacks who never were slaves, displaced or had their properties stolen by the State of California get reparations for nothing they, their parents or grandparents experienced! How can that be fair? On top of that , Italian Americans will be paying up in taxes to fund this bogus “equity” payout, based only on race, so black “victims” of injustices in which NEVER happened to them can be paid reparations for something neither they nor their ancestors in the state of California ever experienced! THERE’S the systemic racism they are always crying about, except it’s happening to Italian Americans.
I have relatives who lived in California when they were displaced, uprooted and [some community leaders] put in relocation camps in Montana during WW2. Some are still alive and their descendants are still alive. Do they get any reparations? No!
If any man ever warranted the Albert Anastasia Treatment, it was that bigoted s.o.b. Robert Moses, who also destroyed the vibrant Jewish community along Grand Concourse in the Bronx with the Cross Bronx Expressway and the vibrant Norwegian community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
In other words, Moses and other builders of infrastructure broke many ethnic eggs to make their omelets, not just Blacks.
There are many iconic pictures showing Irish-Americans and Southerners participating in protests against integration of African-Americans. For example, see the recently circulated photo of NBA owner Jerry Jones, attending a racial desegregation protest in 1957 in Arkansas. Or see the many pictures taken during the Boston desegregation busing crisis.
Is there any evidence (like the pictures above) of Italians participating together in similar protests?
My point is that Italians being villains in Black history is probably due to overblown anecdotes and endless media stereotyping.
The only photo I recall or video specifically showing Italian Americans objecting to a Black protest march was back in the 1989 after the murder of Josef Hawkins in Bensonhurst Brooklyn. Al Sharpton led the protest and young IAs held up watermelons in ridicule. Black filmmaker Spike Lee also joined the protest but the young IAs treated him as a celebrity.
One racial event that never got the media or FBI scrutiny it deserved was the shooting and later death of activist Joe Colombo by a Black shooter at an Italian civil rights rally in Columbus Circle, Manhattan in 1971. Never considered racist. Written off as a mob hit – the shooter was himself killed by a “bystander”, supposedly a mobster. Who really knows? Who really cares when the victim is Italian?
The execution-style murder of Paul and Lidia Marino in 2020 by a Black racist also died on the media vine.