like its kind of frustrating to me how people will talk about italians history of being racialized in america as if it was like. this quirky oddity we stumbled into. how strange! how unnatural! that WASP americans wouldn't consider europeans white! its used as proof that whiteness is a construct, and it is proof of that, but when the takeaway is more "old timey racism was so absurd people were racist towards europeans, instead of only the obviously nonwhite people!" you end up decontextualizing everything in a way i. do not like.
like racist criminology was fathered by a northern italian who specifically applied his theories to southern italians. if you read the shit people wrote during the unification of italy, it was straight up racist imperialism, with the explicit goal of "civilizing" the "primitive" southerners:
As the northern bourgeoisie crafted a national identity from its history of medieval city-states, the Renaissance, and the âgloryâ of the Roman Empire, it sought to discipline the insurrectionary and âbarbarousâ South. Many of the government officials who traveled throughout the South following national unification commented on southern Italiansâ supposed racial inferiority. The senator Eugenio Faina, for example, noted that Sicily was unlike other regions in that it was âinhabited by rough people with primitive instincts.â As a result, the Italian state confronted southern resistance movements with martial law, violence, and by stigmatizing peasants âas criminal members of a racially inferior people who preferred the superstitions of religion to civiltĂ italiana.â As one government official wrote in 1861, âWhat barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civil virtue compared to these peasants.â Civilization, northern officials believed, would have to be imposed on southern peasants at gunpointâ âotherwise the tumour represented by the Southernersâ behavior would grow and infect the rest of the nation.â
Government officials found support for these views from the new school of positivist anthropologists, including Cesare Lombroso (1841â1936), Guglielmo Ferrero (1871â1942), Alfredo Niceforo (1876â1960), Giuseppe Sergi (1841â1936), and Enrico Ferri (1856â1929). Together these men founded the field of criminology, providing âscientific proofâ to support the ruling eliteâs beliefs in biological evolution and racial determinism. In particular, they advanced an argument that supported what many northern political leaders suspected: the darker âMediterraneanâ southerners were not only racially distinct from the lighter âAryanâ northerners; they possessed âinferior African bloodâ and demonstrated âa moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.â Southern Italyâs history of Greek, Roman, Norman, African, and Arab invasions, and its location as a crossroads between Africa, Europe, and the East, they argued, had given shape to âa region that is a priori condemned to perpetual inferiority.â [...]
By the late nineteenth century, Lombroso and his colleagues in Italy produced hundreds of studies to support this ideology, arguing that the pathology of the âsavage womanâ was located in her anatomy. Their publications often included elaborate drawings that compared the âsexual anomaliesâ in the âprimitive genitaliaâ of Italian prostitutes to African women. In popular culture, these connections were often extended to all southern Italian peasant women. Travel writers routinely argued, for example, that southern Italian women âseem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.â The Italian ruling classes also drew these kinds of connections between Africans and southern Italians to justify two simultaneous military invasionsâone in southern Italy and the other in Africa. In 1890, the same year that the North launched a brutal campaign to suppress antinationalist sentiment among peasants, Italy prepared to conquer Eritrea and join Europe in the colonization of Africa. One contemporary observer noted, âThey [southern Italian rebels] kill and rape like beasts thirsty for blood and booty and not men created in the image of God.â Similarly, a government official conducting an inquiry into the southern resistance movement noted that, âin short, this is a country which ought to be destroyed or at least depopulated and its inhabitants sent to Africa to get themselves civilized!â
The elite considered the anarchist movement, in Italy and abroad, to be the most dangerous form of political rebellion. This fear developed not only in response to the willingness of some anarchists to utilize assassination and bombing as political tools but also because adherents sought to overthrow the state and capitalism and thus attracted âa sizeable and militant following among the Italian working classes until the late 1920s.â The anarchist movement took hold in Naples and Sicily in the 1860s as a result of government repression and spread quickly because of its compatibility with peasant resistance traditions. Once the island was placed under martial law after the uprisings in the 1890s, those anarchists who did not languish in prison went underground and into exile. Most went to the Americas to nurture a transnational movement in Buenos Aires, SĂŁo Paulo, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey, among other locales.
To the criminologists, like most of the Italian elite, anarchism was merely a form of brigandage. Thus, they considered the popularity of anarchism as indicative of the inherent criminality and primitive nature of the southern peasantry. In this way, they helped âto formulate the definition of the political subject by elaborating ever more closely the criteria for political exclusion.â Enrico Ferri, for example, declared that it was possible âto delineate good idealist revolutionaries and sick rebelsââone struggled for the nation, the other against it. Lombroso linked the Sicilian peasant rebellions of the 1890s with race, explaining that the epicenter of the movement was in the towns surrounding Palermo, because it was here that âthe rapacious Berber and Semite tribes had their earliest and longest-lasting settlements and where anatomical types, customs, politics, and morality retain a clear Arab imprint.â He pointed out that âthe Arabs are a race of greedy conquerors who are hospitable but cruel, intelligent but superstitious, and always restlessly in movement. Their blood must play a role in fomenting spontaneous and implacable insurrections and perpetuating brigandage.â Consistent with his overall ideas about female criminals, Lombroso viewed southern Italian women rebels as the most abhorrent, noting âeveryone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelty.â In this way, the Italian criminologists used political radicals as a âfoil for defining the boundaries of nationhood and the shared characteristics of ânormalâ citizens.â Moreover, they offered âa scientific way to understand the failures of unification and a blueprint for disciplining groups that resisted integration into the new national culture.â
(from Living the Revolution: Italian Womens Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo)
and Italy shipped its homegrown racism right over to the US and Canada. & i think something similar can be said for how people act the same way with racism against the Irish in the US, as if its not directly connected to the colonization of Ireland and the oppression of the Irish people in their homelands.
and this is just scratching the surface of this topic, but it feels like the result of internalizing the specifically USAmerican white supremacist worldview, that the natural state for European people is imperial colonial whiteness before any ethnic identity, to the extent that the idea of Europeans being conquered / colonized / racialized feels unnatural - separate from whether or not you think blatantly racist ideas are good, you still think its natural for Europeans to be the conquerors even if its bad. you still think there is a fundamental whiteness that really exists, its just that its been poorly defined by avowed racists.
that sense that people you are taught to see as white were once blatantly racialized & that being unnatural may be used to introduce people to the construction of whiteness, but if that feeling isn't ever used to radicalize people further on resisting white supremacy, then what good is it actually doing? how can we discuss the racialization of italians in the US without discussing the imperial violence and racist ideology constructed in italy against southern italians, and in europe more broadly? how can we discuss the assimilation into whiteness of italian-americans without the broader context of escape from poverty and oppression, the anti-social(ist) violence of the First Red Scare and how it targeted anti-racist leftist Italian organizers including many women? how the bloody pursuit of whiteness and imperial dominance is an intergenerational cycle of violence, one southern italians on both sides of the atlantic have participated in?
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