Help Me I Can't Stop

Roy, texting: Theres this hot guy on my metro

Dick: What's he look like

Roy: Buff, white highlights. I think he's reading Jane Eyre?

Dick: Go for it

Bruce: That's my daughter-in-law Barbara, and my other daughter-in-law, Stephanie

Tim: ??? Steph and I broke up forever ago?? How is she your daughter-in-Law?

Stephanie: I may not be dating any of you anymore but I'm the State of daughter-in-law. Daughter-in-law is not a family title, it's the friends you make along the way

Jason: I'm not high enough for this shit

Golden boy Dick Grayson: Me fucking neither

Jason: what

Dick: what

Bruce: ??? What do you mean she's not my daughter-in-law anymore?? I was counting on her marrying into the family :C

Steph: Sorry B, unfortunately your son would rather kiss superbitch than me

Dick: TIM IS KISSING WHO NOW

Bruce: >:( We'll talk about that later, right now-

Tim: I don't think that's necess-

Bruce: We'll talk about that later. Right now can't any of you date her?? Jaylad, you're sin-

Steph: HELL NO

Jason, already on his second blunt: You're so funny, old man. I'm literally co parenting my best friends kid. I'm literallyyyy be gay do crime. Haha.

Dick: YOURE WHAT WITH WHO NOW

Bruce: CAN ANY OF YOU JUST DATE HER

Cass, slowly raising her hand like in Hunger Games: I volunteer

Bruce: ...

Tim: ...

Dick: ...

Bruce: This is why you're my favorite daughter 🥹

Cass: Father, I'm your only daughter

Tim: Untrue. I did drag one time, that has to count

Steph: Does this mean I have a girlfriend

Damian: This family is a disgrace

dude.

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 “glory” of the Roman Empire, it sought to discipline the insurrectionary and “barbarous” South. Many of the government officials who traveled throughout the South following national unification commented on southern Italians’ supposed racial inferiority. The senator Eugenio Faina, for example, noted that Sicily was unlike other regions in that it was “inhabited by rough people with primitive instincts.” As a result, the Italian state confronted southern resistance movements with martial law, violence, and by stigmatizing peasants “as criminal members of a racially inferior people who preferred the superstitions of religion to civiltà italiana.” As one government official wrote in 1861, “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civil virtue compared to these peasants.” Civilization, northern officials believed, would have to be imposed on southern peasants at gunpoint— “otherwise the tumour represented by the Southerners’ behavior would grow and infect the rest of the nation.” Government officials found support for these views from the new school of positivist anthropologists, including Cesare Lombroso (1841–1936), Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and Enrico Ferri (1856–1929). Together these men founded the field of criminology, providing “scientific proof” to support the ruling elite’s beliefs in biological evolution and racial determinism. In particular, they advanced an argument that supported what many northern political leaders suspected: the darker “Mediterranean” southerners were not only racially distinct from the lighter “Aryan” northerners; they possessed “inferior African blood” and demonstrated “a moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.” Southern Italy’s 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 “a region that is a priori condemned to perpetual inferiority.” [...]

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 “savage woman” was located in her anatomy. Their publications often included elaborate drawings that compared the “sexual anomalies” in the “primitive genitalia” 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 “seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.” The Italian ruling classes also drew these kinds of connections between Africans and southern Italians to justify two simultaneous military invasions—one 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, “They [southern Italian rebels] kill and rape like beasts thirsty for blood and booty and not men created in the image of God.” Similarly, a government official conducting an inquiry into the southern resistance movement noted that, “in short, this is a country which ought to be destroyed or at least depopulated and its inhabitants sent to Africa to get themselves civilized!”

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 “a sizeable and militant following among the Italian working classes until the late 1920s.” 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, São 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 “to formulate the definition of the political subject by elaborating ever more closely the criteria for political exclusion.” Enrico Ferri, for example, declared that it was possible “to delineate good idealist revolutionaries and sick rebels”—one 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 “the 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.” He pointed out that “the 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.” Consistent with his overall ideas about female criminals, Lombroso viewed southern Italian women rebels as the most abhorrent, noting “everyone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelty.” In this way, the Italian criminologists used political radicals as a “foil for defining the boundaries of nationhood and the shared characteristics of ‘normal’ citizens.” Moreover, they offered “a scientific way to understand the failures of unification and a blueprint for disciplining groups that resisted integration into the new national culture.”

(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.

speak on it! although this is by no means the result of Calabrian immigrants uniquely. speaking a local language with its own pronounciations is obviously not unique to Calabria & italian american italian is influenced by by Calabrese, Napulitano, Siciliano, etc. the cutting off of the end of words is common throughout these languages!

Helena Bonham Carter & Imogen Stubbs in Twelfth Night (1996), directed by Trevor Nunn and based on the Shakespeare comedy.

Second photo is of the costumes worn above, which were designed by John Bright.

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made by me!