My comment to an assignment Sept 17

This is my ideal for a comment. I wish this is all I had to write for every one of you .

Good deep reading of the material. You draw the logical conclusions.
Excellent job 100

FROM AN ASSIGNMENT:  Maital Chabi                     

Recalling back to when I first saw the New Orleans cartoons, I remember not being shocked. Based on the political cartoons I had seen of Blacks, I expected to see the same depictions of Italian Americans. I only assumed the media would depict Italian Americans as animals and criminals due to the world fear of immigrants at that time. As I have learned from a psychology class before, it is human nature to paint anything, or anyone, different as monstrous. However, when I read the texts, my perspective on the cartoons had changed. I was completely appalled when I found out the cartoons were not drawn from the imagination of fear, but instead they were drawn from actual scenes that occurred in America.

When I first saw the 1888 New Orleans cartoon, I wrote that I was surprised at how a magazine could publish something that was openly encouraging people to “fix” the “problem” of Italian immigrants by murdering them. However, the readings have have given me a lot of context on the situation in New Orleans at the time. I now see how the media could’ve gotten away with such a bold and horrible cartoon, mostly because many Americans were already feeling that way about Italians. What is depicted in that cartoon was in fact being carried out through the lynching of many Italians, and many Americans sided with the killers instead of the victims. Both the local and federal governments refused to put any effort into investigating the lynching and bringing the culprits to light. The press would undermine the reasons behind the lynching or try to defend it by denying that it was a lynching at all because it did not fit under the usual conditions of one. Following the mostly not guilty verdict for the case involving Hennessey’s assassination, the people of the city was enraged and began organizing a “revenge plan” that caused many Italians to go into hiding.

Although it has no direct connection, the cartoon from the New Orleans magazine and the facts I learned from the readings are very similar. There was a very popular opinion among American citizens that Italian immigrants were scum, thieves and murderers. In their eyes, they were ruining America. I believe that the media was the number one enemy of immigration, whether it be racist cartoons or ignoring the facts in newspaper articles that Italians were wrongfully executed. The connection between the cartoon and the readings was that there was only one way to handle Italian immigrants. It was to brutally arrest them, and then to make them suffer until they died without giving them the same legal rights as American citizens.