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Breaking the Silence for Italian-American
Women: Maligned and Stereotyped My internship at WSLA-TV in Selma came to
a climax when the Klan burned a cross on the lawn of the studio, after I’d
appeared, a white spokesperson, enlisting Freedom Riders, on an all Black
gospel show. Hardly realizing it, I’d dared to integrate Deep South
television. The town was racially tense with “Sit-ins” at lunch counters and
“Freedom Riders,” riding on the wrong ends of segregated busses. Non-violent
actions for civil rights were often the cause of raids and riots then.
Following Rosa Parks’s example, black and white students from the SNCC rode
one morning on the wrong end of a bus seething with summer heat and racial
tensions. It wasn’t the first ride for many, but it was for me. Afterwards,
with other integrated demonstrators, I’d taken a drink at a water fountain
marked with a sign: “Colored,” in Tepper’s Department store on Selma’s Main
Street. Demonstrators on our particular ride were
immediately arrested. They assumed that I wasn’t booked and jailed because I
was blond, blue-eyed and young, but my arrest came later in the evening—when
I tried to enter my boarding house on a dark deserted street. A deputy
sheriff, with his pistol drawn, whisked me away in his squad car, warning me
to shut up or he’d shoot me for resisting arrest. “No one’ll be the wiser if
I do. Ain’t none of your big shot niggers or Northern lawyers around to
protect you!” he said. He laughed with satisfaction as he cuffed my wrists
behind my back. The sheriff’s office was the only law for miles around. We
were alone in his unmarked police car on the way to the jail. He reached over
and squeezed my left breast hard. “You’re nice lookin’ for such a piece of
nervy Northern guinea trash. Your Papa must be the dumbest guinea goin’ to
let you come down here all alone. Maybe he’s really an upstart Jew with an
I-talian name. I heared they’s lots of Jews in Italy. Your folks is probably
a couple of Commies like them Jew lawyers who come down here tellin’ us what
to do.” I spoke, quietly, remembering the
non-violent tactics I’d learned: don’t anger your adversary with your
defense. “People are people. We all have feelings.” “Niggers ain’t people, our preacher said
The Holy Bible says so! I got no reason to think they is. And neither is
guinea nigger lovers. We’ve lynched a few Jews and guineas down here, too, ya
know? We got a whole big bunch of you dirty dagos all in one swoop in
Lou’siana once not too many years ago! That burnin’ cross left at your damned
rebel T.V. station was fair and final warnin’. I gave you one more chance.
Then you went ‘around drinkin’ from nigger water fountains, too. Can’t figure
how you isn’t greasy like them wops what run that pizza parlor in Birmingham?
How come you got blue eyes like that Sin-a-tra crooner who dances with
Chimpanzees, like Sammy Davis, on your Northern T.V.? You oughta stay up
there singin’ on television, where your kind belong!” Later, in the jailhouse, I pulled away
from his explicit advances and infuriated him. “You got lots of nerve commin’
down here to follow upstart niggers around my town!” My head hit the brick
wall of the cell as the deputy pushed me to the cot. “You piece of guinea
trash!” Tall and muscular, he stood over me in the dingy cell as he unzipped
his pants. I understood that I wasn’t to be a Rosa Luxemburg or a Fanny Lou
Hammer, but an unknown casualty. Now at fifty one, when I hear a recorded
speech by Martin Luther King telling of non-violent resistance, equality for
all. I ruminate, watery eyed, over those years of hope when we believed and
sang, “We Shall Overcome,” Blacks and whites, together with Jews, Italians,
British, Irish . . . Americans. The fervency of youth in the early
sixties, when I was innocent, and virginal, and hardly knew I could die, or
be seriously hurt by bigotry! It wasn’t that I was brave, just terribly
naive. I began my writing career, at twenty-one, as an intern journalist on
Deep South television which wasn’t integrated in the early sixties, anymore
than were busses or lunch counters. Actually a New Jersey State College kid,
in 1961, I’d travelled to the South for the summer, to work for WSLA-TV in
Selma, where I was thrilled to have been hired to work on television by a
Northern contact. I’d grown up in Newark, attending Avon Avenue School, an
integrated public school, not far from where the Springfield Avenue race
riots were to take place. Italian, Jewish, Black ghettos all bordered on one
another and were inextricably mixed in the school. There was plenty of racism
in Newark, but it didn’t seem unusual to me to live and work among Blacks.
I’d been called a “nigger lover” in third grade, by older kids, for befriending
a “colored girl” Silvy Jackson. We played hopscotch in the corner of the
school yard, away from the other kids. I remember having bonded with her
because we were the only kids in our class who didn’t have the thirty five
cents a week that other students brought in for milk money. She sat to my
left in the back row next to me, and our eyes met in a smile, as the other
kids were munching their graham crackers and drinking their milk. We bonded
in deprivation, pretending fiercely, together, that we hated English graham
crackers and milk. Now with menopausal hot flashes, I’m a
greying blond, who rides the New York subways at night with looks of hatred
coming at me from tired nightshift workers who think I’m the enemy—who don’t
stop to think who might be who, or realize that we all suffer from hate and
stereotyping. All are grieving, the whole earth bleeding now like a Selma
mimosa blossom, spinning lost in greed and hate. Over thirty years since that
horrible night in Selma, with a quarter of century in the peace and social
justice movement, and six published books to my name, I’m still not sure I
exist as an American with a name like “Daniela Gioseffi”—too many vowels or
syllables for most citizens to roll trippingly from their tongues. Yet, I’m
grouped together with “white Europeans” as a privileged class. There’s little
acknowledgement of the subtle form of prejudice that still plagues Americans
with my kind of ethnic name. Having lived most of my life amidst the
world of professional writers in New York, I have to relate to this issue of
ethnic prejudice in terms of my career. Writing for me, as for people of
color, is a continuing fight for cultural identity. I look at the roster of
the PEN American center and recognize about five or six Italian female names
and not many more male ones, among the thousands there. Do I ever see an
Italian name on the brochures of The Academy of American Poets with its token
Jewish, Black and Asian visages? It makes no sense to me, to lump all
European American whites in a privileged class. “The Island of Tears” [Isola delle Lagrime] was what Italian
immigrants called Ellis Island, and it proved to be a prophetic epithet for
my father, when he arrived on these shores from Puglia in 1913. He had plenty
of stories to tell his daughters of the cruel epithets that came his way; “dumb guinea, greaseball, dago, wop,
spaghetti bender.” Indeed, after working his way through college and
graduate school with honors, and as a chemist in the budding electronics
industry, after having helped Dumont invent domestic television and Sylvania
perfect soft lighting, he died with the bitter taste of those words implanted
in his psyche. He was never truly happy in America. His passionate effusion,
ornate social humility, emotional oratory—the social styles of his
ethnos—were misunderstood or taken for inferiority. He never knew a single
member of the Mafia, but had to hear joke after joke upon Hollywood smear
about his ethnos. The recent slur on Italian-Americans per-petrated by
Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, tells me that he would still be fair game
if he were alive today at eighty-seven. In my case, as a second generation
Italian-American woman, there are no critically acclaimed role models in U.S.
literature to aspire to or network with in an “ole gal” circuit. Frances
Winwar, who was forced to change her name from “Francesca Vinciguerra” in
order to publish her many biographical novels, is as much forgotten here,
despite her prolific career as a biographical novelist, as Grazia Deledda, who
was the second female writer—after the Swede, Selma Lagerlof—to win the Nobel
Prize for literature, in 1926. Accomplished Italian women writers like Maria
Mazziotti-Gillan, Diane Di Prima, Helen Barolini, Sandra Mortola-Gilbert,
Barbara Grizutti-Harrison, Pyllis Capello, Laura Stortoni, Lucia Maria
Perillo, Patricia Storace, and Dorothy Barresi are fairly invisible on the
American literary scene, despite their achievements and growing numbers. Few,
educated in America, would have the opportunity to know of role models like
Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, [1492-1547] who was the first European
woman to publish a collection of poetry and be widely read. Such writers were
invisible to me, along with my Italian-American women contemporaries, as I
attempted to forge my way into American letters. Only after forty, did I
become aware that other women of my background were writers, and so there was
a double bind in the fight for my identity as both a woman and an Italian
one. Feminists don’t need to hear how important role models are to one’s
aspirations. Vittoria Colonna, Grazia Deledda, or, Frances [Vinciquerra]
Winwar, who published many successful books throughout the 1940s and 50s in
America, would qualify as “Lost Women Writers” in the PEN American Center,
Women’s Committee Events, if that series ever included an Italian woman. When I’ve tried to broach this subject,
moreover, it’s usually been poo-pooed by generally enlightened feminists, let
alone establishment males. I’m made to feel like a “brazen fool” for even
suggesting that there might be a little inequity when it comes to “wops” who
get blamed by Hollywood for all the crime in the country—as if Dillinger,
Legs Diamond, Richard Nixon, Contragates, Exxon oil spills, Rocky Flats
irradiation, S & L Scandals or Jack-the-Ripper never existed! Harvey Shapiro, head of the PEN Events
Committee—made me feel awful, six years ago, when I suggested the first
“Writer in New York” PEN program, featuring Black, Jewish, Asian, and
Hispanic writers might include an Italian-American writer—especially, given
the fact that New York contained the highest concentration of our population.
He replied condescendingly, and I’m quoting exactly from my diary of that
period: “Then let them write some good books!” Mr. Shapiro didn’t even let me
get around to suggesting a man like Gilbert Sorrentino, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Ben Morreale, Jerry Mangione, or Joe Papaleo, for example, who
wrote a good deal about New York neighborhoods, let alone a woman of my
ethnos. I wouldn’t imagine suggesting that I had a novel, nicely reviewed by
Larry McMurtry in The Washington Post,
which contained New York scenes, among my five published books at the time. These literary infractions might seem
minor to those not struggling to make their living as writers in America,
compared to the blatant prejudice which still surrounds people of my ethnos.
Even my brother-in-law who’s a learned Jewish professor at a major ivy league
university, when I mentioned, inadvertently, what a small minority population
Italian-Americans were, as we viewed New York City from a roof top one
evening, said, “That’s hard to believe, the way THEY control everything.” A
comment he would have taken as anti-semitic if I’d said it about his ethnos.
The Italian-American population of approximately 12 million, out of about 240
million Americans, according to the U.S.
Statistical Abstract at the time, was only about twice as large as the 6
and 1/2 million Jews tallied by The
Jewish Year Book. I’ve discovered that most intelligent and educated,
even sensitive people, to say nothing of equal opportunity grant
appli-cations, don’t realize that I’m of a minority which was lynched by the
Ku Klux Klan, along with Blacks and Jews, all through the earlier part of
this century. Hardly anyone remembers the mass hysteria murders and lynching
of Italians that took place in New Orleans in 1891 and continued as far north
as Colorado well on through the 1920s. Or, the execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti by a verdict handed down by the bigoted Judge Thayer of
Massachusetts who was known to have dubbed the labor activists, “Dirty
dagos!” I knew a brilliant physician, Giuseppi Ferrara, now deceased, who was
barred from a residency in a New York hospital, in 1933, because of his
Italian name. Few remember that there were quotas on Italians attempting to
enter ivy league institutions, regardless of their qualifications and ability
to pay, just as there were on Blacks and Jews. The general prejudice toward
Italian-Americans is not made much of any more than Sacco and Vanzetti are
remembered now, though progressive intellectuals of the time, like Edna St.
Vincent Millay, marched and wrote her memorial poem, “Justice Denied in
Massachusetts,” in defense of them. Few are aware, and perhaps, Italian
Americans themselves, are ashamed to remember, that in certain Southern
states, Italians were segregated in schools and blue laws made it as unlawful
to inter-marry with a “guinea, wop, or dago, as a Jew or Negro.” Such facts
are hard to remember amidst other overwhelming horrors like the wholesale
slaughter of Native-Americans, or Black slavery or the Nazi Holocaust, and
the continued suffering of so many other groups, like Hispanics or Asians,
under the onslaught of ongoing prejudice against, and between, ethnic groups. Remember how not long ago, Geraldine
Fararro, in her attempt to run for the vice presidency with Walter Mondale’s
campaign, was unjustly connected in the American mind with the Mafia, just as
Mario Cuomo was in an ethnic slur delivered by Bill Clinton, Governor of
Arkansas, in January of last year. Also, Comissioner Catherine Abate suffered
a similar slur even more recently. Many readers might still, at this date,
find it hard to disconnect an Italian politician from this cruel ethnic
stereotype. When Ferraro was smeared with Mafiosa innuendo the stories in New York Magazine, The New York Post, The
Wall Street Journal were prominent, but when she and her family were
completely absolved—after a painstaking search by nearly every investigative
reporter in the country, especially those working for the Republican
campaign, her complete absolution from wrong doing or Mafia connection was
likely to be found on page sixty, rather than page one. I still meet
intellectuals, well read ones of both sexes, who think she lost the election
because she was a Mafiosa. In terms of Mafia stereotyping, l’ll never
forget how Norman Mailer, back in the 80s, told me I reminded him of
Geraldine Ferraro, because I was a blond Italian. I felt like saying, “Si si,
signor, we all look alike!” He also said, publicly, at a PEN general meeting
over which he presided as president, that Mondale shouldn’t have gotten mixed
up with Italians from Queens, implying that THEY are all mafiosi, and he said
it with aplomb, as if he thought himself very clever to declare Ferraro’s
unfounded Mafia connection the reason Mondale lost. Ferraro in grief has
declared: “Again and again, they [the media] bore on that same theme: Because
I am Italian, I or my family is suspected of being gangsters . . .
with no data to support the claim. . . .” An editor in The New York Times was finally quoted
in Richard Reeve’s column as saying, “The stoning of Geraldine Ferraro in the
public square goes on and on, and nobody steps forward to help or protest.” The media has been so good at creating a
Mafia innuendo that Italian-Americans are afraid to step forward and defend
themselves from the slur. Hollywood has succeeded in making many of us
suspicious of our own kind, disarming our self defensive zeal, and so the stereotyping
persists. We are not so good as Jews and Blacks at defending ourselves from
cruel stereotyping, because wherever and whenever we group together for
support, people whisper, “Mafia.” This idea is verified by an article,
“Scholars Find Bad Image Still Plagues U.S. Italians,” written by Walter
Goodman, reporting on a conference held at Columbia, in The New York Times in October, 1983. Though nearly all of the
infamous “Murder Inc.” was Jewish, Jewish organizations do not let the media
get away with lumping them all together with Louie Lepke or Legs Diamond, the
way Italians continue to be stereotyped by the image of an Al Capone. Even enlightened women’s reproductive
rights advocates of the eighties, didn’t seem to notice that Reagan/Bush were
cavorting with “Born Again Right-to-Lifers” like Falwell, as much as they
feared Italian-American politicians would be opposed to reproductive rights
because of their supposed, stereotypic, traditional Catholism. This was so,
though Ferraro and Cuomo—themselves Catholics—were more aggressively
outspoken than most political defenders of the individual’s “right to choice”
and the idea of the separation of
church and state. I’ve always felt that my assertive feminism came from not
having been raised Catholic, but Humanist Agnostic, by my atypical immigrant
Italian father who was educated by the fruits of his own hard labor. He put
himself through Union College, Phi Beta Kappa, and Columbia University,
selling newspapers, shining shoes, and carrying coal buckets, in the days
when Sacco and Vanzetti were unjustly tortured and murdered by bigotry. In
any case, I’ve ended up a Mother Earth celebrant, but people always assume
I’m Catholic because of my name. Another stereotype put upon Italians, along
with the assumption of a “Greenhorn” attitude. That ethnic stereotyping and scapegoating
toward Italian-Americans is even popular in liberal or progressive
intellectual circles and among the literati—tells me sociopolitics continue
on the same course: “Divide and conquer.” Keep all the ethnics suspicious of
each other, while the majority thugs laugh all the way to the S & L
scandalized bank. How many Americans noted that Neal and Jed Bush were
quietly absolved of wrong doing, in proceedings which were somehow timed to
occur during the Gulf massacre? And weren’t all of us feminists well
distracted from the nefarious doings exposed in the Gates, C.I.A., hearings,
by the Anita Hill/Judge Thomas “sexual circus” perpetrated on Blacks. Though
we believe that Anita Hill deserved to be taken seriously, she herself meant
for her charges to be heard in private by the senate committee. When will we
become wisely suspicious of such media blitzes, often involving “ethnic”
populations? Certainly, one doesn’t have to spell out the social engineering
that such manipulative “Divide and Conquer” tactics involve. It is hardly
necessary to reiterate that the United States has never had a president of
any ethnic origin at all, except for one Irish Catholic, John F. Kennedy, and
his ethnic and religious identity brought him grief and repercussion. As late as the summer of 1989, nearly
thirty years after my time in Selma, I picked up The New York Times Book Review and saw an article on J. D.
McClatchy’s book, Whitepaper; On
Contemporary American Poetry, and was it “white!” And Anglo and Saxon and
nearly all protestent and male. Harold Beaver, a visiting professor at the
University of Denver, began his review of McClatchy’s discussion of American
poetry by referring to “the vast patchwork” of American poetry that Mr.
McClatchy attempts to deal with in his book Whitepaper. Then, he goes on to discuss the poetic voice, defined
in Wordsworth sense as “a man speaking to men.” Once again, we “guineas,
niggers, kikes, polacks, spikes, chinks and twats” hardly existed in a
treatise analyzing why American poetry is so dull, academic and suburban. The battle for a recognition of the
multicultural quality of America goes on, keeping us all divided and
conquered as we reach for a piece of that dwindling pie in the sky. Now that
the Russians aren’t coming we’re told “the Moslems are” or the “Japanese are
ruining our economy,” to continue our compliance with war machine
economics—just when our human resources should be going to save us from the
disappearing ozone layer, or the erosion of our civil and human rights, let
alone our dwindling arts foundations. Flag burning amendments get played up
in the media while civil rights get run down in the courts. But, as an
Italian-American who can hardly speak Italian, just as Native-Americans are
forced to write their plight in English, I witness the language of my roots
dying out and think about how Italy has no colonies speaking her tongue and
puzzle over putting the whole rap on old Cristoforo Colombo like he was a
Mafioso that ran the world, especially as he sailed for Spanish kings who
were Hapsburg Teutons. Every time Columbus’s name is mentioned, at any rate,
someone says, “Leaf Erickson got here first.” Can’t Italians have a parade
once a year without everybody protesting it’s right to be? Why pin all the
rancor on Columbus for starting the demise of multiculturalism? He died a
pauper in prison anyway. And no one calls him by his Italian name,
“Cristoforo Columbo,” either. One Thyrrhenian Sea group of pre-Roman
Italians were the Etruscans who inhabited a strip of coastal land from
Tuscany down-ward. Etrurian culture was much admired by D. H. Lawrence and
many feminist scholars, too, for its egalitarian treatment of women. Etruscan
women shocked Roman men by attending public events with their husbands,
rather than remaining sequestered as Roman women were forced to do. Indeed,
the Etruscan statue of a woman and man as equals was often used as a symbol
of the feminist movement in the early seventies when Etruscan culture enjoyed
notoriety among feminist writers who appreciated its custom of matrilinear
descent, and circular, rather than rectangular, architecture, among other
qualities. From Saturday
Night Live to Hollywood, right up until today’s presidential campaigns,
to misconceptions of the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst incidents, Italian
Americans continue to be stereotyped and scapegoated, even as their cuisine,
fashion styles, music or art are tauted as “in.” We are excluded from manuals
on racial and ethnic etiquette, and along with Poles, we are still the brunt
of “dumb” jokes, even in “polite” company. If Italian-Americans are
occasionally stereo-typically “Moonstruck,” portrayed as families screaming
over spa-ghetti dinners, they are more often portrayed as syndicated
gangsters as in “Prizzi’s Honor,” Academy Award Film of the 1980s. Just a few
years ago, speaking of racist stereotyping by Hollywood, “Prizzi’s Honor”
portrayed only Italians, Poles, Jews, Hispanics and Blacks as criminals. All
the police were Irish or British. Even a progressive satirist like Woody
Allen felt perfectly fine stereotyping Italians as Sicilian Mafiosi, in
another Academy Award winning film of the 80s “Broadway Danny Rose.” This was
a fact acknowledged in a review by Katha Pollitt in The Nation. It’s the only time I can remember seeing
Italian-Americans defended from stereotyping by someone of a different
background. Not only are not all Sicilians in the Mafia, but not all
Italian-Americans are Sicilian—no more than all Africans are Zulu; all Irish,
Catholics; all Jews, Israelites; or all Asians, Chinese. Italian women don’t
all have hair on their upper lips and stir a pot of spaghetti sauce as their
main occupation, anymore than all Blacks love watermelon or all Irish are
drunkards. Neither are our women all the passive girlfriends or wives of
mobsters, and neither are we the only prejudice folks in town, as media
sensationalizing of biased-crimes in Brooklyn would lead us to believe. Media coverage of the Howard Beach racial
attack left most Americans under the misconception that the chief perpetrator
of the biased murder crime were Italian youths of an Italian neighborhood.
But, an Englishman by the name of Jon Lester, born and bred in South Africa,
was the main assailent convicted of man slaughter in the death of the Black
teen, Michael Griffith, along with Scott Kearn and Jason Ladone of the mixed
neighborhood. But, “Howard” [not “Luigi”] Beach has become, in the American
mind, an “Italian” neighborhood synony-mous with prejudice and biased crime.
“Pizza boycotts” were instituted by Black community leaders, and today few
literate people, or college students, with whom I come in contact daily, are
aware that it was a Jon Lester, not even born in America, let alone an
Italian-American, who led the attack. Few recall, also, that an Italian
woman, Marie Toscano, gave testimony which helped to convict the teenagers
who were found guilty. Nearly no one, it seems, remembers,
Elizabeth Galarza, an Italian woman, who ran down from her upstairs apartment
into a street where gunfire was heard, and tried to resuscitate Yusuf
Hawkins—in the infamous Bensonhurst incident. The murder of Yusuf Hawkins,
August 23, 1989, was no Kitty Genovesi situation. Eleven phone calls were
made to the police from concerned community residents who heard the
disturbance outside their homes. Elizabeth Galarza, instinctively responded
to Hawkins’s need for help, without regard for her own danger. Seeing
Hawkins—the Black youth lying wounded in the street—from her upstairs window,
she ran down into the street where a gun shot had been heard, to be of
assistance, leaving the safety of her apartment. She called for people to
dial 911 for an ambulance and comforted Hawkins, holding him, trying to keep
him alive and hopeful as the ambulance was on its way. But, there is not one
entry concerning Elizabeth Galarza’s act of human decency to be found in all
the articles that appeared on the Bensonhurst incident in the computerized
library periodicals index, Infotrac, which includes listings from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and 960
assorted academic journals, too. One can’t easily find a media reference to
the six Italian neighborhood women who visited the Stewart/Hawkins home to
offer their sorrow and empathy: Nancy Sotile, Eddie Bonavita, Teodolinda
Mellace, Rita Schettini, Rosa De Guida, and Rosalie Campione. “These women stepped forward willingly as
volunteers, where the men didn’t step forward quite so easily, to keep peace
in the community during the crisis situation of the marches led by Sharpton,”
explained Jack Spatola, Principal of a Bensonhurst school and a community
leader working to save the youth of his area. “Italian ghetto kids have the
third largest drop out rate in the city, next to Hispanic and Black youths,”
Spatola says. Everything reached a crisis level and the women served as
peacemakers, on the streets, in the schools, in the churches. Some of them
attended the Hawkins’s funeral in East New York among thousands of Black
mourners, Nancy Sottile, Eddi Bonavita and Teodolinda Mellace, with myself,
Frank Barbaro, Father Arthur Minichello of St. Dominic’s parish, and other
Italian-American clergy. We went to pay respects and offer our sincere outrage,
sorrow and sympathy for the terrible loss and senseless murder. Michael McQuillan, Advisor to the Brooklyn
Borough President’s Office for Racial and Ethnic Affairs offered his
observation: “In my experience, as I work in the neighborhoods, whether it be
Bensonhurst or Canarsie, wherever, women are often more willing to speak
frankly about ethnicity. They reach out with a spontaneous sense of empathy
for the suffering of other people, perhaps because the reality of the
experience of sexism in a male dominated society contributes to their empathy
for the plight of, for example, people of color in a white dominated
society.” Rosalie Campione, a college student of
Bensonhurst feels wounded by the major media portrayal of her home turf as a
place of unadulterated bigotry. Rosalie helps to run a Bensonhurst Tenant
Counselling Program for Displaced Homemakers—women who have lost a job or a
mate through widowhood or divorce, or who simply wish to improve their job
skills and self-image. The program—though run by The Federation of Italian
American Organizations of Brooklyn—accomodates women of every ethnic
background: Asians, Russians, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics to their job
rehabilitation services. I went to F.D.R. Highschool, the one
attended by the boys involved in the Bensonhurst crime, Rosalie says, “At
F.D.R., I had close friendships with Latinas, Blacks, Irish, kids of every
sort of background.” Rosalie and her friend, Frances Failla, were among three
Italian young people to represent Brooklyn at a gathering titled: “Youth
Speaks Out” held at Long Island University and aired on NBC Rosalie said:
“Most of the attenders from the five boroughs were Blacks or Hispanics, and
when they heard we were from Bensonhurst and the word “Bensonhurst” was
mentioned they booed us, without knowing anything about us, or even giving us
a chance to explain the truth of the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. My friends and
I felt terrible about the murder. Joseph Fama, who was convicted of the
shooting, was an older drop-out with problems. I think he’d even had a
serious head injury at one time. He wasn’t a part of the high school Mondello
crowd of neighborhood kids. Gina Feliciano, an Hispanic-Italian, had told
Mondello that a group of her Black and Hispanic friends were coming to her birthday
party and were going to beat up Mondello and his friends. Yusuf Hawkins came
down the street with his Black friends to buy a used car in the neighborhood,
and Mondello’s crowd thought they were the Blacks coming to beat them up.
They were waiting outside of Gina’s apartment on the day of her birthday
party. There were two black kids in the neighborhood crowd, too. One of them,
Joseph Russell Gibbons, admitted to bringing the softball bats to where his
group of white neighbors were gathering to defend their turf. Those foolish
machismo guys thought they were defending their neighborhood, or something.
Most of us girls aren’t like that. We make friends across racial boundaries.
We don’t have such a sense of territory. People are just people to us,” Rosalie
explained. Most Americans are unaware that the
machismo “Black Hand” or “Mafia” [a word now used generically for all
syndicated crime of every ethnos] began in Southern Italy as an indigenous
peoples’ vigilante to protect the women and land from rape and pillaging, as
many foreign invasions swept over Southern Italy from Naples to Sicily.
Though most Italian-Americans come from Southern areas, particularly Sicily
and Naples, as my grandmother did, my Grandfather was from Puglia, a small
village near the Gargano, an area where limestone cave paintings older than
those of Lascaux have been discovered. Few Americans realize what a mixture
of cultures the Italian peninsula encompasses with invasions by the French,
German, Spanish, and Phoenician armies. Tuetonic Lombards and Gaelic tribes
and Northern Africans are all mixed together with Albanians, and
Yugoslavians, as well. The Italian Renaissance, because of Venetian trade
with the East, integrated many elements of Eastern culture bringing them
Westward throughout Europe. The oud became the lute, and the swirling mandela
patterns of Eastern spiritual meditative art were incorporated into the
Italian Baroque and Rococco forms which spread throughout European culture,
just as the Asian rice noodles Marco Polo brought from China became Italian
forms of wheat flour pasta. All cultures are inextricably mixed when you
study them, and that is why prejudice is so insane. We all began in the heart
of Africa, anthropologists and geologists and other scientists tell us, in
any case. We are all of the same human family, more alike than different.
Words like Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid are useless classifications. I
teach, in intercultural communication, that these are bigoted terms in
themselves, implying prejudice. “Divide and conquer” was a tactic I saw
used in Selma, just as it is used in South Africa today, where it’s called
“Divide and Rule.” Throughout history, those making profits from a war
machine have laughed all the way to the bank, while poor ethnics at the bottom
of the money ladder have been set at each other’s throats to distract them
from the real criminals. Now, Italians seem to be the scapegoat for all
organized crime, as well as all biased street crime, too. Mario Puzo starved
writing his earliest novels and his best, like The Fortunate Pilgrim, about ordinary, hardworking Italian
immigrants, until he gave Hollywood The
Godfather—the sensationalized Mafia image, which it wanted to market—just
like Amos and Andy or Little Black Sambo, or Steppin Fetchit were marketable images
that fulfilled the majorty’s prejudice. We don’t need to be told how wrong it
is to stereotype any whole group of people—including white Anglo Saxon
Protestants—as more heavily prejudice than other groups. Every group contains
enlightened individuals, a Jane Addams or Lucretia Mott, and extreme
elements, too. There was an Italian-American girl of 15
years raped by two Black men, on January 15th 1992, in the Marine Park,
Midland area of Brooklyn. She was on her way to school when she was accosted
and forced at threatening gun point into a car, raped, sodomized and robbed
and then dumped by two Black men who used racial epithets. Since she was a
minor, her name was withheld by the press. It was simply mentioned as a
biased crime. She was classified as white, so no one made a big deal that
this was a Black crime perpetrated on an Italian-American child. I think of
how no Italian-Americans will march on an African-American neighborhood to
protest the biased crime of the rape of that 15 year old Italian-American
girl—and of all the crimes of prejudice now taking place between this and
that group in New York and elsewhere around the nation and the world, the
Neo-Nazi groups here in the U.S. and in Germany and Europe with their
swastikas on Synogogues and Catholic Churches, their acts of hate, and I get
very depressed. Still, I know, dealing daily with young people, and people of
all kinds, that most of us are decent and even if we have awful stereotypes
from Hollywood and television in the backs of our minds, we would never act
upon them or go so far as to hurt or murder someone based on on these ghosts
of prejudice about others. But, the major media wants us to believe that we
are all hideously prejudice, because big Pentagon contractors sit on the
boards of major media conglomerates, and there’s weapons profits to be made
in dividing and conquering. Which came first the chicken or the egg? I think
the media encourages prejudice with its sensationalized reporting. We don’t
hear about the good and decent people who are doing things to combat
prejudice. It’s important to acknowledge that Blacks,
Jews, Americans, and also indigenous peoples everywhere often have had the
worst of it in recent history, but we Italian Americans have suffered and are
suffering, too. We women need to be wise to the old “Divide and Conquer”
tactic. I keep hearing from Women’s Studies scholars who tell me that there’s
no money for women’s studies programs since Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was
on the Best Seller list. And the civil rights I got bashed for trying to help
institute, are being eroded along with the rights I thought I gained over my
female body, let alone my Italian name. I try to think of how many millions
of people live and work together and walk together and ride together
peacefully every day in big urban centers of mixed races and ethnic
complexions. We don’t marvel enough at the peace and decency that we are
capable of. The little acts of heroism performed by an Elizabeth Galarza, for
example. Such people, especially women, are forgotten. History is such a
blood bath of hatreds fueled by warlords and weapons manufacturers that we
become cynical of what our species is capable of. But, deep down, I believe
that we shall overcome, and I am glad, even still, that I stood up for what
was decent in Selma long ago. I’m sorry that the lessons of the past have to
be constantly relearned. The rise of Neo-nazism, the KKK gaining power, is
the saddest phenomenon on earth today. It’s happening just when we all need
to pull together to deinvest in the war machine, to save Mother Earth, the
only tear drop of love and laughter afloat in cold unillumined space. Daniela Gioseffi |