No Butter on Our
Bread: Anti-Intellectual
Stereotyping of Italian Americans The title of this
article arises from my experience as the director of grants and fellowships
in my department, an Italian American university professor finding myself
confronting the confusion and ambivalence of students attempting to apply for
Italian American scholarships. I want to address the problem of rediscovering
ethnicity after generations of assimilationism, and to suggest new ways of
developing intellectual initiatives for Italian American students. Although I
shall direct attention to how some Italian Americans abet the
anti-intellectual stereotyping fostered by others, this paper predominantly
is designed not to present scholarship on particular Italian Americans in the
public eye, but as a position paper and call to action on the representation
and recovery of Italian American culture. Models for Activism: Students and Scholarships I began to think
about this issue when graduate students told me of their difficulty answering
questions on applications for Italian American scholarships. To ask, “How do
you define yourself as an Italian American?” is reasonable and thought-provoking,
and allows for generational awakening. But to ask, “How does your family
maintain Italian language and culture?” is to exclude many potential
applicants who are awakening from generations of assimilation. As one student
wryly put it, “What am I going to say—that in our home we don’t use butter on
our bread?” It is a significant testimony of our historical moment, that only
after she went to study in Italy for a semester abroad program and returned
with various customs did her family practice them. Another student spoke of
parents conspicuously disavowing garlic—a culinary association earlier
generations spurned as epitomizing foreignness. Paradoxically, food
is one of the cultural connections favorably identified by students, yet
even the simple culinary customs we are currently reviving branded our
parents’ generations as outsiders. In fact, many Italian Americans are only
just rediscovering a culture, language, and customs lost during the forced
assimilationism of their parents—an assimilation essential to professional
success throughout most of this century. People with Italian surnames had to
shed their cultural uniqueness—including very often, their names—yet with
that rigid assimilation came the loss of cultural pride. We need to devise new
models of activism that confront the unwelcome reality that students have
internalized stereotypes; that by and large they do not want to be identified
as Italian American; that many women are relieved to shed their names in
marriage; that Italian Americans do not come from a homogenous family background;
and that Italian Americans who secure professional footholds often do not
want to be reminded of affiliations they believe they have transcended. Indeed, for many
Italian Americans, the shared Italian American experience is not one of
customs, idioms, music, even the common ground of food—it is the sudden shock
of recognition, often in college, that although we may feel the same as
everyone else, we are not being regarded as part of the normative culture. As
children we thought ourselves accepted: instead, we discover ourselves
exceptions, outsiders neither sharing minority activism, nor benefiting from
white hegemony. The battle against
ethnic stereotyping is not to be won easily. However, scholarships and grants
can be one of the best incentives for transmitting culture and heritage, as
long as they do not reinforce a cultural essentialism that relegates people
with Italian surnames to particular fields. They should encourage students to
do outstanding work in any field, not just Italian studies, but at the same
time they can provide the motivation for students to retrieve a culture we
cannot expect students to have imbibed automatically at home. Grants and
scholarships can provide the opportunity to diversify by providing funding to
explore Italian American history, to learn the Italian language, to visit
Italy, to take courses in Italian art, music, or science. The current
emphasis of Italian American scholarship applications, however, is to reward
students for having families who maintain Italian customs, rather than
rewarding the diligence of students. Applicants should of course demonstrate
a pride in their heritage, but they should not be punished or disadvantaged
because language and cultural customs were not maintained. No one expects
people named Smith to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day; expecting Italian American
students to know customs from families who arrived a century ago—or
conceivably as long as three centuries ago as glass blowers in Jamestown, silk
workers in Georgia, or dissident Protestants on Long Island—is to reinforce
the notion that having a non-Anglo name is a sign of a raw immigrant
experience, to imply there is a qualitative difference between stepping off
the boat onto Ellis Island and stepping off the boat onto Plymouth Rock. North and South Indeed, one of the
most troubling of social phenomena is the way Italian immigrants and their
offspring have been denied their claim to the artistic and intellectual
heritage of Italy. In contrast, Irish Americans (who outnumber the population
of Ireland) have been careful to establish bonds with their European
literary, historical, and musical heritage. But Italian Americans have in
many ways been shunned by Italian Europeans, rather than embraced as an
intellectual diaspora. Too often, Italian
Americans are dismissed as the children of “uneducated” immigrants,
unentitled to the high tradition of the arts dating back to the culture
ancient Rome and the Renaissance entailed upon the world. Italian culture is
not something that stopped in the sixteenth century, a global possession that
the children of southern Europe cannot be trusted to steward properly—a
condescension that, for example, leaves nineteenth-century British
expatriates more in possession of their Tuscan villas and Italian culture
than the Italian Americans who emigrated here at the same time. Italy as a nation has
largely ignored Italian Americans except as a consumer market for Italian
products—largely indifferent to discrimination against Italian Americans,
unaware of their demographic prominence, and unquestioningly accepting the
spurious vision of America as fundamentally Anglocentric. In America we are
regarded as neither authentically Italian, nor authentically American. Our
strange-sounding names brand us as incomplete or unauthentic Americans. At
the same time, northern Italian businessmen and academics in America often
voice disdain for southern Italians, in veiled hope of being accepted by
Americans as “northern Europeans”; but whatever the status they enjoy as
globetrotters, they soon discover once they settle in this country as
permanent residents that any children they may have are quickly relegated to
the status of second-generation southern European immigrants, shouldering the
scorn their parents perpetuated. We need to develop Italian awareness of, and
sensitivity to, Italian American issues as well as enhancing the European
understanding of the Italian diaspora. This means halting the invidious
distinction of northern and southern Italian, and instead emulating the
power-consolidating strategies of African Americans and more recently Asian
Americans, who have wisely enlisted a pan-Africanism and pan-Asianism to
rally diverse groups into collective action. Cultural Nomenclature
and the Politics of Language: Ancestry, Ethnicity,
Hyphenation African American
pride and self awareness have provided an extremely effective model for other
cultural groups and may well prove a model Italian Americans can adopt to
recover their past and chart a future. African Americans have made it a
priority to map their cultural history, and to insist others incorporate it;
moreover, they have taken control of the vocabulary used to describe it, a
task that has included a periodic self-redefinition (in the past
half-century, from negro to Afro-American to black to African American) to
disrupt the complacent stereotyping by the media and its onlookers. Similarly, Italian
Americans must realize that part of our problem is a cultural nomenclature,
the language of “ethnicity.” Let us begin by habituating ourselves to using
the phrase “of Italian ancestry” or “of Italian heritage” in place of the
phrase “of Italian descent.” As the field of gender studies has made clear,
points of language may be small, but they are incremental; we may well ask
ourselves, how many times do we hear someone identified using the expression,
“of British descent”? Indeed, we need to
address in a larger sense the concept of “ethnicity” in American culture and
the denotation of minority cultures in America: both how the politics of
hyphenation defines American “ethnicity” as a departure from Anglo norm; and
how the concept of “ethnicity” is selectively invoked in America as a social
construct, labeling some groups perpetual immigrants no matter how many
generations in this country, inseparable from an exotic or folkloric past
that adorns and imprisons them. Just as urban
diminutives such as “Little Italy” and “Chinatown” in the nineteenth century
(like “Little India” and “Koreatown” in the twentieth) affirmed a specious
concept of the homogenous community while actually helping to restrict
cultural outsiders to their “own” neighborhoods, the cultural label of
“ethnic” is selectively applied to European ancestry groups (and African and
Asian ancestry groups) as a marginalizing construct. Although various
cultural hyphenations or portmanteaus have been developed, they have been
applied only to groups designated as non-normative and subordinate. They
contain a kind of implicit xenophobia like the concept of “ethnic” food, a
perpetually probationary status in American culture. The Asian American
population was the first to question the subordination implicit in the actual
hyphenation, and other national ancestry groups have followed suit. I agree,
and I do not believe in hyphenating Italian American, Asian American, and
such terms. But in truth, only when the term British American becomes an
equally commonplace qualifier, will ethnic hyphenations and portmanteaus
cease to imply secondary status. Anti-Intellectual Stereotypes In addressing the
rediscovery of cultural complexities, we need to acknowledge that the problem
is not simply the way we are depicted by others. Prominent Italian American
figures who have associated themselves with Italian American culture have in
part reinforced stereotypes. In a recent article,
“Where Are the Italian-American Novelists,” Gay Talese boldly reveals the
discriminatory experiences of having an Italian name, of being regarded as “a
fractional American” (23), of being rejected by prestigious universities, who
earmark and disdain Italian surnames as a first-generation-college white
underclass. But at the same time,
highly problematic are his assertions about Italian Americans lacking “zeal
in educating themselves,” being “nonreaders” who “grew up most often in homes
without books, or with very few books,” who regard “education and book
reading as a threat,” as “exposing young family members to alienating ideas”
(25). Culminating the anecdotes, director Martin Scorsese allegedly “shocked
his parents one day by walking into their home carrying a book,” leading to
Talese’s assertion that Italians shun reading and writing in favor of movie
watching and movie making because the “writer’s life is a solitary one, and I
believe solitude is a most unnatural condition for the village-dwelling
people that the Italians essentially are” (29). Keeping to one side those
pre-cinematic villagers Petrarch, Tasso, and Dante, this strain of quaint
essentialist provinciality not only implies that somehow literary cultures of
English, German, or French life were fundamentally different, it is also a
rampantly anti-intellectual and counter-productive model to perpetuate so
heedlessly. It is true that the
publishing industry is hostile to Italian American bylines: because Italian
surnames are not considered normative American culture, it is assumed that
their writings will not be typical or representative of American life. Talese
tells the story of having an editor assign him the penname “Hyman Goldberg”
claiming Talese’s own name was “too attention-getting” and “inappropriate”
(25). Despite the turn of the century goal of assimilation—ethnic
invisibility—people of Italian ancestry are still fighting the battle to be
regarded as typical Americans. Moreover, the
discipline of American studies has inherited traditions of New England
Anglo-elitism that emphasize the primacy of British cultural history, and
foster the bias that the fundamental identity of the United States is not
merely Anglophonic, but British. The shorthand critical codeword
Anglo-American in literary circles—instead of more correctly, British and
American literatures—is a popular modern hyphenation that reinforces a
cultural vision of the United States and the Anglophonic world as still a
predominantly British ethnicity. Italian Americans are part of a culturally
diverse Anglophonic national tradition. Anglophonic is not synonymous with
Anglocentric, as national awakenings in places such as India, Australia, and
South Africa have asseverated. From careless media
caricatures, many Americans have actually come to believe that Italian
ancestry (despite being the fifth largest category in the 1990 census, after
German, Irish, English, and African ancestry) is not a representative
American experience, and that life with an Italian surname is radically
different from being named Smith. And in one important respect it is
different: a resume with the name of Smith is not laden with cultural
stereotypes. For Italian Americans, discriminatory ethnic stereotyping
precedes us through the door on our resumes. Talese should be
applauded for bringing such Italian American issues to the foreground and
breaking the barrier of the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Yet I find it troubling that part of
his message brands Italian Americans as anti-intellectual, and, moreover,
that he mentions only one woman, Camille Paglia, and she for labeling
film—rather than books—“as a truer, more traditional outlet” for Italian
Americans (29). Paglia, probably the most commonly named Italian American
woman in the arts, for all her vocal allusions to being Italian American, is
always speaking through the eye of caricature. She says, “sensuality and
decadence” appeal to the “Neapolitan side of my heritage,” “no Italian
believes in turning the other cheek,” “we have an instinct for sex and
violence,” “as an Italian, I believe in 10 eyes for an eye and 10 teeth for a
tooth” (Vamps and Tramps 61, 245,
272, 488); “as an Italian, I have little problem reconciling violence with
culture”; “a savage vehemence of speech is common among southern peoples,
due to the nearness of agriculture and the survival of pagan intensity,”
“torture and homicide are immediately accessible to the Mediterranean imagination”
(Sexual Personae 217). Despite
Paglia’s flamboyant self-identification as Italian American, she obsequiously
complies with the most reductive of ethnicizing stereotypes; indeed, she
contrasts her authenticity to that of the writer Sandra Mortola Gilbert, whom
Paglia dismisses as “only half-Italian and to have had few formative
Italian-American experiences” (Bevilacqua 87–97). What qualifies as the
authentic Italian American experience here—indeed, the need to authenticate
it at all—is as misguided as claiming the authentic American experience is
Anglocentric. In contrast, African
Americans never publicly disparage their intellectual ancestry, and instead
engage in a collective restoration of their history and traditions and a
forward-looking identity; when recounting the history of being denied access
to education and the institutions of publication, they champion an oral and
sermonic tradition; they refuse the self-caricature of conforming to
stereotypes. I do not need to
rehearse here the popular stereotyping of Italian Americans, beyond urging
collective activism to direct the mass media into fairer representations.
Media images influence not just the perception of cultural minority groups,
but hiring practices, educational opportunities, governmental representation,
and public policy decisions. But we also need to look at our own self-image,
to recognize and combat stereotypes and to promote positive images for
Italian Americans, rather than raise yet another generation of students
ashamed of their polysyllabic names because their ancestry is publicly
disparaged. Developing Initiatives
for Italian American Students At present there are
very few incentives and many deterrents for young Italian Americans to
declare their ancestry. Within the academy, we need to develop initiatives
for Italian American students, to correct media enhanced stereotypes, and to
repair the self-esteem of chronically disparaged cultural groups by
contributing to the rewriting of the history of identity politics in the United
States. No butter on our
bread is a banner of some of the challenges we face in looking to reassert
Italian American issues and culture: the assimilationist strategy of prior
generations, while moderately effective in the short term, led to the suppression
of language and customs; as a result students often do not know anything
about their cultural heritage; and, unlike other racial or cultural groups,
there are no support structures, rewards, or incentives for Italian American
students, so they are often reluctant to identify their ancestry. I want to suggest
four directives for promoting the recovery of our heritage to counteract the
stereotypes that have burdened Italian Americans. 1) Since we cannot
expect Italian American students to have knowledge of their cultural
background, after emerging from generations of assimilation, we need to
provide highly desireable incentives to study Italian and Italian American
culture: financial awards for any kind of academic excellence, with the
prize being the opportunity to learn Italian, visit Italy, or study Italian
American culture outside their professional specializations. 2) Italian names must
be made to be seen as normative in every walk of life. It took decades to
establish African American studies and the field of women’s studies is still
struggling for acceptance; it is unreasonable to expect at this point in
history hearty enrollments and dissertations in Italian American studies. We
need to begin by acclimating students, of all ancestries, to hearing Italian
names—which they are accustomed to hearing only as part of
stereotypes—worked into every curriculum, whether it be Virgil, Galileo,
Bernini, Leopardi, Verdi, Garibaldi, Fermi, or La Guardia. 3) We need to borrow
strategies and alliances from other powerful self-awareness groups such as
African Americans and Asian Americans: in addition to organizing support
systems, scholarships, grants, curricular reform, boycotts, lobbying, and
media coverage (including analogues to the “African American Achievers”
moments on television, and “Black History Month” in bookstores) to halt
stereotyping and insulting jests whenever they arise, we also must demand
that role models and outspoken defenders of our interests are prominently
placed as executives in business, as faculty in universities, and as
representatives in government to speak out on our behalf against prejudice
and job discrimination. 4) Finally, we need
to write our own ongoing history—not allowing others to stifle it or usurp
it. The public dimension of Italian American studies must bring about the
understanding of America’s Italian ancestry and presence to an Italian
American public and to the general public. And until we accomplish that, let
us keep in mind the call to action: let there be no butter
on our bread. Columbia University Works Cited Bevilacqua, Christina.
“Interviews: Camille Paglia and Sandra Gilbert.” Italian Americana 16 (Fall/Winter 1992): 69–97. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. New York: Vintage, 1990. ___. Vamps and Tramps. New York: Vintage,
1994. Talese, Gay. “Where Are
the Italian-American Novelists.” New
York Times 14 Mar. 1993: 1, 23, 25, 29. |