How Italians Became 'White'
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.htmlHow Italians Became ‘White’
By Brent Staples
OCT. 12, 2019
Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.
As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.
Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.
Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white nigger” and “nigger wop.”
Italian-Americans were often used as cheap labor on the docks of New Orleans at the turn of the last century.
Library of Congress
Lynchers in 1891 storming the New Orleans city jail, where they killed 11 Italian-Americans accused in the fatal shooting of Chief Hennessy.
Italian Tribune
= new reply since forum marked as read
They wanted to visit the small town where his wife's [wife is blue-eyed blond] father was from, about a third of the way along the Southern coast of Sicily. They discovered that the languages in the different towns along the coast were still different from one another - a product of long ago invasions and minimal immigration into those towns. We were all surprised at the differentiation being so marked in short distances. I knew that my maternal grandmother who was from Messina, and my grandfather from the Abruzzi/upland Pescara, spoke basically different 'italian' languages.
Son and his wife thoroughly enjoyed that vacation. My dds recently took a 2 week vacation on a Rick Steve's tour of small Italian towns.
My family, over the years has taken several trips to Rome, Venice, Florence, Pescara].
[Empedocles the greek phisosopher, was from Sicily, Agrigento, on the SSW coast. 
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