Now fast-forward to Oct 12, 2019, when the New York Times published an Opinion column by  Brent Staples, editor, in their series, Vicious bigotry, reluctant acceptance: an American story. The opinion, titled “How Italians Became ‘White’”, traces the timeline marking “The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th.” (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html)

The article begins with this:

“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.”

Regarding Italian immigration, the writer goes on to say,

“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.”

He explained how the myth-making around naming Columbus Day a national holiday “allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record as ‘free white persons'”.

Much like the horrible truth I’d learned about the English treatment of the Irish, Mr. Staples explains the truth about Columbus Day as this:

“President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.”

These were eleven of nineteen Italian men who were wrongfully accused of murdering a popular Louisiana police chief. Charges had been dropped for the eleven who were then murdered by a mob. “The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city’s elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans — would never seek justice for the dead. After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as ‘possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.'”

The roots of racism and white supremacy in this country go long and deep.

My mother-in-law was Irish-Italian-American, and my father-in-law was Sicilian-American. According to my wife, her father would always repress their maternal Irish heritage; he would say that they weren’t Irish, that their dominant Italian genes canceled the Irish ones out; this helps me to see how generations of discrimination, then “whitewashing”, systemize racism and keep it festering in the guts of our society.

But here’s what happened. Shortly after her Mother passed on, my wife came to Ireland with me. Boarding a ferry, she burst into tears when she saw a woman who looked and dressed just like her mother. It was uncanny. She saw the woman again later and apologized for staring, then explained why, and asked her if she might be related to the Quinn family. “I’m sorry, no,” she said in a thick Irish accent. So they posed for photos, and the whole family agreed – this was Mom’s doppelganger…and a thick layer of invisible racism peeled away! The following year, my wife’s sister joined us, and she loved the trip! This was another small miracle and a joy 🙂 Thank you, Ireland!

If you want to learn about Ireland first-hand, as I have, join me with my musical co-hosts, Sloan Wainwright and Sue Riley on April 14–23. We will visit Counties Cork, Kerry, and Clare.

(Beautiful photo by my friend, Tom Grogan, on the tour in 2022!)

There are a few seats left!