If you are a member of the campus thought police and offended by the word “dago,” too bad. Here are some other offensive synonyms for “Italian:” wop, greaseball, greaser, goombah, mobster, and garlic eater.
I grew up being called all of those slurs. But until recent times, I was never called a privileged white. It takes a special kind of stupidity and cultural insensitivity by academics and their fellow Mao-style cultural revolutionaries to mash together scores of distinct ethnic groups, shades of skin color, nationalities, and socioeconomic classes into one glob and then to say that everyone in the glob is white and privileged and that everyone outside of the glob is disadvantaged.
This is particularly galling in view of the fact that in the early 1970s, at the start of my business career, I was at the leading edge of the equal rights and affirmative-action movements in industry, and then later, the diversity movement—a movement that began when Roosevelt Thomas published his 1990 landmark article on diversity in the Harvard Business Review. I even went on retreats with minorities and women to have frank discussions about racial and gender issues in the workplace.
All of those efforts have now been turned on their head. Ugly stereotypes about people of color have been replaced by ugly stereotypes about whites, especially the stereotype that whites have political power, cultural hegemony, wealth, and other advantages because they are guilty of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the propagation of a white and Western take on history, art and literature—as if other races and cultures haven’t done the same throughout human history.
Unwittingly and ironically, the cultural revolutionaries are demonstrating a universal fact about human nature, a fact that university anthropologists and historians would admit if most of them weren’t doctrinaire leftists or afraid of being called racist, or worse, capitalist—namely, that the natural tendency of humans is to think in terms of their tribe and to stick it to other tribes when given the opportunity to do so.
More on this later, but first please hang on as I veer into a discussion of my white privilege, which is a similar story for other white ethnic groups.
The roots of my privilege go back to my immigrant grandparents, who had emigrated as peasants from Italy and settled in the Italian section of St. Louis. Due to being on a prominent hill in the city, the community was called Dago Hill by WASPs, blacks, and Italians alike for the first 20 years of my life. Now a tourist destination, it’s just called “The Hill.”
Irish cops who worked for the corrupt Democrat machine that controlled St. Louis liked to bop wops with their billyclubs, in an early form of racial profiling. During Prohibition, local cops and the feds would peek into the basement windows and keyholes of homes to see if the inhabitants were mashing grapes for wine, which is exactly what my fraternal grandparents did in the basement of their humble flat, using grapes grown in their small backyard. At the same time, city bigwigs would patronize speakeasies, including one where my fraternal grandpa worked as a barkeep and bouncer, a job he took after leaving the coal mines of Southern Illinois. He had hands the size of coal shovels and forearms the size and strength of pistons. My maternal grandfather worked as a waiter and walked a mile to his job because he and nonna never owned a car and didn’t want to spend their meager income on bus fare.
Some privilege.
Just like today’s immigrants from Latin America, most of the inhabitants of Dago Hill worked as restaurant workers, butchers, factory laborers, sewer workers, and tile setters. The last was the occupation of my dad and my uncle.
At the age of 15, I began working at an exclusive country club, a club that papist “Eyetalians” couldn’t join. I was the only white, er, olive, member of the clubhouse staff. Everyone else was black. The employees had their own pecking order. I was at the bottom with the janitors, porters and dishwashers; next came the chef and cooks; then came the waiters, all of whom were former Pullman waiters and wore crisp white shirts and jackets and drove big Buicks and Oldsmobiles, cars that my parents could only dream of owning; and finally, at the top of the pecking order was clubhouse manager Bill Williams, a distinguished looking black man with impeccable manners, perfect diction, and finely tailored suits with cuff-linked shirts.
I would wash and wax Williams’ car as well as the waiters’ cars after work for extra money—and felt privileged to do so.
The employee locker room and restroom were in the dingy basement. On the first day on the job, my black boss told me to clean the restroom, which looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Knowing it was a test to see if I knew where I stood in the pecking order, I decided to make it gleam. As I was finishing, one of the cooks, a former prize fighter, walked in clearly inebriated and proceeded to pee on a wall and the floor. When done, he said, “Here, clean this up, whitey.” My boss, who happened to be walking by, pounced on the cook as quickly as a panther, threw him against the wall, and said, “You clean it up, you black mother******.” Not wanting the cook as an enemy, I said, “No problem, I’ll get it.”
After that, my coworkers accepted me as one of their own and would invite me to picnics in Forest Park with their families. I can still taste the wonderful barbecued ribs. This was at a time when blacks were still suffering immensely from poverty and discrimination, but it also was before the welfare state had disintegrated black families and made men unnecessary in the raising of children.
After high school, using the money I had saved from working at the country club and holding other menial jobs, I attended a small Catholic university in Texas, where about a third of the student body was second-generation Mexican Americans or Mexican nationals. They didn’t refer to themselves as Hispanic or Latino or aggrieved or disadvantaged. Other than culture, cuisine, second language, and skin shade, they were no different from the residents of Dago Hill: They simply wanted to better their lives.
Some of them were a lighter shade than I was, especially if I had spent a summer in the sun. Others were even privileged, as was the case of a friend of mine whose dad was an industrialist in Monterrey, Mexico. Imagine that: the son of an Italian tile setter getting along with the son of a Spanish industrialist without the need for diversity training.
Back then, the adjective “Hispanic” was used correctly to describe someone from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe; that is, a dreaded European. Now it’s a catchall term that includes not only white Spaniards and Portuguese, but also various other nationalities and races, including Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, native Americans, blacks, and mestizos.
A TV commercial shows how confused people are about the word. The commercial is for a company that analyzes blood samples to determine the customer’s race. It features a woman who says, “I didn’t realize that my nationality was Hispanic.” Memo to ad agency: “Hispanic” is neither a nationality nor a race.
Not that I want to know, but there is no telling what a DNA analysis would say about my race, given that the peninsula of Italy has been conquered and ruled by Visigoths, Muslims, Greeks, Etruscans, and the French, among others. And until the late nineteenth century, Italy wasn’t a unified nation at all. To this day, Italians identify themselves by region, as was the case for my Piedmontese mom and my Lombard dad—both of whom viewed Naples and Sicily as foreign lands and felt no kinship to the characters in the “Godfather” movie or to the Sicilian and Napolese cultures that prevail among the Italians of New York City and New Jersey.
They also didn’t feel any kinship to Benito Mussolini, whose adventures in colonialism, imperialism, and fascism eventually got him hanged by his heels, along with his mistress. My parents had nothing to do with these adventures, because their parents had left Italy decades before El Duce came to power.
Nor did they have anything to do with Christopher Columbus’ brutality against indigenous people in the Caribbean, or the brutality of Spaniards (aka Hispanics) against indigenous people in South and Central America, or the enslavement of Africans for the sugar and cotton industries in the Americas, or for the genocide committed by Belgians in the Congo.
Nor were they responsible for centuries of butchery committed by Arab tribes, or by sub-Saharan African tribes, or by the Incas and Mayans, or by Genghis Kahn, or by Chinese war lords, or by Native Americans, or by the imperial Japanese, or by Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot, or by Sunni and Shiite Muslims of today.
Campus cultural revolutionaries don’t seem to know about this universality of human butchery and bondage, because they have studied only Volume II of a twelve-volume set of human history. Volume II negates everything in Volume I, which was the volume that used to be taught in K-12 public schools and colleges. It was the volume of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, the shining city on the hill, John Wayne, “Father Knows Best,” “Leave it to Beaver,” Boy Scouts, and Western culture and history. In other words, Volume I was just as biased as Volume II is in the other direction. Instead of glorifying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as Volume I did, Volume II demonizes them.
The subscribers to Volume II think that their take on human existence is the final word, thus demonstrating that they have no idea what is in the remaining volumes. This is particularly true at Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools, which I never had the means to attend but where privileged minorities do attend and rail against white privilege. Such ignorance and closed-mindedness is hard to fathom.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Similar ignorance and closed-mindedness prevails at the University of Arizona, where my son earned a bachelor’s and master’s in engineering and was very active in campus life—and where the indoctrination, propaganda, political correctness, piety and sanctimony of Volume II pervade the curricula, residence halls, and every nook and cranny of campus, just as conservatives claim. Knowing about the the vindictiveness and pettiness of the cultural revolutionaries on campus, I postponed the writing of exposes on this while my son was attending the university.
Of course the University of Arizona has an obligatory office for inclusion and diversity, which is a euphemism for favoring non-whites over whites. Also, of course, the office is headed by someone with a Spanish surname and not an Italian one, although Arizonans of Spanish descent far outnumber those of Italian descent, thus making Italians a minority by comparison. It has been reported that the diversity dilettante’s salary is over $200,000, but I haven’t verified that.
This brings to mind an exhibit on campus years ago in honor of fighter pilots. A separate display was devoted to Hispanics [sic]. There was no separate display for Italians or any other ethnic/racial group. Some inclusion.
Actually, I would’ve been offended if there had been a separate display for Italians, because it would’ve smacked of racial pandering and condescension.
The cultural revolutionaries don’t seem to understand or don’t care that their racist stereotyping of whites creates a backlash and undermines the racial harmony that they claim to want. As a case in point, here is my closing message to them: Baciami il culo!
