XPost: tx.politics, sac.politics, alt.politics.usa.republican
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns

He needs to admit that our Framers would have considered him a nigger.

Italians were thrust into a country where being one and not the other
meant the difference between finding economic success, safety and
acceptance.

Like the Irish, another immigrant group that arrived in the United States during this time, Italians were not perceived as white. They were, as historians James Barrett and David Roediger call them, “inbetween people."
But once Italians gained an awareness of what whiteness could bring them,
they embraced it, the authors say.

There is proof Italians didn’t always see themselves as white. In the
1880s, Italian immigrants occupied the East Harlem section of Manhattan.
There still stands Church of Our Lady Mount Carmel on 116th street, one
block from the East River, a vestige of that time. A giant festa took
place in the neighborhood on the streets surrounding the church, to honor
and celebrate the Madonna, an important figure for Italians.

But what started out as a party that drew “immigrants from all over
southern Italy” became an important plot point in how Italians learned to navigate the shifting lines of race in America.

The following selection from Roediger’s book Colored White tell the story
of how a neighborhood rejected what they believed to be a black stain on
their path to whiteness. More from Splinter
Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party
The real story behind 'Okay Guy,' the viral meme that's blowing up Vine
What Time Does the Game of Thrones Traffic End?
A complete history of the phrase 'paddy wagon,' the surviving
Irish-American slur

The festa surrounding the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel there had
its roots in devotions begun by immigrants from Pollo, near Naples, in
the 1880s. The celebration in the Virgin's honor, so brilliantly
described in the work of Robert Orsi, became the "central communal
event" in Italian Harlem, "drawing immigrants from all over southern
Italy." As Italian Americans…who were "finally well-off enough to get
out" left the neighborhood (and often their parents) after World War
II, ties of ethnicity and family became still more bound up with
rituals of return to the festa. According to Orsi, the Puerto Ricans
who transformed the area into Spanish Harlem had to be imagined as
pushing out the Italians who left. Because of their "proximity" to
Italian Americans in color, language, and (for a time, around
Marcantonio) politics, Puerto Ricans represented a particular threat
to the security of Italian American whiteness. One strategy in
policing the line between Italian Americans and Puerto Ricans was to
keep the latter unwelcome at the festa to the Madonna of 115th street.
Indeed, Orsi adds, this racial imperative was so strong that the
darker, but less "proximate" and therefore less threatening, Haitians
could be included in the festa and could been be considered not so
"black" as the Puerto Ricans. St. Ann's Parish in East Harlem
featured, in the image of San Benedetto (or "Il Moro," as he was known
in southern Italy), perhaps the most dramatic statue of a Black
Italian saint in the United States. The son of slaves brought to
Sicily from Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, Benedetto's feast day
was marked early in the century with some African Americans included
in the Harlem festivities. Indeed, his transplantation to New York
City suggests the possibility of a road not taken toward an
egalitarian pan-Latin challenge to the hyper-whiteness of holiness.
Italian Americans more typically took a road to white identity, and in
many cases, to the suburbs. Puerto Rican worshippers inherited the
statue, although a few Italian Americans persist in the parish.
Elsewhere, San Benedetto became known as St. Benedict the Black, the
patron saint of African Americans.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: tx.politics, sac.politics, alt.politics.usa.republican
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns

He needs to admit that our Framers would have considered him a nigger.

Italians were thrust into a country where being one and not the other
meant the difference between finding economic success, safety and
acceptance.

Like the Irish, another immigrant group that arrived in the United States during this time, Italians were not perceived as white. They were, as historians James Barrett and David Roediger call them, “inbetween people."
But once Italians gained an awareness of what whiteness could bring them,
they embraced it, the authors say.

There is proof Italians didn’t always see themselves as white. In the
1880s, Italian immigrants occupied the East Harlem section of Manhattan.
There still stands Church of Our Lady Mount Carmel on 116th street, one
block from the East River, a vestige of that time. A giant festa took
place in the neighborhood on the streets surrounding the church, to honor
and celebrate the Madonna, an important figure for Italians.

But what started out as a party that drew “immigrants from all over
southern Italy” became an important plot point in how Italians learned to navigate the shifting lines of race in America.

The following selection from Roediger’s book Colored White tell the story
of how a neighborhood rejected what they believed to be a black stain on
their path to whiteness. More from Splinter
Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party
The real story behind 'Okay Guy,' the viral meme that's blowing up Vine
What Time Does the Game of Thrones Traffic End?
A complete history of the phrase 'paddy wagon,' the surviving
Irish-American slur

The festa surrounding the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel there had
its roots in devotions begun by immigrants from Pollo, near Naples, in
the 1880s. The celebration in the Virgin's honor, so brilliantly
described in the work of Robert Orsi, became the "central communal
event" in Italian Harlem, "drawing immigrants from all over southern
Italy." As Italian Americans…who were "finally well-off enough to get
out" left the neighborhood (and often their parents) after World War
II, ties of ethnicity and family became still more bound up with
rituals of return to the festa. According to Orsi, the Puerto Ricans
who transformed the area into Spanish Harlem had to be imagined as
pushing out the Italians who left. Because of their "proximity" to
Italian Americans in color, language, and (for a time, around
Marcantonio) politics, Puerto Ricans represented a particular threat
to the security of Italian American whiteness. One strategy in
policing the line between Italian Americans and Puerto Ricans was to
keep the latter unwelcome at the festa to the Madonna of 115th street.
Indeed, Orsi adds, this racial imperative was so strong that the
darker, but less "proximate" and therefore less threatening, Haitians
could be included in the festa and could been be considered not so
"black" as the Puerto Ricans. St. Ann's Parish in East Harlem
featured, in the image of San Benedetto (or "Il Moro," as he was known
in southern Italy), perhaps the most dramatic statue of a Black
Italian saint in the United States. The son of slaves brought to
Sicily from Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, Benedetto's feast day
was marked early in the century with some African Americans included
in the Harlem festivities. Indeed, his transplantation to New York
City suggests the possibility of a road not taken toward an
egalitarian pan-Latin challenge to the hyper-whiteness of holiness.
Italian Americans more typically took a road to white identity, and in
many cases, to the suburbs. Puerto Rican worshippers inherited the
statue, although a few Italian Americans persist in the parish.
Elsewhere, San Benedetto became known as St. Benedict the Black, the
patron saint of African Americans.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)