How Did Italians Become White?

The same question can be asked about hundreds of other unique ethnocultural groups. 

When I was a kid long ago at the leading edge of the boomer generation, I wasn’t white. But now I’m not only white but also privileged and fragile. What happened?

In the St. Louis of my youth, I was Italian and swarthy. So were my second-generation parents, my poor immigrant grandparents, and everyone else from the Italian section of town known as Dago Hill.

My dad, who served in World War II, is buried in a Veterans cemetery. He escaped the fate of the thousands of Italian Americans who were persecuted by the government at the start of the war, including the couple of hundred who were sent to internment camps, due to unfounded suspicions of disloyalty.

The large number of Germans in St. Louis lived in the German part of town and were called Krauts during World War I and World War II. That pejorative paled in comparison to the lynching of a German American in 1918 by a mob across the river from St. Louis in Collinsville, Illinois. He had offended the mob by criticizing President Woodrow Wilson and America’s entry into World War I.

The German part of St. Louis is now populated by Bosnian refugees. Are Bosnians white?  Are they privileged and fragile? Are they minorities for purposes of diversity and inclusion?

Jews lived in University City, or U. City for short, next door to Washington University. Gentiles commonly referred to U. City as Jew City but didn’t necessarily mean it as a pejorative. My parents admired Jews, as did a lot of Italians, and held them up as exemplars of success, industriousness, education, and love of family.

No one in my family spoke about the Irish, maybe because they were concentrated in government and the police department, two institutions that had unfavorable reputations in the Italian community, due in large part to the legacy of Prohibition. 

Like a lot of Italians, my paternal grandfather made wine in the cellar during Prohibition. He was also a barkeep in a speakeasy patronized by government officials. Prior to moving the family to St. Louis, he had been a coal miner in southern Illinois. He would die of emphysema from years of inhaling coal dust.

“Anglo” was not a common word in the hood. The same for “Asian,” because, unlike today, there were very few Asians living in St. Louis. Nor were there many people with Spanish surnames, although the Spanish Empire had reached present-day southeastern Missouri and established the settlement of New Madrid on the Mississippi River. In a reversal of history, Hispanics have gone from being conquerors and enslavers to now being classified as disadvantaged minorities, although they far outnumber Bosnians.

The residents of the Hill were predominately working-class, but they didn’t harbor any discernible hatred of the rich, most of whom lived in the near-suburb of Clayton or the distant suburb of Ladue, which, today, has a median household income of nearly $225,000.

I never rubbed shoulders with the rich until my parents somehow found the money on a tile setter’s pay to send me via a long bus ride to a Catholic prep school in Ladue. I rubbed shoulders again with the rich when I worked as the only non-black employee on an otherwise all-black clubhouse crew at an exclusive country club, where membership was denied to blacks, Jews, Italians, and Catholics. The members of the country club didn’t see me as white.

A big social divide in St. Louis was between those who attended public school and those who attended parochial school. My parents had attended the parochial school that was the center of the Italian community. The church next to the school still has a sculpture in front of an immigrant Italian family carrying everything they owned in a few valises.

Another social divide developed when the backwoods people of southern Missouri and the Deep South moved to St. Louis to work in auto plants and other industries. Known by the pejorative of “hillbilly,” they lived in their own parts of the metropolis and had a culture markedly different from that of Italian culture, German culture, Jewish culture, and Ladue culture.

Still another social divide was between blacks and mostly everyone else. Italians in the old hood understood the plight of blacks but were preoccupied with their own challenges as poor ethnic minorities and didn’t have the means or political power to do anything about it anyway. They didn’t use the “N” word to describe blacks, but many did refer to them as gatto, which is Italian for “cat”—perhaps because many cats are black. I would later have the means and education to be at the vanguard of equal opportunity, affirmative action, and diversity over my business career, but that was before such initiatives became corrupted.

So, how did Italians become white? The same way that hundreds of other unique ethnocultural groups from Southern Europe, the Middle East, and Eurasia became white. First, the government came up with the largely contrived categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American.  Then the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups, including Italians and Bosnians, were stripped of their diversity and force-fitted into the White category, along with Germans, Jews, hillbillies, the Irish, and the residents of Ladue—as if there was no difference between any of these.

Now, adding insult to prejudice, the hundreds of diverse groups are excluded from diversity and inclusion initiatives and stereotyped as privileged, fragile, and racist.

To those responsible for this racism, I say, Baciami il culo!