XPost: alt.politics.trump, sac.politics, alt.politics.usa.republican   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns   
   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
   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: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)