Even relatively recently, Italians weren’t really considered “white”, especially by Americans. The KKK considered them “coloured” people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of “italiapobia” in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous”.
People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Sicilians weren’t seen as Italians by other Italians because Arabs had held Sicily for centuries. This is also why some did not see the Spanish as white.
My grandmother’s mortgage paper from 1955 had a clause to check to see if the Italian quota had been hit before offering the home for sale to Italians. Of course you couldn’t sell to black or Jewish people. This was in Northern NJ.
I can’t vouch for the veracity of any of these since it’s not really my field but it’s interesting to see how how stuff like this has shifted over time and where the parallels to modern racism and xenophobia are.
Even relatively recently, Italians weren’t really considered “white”, especially by Americans. The KKK considered them “coloured” people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of “italiapobia” in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous”.
People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Sicilians weren’t seen as Italians by other Italians because Arabs had held Sicily for centuries. This is also why some did not see the Spanish as white.
My grandmother’s mortgage paper from 1955 had a clause to check to see if the Italian quota had been hit before offering the home for sale to Italians. Of course you couldn’t sell to black or Jewish people. This was in Northern NJ.
Got any further readings for this? Thank you for sharing that knowledge. Yeah racists are going to racist
Sure! I stole the quote from the wiki article: Anti-Italianism
This article was also pretty interesting: https://accenti.ca/jim-crow-and-italian-immigrants-in-the-american-west/
There’s also an interesting series of short US LIbrary of Congress sources for history classrooms on immigration that has a section on Italians too: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/under-attack/
I can’t vouch for the veracity of any of these since it’s not really my field but it’s interesting to see how how stuff like this has shifted over time and where the parallels to modern racism and xenophobia are.