ISBN : 9782296123366
ETHNICITY AND RACE IN THE REPRESENTATION OF ITALIAN AMERICANS' IDENTITY
Testifying before a Congressional committee on immigration in 1890, a railroad construction boss contended that an Italian was not a white man but a "Dago," an ethnic slur usually reserved for immigrants from Italy. Thirty-two years later, a court in Alabama cleared an African-American man of miscegenation charges on the grounds that it could not be proved that his partner, a Sicilian woman, was white. However, in 1997, an Italian American, Frank DeStefano, became the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Long Island, New York.1 Such events well epitomize the whitening of Italian Americans' identity during the twentieth century. This essay examines how Italian immigrants and their progeny have reshaped their own self-image since the beginning of their mass influx to the United States in the 1880s. In particular, it analyzes how Italian Americans have acquired a white racial image over the decades after elaborating an ethnic...