Political Memes

I mean, its amusing at first glance. But half my family is Italian. Quite a few of them have stories from parents/grandparents, etc about the genuinely nasty racist policies the city had towards Italians, Latinos, and Irish ex-pats - everything from redlining policies and employment blacklists to police gangs brutalizing relatives and government officials refusing to honor debts or outright stealing property unimpeded.

The social and legal justifications used are all common to the Smithsonian "Aspects of Whiteness" list above. Italians were generally described as a lazy, untrustworthy, dimwitted, and even sub-human population. They were accused of everything from vagrancy and slobbery to organized pedophilia. And that, unsurprisingly, had an impact on Italian immigrant community abilities to accrue wealth and status in the city and the surrounding areas.

That's much less true now (although curiously not entirely absent, depending on who you talk to). But the legacy of discrimination has a real downward impact on plenty of people's livelihoods to this day. If nothing else, there's a ton of NYC real estate in the hands of grandchildren of kleptocrats who profited by seizing it from folks lower on the racial totem pole.