I genuinely have no idea where the joke came from but it seems pretty big since I've heard it IRL a few times now. Where did this come from?
It probably went from a snowball to an avalanche after Chris Cuomo said "Fredo" was as bad as the n-word.
Pausing to ask if any of the onlookers are Italian, Cuomo adds, “It’s an insult to your fucking people. It’s like the n-word for us.” Then he threatens the man who apparently called him Fredo, saying he’ll “throw you down these stairs like a fucking punk.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/13/20804039/chris-cuomo-fredo-godfather
He deserves a life sentence for this statement alone before we even get to all of those people he killed
Chris is the TV brother, he sucks for different reasons than the former governor
Central park both of them though
It comes from white US people, who can barely prepare store bought pasta, asserting Italian identity as a way to both claim minority status and superiority to other groups
Actual Italians are pretty dope :gramsci-heh:
I know plenty of chuds who hate African Americans for being lazy/violent while thinking Africans from Africa are hardworking and based. This is an extremely yikes take.
Italian-Americans are in absolutely no sense systematically oppressed and were aggressively incorporated into whiteness post WW1 and WW2. It's funny as shit. The modern function of whiteness is to shear you from any sense of historical identity so seeing these fully americanized chuds try to claim an ethnicity they no longer have any meaningful relation to is darkly comic in a way.
Also p sure eventually communism will reproduce a monoculture that will render all attachments to historical identity similar to the plight of the current Italian American so it's a good preview for the theater of the absurd that living in a communist society will entail because God knows not everyone is gonna accept the cultural production of a new organizing economic model that easily.
Actual Italians are ime far more bigoted and almost as goofy as the ones that moved to America.
I'll take your word for it, I definitely have more exposure to Italian Americans than Italian nationals.
That said, Italian Americans (like most whites in US) have fully bought into the settler colonial project of the US.
Absolutely they have as a condition of being whitified or whatever it is people say, although historically Italian immigrants tended to be less reactionary than WASPs, Spanish, French, etc, but thats all ancient history really. But its like hearing Dutch people complain about Afrikaners, lotta pot-calling-the-kettle-blackface goes on when Euroscum get to feeling superior
There's a certain type of conservative who is Italian American and that's who it's about. They worship Columbus, take pride in his cruelty, and credit the Italian race with civilizing the West. They love the shit out of Trump and all types of reactionary populist (or populist wannabes). They like the mob and treat mobsters as inspirational figures, ones who helped the US government fight against labor and communism. Just a very particular and specific kind of annoying political person. Sort of like the Italian version of a gusano.
But the truth is that we accidentally end up doing a little racism. It's hard to describe this kind of person without using slurs or lumping in all Italians. Italian people were discriminated against in US history. They were forced to live in slums, had fewer opportunities, and were interned during WWII. Some moved here because they were escaping fascism and they are not to blame.
ITT: oh I love Italians from Italy, they're so nice and have such an authentic culture!
Italians from Italy: I exclusively vote CasaPound and go to bed every night hoping Il Duce comes back from the dead and personally drowns all the refugees
The truth is, most people you meet from anywhere, even long island probably, are going to be nice and have a lot of things going for them. Lots of beautiful people and cultural richness in every corner of the world. But if you're gonna be making joking generalizations to take a group down a peg, Italians from Italy are massively soft targets. Its a country where the main form of communication with strangers is shouting removed from a passing auto.
It's Italian-Americans specifically, and it's because in America they're the progenitors of a really funny racial identity politics where they understand themselves as "ethnic whites" even though they haven't been anything other than white since the 50s. Most white Americans do this to one degree or another, but Italian-Americans are the best at it, with the next probably being Irish-Americans.
With Italian and Irish americans you also get the "we're the target of racism too" brainworms from how both groups were treated a hundred years ago, mostly as an excuse to say racist stuff about POC
"White" is a variable in-group. Today it's anyone with pale skin, a century ago you weren't Irish and white or Russian and white or Italian and white. They were pale out-groups that served the extractive labour role of other races. Their whiteness was bought by becoming the guard dogs of the system that excluded them. The material comfort of the Italian-American cop was bought by persecuting the working class neighbourhoods that were radicalising against the system. I see Antitaly as calling out the bullshit of whiteness to the groups it includes but doesn't represent. It's still punching up because it's attacking that power structure and the people protecting it, the pigs and the mafia stereotypes which may as well be an actual deep state, to undermine its legitimacy. The same goes for English Abolitionism. It's all attacking imperialism, the decadence it brought the ruling class, and the the crassness of the right-wing defenders of that system. If we generically hated Iceland because its people are white, there wouldn't be a joke that appeals to communists.
That’s just racism.
Attacking cops and criminal gangs who prey on the working class: cool and good
Mocking Italians immigrants accents, food culture and being preyed in by gangs because … there’s a racist stereotypes of Italians as cops and gangsters???: reactionary and racist.
This isn’t fucking rocket science.
It'sa nota rocket spaghetti :AyyyyyOC:
If that group is part of the in-group, and they've made themselves part of the in-group, they're fair game. What does insulting a white person mean and what does your white fragility say about you if you want to throw a word like reactionary around?
Dividing the working class by along ethnic lines by mocking class enemies for ethnic characteristics that working class people share and have been discriminated against for.
not reactionary
:curious-marx:
I don't really have the time to engage with this properly so I'm just going to link the thread from last time.
TLDR: Where I’m from, there are a whole lot of 60-80 year olds who came here not speaking any real English, were preyed on by gangs and worked shitty jobs where they were payed less and treated worse than their coworkers because they didn’t have the language, connections or cultural understanding to fight back. And a whole lot more 40-60 year olds who were those peoples kids, and came home from school the first day thinking everyone was talking gibberish because no-one at home spoke any English.
“It’s okay to mock them because they’re white” is only relevant if we’re talking about “whiteness” as the privelege of being in the economically/ culturally dominant/ accepted/ not discriminated against ethnicity in their societies.
Mocking people based on national or ethnic characteristics in the first place isn’t great, it’s straight up reactionary thought, but it is a little different when you’re talking about England and the US because they are culturally dominant in most of the English speaking world. That’s very much not the case for Italians and xth generation Italian immigrants.
Those people have had a much harder time in life, and are often in worse material conditions now because of the discrimination and marginalisation they experienced on the basis of their language and culture. Dismissing that on the basis of ??? and mocking them and their children for those same things that have made their lives harder is an incredibly shitty and harmful thing to do.
Neat. So if we're attacking whiteness as the system that oppresses those people by attacking the stereotypes that protect that system, would you say that's a net win for the historically oppressed Italian? If your issue is with generic observational humour, stop being a funny white culture. Do you think I give a fuck when people make fun of the English or am I right there making those same jokes because I'm not a fragile cracker and understand what's being attacked?
I really wish people would stop doing this bit.
Anti-italian discrimination has been and is a real thing in a lot of the english speaking world, as immigrants who aren’t native English speakers, and the forms the mockery takes, targeting accents, food culture and stereotypes of criminality are the same forms real anti-Italian, and most anti-immigrant bigotry in general takes.
I get that the bit started as a way of mocking a few extremely priveleged chuds in positions of power who have Italian heritage that some people were saying were facing discrimination, but the bit’s gone well beyond that now. It’s become just “ironically” being racist against Italians or xth generation Italian immigrants in general, and that’s harmful and extremely alienating to a lot of really cool people.
What part of “these people are and have historically been marginalised and discriminated against because of their ethnicity, but its still okay to mock them for their ethnicity and dismiss and invalidate the discrimination they’ve experienced because their skins the wrong colour” sounds okay to you?
“It’s okay to mock them because they’re white” is only relevant if we’re talking about “whiteness” as the privelege of being in the economically/ culturally dominant/ accepted/ not discriminated against ethnicity in their societies. If you’re talking about literal skin colour it’s just fash shit in the other direction.
Mocking people based on national or ethnic characteristics in the first place isn’t great, it’s straight up reactionary thought, but it is a little different when you’re talking about England and the US because they are culturally dominant in most of the English speaking world. That’s very much not the case for Italians and xth generation Italian immigrants.
When I was in school there were kids who were bashed and called slurs for being Italian. Your experience is not universal.
That’s an ignorant and harmful thing to say.
That Mussolini and the fascists defeated the (millions) of Italian communists and entered the second world war on the wrong side has pretty much fucking nothing to do with you being shitty to the Napoli family who lives down the street for talking funny and eating different food.
Whatever horrible fucking thing the bourgeois in control of a nation did 60 years ago should have absolutely no bearing on how you treat, first, second and nth generation immigrants from that country unless they specifically voice support for those things. Where I’m from, there are a whole lot of 60-80 year olds who came here not speaking any real English, were preyed on by gangs and worked shitty jobs where they were payed less and treated worse than their coworkers because they didn’t have the language, connections or cultural understanding to fight back. And a whole lot more 40-60 year olds who were those peoples kids, and came home from school the first day thinking everyone was talking gibberish because no-one at home spoke any English .
Those people have had a much harder time in life, and are often in worse material conditions now because of the discrimination and marginalisation they experienced on the basis of their language and culture. Dismissing that on the basis of ??? and mocking them and their children for those same things that have made their lives harder is an incredibly shitty and harmful thing to do.
Dismissing that on the basis of ???
The conscious shifting of sympathy from black victims of lynchings to supporting or becoming the perpetrators, especially during the 1919 race riots which was instrumental to white Italian American identity formation in the North, to the point that poet Rosette Capotorto recalls "I was raised to be a racist"
But if you were talking about the Italian Americans along the Mississippi Delta, then you'd have a point, there their white identity wasn't as set in stone as in the north
Also this quote always gets me
Fascist-induced nationalism made inroads even into working-class strongholds that should have been the most immune to jingoistic sentiments. Luigi Antonini, the general secretary of the Italian-language Local 89 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was one of the most vocal Italian-American opponents of Mussolini’s colonial venture. But his anti-Fascist appeals often fell on deaf ears. Remarkably, a member of Local 89, John Milazzo, maintained:
"I collected money for the Italian Red Cross twice in the factory where I work and shall initiate additional fund-raisings until our beloved Duce orders our brothers who are bravely fighting in Africa to lay their arms. […]. I am not and shall never be a Fascist, but I am Italian, an unrepentant Italian. "
"Their whiteness was bought by becoming the guard dogs of the system that excluded them. The material comfort of the Italian-American cop was bought by persecuting the working class neighbourhoods that were radicalising against the system."
When you definitely know what you're talking about. :what-the-hell:
You sound like you're writing an essay on a book that you sparknotes'd an hour before class
Huh, turns out he does know what he's talking about , almost like the assimilationist movement among Italain-Americans was out in the open in the 40s/50s or something
Cope harder spaghetti cracker :sicko-spin:
Yes and- Italian immigrants and earlier generations had a significant history of leftist/labor organizing. Their politics veered hard right as a reaction to the Civil rights movement. (Perhaps an oversimplification, it had to do with the growth of suburbs, white flight from the urban centers, a return to parochialism as a counterbalance to 60s hippie counterculture)
Our comrades at gladiofreeeurope had a wonderful episode, interesting stuff
Mario simps for the monarchy instead of building solidarity with other working class folk
Lotta people on this site think people from New Jersey are Italian for some reason
Europeans love saying you can't be their nationality unless you've lived there your whole life and have a thousand years of pure blood because they are all very racist
Well you can't be Italian if you were being in new Jersey, you've never been to Italy, and you don't speak the language. Europeans being racist doesn't make this not true.
No, but you can be an Italian-American and feel a meaningful connection with Italy, even with all those being true. Usually these forms of admittedly (and understandably) far-removed hybrid nationality are passed down by older generations within their family, so they are really more familial than national. They are then reinforced by cultural institutions and in media. Its not like WASPs (which is what people mean when they say "you're just a plain American") wake up one day and decide they want to feel a connection with some random country they pick on a map.
I can't really put to words why its such a bother to me, but I can say this. Reactionaries in the home country always shit on the diaspora for being no longer really an authentic part of the nation. Reactionaries in America often try to call for the same; "You're American now, act like it! (Read: act like a white protestant anglo)", while at the same time only really allowing 'whites' to do so. Its reactionary on its face to think of national identity as this immutable purely defined thing that you need the right blood and to be on the right soil for. Who cares if diaspora populations, even 4th gen ones, want to feel an identity they are maybe a little distant from? Let people live and don't be like a reactionary!
Hard disagree. Ethnicity is fake and obsessing over it is a uniquely American form of brainworms. "Italian"-Americans are just Americans
Gender is also fake but I don't go around telling people they don't have a right to identify as they like because they don't meet my standards for defining the fake thing
Sure, but nobody out there is using their gender as a way to harm other people. Unlike "Italian" Americans, for example, who love to use their "italianness" to argue for the continued generation of Christopher Columbus.
Non WASP White people who obsess over their ethnicity are essentially stealing oppression valor from actually oppressed people. The same is not true w gender
People absolutely do use their gender to harm people its called men lmao
I think its bad when Irish or Italians do the "hey we had it tough too" thing but that is just a thing they do that is annoying, like so many things they do that are annoying, and not inherent to the concept of ethnicity and lots of other American hybridized ethnicities don't do that because they don't have that history to draw on. Maybe we should just ban Irish and Italian as ethnicities and let the others have it.
Fuck, man, I need to sit down and watch this show. Also, for some reason I thought that screenshot of the frame where he says "it's anti-Italian discrimination" (it makes it's rounds on twitter) was a render from a video game cutscene based on the show lmao
