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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

I like this article because it reminds us that "whiteness" is not actually a strictly racial identity. There are numerous factors that make someone "white" in America, which makes them acceptable to white nationalists. These purity rules can change over time to represent what's politically expedient.

Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.

This is one of the primary reasons that fascism is such an uncomfortable situation for its citizens. Fascism thrives in the face of an "enemy" that can be defeated by force and a "strong leader." These enemies will be selected by convenience, not rationality.

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In another example of America's fluidly morphing standard of whiteness, Finns were sometimes considered Asians:

"Finns faced racial discrimination, with many people using the Finnish language as “proof” that Finns were not European and thus fair game to be subject to unfair treatment. Some argued that Finns were Asian, meaning they should be barred from citizenship under the Asian Exclusion Act of the early 1900s. The word “Finlander” was used as a slur, along with “China Swede” and “roundhead.”"

http://inktank.fi/china-swedes-forest-finns-and-the-great-mi...

Somewhat relevant: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/findians__the_story_of_fin...

"There are many reasons for the common understanding forged by Finns and Native Americans, but above all they were united by their intimate relationship with the forest. Just like the Ojibwa Finns hunted, fished and foraged. The locals also valued Finns’ handiwork skills: the ability to build a boat or carve skis. Finns learned how to cultivate maize and use medicinal herbs, among other things. In return they lent their expertise in building log cabins and weaving shoes out of birch bark."

Whiteness is a theme of The Godfather, particularly the book but also the movie.

I know this is touched no in The Godfather II, when the Senator's talking to Michael. Where is whiteness a theme in the first movie?

Michael does not go into the family business. He goes to war. He goes to college. He marries a 'white' wife. He wants out of the family and to become an American; in essence, he wants to become white. Even his own family refers to him as the war hero with both pride and condescension. But he's drawn back into the family, back to his father.

Bonasera, the funeral director (corpse valet): I believe in America. America has made my fortune. But when Bonasera's daughter is raped, the (white, American) police did nothing. So he goes to the Godfather for justice.

There's always a distinction between white America and Michael's immigrant Italian-ness. Even the beginning of II, young Vito is an immigrant but is drawn back into his community. Always a distinction, cultural, ethnic, generational, racial.

The Godfather really is a/the great American novel.

Interesting, I guess you have to be on the look out for some of that stuff to pick up on it. Probably some of the choices of casting and wording were based on these aspects of the book, but if you're not aware of them, they don't really stand out.

In hindsight, I guess it's obvious that Kay doesn't look like the other women in the family. As someone who considers Italians to be "white", it never really stood out to me as notable (aside from the fact that she was unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the family business). I also never would have associated going to war or going to college as rebelling against being Italian, just seemed like a normal thing for a kid to want to do. Probably you view some of these things differently if you've read the book...

Book is awesome. Extremely readable. The movies are a faithful yet not slavish adaptation.

>Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.

This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.

This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw "All right, we'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks... But we don't want the Irish!" It's a nice film, its director made quite a few good films (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#Film).

Mel Brooks is probably our greatest American comedy director and writer, at least in the second half of the 20th century he's in the top handful. Who comes to mind, Blake Edwards?

There's also a scene in The Sopranos that covers this. Tony is talking with his therapist and they basically come to the conclusion that he thinks Italians aren't white and won't ever be truly accepted by what I think he called "Mayonnaise Americans" (basically WASPs). Growing up in a large Italian family there was definitely some family members that felt this way as well, particularly the older ones.

Even in Europe, we Italians often carry an inferiority complex towards our Northern neighbours, historically reinforced by the wealth gap that started accumulating since the Industrial Revolution.

To me that read as a rhetorical flourish and not a genuine concern about moderation. Ironically, the zeal with which it's being interpreted as a live concern sort of makes its own point. :)

Another reply to your post added the quote.

I sincerely hope that posting such a quote isn't cause for a ban - since it's pulled directly from the film, and does a good job of emphasizing the point you're trying to make.

Posting such a thing shouldn't be reason for banning, and one should not be afraid of quoting such text.

Yes, I was clearly too hesitant.

I can't speak for the HN mods, but I am fine with seeing offensive words here when they are employed in a documentary rather than a pejorative sense.

Let's examine a few examples, using 'oompa-loompa' as an imaginary term of abuse. Shut up Alice, you're just an oompa-loompa! - not OK. Ignore Alice; she's a stupid oompa-loompa. - not OK. Bob denigrated Alice by referring to her as an 'oompa-loompa.' - OK.

It's not the specific words that are offensive, but the context in which they are employed. When you're reporting someone else's speech, it's OK to quote them accurately and in full - indeed I think it's often necessary. If we use euphemisms or bowdlerisms - such as saying 'the f-word' or 'f---' to avoid saying the word 'fuck' when reporting what someone said - the we are not only insulting the intelligence of our interlocutors, but we are softening the impact of the original statement. To do so out of a regard for the tender feelings of others is misplaced, because by implication we're saying that the offensive content inheres in the word rather than intention of the speaker, and the use of offensive words is easily dismissed nowadays by someone saying they 'misspoke'.

Let's take another example. Bob says to Alice: 'Your life is unimportant because you are only an oompa-loompa' in some public confrontation. Carol reports this on the evening news as 'bob said that Alice's life was not important, and employed an ethnic slur.' Technically true, but 'employed an ethnic slur' sounds pretty mild compared to the unpleasant experience of being called an oompa-loompa directly, or feeling empathy for someone subjected to such a term of abuse. By resorting to euphemism, the offensive nature of Bob's aggressive remarks towards Alice is significantly understated, which is a win for bob.

I think that when a public figure (qua someone whose utterances or actions are consequential because of their social reach) makes an offensive remarks such as 'You know what? fuck the oompa=loompas!' it should be reported verbatim on the evening news, not bleeped or euphemized. There's an argument that doing so spreads it and normalizes, it, and that is true to some extent. (There are increasingly common reports, albeit apocryphal, of school students excusing offensive or assaultive behavior by citing the President's well-documented model). But the unpleasantness of hearing that repeated and perpetuated has to be balanced against the value of people knowing exactly what was said and how it was said, so that the fact of offensive or assaultive behavior is not obscured to the end of deniability or dismissability.

Linguistic infantilization is but a prelude to cognitive manipulation, and the latter has reached pandemic proportions in an age of almost-instant global communication. The averred reluctance of some to be exposed to horrible words is really a plea not to be informed about the existence of horrible behavior, a preference for not knowing about the fact of conflict. Meaningful discourse on how we should behave is impossible if we cannot express ourselves honestly about how we do behave.

I have yet to see anyone try to advance a similar line of argument citing the past or present hostility existing between the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean peoples as proof that "East Asians" don't really exist and are merely some kind of social construct--let alone with the non-obvious corollary that the peoples wrongly socially constructed as "East Asian," not really existing as such, should therefore immediately open their immigration flood gates to the swarming masses of Africa and the Middle East.

I'm impressed by the number of fallacies you manged to cram into a single run-on sentence.

I think I characterized by analogy the argument of both the article and the grandparent quite well: "Because many Anglo-Saxons despised the Irish and Italians a century ago, white people don't really exist as anything more than a social construct (someone apparently forgot to tell the NIH, CDC, and 23andme this), and the opposition to mass immigration from Somalia, Syria, or other countries in those regions is a result of prejudice against and fear of a socially-constructed non-white 'other.'"

Where are the articles arguing that "East Asians," "Indians," "Arabs," or other racial groups are just social constructs and that these peoples consequently lack the right to control the immigration policy of their respective nation-states?

Well, the first place to look would be in ethnic studies departments, which examine (exactly* such questions. Secondly, you might want to consider that 'East Asian' works OK as a geographic descriptor, but you're assuming that a western-originated social construct of 'East Asians' is held by the people who live in that region, most of whom I think would argue that their genetic similarities are superficial, just as almost all humans have two arms and two legs etc. I could also point to the rather complex internal history of the Asian countries you mention to highlight the existence of internal disagreements in those countries about the nature of identity, but that would involve a long historical detour and a ton of background material that neither of us likely has the inclination to review.

It might be worth mentioning that I regard your view of East Asian identity as extremely simplistic partly because I'm married to an Asian person and have had a disproportionately large number of friends from that region for several decades. Your homogenous characterization of the region is superficially persuasive but falls apart as soon as you look at the history of the region in any detail.

As for lacking the right to control immigration policy (a subject that was not in discussion but which is clearly what you want to express your views about, arguments against the restrictive immigration policy that obtains in the various East Asian countries are made all the time - not on the basis of those people lacking rights of self-determination but on the basis of economic utility. Finally, you overlook the fact that the the US (where I suspect you are based and whose immigration policy you're indirectly commenting on) was, unlike the East Asian countries you mention, explicitly founded on inclusive liberal ideas (as exemplified in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence) rather than on an ethnic nationalist identity and that it's not unreasonable to evaluate US policy in the light of the assertions upon which it is nominally founded.

Ask any "East Indian" what their population and subgroups actually consist of and you will get an immediate list of subgroups, immigration history and ideological differences.

You're right that those are all equally social constructs. Same with Arabs, that's a massive group.

When someone is discriminated against with a broad brush their list of qualifications for "an ally" is often the other people equally maligned in that group, so if "Arabs" as a group talk back to discrimination against "Arabs" then that's an unsurprising development.

Quite so. I recommend Colin Woodard's excellent book American Nations to anyone who wishes to understand the often-conflicting worldviews that shape the USA and which have come to transcend state borders.

First, the article doesn't discuss 'whiteness', so your comment is something of an irrelevant narrative imposition.

Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2, and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.

Obviously the war is a big part of this, but the article makes it clear that wasn't the only factor. Right near the beginning:

> Italian-Americans had faced prejudice for decades by the time the order was drafted, says Guglielmo. Italians were the biggest group of immigrants to the United States who passed through Ellis Island for much of the late 19th and early 20th century; between 1876 and 1930, 5 million Italians moved to the U.S. Not without backlash: By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans.

Your argument fails, because Italians obviously weren't the only ethnicity now considered "white" and formerly considered not. The US has never been at war with Ireland, but white America's rejection of the Irish is so well-known it forms the basis for one of the most famous Simpsons jokes.

> First, the article doesn't discuss 'whiteness', so your comment is something of an irrelevant narrative imposition.

It discusses "outsider" status, and WW2 represented a massive debate about who was "trustworthy." Historians have pointed out that in many cases these camp approaches were in part appeasement tactics for the rather large fascist movements growing in America. Hell, WW2 was the mark of the last unsuccessful kleptocrat-fascist coup against America lead by the leadership of Chase Manhattan bank in concert with the actual German nazis. It nearly happened, too!

"Whiteness" is A Word for it that fascists don't like, in part because it speaks to their "white homeland" ideology. I rather enjoy using it to point out the other side of what they're polishing is in fact a turd.

> Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2,

AND YET! Mysteriously! Japanese were specifically targeted for the harshest treatment, Italians the second most, and the fewest German Americans ended up in concentration camps. What's more, it "wasn't about race" but the principle tie for many of these people to these camps was their heritage and if their looks conformed to a stereotype!

Like you yourself said:

> and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.

Honestly, what the hell do YOU think this means? If someone looked the part, as defined by their "ancestral heritage" they had their property seized and their entire families put into war-crime level imprisonment.

And you're going to say, "This isn't about race, it's about ancestral heritage." This just in: That's one of the primary components of race and the racist discourse in America. How many times did we see the Trump campaign supporters point out that if only 3rd greater generation Americans voted, the RNC would win the presidency every time?

You are eager to call it "intellectually dishonest" and maybe that'll work in your christian-sponsored micro-targetted facebook ads and now-banned subreddits. For everyone not looking for an enemy to blame it's the observable and objective facts. None of the concentration camps America set up were fun places, but the ones for the least white-looking people were objectively horrifying, and the seizure of property against that class of people was much more widespread and damaging. More asian-looking people were dissipated than every other category combined.

> AND YET! Mysteriously! Japanese were specifically targeted for the harshest treatment, Italians the second most, and the fewest German Americans ended up in concentration camps.

Practically speaking, it would be difficult to round up all German-Americans and put them into concentration camps in WW2. They had basically interbred with other people with dissimilar European ancestry, did not retain any unique accent, or group themselves into ethnic communes.

Additionally, many believed that by fighting against Germany in World War 1, all German-American's had proved their loyalty beyond any more doubt.

Lastly, Germany had its greatest waves of immigration to the America's either before the US was even a nation, or during its infancy.

Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.

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Personally, I believe that this is better stated as ethnic discrimination. In Europe, Africa, and Asia---all 'old world' continents---there is less of a tendency to trumpet ones own race. Rather people have the view that their ethnicity is the best, their bloodline lineage is the best, their family heritage is the best. Discrimination there takes the form of Germany believing that anyone who isn't german is low-class---which includes Spaniards, Italians, British, Russians, Poles, Finns, etc.

In the US today, ethnicity has been de-emphasized with a greater focus being put on race and religion, which is to our detriment in understanding both historical treatment of immigrants, and also current day treatment of immigrants.

For example: why are so many people against Syrians, but view Saudi's as tolerable? Why is Yemen seen less favourable than Oman?

> Additionally, many believed that by fighting against Germany in World War 1, all German-American's had proved their loyalty beyond any more doubt.

I'd love to see a source for this. My research and interviewing my relatives who were there suggested that they were quite concerned that the germans were "hard to spot".

> Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.

I mean it wasn't _that_ new. There was a major wave of immigration in 1910.

But bigotry based on appearance is almost always the basis of this.

> My research and interviewing my relatives who were there suggested that they were quite concerned that the germans were "hard to spot".

Were they talking about German nationals, or German-American's?

First, the article doesn't discuss 'whiteness'

Your argument is basically that if the word doesn't appear in the original article, we should be able to hold a discussion of that concept that refers to the article. There is a lot more to reading comprehension than iterating over a bag of words to see whether they appear in a given corpus.

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