Abstract
Italian Americans are invisible people. Not because people refuse to see them, but because, for the most part, they refuse to be seen. Italian Americans became invisible the moment they could pass themselves off as being white. And since then they have gone to great extremes to avoid being identified as anything but white, they have even hidden the history of being people of color.
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
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Notes
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 3;
James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ … And Other Lies,” Essence (April 1984), 90–92;
Rose Romano, “Vendetta,” La bella figura: a choice (San Francisco: Malafemmina Press, 1993), 35–42.
Joseph Sciorra, “Italians against Racism,” in Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 192–209.
Mario Puzo, The Godfather (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1969), 290.
Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans. (1973; New York: Anchor, 1975), 329.
Patrick J. Gallo, Ethnic Alienation: The Italian-Americans (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974), 209.
Daniela Gioseffi, “The Bleeding Mimosa,” Voices in Italian Americana 2, no.1 (1991): 59–65.
Frank Lentricchia, “Confessions of an Ex-Literary Critic,” Lingua Franca (September–October 1996), 59–67.
Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown, 1993).
Robert Viscusi, “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture,” Voices in Italian Americana 1, no. 2 (1990), 1–14: 3.
Jerome Krase, “Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian-American Victimizers and Victims,” Voices in Italian Americana 5, no. 2 (1994), 43–53;
Robert Anthony Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990,” American Quarterly 44, no. 3 (September 1992), 313–347;
Rudolph J. Vecoli, “‘Are Italian Americans Just White Folks?’” In Through the Looking Glass: Italian and Italian/American Images in the Media, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1996), 3–17;
David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,” Lingua Franca(September–October 1996), 68–77: 74.
Noel Ignatiev, “Immigrants and Whites,” in Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15–23;
Raymond A. Belliotti, Seeing Identity: Individualism Versus Community in an Ethnic Context (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 163.
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© 2010 William J. Connell and Fred Gardaphé
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Gardaphé, F. (2010). Introduction: Invisible People. In: Connell, W.J., Gardaphé, F. (eds) Anti-Italianism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115323_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115323_1
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