A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
uneasiness over Italian immigrant marginality. Concurrently, during this period the United States increasingly came to focus on the “Negro question” as the foremost social issue affecting the nation. This owed to several factors, including the migration of African Americans into the urban North and the emergence of the New Negro movement. According to Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The result was a culture of racial thinking termed ‘bi-racialism’ by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which encouraged Americans to focus on race-as-color, and almost solely on whiteness and blackness.”8 During this emerging “bi-racialist” period, Italian immigrant prominenti espoused a particular class-based notion of Italian identity, or italianita, influenced by the recent Italian unification in Italy. Steeped in racial nationalism, prominenti versions of Italian identity argued for full inclusion as Americans based upon an imagined “Italian” heritage of civilization and whiteness. By the period of World War I, mainstream newspapers, cognizant of the strong association between one’s racial grouping and their defined whiteness or nonwhiteness, abandoned a racial perspective that had concomitantly entertained color, race, and civilization in favor a more rigid binary of black and white.
A Great Conspiracy against Our Race explores the vital institution of the radical and mainstream Italian language press in New York City and seeks to answer how the immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity during the period 1886 through 1920. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, the book demonstrates how both radical and mainstream papers often constructed racial hierarchies in tandem with their own class-based interpretations of society. Ultimately, mainstream, or prominenti-owned, newspapers, constructed an identity as Italian, American, and white. The book focuses on Italian immigrants’ self-representation of race at a time when racial categories were being reconstructed as a consequence of mass black migration and European immigration during the decades between Reconstruction and World War I. Italians’ insistence on self-representation provided a much-needed intervention in categories of race meant to normalize extralegal and legal violence. During the years 1909 through 1919, newspapers such as Il Progresso and Il Cittadino proposed that Italian inclusion in American society be based upon the merits of an Italian civilization inextricably linked to whiteness. Constructing a version of southern Italian racial identity at odds with much of the public’s perception, by 1916 certain Italian American newspapers not only insisted Italians were white but claimed they would be responsible for saving the white race in the United States. By 1919, it had become clear to newspapers such as Il Progresso Italo-Americano, at this point the largest Italian daily in the country, that full incorporation into the American republic was intimately tied to one’s whiteness, as well as one’s distance from African Americans. Although scholars maintain Italian American assertions of whiteness actively began with the emergence of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s through the World War II period, this work demonstrates that this process had earlier roots.9
Working within scholarship that sees race as central to immigration history, one of the book’s primary presuppositions is that in the United States race and color have been historically connected. Discussions about race became intimately connected, and in some ways interchangeable, with categories such as civilization, savagery, and color. And, it was often assumed that civilized races were white and superior to darker races, which were perceived as primitive. Whiteness studies are grounded on the premise that the racial “other” in American history embraces categories in addition to black. What these works attempt to accomplish, in general, is to recover, or uncover, a racial identity to whiteness that belies the traditional assumption that being “white” means racial transparency. According to Coco Fusco, an activist and writer, “Racial identities are not only black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and so on; they are also white. To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it.”10
Although southern Italians were white enough to enter the country and naturalize as American citizens, consistent alarm over their suitability to become full members of the American republic included concerns regarding their race and whiteness.11 Historians have attempted to describe this precarious racial status in a variety of ways, from “conditionally white” to “situationally white” or “not quite white.”12 Along with historians such as Robert Orsi, John Higham, David Roediger, and others, I believe the term “inbetween” most accurately describes the racial position in which European immigrants found themselves as they learned and negotiated the American racial landscape. Writing in particular about southern Italian immigrants in East Harlem, Orsi proved instrumental in establishing the notion of inbetweeness and the effort to establish a border between oneself and those perceived as the “darker other.” As historian Ian Haney López and others have demonstrated, race is understood not as an absolute category but rather “as comparative taxonomies of relative difference. Races do not exist as defined entities, but only as amalgamations of people standing in complex relationships with other such groups.”13 Orsi’s work deftly presents the various degrees of perception that undergird racial othering—between us and them, white and black, Protestant and Catholic, American and foreign. Defined as an inferior race by many Americans, southern Italian immigrants arrived already stigmatized by northern Italian constructions of race and civilization coming out of Italian unification branding them as turks or African. Learning and adapting to the American racial system would be a process fraught with confusion, requiring an intimate struggle against the uncertainties and realities of “inbetweeness.” According to Orsi, “The immigrants were transformed first into ‘Italians’ in this country, initially in the perceptions of others who were hostile to them and their dark skins; then they had to become ‘Americans’ at a time when this identity itself had become the site of bitter, often racially charged conflict.”14
David Roediger and James Barrett employ the phrase the “confusion of inbetweeness” to characterize how immigrants perceived their place in the American racial system. The authors argue that the process was not a clean, linear path toward the attainment of whiteness but an uneven struggle whereby immigrants would simultaneously embrace whiteness, reject it, and many times remain indifferent to it. More specifically, according to Roediger and Barrett, “to assume that new immigrants as a mass clearly saw their identity with non-whites or clearly fastened on their differences is to miss” this confusion.15 In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson contends that the privilege of being white in various forms has been a constant since colonial times, but that whiteness itself has been subject to many changes throughout American history. He argues that whiteness became fractured into a hierarchy of scientifically and sociopolitically determined white “races” during the period of mass immigration in the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stating that American immigration scholarship is guilty of conflating race and color, Jacobson argues that contemporaries did not see “ethnicity” when discussing official categories such as Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Mediterraneans, Hebrews, Slavs, Alpines, and Nordics, but rather distinct “races” ranked according to their perceived proximity to whiteness. Therefore, an immigrant might be considered white yet at the same time be perceived as racially distinct from other whites. Complicating the simple “white-black” dichotomy of some whiteness studies, Jacobson cautions that to “miss the fluidity of race itself in the process of becoming Caucasian is to reify a monolithic whiteness, and, further, to cordon that whiteness off from other racial groupings along lines that are silently presumed to be more genuine.”16
However, with the publication of White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 in 2003, Thomas Guglielmo challenged the concept of inbetweeness, arguing that scholars have failed to “understand the distinctions between race and color.”17 According to Guglielmo, when contrasted with African Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans whose nonwhiteness systematically excluded them from citizenship and equal rights, Italian immigrants could not be described as anything but white. Thus, “While Italians suffered greatly for their putative racial undesirability as Italians, South Italians, and so forth, they still benefited in countless ways from their privileged color status as whites.” This distinction between race and color, argued Guglielmo, explains how southern Italian immigrants could face racial discrimination upon their arrival but still enjoy privileges due to their whiteness. Guglielmo contends that the