7-11-05,10:10am
The several hundred or so hoodlums in the organized rackets who are of Italian descent compose but a tiny fraction of an Italian-American population numbering over twelve million people. Yet with the help of television and movies, these racketeers have become representative of an entire ethnic group. In one of his stand-ups, the comedian Richard Pryor joked: “Not all Italians are in the mafia. They just all work for the mafia.” Linking Italians as a group with organized crime has long been one of those respectable forms of bigotry.
There have been Irish, Jewish, Black, Latino, and even Anglo-Protestant mobsters in our history. None of them are representative of the larger ethnic formations from which they happened to emerge. But it is the Italian mafia (a real-life crime syndicate, to be sure) that the media have fixed upon over the last half-century. In the 1950s there was the TV series “The Untouchables”; today there is “The Sopranos,” while in the film world it is “The Godfather” and other movies too numerous to list.
Worse still, the mobsters in these flicks are sometimes depicted in a romanticized way, powerful but admirable family patriarchs who mete out a rough justice, occasionally helping the little guy. Scarce attention is given to how these gangsters actually make their living. The economic base is often left unmentioned. One would never guess that they are extortionists, swindlers, and small-time thieves. They exploit the weak and vulnerable, maybe not as effectively as Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom, but viciously enough.
Just about the only positive feature of “The Sopranos,” is the way it realistically depicts mobsters as ruthless extortionists who regularly victimize small business people and other hard-working folks. Distinct among mafia films is Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” An exceptionally well made movie based on a true story, “Goodfellas” divests the mafiosi of any romantic or glorified aura, revealing them to be the vicious bloodsuckers and cutthroats they really are.
Before I finally gave up on “The Sopranos,” I found myself enjoying the arcane Southern Italian slang words and expressions (which few non-Italians could grasp) that were slipped into the show’s scripts. Italian dialect terms that I had not heard since my youth in the old neighborhood, I now heard on a major media show.
Having been fed all these mafia shows, we need to remind ourselves that not all gangsters are Italian and not all Italians are gangsters. As with other ethnic groups in the last half century, Italian-Americans have moved in noticeable numbers into government service, political life, sports, law enforcement, education, organized labor, the professions and the arts. But very little of what constitutes non-criminal Italian-American life has been deemed worthy of cinematic treatment. (There have been a few exceptions such as “Marty,” “Bloodbrothers,” “Moonstruck,” and “Dominic and Eugene.”)
When Italians actually are portrayed as law abiding people it is usually within the framework of working-class stereotypes: action-prone, loud-mouthed, simple-minded, visceral, living a proletariat existence worth escaping (see for instance “Saturday Night Fever,” “Staying Alive” and “Hard Hat and Legs”). The media’s Italian ethnic bigotry is also a class bigotry.
Additional Italian-American media stereotypy can be found in the world of television advertisements, as Marco Ciolli reminds us: there is the Latin lover who wins his lady with his right choice of beverage; the Mafia don ready to start a gangland massacre if the lasagna isn’t magnifico; the nearly inarticulate disco dimwit who can barely say “Trident” as he twirls his partners around the dance floor. Above all, there are the uproarious family meal scenes of blissfully chattering Italians shoveling food around the table.
In the world of commercials, Italians are represented as noisy gluttons feasting with lip-smacking exuberance on endless platters of pasta, volunteering such connoisseur culinary judgments as “Mama mia! datza spicy meatball!” The stereotypic linking of Italians with food is so predominant as to preclude this ethnic group’s association with other realms of activity (except, of course, crime).
Thus a PBS documentary mini-series on the English language, written and narrated by Robert MacNeil (of MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour fame) dwelled at length on how various foreign languages have enriched the English language. However, Italian was something of an exception, MacNeil asserted, since the only Italian words he could find that have passed into English “all relate to food.”
MacNeil should have searched a little more carefully. The food stereotype so pre-empted his myopic vision as to cause him to overlook such inedibles as: politico, studio, ghetto, umbrella, piano, maestro, crescendo, graffiti, virtuoso, cognoscenti, literati, illuminati, incognito, prima donna, forte, dilettante, falsetto, aggiornamento, inamorata, vendetta, imbroglio, stiletto, paparazzi, regatta, impresario, rotunda, buffo, brio, bravo, bravado, divertimento, fortissimo, soprano, contralto, viola---one could on and on.
Their days taken up with runs to and from the kitchen, or with shooting people in the face, Italians doubtless are a poor choice when it comes to chairing a board meeting, offering medical advice, writing a cogent social analysis, debating a public policy, arguing a court case, or conducting a scientific experiment. As Ciolli observes, “Certainly no commercial has ever shown an Italian-American involved in any professional activity.”
It has been argued that the media merely reflect reality: after all there actually are Italian gangsters and Italians do like to drink wine and eat pasta (as do many other people). But such assertions overlook the distorted dimension of the “reality” presented. More often than not, the media’s approach is to propagate and reinforce the cheap, facile notions about one group or another rather than challenge such views in any measured way.
If the images can easily be made plausible, amusing, or sensational, then the corporate media will use them. The goal is to manipulate rather than educate, to reach as many people as quickly as possible with readily evocative labels and prefabricated representations.
Come to think of it, that’s also the way this nation’s rulers manipulate the wider political environment in regard to many other issues.
--Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in paperback. For more information, visit .
