Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

9. Skin: Giancarlo and the Border Patrol

chapter 9 Skin Giancarlo and the Border Patrol To be white and sound that black, you’ve got to be Italian. —Steve Van Zandt, 1997 To their corporate shame, Italian Americans figured prominently in two of the New York City hate crimes of the 1980s, crimes so closely tied to the patrolling of informal community borders that the fatal incidents are now known simply by the names of the respective neighborhoods: Howard Beach and Bensonhurst. On the night of December 20, 1986, a posse of young toughs in their late teens—the boy wielding the bat was Jon Lester, but eight of the other eleven had conspicuously Italian surnames—chased down four black men, beat them with fists and bashed them with the baseball bat and a tree limb, for the “crime” of needing to make a telephone call in a pizzeria after their car broke down on the outskirts of Howard Beach, an isolated section of Queens near Kennedy Airport also known as the home of gangster John Gotti. Trying to escape, with the bloodthirsty mob in pursuit, one of the four men, Michael Griffith, twenty-three, was struck and killed by a car, whose driver thought he had hit a deer. On August 23, 1989, a warm summer night, Yusuf Hawkins, sixteen, and three of his buddies were on their way to keep an appointment to inspect a used car, advertised for sale in Bensonhurst (at that time, the Little Italy of Brooklyn), when they were accosted by a pack of thirty to forty white youths armed with handguns, knives, and baseball bats. Four shots rang out: Hawkins was shot dead, another of the boys was 162 grazed. Eight young men—all of them from Bensonhurst, seven with conspicuously Italian names—were arraigned for some combination of civil rights violations, criminal possession of a weapon, first-degree or aggravated assault, first-degree riot, manslaughter, and murder in the second or first degree.1 The youth who actually pulled the trigger, Joey Fama, may have been “not right in the head,” but the extenuating circumstances otherwise spoke volumes. The boys had been whipped into fantasies of proprietary masculinity and preemptive sexual vengeance by one Gina Feliciano, of Afro-Caribbean and Italian heritage, who had boasted that her black and Latino friends were coming to kick the local boys’ “pussy white asses.” “Italian Americans in Bensonhurst are notable for their cohesiveness and provinciality; the slightest pressure turns those qualities into prejudice and racism,” Marianna De Marco Torgovnick reports: “I detested the racial killing; but I also understood it.” Maria Laurino, another offspring of Bensonhurst who crossed Ocean Parkway, passes judgment: “Yes, [the residents of Bensonhurst] were right to assert that it was a mentally impaired young man who pulled the trigger that killed Hawkins, but they refused to accept blame for an entrenched bigotry that created the setting for this racial tragedy.” Truth be told, Italian American xenophobia had struck African Americans in the Brooklyn-Queens corridor once again.2 Of course it hadn’t always been this way. At the turn of the century, during the height of immigration, Southern Italians were “swarthy,” and therefore not exactly white: dagoes, wops, and guineas. In the North, the Italians took the dirtiest jobs—digging ditches, picking rags, shoveling manure off the streets—at the lowest pay, on a scale that went from “white” to “black” to “Italian” (with “Irish” and “Hebrew” pegged variously in between); in the Jim Crow South, in Alabama and in Mississippi and especially in Louisiana, Sicilians worked side by side with African Americans in the cotton and sugar fields, upon occasion bunking with them, and upon occasion getting lynched, too. Everywhere they went, the Italians were tagged as dumb, dangerous, and apelike; and the police profiled them, with familiar results. By 1924, the nativist forces in the U.S. House and Senate had passed laws grossly favoring immigrants from Anglo-Saxon Protestant Europe, especially the British Isles, reducing the influx from Italy and its Mediterranean neighbors to a trickle.3 The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, which skin 163 mixed the sorts of prejudices that greeted African Americans with the ones that greeted Jews (prejudices in play whether Sacco and Vanzetti did it or not) spanned the better part of the 1920s. Roosevelt’s decision in 1942 to take the Italians off the suspect aliens list and close down the Montana internment camps...