Discrimination Against The Southern Italian Immigrants

While reading “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990” by Robert Orsi, I learned something that I had never known before. I know that people from many countries are discriminated against, but I never thought that people from Italy were discriminated against. Orsi’s work states that there was a difference between the people from northern Italy and from southern Italy. Northern Italians were fair-skinned, “more industrious,” and “law-abiding.” They were welcome to the USA, but southern Italians were “lazy, criminal, sexually irresponsible, and emotionally volatile.” A group, the Dillingham Commission, did not even include the southern Italians in the white race. I never thought that Italians were a group that was discriminated against, so that information was somewhat shocking to me. I always thought they were considered to be white. It just had not occurred to me that there was discrimination against specific people from countries like Italy or Ireland. We never learn about that in middle school or high school, but rather we focus on discrimination against African Americans or Native Americans.
Soon enough, southern Italians moved into the territory of African Americans. They competed with one another for housing, jobs, and neighborhood power and presence. “Italians moved into established black neighborhoods at the turn of the century in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Greenwich Village, among other places; fifty years later, African Americans were displacing Italians in these same locations.” Italians moved into jobs that African American used to have, such as “barbering, restaurant service, brickworking, and garbage collecting.” They even began to dominate these jobs, displacing the African Americans.
Although it may seem as though the southern Italians and African Americans may get alone since they are both groups of people that are segregated against, this is not necessarily true. This is because of the fierce competition between the two groups, but also because of something written by George Cunningham. He wrote that southern Italian immigrants learned that if they wanted to survive, they had to look down upon everything that white people loathed, which included African Americans. This idea is very upsetting because it is wrong to look down upon other people in the first place, but now, people are looking down upon others to fit in. It isn’t correct to change yourself for someone either, but the idea of debasing other people to fit in? That is absurd! The southern Italians would soon come to be accepted as the African Americans were, but they had to be patient, which they obviously were not willing to be.