For the last sixty or so years the media-education complex has established a rule that only ethnic groups of color are permitted to have grievances. Indeed, since the emergence of Barack Obama, these groups have formed something of a grievance-industrial complex.

Italian-Americans apparently don’t pass the color test. Although they come from roughly the same Mediterranean stock as people from Spain, Americans of Spanish descent get a bump up the swag wagon. Italians get niente.

People of Spanish descent even get a designated month, National Hispanic Heritage Month. In that month begins on September 15, it overlaps and overshadows the one day historically allotted to Italians, the second Monday of October, as well as the real Columbus Day, October 12, the actual anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America.

Italians, in any case, are less inclined to dwell on past injustices than most other ethnic groups. They have not, for instance, pounded into our consciousness the events that took place in New Orleans in 1891. They could have. That year the city’s popular police chief was shot down on a city street. As the chief lay dying, he was asked who shot him. He reportedly whispered, “Dagoes.” Nine Italians were promptly rounded up for trial.

In a tribute to American justice, the jury found six of the accused innocent and could not reach a verdict on the guilt of the other three. As happens even today, unpopular verdicts provoke mobs to violence. In this case, on March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the jail and lynched the nine accused, plus two of their paisanos who got in the way.

Although the CRT crowd is mum on the subject, this attack represented the most deadly mass lynching in American history. That said, rather than fret about systemic anti-Italianism, just a year after the New Orleans lynchings Italians proudly celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

In Newark, New Jersey -- the city at the center of my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities -- some 32 Italian societies joined in the festivities. For Italians, no historical figure solidified their status as real Americans the way Columbus did.

Italians celebrated despite the decidedly mixed reception they received from the native born. A late-century Newark publication, the Sentinel of Freedom, said of these newly minted Americans, “Though the Italians form a very small part of the population of Newark, they are steadily growing in numbers and, as a rule, are quiet, inoffensive people, and many of them are industrious and thrifty and are steadily making money.” So far, so good, then this unfiltered gem: “They come chiefly from Naples and a more ragged, dirty set of people it would be hard to imagine.”

Ignoring the contempt from the Anglo establishment, Italians increasingly identified themselves as Americans. In 1927, with the cooperation of the city, Newark’s Italians chipped in to place an epic statue of Christopher Columbus in downtown’s Washington Park. Some fifty thousand people showed up for a parade and the unveiling.

Newark’s Italian population was centered in the First Ward, known affectionately as “Little Italy,” a thriving neighborhood filled with shops, restaurants, nightclubs, and the occasional street festival. In 1952, the progressive “housers” of the federal government declared the neighborhood a “slum” and set about to level it.

The plan called for the destruction of 477 buildings, most of them three-story walk-ups. The 3,000-plus people who lived there were unceremoniously set adrift on their own trail of tears. The CRT crowd doesn’t talk about this mass removal either. Replacing Little Italy was a housing project comprised of eight thirteen-story buildings. As balm to the Italian community, the authorities called the project the “Columbus Homes.” Within a decade, it would be unlivable. Within four decades, gone.

In Newark as in other American cities, Italian-Americans were reluctant to flee the increasing crime and chaos consuming urban America. Instead, they fought back. After the lethal Newark riots of 1967, aspiring local politico Anthony Imperiale organized a resistance. The media were quick to denounce him as a vigilante and worse.

The locals who saw Imperiale and his crew in action had a different take. He was not resisting Blacks, they argued. He was resisting criminals. Imperiale’s people often got to crime scenes before the police did and were particularly attentive to the victims, especially women. His presence solidified neighborhoods and slowed white flight.

It didn’t matter. The White ethnics of urban America were damned if they fled and damned if they fought. As an ethnic group, Italians in Newark and elsewhere had been effectively cleansed from the political landscape. Their resistance was denounced. Their champions were denied status as civil rights leaders. Their protests went all but unheard.

Nationally, the media indifference to the plight of Italian-Americans showed itself in their growing hostility to Christopher Columbus. “For many Indigenous peoples,” US News reminds us, “Columbus Day is a controversial holiday. This is because Columbus is viewed not as a discoverer, but rather as a colonizer. His arrival led to the forceful taking of land and set the stage for widespread death and loss of Indigenous ways of life.”

Overlooked in this description is the fact that Christopher Columbus was in the employ of the Spanish crown. He was a discoverer, an explorer, a bold and brilliant one. The Italians did no colonizing. Columbus’s employers did, and yet their descendants get to celebrate “National Hispanic Heritage Month.” How does that work?

Although Columbus Day still exists as a federal holiday, it is increasingly being replaced by what is called “Indigenous People’s Day.” Says US News, “Research has shown that many schools do not accurately represent Indigenous peoples when they teach history.”

Of course they don’t. If their teachers did teach the truth, they would start by telling their students that there are no indigenous people in America. American Indians all came from somewhere else, most likely northeast Asia, and not that long ago. Most tribes kicked a lot of Indian butt to end up where the Europeans found them.

The hatred of all things American and Italian culminated in the summer of 2020. All across America, the George Floyd mania gave the haters the excuse they needed to deface or destroy Christopher Columbus statues. In Newark, Mayor Ras Baraka had city work crews rip the epic Columbus statue from its pedestal in the middle of the night without even consulting the Italian community that had given it to the city.

Baraka claimed the statue’s removal was “a statement against the barbarism, enslavement, and oppression that this explorer represents.” He then had the moxie to say, “The removal of this statue should not be perceived as an insult to the Italian-American community.”

“Insult,” no. This crudely symbolic stroke of ethnic cleansing went well beyond “insult.” Baraka wasn’t through. Although he promised that the statue would be kept in storage, this was not a promise he felt obliged to keep. The statue was soon found dumped in an open field next to an interstate.

That same summer, Newark began work on a statue of the newly sainted George Floyd. The 700-pound Floyd now sits on a bench in front of City Hall. His lengthy rap sheet includes no known instances of oceans crossed or continents discovered or, for that matter, anything that made anyone proud. Ever.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is now available in all formats.

Image: Public Domain