Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice edited by William J. Connell and Fred Gardaphe includes a number of very interesting and informative pieces.  I focus on just two: but the entire volume merits reading.  

Anyone who has spent time here will be aware that I think that the Italian-American experience delineates the behavioral realities that also create nuclear weapons:  As a population shifts from a peasant economy to an industrial economy a school system differentiates students by IQ.  That differentiation was necessary for Italians to match the Native Born White of Native Born Parents category in terms of broad occupational categories and income. That differentiation is also the behavioral backbone of every country which succeeds in moving a portion of its population into the nuclear holocaust game. Where the best student is very very good; nuclear weaponry can get very very good; very, very fast. Think China.  

So while the differentiation by IQ inside a relentlessly efficient school system was part of the story, the other part of the story is a developing awareness of commonness. Southern Italians, particularly those who look the part, learn to sing a similar aria in public.  

The essay that underlines commonality, "Narrating Guido" is a particularly informative and, unusual for a work in a collection directed at prejudice; humorous. It describes its purpose and paints a picture of young people in an urban setting developing an ethnic narrative, and a posture. It is a little different. It sees strengths that are utilized in an urban environment; the big city, to navigate a relentlessly ethnic universe.

Part of the  story is external; part of the story is internal. There is a conscious awareness of sharing a style-based identification with other youth that places them in a 'youth category.' Shared style implies an established difference in relation to youth others. 

We have different youth, made different by ethnicity. 

The background is part of what makes this specific essay particularly interesting: New York City. A really big city. But a city where, from the perspective where I live, New Hampshire; practically no one is actually an American. 

Well, that's an exaggeration: the Irish are Americans. But, besides Italians and Irish, the city is also filled with Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Mexicans, Jews and Asians.  In New York City, it would be incorrect to paint the canvas with an imposing blond nativist assaulting the sensibilities of a poor short Italian. In the stigmatization narrative, Italians cannot justify a claim for primacy. From the perspective of White America the city is a mess in which Italians are part of the mess; but generally not the worst part.
 
This general ethnic mess opens opportunities for ethnic cohesiveness, and even display, which would not be available in, say, Northern New England. I do not know where defiance meets irrational denial; or rational assertion, but there is an assertion in New York as befits the young:

  - The essay is based on "the point of view of young Italian Americans who call themselves 'Guido.' "

  - "The larger significance of this story may be found in a 'struggle for recognition and respect' that shapes the assimilation of subordinate ethnic groups in American society."

  - "Youth subculture can be a 'construction site' for ethnicity."

 - "[I]t is a matter of intellectual integrity to own the story of Guido within the Italian American experience . . ."

 - "Meanings originate in the  popular culture, especially in the mass media, but are translated and rearranged to suit a youth agenda."

 - "Instead of wearing baggy and oversized clothes, Guidos make sure their clothes are tight. Straight legs are very common. They go perfect with their Sketcher boots. Shirts have to be tight to show off their muscles and tattoos. You still need a gold chain to go with your outfit."

 - -"We wear pretty much the same type of jewelry; things like gold crosses, pretty rings, and bracelets our boyfriends gave to us. Before I started hanging out with this group all I listened to was rap and reggae. Now all I listen to is freestyle and club music. . . . Most people say that freestyle is all Italians listen to. I have to say that for the most part, that is true."

 - "The emergence of contemporary style-based youth subcultures is predicated on requisite discretionary income and consumption; sufficient leisure is also a factor, a development bound up with delayed marriage and employment. . . Italian American youth culture in the West End of Boston in the late 1950's was truncated by the onset of adulthood in the late teens."

 - "Guido also presupposes diminished familial and community traditions, leading to an erosion of 'adult surveillance' necessary for more autonomous 'youth formations.' "
 
 - "When it (WKTU) returned to the air in 1996 . . . with a publicity stunt in Times Square that invoked the mythic energy of Saturday Night Fever, it was anointed as the 'Guido station.' "

 - However, the realities of city life, commercial life, demands a certain amalgamation with other ethnicities. The "fit" between Italians and certain Hispanic groups cannot be missed. On the station, "Latin and Italian American personalities display a fraternization that mocks serious ethnic identity." 

 - Moreover, on the issue confronting any outsider in a blond society Latins and Italians carry a common vulnerability: "An egregiously biased comment was attributed to WAXQ FM . . . on June 26, 2002: 'Italians are niggers that have lost their memories. ' "

- "Although a youth subculture, Guido does emerge out of social conditions that are general for an Italian American experience that has unfolded in New York City (and throughout much of the urban Northeast.)"

 - "The identity transactions that comprise Guido point to the ongoing 'dialectical' construction of Italian American ethnicity. Guido is more a narrative of about 'routes' than 'roots.' "

  One sees in Guido, a common ethnic assertion. A unifying theme.

 One sees in school, a disaggregation. A population that represented the behavioral monotone of the peasant differentiated into an industrial work force. 

 Readers of my paper on nuclear weapons know that I see the American school system confronting immigrant populations from peasant backgrounds as a specifically non-unifying force. The school makes visible IQ differences within that peasantry; which differences had never been visible before. That difference basically accounts for what I say happened between the Italian immigrant population and the offspring of that group between 1950 and 1970.    

  Perversions of Knowledge: Confronting Racist Ideologies behind Intelligence Testing" by Dr. Elizabeth G. Messina essentially tells the story of stigmatization.   Her article is almost entirely an assault; but one is not sure if the assault is on IQ tests or the reports about the tests. 

  -"Nearly a century ago, race psychologists stigmatized Italian Americans as a genetically inferior identity group. The success of Italian Americans today is complicated by the persistence of negative stereotypes of Italian Americans in the media . . ."

 -"No other European ancestry group in America who migrated at the turn of the century continues to be so blatantly defamed and stigmatized."

 - "[T]he impact of psychology's early intelligence testing research on the intergenerational educational experiences of Italian Americans will also be explored."

 -"Eugenicists believed that all men are not born equal, and that white Americans and northern and western Europeans, in particular, were superior to all other racial groups."

-"The Army's Alpha and Beta tests were designed to determine innate differences in intelligence between American-born citizens and foreign-born draftees."

 -"Yerkes, along with several other eugenicist psychologists, drew broad conclusions from the low scores earned by these foreign draftees and used data to confirm the innate inferiority of foreign races and to argue for new laws restricting immigration by national origin."

  - "The superior intelligence of the 'American Nordic race' permitted America to eternally pursue progress. Culturally entrenched racial prejudices supported by dehumanizing stereotypes of Italian immigrants permitted Americans to exclude them from benefitting from the nations's prosperity on equal terms."

 -"The findings of Dr. Arthur Sweeney's 1922 journal article, 'Mental Tests for Immigrants,' were incorporated in the appendix to the Hearings of the House Committee on Immigration. . . Sweeney proffered that Italian immigrants belonged to a 'degenerate horde so depraved they hardly belong to our species.' "

 - "He (Sweeney) writes, 'The economic exploitation of cheap, unintelligent labor from abroad has fastened a serious racial as well as social-economic problem upon us,' " 
 

OK, all familiar enough. But Messina's piece gets interesting when she addresses certain facts around IQ issues.

 -"Throughout the 1920's, group-administered tests of intelligence (instruments that could be given to a group of participants in a single setting) were systematically used by racist psychologists to accrue evidence for a genetic-evolutionary explanation of inherent racial differences in intelligence. From a eugenicist perspective, gathering empirical evidence to document the innate intellectual inferiority of the immigrant's child would leave no doubt that intelligence is heritable." 
           Commentary: Why does Dr. Messina throw in the gratuitous "racist psychologists" to characterize social scientists who in many cases may have been simply curious and emotionally neutral about what the tests might reveal?


 - "In 1920, Columbia University instructor, Katherine Murdoch, conducted a comparative study of the intelligence of the 'brightest' immigrant children . . .Based on the mean score of each racial group, the study showed that Italian children scored considerably below the mean scores of American-born and "Hebrew and Negro" children in intelligence. . . . The Italians maintain their position at the foot of the four races." 
            Commentary: After this  Dr. Messina writes, "Murdoch's conclusions about the children of Italian immigrants were unequivocally racist." What justifies the label racist? Presumably Ms. Murdoch is reporting what the test scores told her.

 - "Maud A. Merrill analyzed 'mental differences,' as measured by the Stanford Binet, between American and foreign-born children . . . Merrill found that the majority of IQ scores of the foreign-born children were in the below average or mentally retarded range. She also found that 8 percent of their IQ scores fell into the average or above average range . . .Guided by Terman's eugenicist ideology, Merrill concluded that foreign-born students in general, and Italian students in particular, 'have been pushed beyond their mental capacity.' To acknowledge;edge that social class differences affect IQ is to suggest that environmental differences, and not heredity alone, accounted for racial differences in intelligence. Similarly, to acknowledge that 8 percent of the 'foreign group' scored in the average range is to suggest that genes or race alone were not controlling intelligence. Clearly, Merrill's selective interpretation of the study results demonstrate that eugenicist orthodoxy, and not scientific objectivity, guided her conclusions."
  Commentary: Not fair.  The IQ argument has always implied the bell curve. It is not inconsistent to argue that Italian immigrants suffer from a handicap that is reflected in a statistical analysis; while also holding that not every Italian has a handicap as measured against a standard set by the American majority.

-"The participants in V.T. Graham's study of 1926 were American-born Jewish and Italian children who resided in Boston and its environs. She compared racial differences in intelligence, as measured by the Revised Stanford-Binet and the Pinter and Patterson Performance Tests, between three 'racial' groups: Jewish children ranked highest (IQ=105), American children ranked second (IQ=99) and Italian children ranked lowest (IQ=85). Because both the the verbal and nonverbal versions of the intelligence tests were used, Graham concluded, 'While Italians made a poor showing in every respect . . . all possible language factors were ruled out, so that the consistent inferiority of the Italians to the Jews cannot be explained away as a function of language.'
  The Jewish and American children scored in the average range (90-100), and the Italians in the low average range (80-90). In graham's study, small differences were found between Italian, American, and Jewish children, yet Graham's conclusions exaggerated the significance of these differences. Moreover, the performance of foreign-born children on the Stanford-Binet was compared to a 'normative sample' of one thousand white, middle-class, and English-speaking children. Foreign-born children were not represented in the standardization group of the Stanford-Binet. Consequently their performance was unfairly compared to native-born children."
  Commentary: Three points. First, to call a deficit of 15 IQ points from the average a "small difference" is to miss the point of the IQ argument. It is exactly because the difference is so big, that we know it cannot be correct after we measure Italian economic and educational achievement against the Native Born White of Native Born Parents norms. Second, American academicians have been using Jews as a sort of template for white America, in examining Italian immigration experience, for generations. (See my discussion on Professor Thernstrom in Nuclear Weapons and the Blue-eyed People.)  In fact, by the second generation, Italians virtually mirror the American white majority in education, income and occupation: It is the Jews who are very, very different. Third, following the quoted material, Dr.  Messina again labels the researchers as "racist psychologists." Unfair. Maybe they were not prejudiced against Italians. They were just reporting their findings.

  It is interesting to contrast Dr. Messina's observation that Italian Americans have had success, a comment I find congenial, with her observation about the impact of intelligence testing on the opportunities that they were given. One would think that the findings of the psychology experts did not have much of an impact on the way the economic and educational realities played out.   

 -     Dr. Messina's treatment of what she terms "Antiracist Intelligence Testing" is right on point. We now know most children who speak a foreign language at home, do better on so-called performance tests, which use a minimum of language in the test, than they do on language tests. Further, Margaret Mead's study that showed language based IQ scores increased with the amount of English language spoken in the home, shows the importance of having facility with the language of the specific IQ test under consideration. 

  By 1968, when AFQT scores in Rhode Island were above the national average, Italian Americans who made up about one-fifth of the total population, had grown up speaking English.  Once Italians were comfortable in the dominant language, second generation Italian-Americans would inevitably be distributed by the American school system along the economic-educational dimension of the larger society, if their IQ matched the IQ of Native Born Whites of Native Born Parents. 

 






































I think that the Italian-American experience demonstrates the power of IQ tests, but that the Rhode Island experience on the AFQT demonstrates the need for fluency in English.

Properly seen, IQ and a school system disaggregated an Italian-American work force. A peasantry confronted a school system that separated them by IQ: By 1970 Italians who had been a uniform peasantry separated into different occupational trajectories that matched the larger categories for native born whites.