Thursday,
June 21, 2007
Accepting Negative Italian Stereotypes
Hurts Blacks Also, Warns Black Award Winning Writer
The
ANNOTICO Report
Gregory
Kane of BlackAmericanWeb.com was stunned to see how many black folks
rocked "The Sopranos." Some of those black folks he
considers pretty sharp, who would be the first to sniff out -- and
condemn -- anything even remotely resembling the stereotyping of
African-Americans.
&
nbsp;
He
says:"I don
But
one Italian-American did. His name is Mark
Di Ionno. His
column forThe
Di Ionno said the show "makes many Italians embarrassed, and is
damaging to their image."
"Worse,
it gives some impressionable Italian-American young men - a role model for
acting like wannabe goons. Don
But what grabbed
Kane
Kane then goes on
to warn the Black American Community of embracing this Black Negative
Stereotype, or celebrating ANY Negative Stereotype.
It
That includes a
lot of black folks, many of whom were diehard fans of the HBO series about an
Italian-American mob family. I was stunned to see how many black folks rocked
"The Sopranos." Some of those black folks are ones I consider pretty
sharp, who would be the first to sniff out -- and condemn -- anything even
remotely resembling the stereotyping of African-Americans.
So exactly why were some of these same
black folks ardent watchers of "The
Sopranos"?
I don
And if one ethnic
or racial group is fair game for stereotyping, then all groups should be.
Black fans of "The Sopranos" couldn
DiIonno said the show "makes many Italians embarrassed, and is
damaging to their image. Worse, it gives some impressionable Italian-American
young men - a role model for acting like wannabe goons. Don
Young
Italian-American men aren
We know Morrow as
Ice-T.
DiIonno said biographies of Ice-T
mention the gangbanging and drug dealing and the pimping, but "leave out
the 13 years in
Amen to that, DiIonno. No wonder black devotees of
"The Sopranos" couldn
Apparently Ice-T
has no problem with bios that portray him as a gangbanger,
drug dealer and pimp while downplaying his middle-class upbringing. It
At a symposium
held at the Milton S. Eisenhower Institute in
I told those
assembled that I did two different Lexis Nexis
searches of news stories. One had the words "black and poor." The
other had the words "black and middle class." It turned out the
media, far from ignoring stories about race and poverty, had a wealth of them.
There were more
stories with the words "black and poor" in a one-year period than
there were with the words "black and middle class" in a five-year
period.
It
We should be
proud of that. We should be celebrating that. Instead, it seems we
"The
Sopranos" made many Italian-Americans embarrassed, and rightly so. Why is
a middle-class upbringing so embarrassing to some black folks?
* *
Gregory
Kane is an award-winning columnist for the
The
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