Paul Basile, the Editor of "Fra Noi" (a Chicago based, Italian American
National Monthly), has been immersed in the antidefamation movement
for
nearly two decades now, first as a reporter for a multi-ethnic news
service
in the early ’80s, then as the managing editor of Fra Noi in the mid-’80s,
and finally as the editor of Fra Noi since 1990.
Over the course of the last several years, Mr. Basile has written several
pieces
about how we might do a better job of defending our good name. I have
asked
his permission to reprint that collection, which I will transmit in
a daily series.
I do so with just a few prefacing remarks. These articles do a wonderful
job
of covering the spectrum. One may quibble with some details, but therein
lies
the basis/template/draft for a Battle Plan for a Conference of Anti
Italian
Defamationists (AID) to address and "tweak".
I would be interested in hearing (and reprinting) any significant constructive
remarks regarding the CONCEPT,....... NOT the details. Yes, looking
to the
Future we MUST incorporate utilization of the INTERNET!!!!
This is a 6 Part Series.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Our Act Together- (Part 1 of 6)
ANTI-BIAS POSITION PAPER
by Paul Basile
Last year, USA Today published an article proclaiming that the Italian
mob
was dead in America: that after decades of relentless pursuit by law
enforcement officials, the back of “The Syndicate” has been broken,
and that
there are just over 1,000 Italian mobsters left nationwide. That’s
one five
thousandth of one percent of a total of 20 million overwhelmingly law-abiding
Italian Americans.
And yet, when Americans were asked in a national survey if they thought
that
Italian Americans were “into a lot of organized crime in this country,”
75
percent of them strongly agreed. No other ethnic group stirred more
than a 20
percent response rate, despite the fact that, statistically speaking,
organized crime is now dominated by other ethnic groups.
Why is that? Mainly because the entertainment industry has relentlessly
portrayed Italian Americans as gangsters for the last 30 years.
Everywhere you look — in the movies, on television, in books, even in
children’s programming —Italian Americans are portrayed almost exclusively
as mobsters or non-mobsters fighting the mob.
At the theaters, you can find them in movies like “Jane Austen’s Mafia,”
“Suicide Kings,” “The Big Hit,” “Analyze This,” “Mickey Blue Eyes,”
“Brooklyn State of Mind,” “Prince of Mulberry Street,” “Gangs of New
York,” “Peppermint Lounge” and “A Better Way to Die.”
On television, you can find them in fictional shows like “The Sopranos,”
“Bella Mafia” and “The Last Don”; and docudramas about John Gotti,
Sammy
“The Bull” Gravano and Bill Bonanno. A&E devoted an entire week
to Italian
crime families in 1997. A year later, they ran a week-long series on
family
business empires that featured the Rockefellers, DuPonts, Kelloggs,
Coors and
… the Gambino/Gotti crime family?!
Of late, movie mafiosi have been popping up in the most gratuitous of
cinematic places. In the paranoid thriller “Enemy of the State,” attorney
Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) survives a government conspiracy by
tricking
his tormentors into a climactic shoot-out with Italian mobsters. And
in the
romantic comedy “One Fine Day,” reporter Jack Taylor (George Clooney)
investigates a Mafia money-laundering scheme while romancing Michelle
Pfeiffer.
Italian mobsters have even invaded children’s shows, albeit in a more
cuddly
form. The “Animaniacs” cartoon series features a group of mafioso pigeons
known as the Goodfeathers, “Muppets Tonight” boasts a muppet Mafia
don and
his gorilla bodyguard, and in “Babe: Pig in the City,” the gangster
bulldog
speaks like Don Corleone.
And when we’re not being pigeon-holed as mobsters, we are being portrayed
as
ignorant savages in movies like Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” or charming
but
ethically challenged tricksters like Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny.”
Women
fare little better, being typecast either as oversexed bimbos or tyrannical
shrews.
This saga of pervasive stereotyping is filled with galling ironies.
In the dark comedy “To Die For,” an ambitious female TV reporter seduces
three teens and convinces them to murder her low-brow Italian-American
husband, whose family calls upon their contacts in the mob to return
the
favor. The only Italian Americans to be found in the real-life story
upon
which the movie is loosely based are the district attorneys who bring
the
woman to justice.
In the romantic drama “A Walk in the Clouds,” Keanu Reeves plays a young
G.I. who falls in love with the daughter of a California wine grower
of
Mexican descent, even though the industry has long been dominated by
Italian
Americans. I suppose we should take solace in the fact that the part
of the
patriarch went to an Italian, Giancarlo Giannini.
The opposite is true in “Lorenzo’s Oil,” the story of an Italian couple
in
America who find a miracle cure for their son’s fatal illness. The
parts of
the family members were played by Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon and Zack
O’Malley Greenburg, who only have a single real-life Italian-American
parent
among them. (It’s a little known fact that Susan Sarandon’s mom is
of
Italian descent.)
In the television series “NYPD Blue,” Italian mobsters make frequent
cameo
appearances, but there isn’t a single Italian-American officer on the
fictional police force that is otherwise commendable for its ethnic
diversity. The lone Hispanic officer is played by Italian-American
actor John
Turturro.
In those rare instances when we are cast as good guys, it’s almost always
in
a setting dominated by organized crime. Robert DeNiro plays an
Italian-American dad battling to free his son from the influence of
a
neighborhood thug in “A Bronx Tale,” Lorraine Bracco is the down-to-earth
Italian-American therapist who counsels the main character in “The
Sopranos,” and Johnny Depp plays an Italian-American officer who infiltrates
the Italian mob in “Donny Brasco.”
In general, when Italian-American actors are permitted to play heroes,
they
are almost never allowed to play Italian-American heroes. As a small
sampler,
Robert DeNiro plays family man Frank Raftis, who resists the temptation
to
have an affair in “Falling in Love”; Al Pacino plays crusading attorney
Arthur Kirkland in “Justice for All”; Stanley Tucci plays legendary
reporter
Walter Winchell in “Winchell”; John Travolta plays doomed genius George
Malloy in “Phenomenon”; Joe Mantegna plays the doting father of chess
prodigy Josh Waitzkin in “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and Renee Russo
plays
save-the-day scientist Robby Keough in “Outbreak.”
As a rule, when Hollywood conjures up a character to take the beach,
halt the
lava flow, stop the speeding bus, save the rain forest or blowup the
asteroid
before it hits, it turns to every other ethnic group other than Italian
America for inspiration.
You have to go as far back as Al Pacino’s Officer Frank Serpico in the
movie
“Serpico” and Daniel J. Travanti’s Captain Frank Furillo in the TV
series
“Hill Street Blues” to find an Italian-American actor who plays an
unequivocally heroic Italian-American character who isn’t battling
the
Italian mob tooth-and-nail.
Sure there are exceptions to the stereotype today. On TV, it’s “Everybody
Loves Raymond,” a sitcom created by comedian Ray Romano that tells
the story
of a charmingly wacky Italian-American family. In the movie theaters,
it’s
“The Big Night,” a comedy-drama created by Stanley Tucci in which two
Italian brothers struggle to keep their restaurant afloat in an America
that
hasn’t yet discovered the joys of risotto and timbale. In both cases,
Italian
mobsters are conspicuous by their absence. But these are exceptions
that
prove the rule.
Why do we find this state of affairs so offensive?
For the answer to that question, first look in the history books. We
hail
from a country that almost single-handedly created Western Civilization.
We
gave the modern world many of the basic principles of justice, government,
higher education, music, accounting, astronomy, medicine, mathematics
and
architecture, and we helped blaze most of the trails to the New World.
Now look at Italy today. It is the fifth strongest economy on the planet,
boasting mastery in the diverse worlds of fashion, cuisine and industrial
design, and it contains most of the world’s artistic treasures within
its
relatively narrow borders.
Now look around you. Italian Americans have achieved the pinnacle of
success
in almost every field. We are supreme court justices, presidential
chiefs of
staff, legislators and big city mayors. We are captains of industry,
heads of
universities, legends of the sports world and trendsetters in the arts.
We
discover cures for diseases, save families from burning buildings,
bring
criminals to justice, rescue innocent people from death row, perform
pro bono
surgery on destitute children in Third World countries, fight for veterans
rights and battle injustice in totalitarian regimes. We are honest,
law-abiding citizens whose work ethic, family ties, passion for life
and
creative spirit are the envy of the nation. We are among the most affluent
ethnic groups in the country, and only five thousandths of one percent
of us
are involved in organized crime.
Now look at your TV and movie-theater screens and what do you see? Mafia,
Mafia everywhere, and hardly an Italian-American hero to be found.
At heart, the offense committed by mob movies and TV shows is that they
take
the best our community has to offer — the passion, the loyalty, the
love of
family, the glorious cuisine — and they graft it onto the worst our
community
has produced. In effect, they debase everything our community holds
dear
while glamorizing bad people who have all but disappeared from American
society.
Apologists for “The Sopranos” and other shows of its ilk will argue
that
these shows are a fantasy, that nobody believes they are real. If that’s
so,
then why do 75 percent of Americans intimately link Italian Americans
with
organized crime at a time when U.S. government figures show that there
are
only 1,000 Italian-American mobsters left on the streets out of a total
population of 20 million Italian Americans?
Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that a lot of Italian Americans
enjoy the show, but then again, a lot of us don’t, including every
major
Italian-American organization in the country, representing hundreds
of
thousands of Italian-American families. Stereotypic portrayals of ethnic
groups have always been enjoyed by segments within the group being
stereotyped, but that doesn’t negate the views of those within the
group who
are offended.
Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that the show is written, produced,
directed and acted in by Italian Americans, but the same can be said
of the
“blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, which were written, produced,
directed
and acted in by African Americans until the African-American community
rose
up and said, “enough is enough.” (I’m fairly certain that the main
audience
for these films were African Americans. And yet, nobody looks back
on that
sorry era in our cinematic history and uses the audience’s makeup and
reaction to justify the stereotype.)
Apologists for “The Sopranos” will argue that the show is well done,
but in
my estimation, that makes it all the more reprehensible. A destructive
message presented in a well-crafted package makes that message all
the more
seductive and potent. The films of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl
are
considered by many critics to be cinematic masterpieces, but she will
never
be allowed to enter the pantheon of film gods because she used her
talents to
foist Adolph Hitler on the German people.
Apologists for “The Sopranos” will hide behind the Constitution, claiming
that it is protected by the First Amendment, but that debases one of
our most
precious rights. The Nazis are allowed to march in Skokie and the Klan
to
rally in Georgia thanks to the First Amendment. But the First Amendment
doesn’t make what they have to say good or decent or true, it only
protects
their right to say it. Personally, I’d rather hold myself to a higher
standard.
Why do so many Italian Americans love “The Sopranos”? For the same reason
that non-Italian Americans love it. Americans have long adored their
outlaws,
from the days of Jesse James to the present. And when you combine that
enduring national obsession with a walloping dose of Italian passion,
the
result is almost narcotic.
Quite honestly, if “The Sopranos” were the only show in town to traffic
in
such dangerous substance, I’d be more sanguine. But the fact is that
just
about every time you see Italian-American characters on the big or
small
screen, they’re either fighting the mob, fleeing the mob, or being
the mob.
And don’t think for a moment that this is a harmless association. Sam
Donaldson once said that he would automatically investigate any Italian
American running for higher office for ties to organized crime, without
making a similar assertion about any other ethnic group. And if you
were to
be honest, you’d have to admit that you, too, make the same assumption
whenever an Italian American rises to a position of power and influence.
Forget about the relentless Mafia jokes that Italian Americans in all
walks
of life have to endure as a result of this relentless pattern of portrayal.
Prejudice of this magnitude invariably blossoms into discrimination,
with
jobs, contracts and advancement hanging in the balance.
Apologists for “The Sopranos” argue the show’s detractors should relax.
To
them, I say, “Do the math.” A mere one in 20,000 Italian Americans
is
currently involved in organized crime. When Hollywood gives me 19,999
decent-to-heroic Italian Americans for every Mafioso it serves up,
that’s
when I’ll relax.
|