A Dago's Perspective on Diversity and White Privilege - The Libertarian
Institute
https://www.libertarianinstitute.org/blog/dagos-perspective-diversity-white-privilege/

*A Dago's Perspective on Diversity and White Privilege*

April 4, 2017 - 

By Mencken's Ghost

If you are a member of the campus thought police and offended by the
word "dago," too bad.  Here are some other offensive synonyms for
"Italian:" wop, greaseball, greaser, goombah, mobster, and garlic eater.

I grew up being called all of those slurs.  But until recent times, I
was never called a privileged white.  It takes a special kind of
stupidity and cultural insensitivity by academics and their fellow
Mao-style cultural revolutionaries to mash together scores of distinct
ethnic groups, shades of skin color, nationalities, and socioeconomic
classes into one glob and then to say that everyone in the glob is white
and privileged and that everyone outside of the glob is disadvantaged.

This is particularly galling in view of the fact that in the early
1970s, at the start of my business career, I was at the leading edge of
the equal rights and affirmative-action movements in industry, and then
later, the diversity movement—a movement that began when Roosevelt
Thomas published his 1990 landmark article on diversity in the Harvard
Business Review.  I even went on retreats with minorities and women to
have frank discussions about racial and gender issues in the workplace.

All of those efforts have now been turned on their head.   Ugly
stereotypes about people of color have been replaced by ugly stereotypes
about whites, especially the stereotype that whites have political
power, cultural hegemony, wealth, and other advantages because they are
guilty of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the propagation
of a white and Western take on history, art and literature—as if other
races and cultures haven't done the same throughout human history.

Unwittingly and ironically, the cultural revolutionaries are
demonstrating a universal fact about human nature, a fact that
university anthropologists and historians would admit if most of them
weren't doctrinaire leftists or afraid of being called racist, or worse,
capitalist—namely, that the natural tendency of humans is to think in
terms of their tribe and to stick it to other tribes when given the
opportunity to do so.

More on this later, but first please hang on as I veer into a discussion
of my white privilege, which is a similar story for other white ethnic
groups.

The roots of my privilege go back to my immigrant grandparents, who had
emigrated as peasants from Italy and settled in the Italian section of
St. Louis.  Due to being on a prominent hill in the city, the community
was called Dago Hill by WASPs, blacks, and Italians alike for the first
20 years of my life.  Now a tourist destination, it's just called "The
Hill."

Irish cops who worked for the corrupt Democrat machine that controlled
St. Louis liked to bop wops with their billyclubs, in an early form of
racial profiling.  During Prohibition, local cops and the feds would
peek into the basement windows and keyholes of homes to see if the
inhabitants were mashing grapes for wine, which is exactly what my
fraternal grandparents did in the basement of their humble flat, using
grapes grown in their small backyard.  At the same time, city bigwigs
would patronize speakeasies, including one where my fraternal grandpa
worked as a barkeep and bouncer, a job he took after leaving the coal
mines of Southern Illinois.  He had hands the size of coal shovels and
forearms the size and strength of pistons.  My maternal grandfather
worked as a waiter and walked a mile to his job because he and nonna
never owned a car and didn't want to spend their meager income on bus fare.

Some privilege.

Just like today's immigrants from Latin America, most of the inhabitants
of Dago Hill worked as restaurant workers, butchers, factory laborers,
sewer workers, and tile setters.  The last was the occupation of my dad
and my uncle.

At the age of 15, I began working at an exclusive country club, a club
that papist "Eyetalians" couldn't join.  I was the only white, er,
olive, member of the clubhouse staff.  Everyone else was black.  The
employees had their own pecking order.  I was at the bottom with the
janitors, porters and dishwashers; next came the chef and cooks; then
came the waiters, all of whom were former Pullman waiters and wore crisp
white shirts and jackets and drove big Buicks and Oldsmobiles, cars that
my parents could only dream of owning; and finally, at the top of the
pecking order was clubhouse manager Bill Williams, a distinguished
looking black man with impeccable manners, perfect diction, and finely
tailored suits with cuff-linked shirts.

I would wash and wax Williams' car as well as the waiters' cars after
work for extra money—and felt privileged to do so.

The employee locker room and restroom were in the dingy basement.  On
the first day on the job, my black boss told me to clean the restroom,
which looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in years.  Knowing it was a
test to see if I knew where I stood in the pecking order, I decided to
make it gleam.  As I was finishing, one of the cooks, a former prize
fighter, walked in clearly inebriated and proceeded to pee on a wall and
the floor.  When done, he said, "Here, clean this up, whitey."  My boss,
who happened to be walking by, pounced on the cook as quickly as a
panther, threw him against the wall, and said, "You clean it up, you
black mother******."  Not wanting the cook as an enemy, I said, "No
problem, I'll get it."

After that, my coworkers accepted me as one of their own and would
invite me to picnics in Forest Park with their families.  I can still
taste the wonderful barbecued ribs.  This was at a time when blacks were
still suffering immensely from poverty and discrimination, but it also
was before the welfare state had disintegrated black families and made
men unnecessary in the raising of children.

After high school, using the money I had saved from working at the
country club and holding other menial jobs, I attended a small Catholic
university in Texas, where about a third of the student body was
second-generation Mexican Americans or Mexican nationals.  They didn't
refer to themselves as Hispanic or Latino or aggrieved or
disadvantaged.  Other than culture, cuisine, second language, and skin
shade, they were no different from the residents of Dago Hill:  They
simply wanted to better their lives.

Some of them were a lighter shade than I was, especially if I had spent
a summer in the sun.  Others were even privileged, as was the case of a
friend of mine whose dad was an industrialist in Monterrey, Mexico.
Imagine that:  the son of an Italian tile setter getting along with the
son of a Spanish industrialist without the need for diversity training.

Back then, the adjective "Hispanic" was used correctly to describe
someone from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe; that is, a dreaded
European.  Now it's a catchall term that includes not only white
Spaniards and Portuguese, but also various other nationalities and
races, including Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, native Americans,
blacks, and mestizos.

A TV commercial shows how confused people are about the word.  The
commercial is for a company that analyzes blood samples to determine the
customer's race.  It features a woman who says, "I didn't realize that
my /nationality/ was Hispanic."  Memo to ad agency:  "Hispanic" is
neither a nationality nor a race.

Not that I want to know, but there is no telling what a DNA analysis
would say about my race, given that the peninsula of Italy has been
conquered and ruled by Visigoths, Muslims, Greeks, Etruscans, and the
French, among others.  And until the late nineteenth century, Italy
wasn't a unified nation at all.  To this day, Italians identify
themselves by region, as was the case for my Piedmontese mom and my
Lombard dad—both of whom viewed Naples and Sicily as foreign lands and
felt no kinship to the characters in the "Godfather" movie or to the
Sicilian and Napolese cultures that prevail among the Italians of New
York City and New Jersey.

They also didn't feel any kinship to Benito Mussolini, whose adventures
in colonialism, imperialism, and fascism eventually got him hanged by
his heels, along with his mistress.  My parents had nothing to do with
these adventures, because their parents had left Italy decades before El
Duce came to power.

Nor did they have anything to do with Christopher Columbus' brutality
against indigenous people in the Caribbean, or the brutality of
Spaniards (aka Hispanics) against indigenous people in South and Central
America, or the enslavement of Africans for the sugar and cotton
industries in the Americas, or for the genocide committed by Belgians in
the Congo.

Nor were they responsible for centuries of butchery committed by Arab
tribes, or by sub-Saharan African tribes, or by the Incas and Mayans, or
by Genghis Kahn, or by Chinese war lords, or by Native Americans, or by
the imperial Japanese, or by Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot, or by Sunni and
Shiite Muslims of today.

Campus cultural revolutionaries don't seem to know about this
universality of human butchery and bondage, because they have studied
only Volume II of a twelve-volume set of human history.  Volume II
negates everything in Volume I, which was the volume that used to be
taught in K-12 public schools and colleges.  It was the volume of
American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, the shining city on the hill,
John Wayne, "Father Knows Best," "Leave it to Beaver," Boy Scouts, and
Western culture and history.  In other words, Volume I was just as
biased as Volume II is in the other direction.  Instead of glorifying
white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as Volume I did, Volume II demonizes them.

The subscribers to Volume II think that their take on human existence is
the final word, thus demonstrating that they have no idea what is in the
remaining volumes.  This is particularly true at Harvard, Yale, and
other Ivy League schools, which I never had the means to attend but
where privileged minorities do attend and rail against white privilege.
Such ignorance and closed-mindedness is hard to fathom.

Well, that's not entirely true.  Similar ignorance and closed-mindedness
prevails at the University of Arizona, where my son earned a bachelor's
and master's in engineering and was very active in campus life—and where
the indoctrination, propaganda, political correctness, piety and
sanctimony of Volume II pervade the curricula, residence halls, and
every nook and cranny of campus, just as conservatives claim.  Knowing
about the the vindictiveness and pettiness of the cultural
revolutionaries on campus, I postponed the writing of exposes on this
while my son was attending the university.

Of course the University of Arizona has an obligatory office for
inclusion and diversity, which is a euphemism for favoring non-whites
over whites.  Also, of course, the office is headed by someone with a
Spanish surname and not an Italian one, although Arizonans of Spanish
descent far outnumber those of Italian descent, thus making Italians a
minority by comparison. It has been reported that the diversity
dilettante's salary is over $200,000, but I haven't verified that.

This brings to mind an exhibit on campus years ago in honor of fighter
pilots.  A separate display was devoted to Hispanics [sic].  There was
no separate display for Italians or any other ethnic/racial group.  Some
inclusion.

Actually, I would've been offended if there had been a separate display
for Italians, because it would've smacked of racial pandering and
condescension.

The cultural revolutionaries don't seem to understand or don't care that
their racist stereotyping of whites creates a backlash and undermines
the racial harmony that they claim to want.  As a case in point, here is
my closing message to them:  /Baciami il culo!/