Italian Americans used to face a lot of discrimination but now Italian hate in America is virtually non existent. How did this happen? Is it possible for this change to happen for other marginalized groups?
Edit: You don’t need to state the obvious that they’re white and other minorities aren’t, we all have eyes. Also my definition of discrimination was referring to hate crime level discrimination, I know casual bigotry towards Italians still exists but that wasn’t what I was referring to.
Anyways thank you for all the insightful answers, I’m extremely happy my post sparked a lot of discussion and interesting perspectives
In: Other
Italian American here.
For one Italians are not obvious to most people at all these days. A big part of it is that different European features aren’t super obvious to the untrained eye or except when in the extremes, and also that there is an extraordinary amount of diluted Italians in the US– its common to meet someone who is 50, 25, 12.5% Italian but not very common to meet someone who is 100%.
In addition there really isn’t a distinct subculture at this point. Most of the Italian foods have integrated and become de facto American cuisine, for a very superficial example. By contrast, Italians at the turn of the century often lived in very homogenous communities, which made them stand out quite a bit from everyone else. Christians have also largely accepted other denominations as legitimate and not a threat generally speaking— the US had a great fear of the Catholic church until the 1900’s, in the presumption it’d make an attempt to create an actual takeover of the US government.
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