“It’s the greatest love story—that movie is emblazoned on us. It romanticizes the decadence and excess that is hip-hop,” DJ Quik says from the Zoom rectangle, holding up a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt featuring the image of one of Al Pacino’s most famous roles, Scarface’s Tony Montana.
Though Scarface centers on the rise and fall of a fictitious Cuban immigrant turned Miami cocaine kingpin—a story inspired by Al Capone, an Italian American mobster, and directed by Brian de Palma, who is also of Italian descent—it resonates with Quik, and with me. We are African Americans, born and raised on opposite sides of the country with upbringings marked by different generations. And yet we have this deep love for Italian American actors—and the country’s cinema at large—that bridges the gap between us. Quik vividly remembers when the VHS of Scarface first made its way to his California neighborhood, while I fondly recall a Christmas morning from my childhood when my mother gave me copies of the Rocky movies and the Godfather trilogy.
I grew up in South Jersey, where you could no more extract the Italian American influence from my formative years than you could separate salt from saline. Around the dinner table, my loved ones would joke about Sicily’s proximity to Africa. We’d talk, lovingly, about the seasoning in our respective cuisines, about how some southern Italians looked like us.
My mother passed down an abiding love of Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci. I’d catch her watching The Sopranos when I’d come home from school. The sense that Italians and African Americans were somehow connected felt ingrained, but I’ve recently started to think about the ways cinema reflects back to us as a group with its own history of stereotyping, marginalization, and class. When I would watch Italian Americans onscreen, I recognized that there is a white-Black binary; at the same time, there was a spectrum of whiteness and the less WASP-presenting one was (darker skin and hair, thicker accents, flamboyant clothing), the more bigotry they received.
Since the late-19th century, Italian immigrants and African Americans have lived close to one another, especially throughout cities and neighborhoods in the Northeast. “Italians were not a part of the white American imagination and social structure until later,” John Gennari, author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge, tells me. Like my own, Gennari’s mother grew up in New Jersey, which, along with New York and southern New England, he calls “the Sinatra belt.” Italian Americans and African Americans often worked alongside each other, whether in the southern fields, or further north. The two populations overlap in their migrations to the north. Ours is famously recognized as the Great Migration. “When emancipation comes, most formerly enslaved Black folk want to get away from the plantation economy,” Gennari said, “and those workers need to be replaced and southern Italian immigration has a lot to do with that.”
Recall the scene from Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, in which John Turturro’s Paulie Carbone is perusing a newspaper when Nicholas Turturro’s Vinny demands to know what’s so important about his reading material.
It’s a striking scene, in part because of its fidelity to history. Extrajudicial killings of Italian Americans weren’t at all uncommon. In fact, the largest documented mass lynching in American history, in 1891, was of when 11 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants were accused of murdering a police chief in New Orleans. Public sentiment wasn’t in their favor, with even the mayor accusing Italians of being “idle, vicious, and worthless” and “without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen.” Under Jim Crow, they weren’t classified as Black, but neither did they enjoy the protections enjoyed by whites. It followed that in both the North and South, noted Gennari, Italians would cross color lines not only to do business with African Americans, but to fraternize and have intimate relationships with them.
This history, depicted in films such as Jungle Fever and A Bronx Tale have their roots in Harlem and Belmont. In these films, Italian American men have romantic affairs with Black women amid a backdrop of racist, economic anxiety and urban sprawl within their respective neighborhoods.
Whiteness, as it relates to Italian American culture, has always been thorny. Vinny frequently uses the N-word, and oftentimes racism toward Black people was core to assimilation for white immigrant-minority groups. It’s apparent in The Sopranos, when Carmela scorns her mother for lamenting how dark Meadow’s complexion was as a baby, or when Tony vents to Dr. Melfi about how America opened the floodgates to Italian immigrants so that they could make dynastic families, such as the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, richer through their labor. Though African people were captured via slavery, their labor was just as necessary for the bolstering of American infrastructure. You see it, too, in Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance, when Dennis Hopper’s Clifford Worley notes, “Sicilians were spawned by n—–…Sicilians have Black blood pumping through their hearts.”
When waves of immigrants came to America, including Italians, Ku Klux Klan membership skyrocketed, Catholic churches were burned, while cartoons depicted Italian immigrants as being less than human. In David Roediger’s Working Towards Whiteness, he writes that one of the most common anti-Italian slurs during the 20th century, “ginny/guinea,” was originally directed toward enslaved Black people from Guinea—a stretch of the West African coastline from Sierra Leone to Benin. But with the mass migration of Italians beginning in the 1890s, the pejorative was redirected. Similar to depictions of African American men and their masculinity, stereotypes have persisted about Italian immigrant men and their propensity toward violence. Nothing captures that better than a depiction of organized crime.