Bigotry, xenophobia, and us

Last month the Citizen published Tom Sharpe’s article on PreReal Investment’s purchase of over 400 properties around T or C. A few days later the Citizen was accused of racism (at the worst) or ethnic stereotyping (at the least):

 i was absolutely stunned by the author’s defensive presentation of his
unfounded accusations rooted in bigoted xenophobia and encourage you
to hire an editor and request that this angle be removed. i am not the
only offended italian-american in sierra county today. (Sara Chev)

Because Tom is a new writer for the Citizen, his article was vetted and edited (about 2 hours of discussions and reworkings and 6 hours of technical work on the images in the article). The board of the Citizen takes full responsibilities for the article. We also take seriously the accusation by presuming that the accusation is not a frivolous troll but an honest expression of feelings. The board, therefore, apologizes to Sara and to others who may have been hurt, offended, or angered by the article.

That being said, however, the board, after many re-readings of the article, finds nothing that demonstrates objectively that Tom’s inquiry hinged on ethnic stereotyping of Italian Americans. You can check out the article again at https://sierracountycitizen.org/money-flows-from-staten-island-to-sierra-county-to-buy-property-with-help-from-tax-deferments/.

We appreciate Tom not only giving us information on an enormously important aspect of social and economic life in the county but showing us the investigative process he followed on the way. If you follow his story, then, you will see that he is centrally following a series of associations, beginning with the oddity that the real estate development company has a name (Integrated Environmental Services) that sounds like a landfill. Associations, categorical thinking, type casting, generic expectations are how investigations, whether in journalism or in science operate. In fact, they are the stuff of everyday life. If we are looking for where someone lives in an unfamiliar neighborhood, we go by the architectural type of a house and do not stop at what looks like gas stations or big box stores. Stereotyping is normal. Here, Tom’s association is between a type of naming and landfills generally.

As an investigator his next step is verification, and he inquires, only to have Mr. Berman offer the next association, that between landfills and organized crime. Still pursuing the oddity of the name in spite of Mr. Berman’s denial, Tom finds Mr. Berman owns a landfill in Staten Island. That location seems to verify public suspicion (according to Mr. Berman) of a link between Integrated Environmental Services and organized crime because Staten Island landfills were notoriously connected with organized criminality. If you are not familiar with that notoriety, check out the activities of the Capone brothers, Albert and Stephen, who pleaded guilty to bribing the Fish Kill landfill on Staten Island, at the time the largest dump in the world. See, for example, https://www.propublica.org/article/a-trash-industry-union-thrives-and-employees-say-they-are-left-holding-the-bag and

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/bic/downloads/pdf/denials/tradewaste/capone_and_denilo_inc-163-denial-12-15-2000.pdf.   [The Capones at one time had a construction company called Enopac, their surname backwards, which contracted with the FBI to dig for bodies of mafia victims: https://www.nydailynews.com/2004/12/05/feds-fooled-by-shady-firm-called-enopac-the-company-name-is-capone-written-backward-which-should-be-a-clue-a-daily-news-investigation-into-city-and-law-agency-links-to-companies-with-organized-crime-b/]

That some Italian Americans were prominent in the corruption of the garbage business in New York City is simply a fact, but one entirely beside the point of Tom’s investigation. He did not look for connections to organized crime because of Mr. Prendamano’s Italian name but simply followed another path, the association between Staten Island landfills and corruption. Tom’s process in the article simply ignores the Italian American connection to Staten Island landfills.

In his conversation with Mr. Prendamano, Tom shows the reader the most telling demonstration of his avoidance of the Italian American stereotype. Tom’s remark to Mr. Prendamano about The Sopranos speaks entirely to the connection between organized crime and landfills without mention of Italian Americans, even though that was very much part of the series. It is Mr. Prendamano who brings in the Italian American stereotyping.

Furthermore, we accept the generality that in one way or another we are all prejudiced and can hardly claim to have escaped the social ambiance we grew up in and live in. The only way to deal with that in ourselves is to think about it. It is possible, as Tom himself said to me, that he has unwittingly bought into the Italian American stereotype. However, we do not think so. The article’s story line carefully avoids reference to that association even though it is in plain sight, available to him as an investigative path from the very beginning. Yet, he studiously avoids it in the article. To us this means that even if he were prejudiced, he has successfully avoided that temptation. We don’t think we can ask for more objectivity than that.

For those who were hurt by our article, I would like to suggest that they revisit the ethnic cliché. Is it really such a terrible thing to be associated in some loose way to criminality or is that just a knee-jerk morality? Many ethnic groups trying to assimilate to American culture had to deal with xenophobic prejudice. A common method was to organize secret structures of protection characterized by a strong devotion to ethnic identity. These organizations were essentially outside the law (because the law was prejudiced or controlled by those that were; that is, criminality is not necessarily the same as morality).

This is true of the Irish, of Chinese, of Jews, of Africans, of Italians, of Mexicans, of the Central Americans. How they structured these resistances to xenophobia may differ because of the cultures they came from, but their efforts were often perceived by the dominant culture as criminal. That illegality is part of cultural assimilation, the American experience. One need not be ashamed of it. This is how one should understand attempts like The Sopranos, The Godfather, or Goodfellas to fully deal with the Italian American experience, its history, its tensions, and its humanity. In the Godfather series we see how a Sicilian structure of social control under the pressure of assimilation morphs into a capitalistic corporate structure. In The Sopranos the story flows out of the main character’s psychoanalysis, a clear indication that he has a psyche, that is, a soul. That basis should undermine the simplistic take that he is morally “bad.” He’s not the story’s villain. ‘The Sopranos’ Offered the Best Insight into Italian-American Life (vice.com). These are efforts to undermine the ethnic stereotype by taking apart the stereotype, contextualizing it in the shared, as well as the particular, and the difficult process of cultural assimilation in a hostile society, by peopling it with lived experiences.

These stories resist racial prejudice by turning it upside down, incorporating the stereotype as an aspect to understand about one’s ethnicity, perhaps even to allow it to be embraced. The same thing happens when Blacks call each other “nigga,” say “Black is beautiful,” or defuse the racism by generalizing it in a word like dis.