The worldview of American white Christian nationalists is simple: America was meant to be and was at its best when dominated by white Christians. Yet just who, exactly, qualifies as “white Christian”?
I ask because until the 1970s, my Sicilian-American Catholic parents weren’t considered either all that white or Christian. On the eve of Columbus Day, honoring Americans of Italian ancestry and their achievements, a history lesson is in order.
My first-generation American parents grew up in the ’20s and ’30s in Niagara Falls. The town was divided into its Italian, Polish and Irish working class immigrant neighborhoods, each with its own Catholic parish.
The immigrant communities got along with each other all right. But if a teen from one ethnic neighborhood got drunk on a Saturday night and wandered into the other ethnic neighborhoods, they would likely be beaten up and dumped back in their own quarter.
Then everyone went to their respective Catholic churches the next day and prayed for forgiveness. The WASP business owners and bankers who controlled the town (at least the parts not controlled by the Mothers and Fathers Italian Association and its Polish and Irish equivalents) lived in the posh suburb of Lockport. They certainly did not consider these ethnic immigrants to be their social — or racial – equals.
When World War II broke out, my father (ROTC at the University of Niagara, the first and only one of 14 siblings to go to college) was sent to officer training in Biloxi, Mississippi, my mother in tow. They told stories of how, when they attended Mass at the Catholic Church in town, white non-Catholic residents would line the streets and spit on them as they went by.
Catholic wasn’t Christian in 1940s Mississippi. My father came out of Biloxi with a favorite joke: A swarthy-skinned Sicilian-American get on a bus in Biloxi in 1943. Looking at his dark complexion, the bus driver says: “Back of the bus. Back of the bus.” The Sicilian says: “I’m not black. I’m Italian.” The bus driver says: “Off the bus. Off the bus.”
In 1940s Mississippi, Sicilian wasn’t white. (Fun Fact: Columbus Day wasn’t declared a holiday until 11 Italian-American immigrants were lynched in 1891 in New Orleans after being falsely blamed for the murder of the corrupt chief of police. Benjamin Harrison agreed to create the holiday when the Italian government threatened war.)
After the war, my parents were part of the new American middle-class dream, moving out of Niagara Falls to pursue better job opportunities in a half-dozen states (back when geographic mobility meant economic mobility).
They eventually moved into an “ethnically diverse” neighborhood in San Diego — an affluent suburb called Scripps Ranch.
Today Scripps would be considered a largely white suburb. But in the 1970s it was remarkably “diverse” because on our one street you had Sicilians living next to Irish, English, Scots, Poles, French, Dutch, even Portuguese.
Less than a generation before, this would have been unthinkable. But World War II had started to forge this thing now called “white America.” Call it the “Saving Private Ryan” society.
A WASP high school teacher leads Jewish, Christian, Hungarian, Russian, German, English and Scottish soldiers to save an Irish kid. Such cooperation between the “races” never existed before the war. (Through World War II, what we call ethnicity today was considered racial — e.g. “the master race.”)
But the universal draft, put in place to mobilize a multimillion-man army as quickly as possible, randomly pulled people from their ethnic neighborhoods and threw them together to learn to cooperate or die.
You went into the war with all of your “How many insert-ethnic-identity-here does it take to screw in a light bulb?” jokes. But when a guy named Pulaski took a sniper bullet for you on Tarawa, the joke started to leave a queasiness in the stomach.
After the war, tolerance of others (at least other whites) started to grow and Euro-ethnically-diverse suburbs like Scripps and hundreds more across the country became doable.
That didn’t mean old prejudices simply disappeared. Years after we moved into Scripps, my mother discovered that the (English) woman who had become her best friend on the block at first told everybody: “There goes the neighborhood. The garlic-eaters are here.”
But amidst our postwar prosperity, this new class of “whites” emerged as we got together for summer block parties and put our Italian sausage alongside bangers, bratwurst and linguica on the grill and celebrated a new affluence my Depression-era parents only dreamed of when they were children.
Meanwhile, post-Kennedy, Catholicism moved from a suspect religion to part of the broader American Christian family.
Christian nationalists today are trying to tear apart the very social fabric woven by World War II that allowed my Italian family to be seen as both white and Christian.
Not content to only hold people of other races/non-Christian religions suspect, leaders of the nationalist Christian right (and politicians in Louisiana) actively seek to codify that only northern European protestants should truly qualify to set the rules for a white Christian America. Which would, by logical extension, exclude people like my parents once again — along with myself, four daughters and two grandkids — from being considered “real Americans.”
Once power becomes based on excluding others, as soon as one targeted group has been marginalized and pushed out of public life, those in power must now find the next groups to target to continue to legitimize and grow their power.
While today’s white Christian nationalists currently tolerate Italian-American Catholics, it would behoove my Italian Catholic brethren (and pretty much anyone else whose last name ends in a vowel) to remember that just a few decades ago mainstream America didn’t consider us all that Christian or white.
Nothing guarantees today’s Christian nationalists will continue to accept us tomorrow.
Carl Luna, Ph.D., is the director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement at the University of San Diego and San Diego Community College District.
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