Buzzfeed released a video on Friday called “Signs You Grew Up Italian-American,” where they used biased and racist stereotypes to mock my heritage and experience growing up as Italian-American.
The first issue taken with the video is that the younger actors appear to be non-Italian; that it a clear sign of cultural appropriation on the side of Buzzfeed. The only way this is in any way acceptable for non-Italian-Americans to portray themselves as Italian-Americans is if they were to come out as trans-Italian-American seeking to adopt our people’s culture, physical features, and heritage.
It is, after all, racist according to Buzzfeed when non-Native Americans wear “Indian Halloween outfits.”
Buzzfeed’s video attempts to mock how it’s funny that Italian-Americans come from large families that apparently live close enough together to see each other all the time. That shows the fact that Italian-Americans are systematically oppressed and conditioned to stay near their elders — probably because the government doesn’t provide enough welfare resources to take care of the elderly in our families.
Mocking the fact that a majority of Italians live within 500 miles of New York City — where most of their ancestors came from — isn’t funny. It’s biased and ignorant. Like gender, living close enough to your family to come over for Sunday dinner is learned.
During the two-minute clip, Buzzfeed mimics the way Italian-Americans are suppose to talk, eat, speak loudly, be overbearing, and have ancestral family ties to the mafia — even mocking our names. I, for one, don’t know any Italian-American couples named “Joseph and Josephine” or “Louie and Louisa.”
Anti-Italianism is no laughing matter.
This video clearly displayed all the worst stereotypes that Italians are loud, hungry, descendants of organized crime, that breed too much.
We Italians should be used to this, after all. Italians have long been an oppressed society. From the largest mass lynching in American history — eleven Sicilians in New Orleans — to anti-immigration laws during the massive Italian migration at the beginning of the 20th century, to the way the media portrays us as members of organized crime or housewives looking for a cat fight, or to the fact that there has never been an Italian-American president.
Lastly, no self-respecting Italian-American would eat the food in this video; it looks cold.
Buzzfeed is just the latest in a long series of Italianphobia.
Watch the Italianphobic Buzzfeed video below:
This article is a SJW parody.
