Category: History

Transcript:

Tammy: So do you want to talk about some of the biographies and stuff that originated after she passed and how you know those versions of her might like the older versions the contemporary versions might not be so accurate?

Rosanne: I think that’s very true and of course, as you said earlier that’s true in so much of our history. Someone decided what we should share, what was acceptable, and you could — I think from Emerson’s point of view, I understand that he wanted people to love his friend. So he was he was filtering out what he thought would get in their way of understanding how great she was but then of course the next guy reads that book and only reports that much and that much. I mean it’s true also of the various iterations of the Diary of Anne Frank. Her father only lets certain things out because he didn’t want people to know that she sometimes wrote that she was mad at her mother because that was the woman he loved and he wanted you know and then later people have added those things in to say but here’s the real picture. It doesn’t mean she was a terrible little girl. It just means every teenager goes “my mom is making me crazy” It just gives her the more humanity to know all those dimensions and I think, yes, that’s what’s missing in these early biographies and we have to go back and really look at her writing — what exists — and then analyze that to get a sense of who she was but I think her activities tell us that. So teaching for Bronson Alcott tells us she was okay with an inter-racial group. She thought that you know desegregation was the proper thing to do. We wouldn’t do that. You could work for somebody else. You could tutor for anybody. You chose that job and you knew it was controversial and other people would judge you by it.

Transcript:

It makes perfect sense that she would have been testing the waters for all of it because she’s also married to a foreigner, right, and a Catholic and Catholics were not accepted in the country at that time either because of you know loving the Pope and all that stuff. So she probably was. I would say it’s probably that her son probably wasn’t necessarily — didn’t necessarily have darker skin because Giovanni comes from one more northern part of the country and we probably at that time we weren’t as discriminatory because Italy was kind of part of Europe and France and then you know Lafayette was a good guy and we’re sort of immigrants. Yeah. I don’t think it’s — it happens in the early 1900s because that’s when the great mass of unwashed poor folks show up and we want to put them to work in our crummy jobs and our seamstress factories and things like that and the guys are working on the railroad but yeah…

All the immigrants. And you know and the problem is or the luck the privilege is we assimilate so that we look white which of course is bullshit. There’s no such thing as white. It makes me crazy. Caucasian you know. I always tell students caucasian is the dumbest word in the world because there’s no land of “cauc.” It’s literally the dude right the dude who studied all the skulls to do the hierarchy of all the different ethnicities. He thought the prettiest skulls came from the people who lived in the Caucus mountains of Russia and so he qualified them as Caucasian but that’s not a thing, right?

Transcript:

Rosanne: Now, the other thing is we’re a weird country because I also did a book on this guy, Filippo Mazzei. He’s an Italian who comes to the United States in the 1700s and lives on the plantation next door to Thomas Jefferson and Mazzei didn’t use slaves. He brought Italian serfs — who were not treated great — but were not owned to work though. He wanted to grow wine in Virginia. He thought to bring the wine business to Virginia and he’s the guy — this is off topic — but he wrote “All men are created equal” in a pamphlet that he worked with Jefferson and he was invited to the Continental Congress but he couldn’t — he spoke — he wrote English and five other languages but he didn’t think he could keep up with the verbal debate fast enough, so he’s not in the movie 1776 because he didn’t go but when Jefferson wrote the Declaration he cribbed that phrase and I’m not making this up because the Congress in like the 80s or something did actually put that into the Congressional Record. That’s where that first phrase first appeared in America was from this Italian immigrant.

Tammy: I love it. I love it.

Rosanne: I know this is normal as anyone because he owned land and he was just one of the many people living here like the Scots but there wasn’t a flood of Italians. It’s in the early part of the 1900s when we get the flood of poor Italians. It’s the poor immigrants we never want. The rich guys we’re okay with.

Transcript:

I was just going to say, yes, I wouldn’t exactly use the word parallel because of course Italians were never slaves but actually, some who were shipped here were mistakenly sold into slavery because they could speak the language and nobody understood and they were dark. There are stories of that and of course, the biggest lynching — the most — the largest mass lynching in America happened to a group of Italian men in Louisiana. That’s post-slavery now. Yeah it was and they weren’t considered white because of that now and largely we’re talking about southern Italians, Sicilians, and southern Italians because northern Italians look more swiss. They look more german. They are blonder and blue-eyed. It’s Frank Sinatra versus Dean Martin. So any group that comes into this country, sadly, we sort of do the whole oh you’re at the bottom of the barrel. It would say you know no dogs or dagos allowed you know. No dagos should apply for this job. There was discrimination. I’m two generations away from that so it didn’t happen to me but I understood that it happened to my grandfather and I understood how that got in his way.