Dear Readers,
Ethnic Slurs may not “break your bones” but they do a break your spirit a bit, when “outrage” over offensive utterance in public or print do not seem to be treated as if they are all created equal:Robert Alioto, a Californian, then living in upstate New York, was appointed Superintendent of San Francisco Unified District Schools, after a 1978 National Search, for the “brightest and the best.”
Although Alioto's mother was Jewish, the selection of a school superintendent with an Italian surname incensed Thomas Fleming, then editor, reporter and columnist for the Sun-Reporter, a prominent African American newspaper, he helped found in the early 1940’s with the late Dr. Carlton Goodlet, a community leader who was Mr. Fleming's longtime friend and editorial collaborator.
Since Mr. Fleming ”History” columns were nationally syndicated, his skewered version of the school superintendents heritage was not a tempest in a local teapot.
When Mr. Fleming passed away at age 99, a November 2006 obituary stated “he spent a lifetime fighting racism”.
Apparently, for Signor Fleming, his fight was on a one-way street.In this excerpt of Thomas Fleming's Weekly Report he noted “if the San Francisco School Board at the time did not relish the U.S. District Court order to desegregate the public schools, the right man to undo the court's order was discovered after a nationwide search. The board appointed Robert Alioto to the post of superintendent of schools.
Alioto, a Californian, was plucked from the post of superintendent of an Upstate New York school district to oversee the administration of our schools.”
Along with others, after several black administrators in the school system were demoted to lower classifications and returned to the classroom as teachers, Fleming unleased this attack:
“It seems Alioto, whose ancestors came here from that section of Europe which is just west of the Balkans, the historical trouble spot in Europe, is attempting to Balkanize the San Francisco public schools.Italy is next door to Balkans and it could be that Alioto is a descendant of one of those members of the Italian army who were sent to Ethiopia to conquer that nation and in the process add more real estate to the bankrupt kingdom of Italy, whose rulers suffered from a type of megalomania that viewed Italy as the hub of an inchoate empire.
Italy's army was equipped with the same modern arms of that day as were the armies of other European nations. Italy had a considerable army, millions of men mobilized for war.
The Ethiopians had no united professional army, by European standards. It was a ragtag collection of blacks armed mostly with spears, bows and arrows.
Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, led his troops on the battlefield and the ill equipped Ethiopians stunned the white world when they inflicted a rout on the Italians at Oiradawa, the one major battle in that war.
All the Italian prisoners captured by the Ethiopians were castrated, on the benign philosophy of their captors that such ill-equipped men could not father any male offspring who might return to Ethiopia someday bent on revenge upon the Ethiopians.
Alioto, if he is a descendant or a relative of one of the captured Italians, is using greater finesse in his disdain of Black people.
He avoids getting in the brawling physical contest but he attempts to place roadblocks in the path of Blacks who, by their achievements mount upward in the educational hierarchy.
Nearly every time that Blacks gain a legal victory over racism, whites find some gimmick to subvert the victory.”
...
When Milton Reiterman, then a San Francisco Board of Education member, whose wife's ancestors hailed from Torino, Italy, tried to get a united voice of Italian American protest these slanderous slurs, he contacted community leaders and NIAF Regional and National Directors, who did “NIENTE” and that is why, three decades later we are still in the same “BARCA” and ethnic slurs against Italian Americans never make the evening news…
In case you are wondering; I recently dredged up this sun-reporter story after an Asian Weekly's folly in allowing a “Hate” piece to be published, dominated my morning newspaper and evening T.V. news.
Public apologies and the firing of offending, 22 year old writer, Kenneth Eng, finally put the matter to rest after a hectic week.
Ethnic slurs against Italian Americans with apologies and firings usually take longer, like months, years and decades before they are forthcoming, if ever they arrive at all…
Ted Fang, former owner of the San Francisco Examiner, is Asian week's editor at large. The newspaper, founded by Fang's late father in the 1950's, is distributed all over the State of California and the Pacific North West.
Ted Fang, finally apologized for publishing the racist screed by his columnist, Kenneth Eng, who wrote a regular column called “God of the Universe” in Fang's newspaper.
Fang fired Eng after public outrage heated up to a boiling point.
This wacko San Francisco story got wide play in the national media.
The writer lives in New York, but “Why I Hate Blacks” was published in San Francisco. In a cheap trick to get attention he wrote “I would argue that Blacks are weak-willed. It is the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It's unbelievable that it took them that long to fight back.”That's inflammatory for inflammatory sake.
This is the sort of rubbish you see on the Internet everyday from dozens of bloggers all over the country. Bloggers may write anything with impunity. But newspapers may not. “Grazie a Dio” for that.
Man-on-the-street TV interviews indicated that some Asians and African Americans thought the dispute over the column was a good thing, that it exposed a lot of hidden prejudices.
The Rev. Arnold Townsend, assistant pastor of the Rhema Word Christian Fellowship Church, said Eng did this “because he thought he could get away with it in this town.”
We don't think Mel Gibson or Michael Richards or Kenneth Eng did us any favors by spewing their venomous bile.
The president of the Islamic Society of San Francisco noted that “Hate against one group is hate against all of us.” I am still waiting for the day that “us” includes Italian Americans.
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