Here’s the commercial he’s so worked up about. I would say he’s exaggerating just a little.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwKUu21EAE0
That’s a FUNNY commercial! I love it. All it’s saying is that Italians know food and that ain’t Italian or food.
It manages to sell Wendy’s by doing the opposite. Brilliant! It makes you want to go try it yourself, if you’re not Italian that is.
And I find the guys gawgeous!
THAT is the commercial? I’ve seen that one several times and I absolutely did not recognize it from the description.
I think it’s a little silly but not anything to get all bent out of shape over.
More of mocking of New Jersey morons than Italians.
Agree that the commercial is more of a take-off on The Sopranos than anything else; but he does have a point that mainstream America does stereotype Italians as being mafia thugs and little else. I do find it disturbing. But as for his essay, when he goes off into Italian people being people of color, he loses me. We need to extinguish racism and identity groups other than "American", not continue to hairsplit.
I had a conversation with a black professional guy who migrated here from Africa about how many American blacks view all white people monolithically; but in fact, whites are from a great many different ethnicities, ancient civilzations and tribes, and I named many (Angles, Saxons, Celts, Teutons, Etruscans, Normans, etc etc), and he was totally amazed. "I did not know white people had tribes!" he said.
He was viewing this from his contemporary perspective of having come from Kenya, where there are many educated Christians with British accents, in the same country with primitive tribes in the rural areas who still do things like stretch their necks or lips, dress their hair with cow dung, etc. To him, a tribe is a much more real thing than it is to an American.
I will say that being an old person, it was common for us as schoolchildren in the 50s to ask each other, "So, what are you?" and be completely understood. The other kid would reply by naming their ethnicity, or sometimes their religion (Jewish, Catholic or some Protestant denomination). But we were steeped in American civics then and didn't regard it as anything troublesome; it was something to be celebrated, that America was "the melting pot."