Greeks, even if they have some African admixture in them, are a European people. No one in the USA have ever considered Greeks "black people" like MLK's tribe. Ditto for Italians. (Maybe there is some obscure insults from the 1920s or something where Italians were called "black" but it still remains no one ever thought they were part of what Roots was about.
Italy is obviously European, at the center of Europe's history and culture. |
You can't say that about even the Ashkenazi Jews. They were always a foreign group from the middle east. (Yes, light skinned for the most part.) One of my best friends had his DNA tested. His family was from Poland, he always assumed he had some large portion of Polish or Russian DNA as a result. But his profile came back as 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, in other words his ancestors had been obedient to the rules of the tribe to only marry within the tribe for the hundreds of years that they had lived in those lands.
Just a familial note: when my parents were married, at their reception in the Shelton Hotel they were the only two people who visited each side of the ballroom. Her Irish family and friends felt she was marrying a ginny while his family was upset that he was marrying a stranger, not Calabrese. This was 1945.
On a wider scale, in New Orleans blacks and Italians were treated much the same by the rest of the population. So they socialized with each other. Italian jazz man Louis Prima was a regular at black clubs in NOLA.
If you can dig it up find the famous 1900 pic of Mulberry Street. Those are Italians, yet at the start of black history month Ch 2 WCBS TV NY posted a montages of blacks, singly and in groups, famous and ordinary. The Mulberry Street pic was included. Italians were treated as black.
As for Jews. I worked for years with Jewish teachers. ,most were liberal but one constant was black rights. Why? They felt fighting for black rights protected their own. These were people who experienced mistreatment for centuries. Why? Religious persecution was a reason. So was their isolation from society, sometimes self chosen, sometimes enforced by the state.