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Black national merit finalist GondwanaMan writes:

From what I understand from friends who live there, there was a time in Boston that no black person dare go into certain Italian and Irish neighborhoods. Bill Russell called it the most racist city in the country.

Director Spike Lee did an interesting job depicting black-Italian relations in his films Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever.  This scene from the latter film depicts the fury of an Italian father discovering his daughter is dating a black guy:

Of course this is fictional and folks were more racist in the 1990s, so who knows how many Italian fathers would really act like that today.  And would he have gone so ballistic if his daughter were dating a Jew, an Arab, an East Asian, a South Asian? I don’t think so.  Blacks were in a separate category from other non-whites, at least back then, and perhaps through most of history.

Below is scene from a show commenter RR and I both like, The Sopranos. Tony’s daughter brings home an African American, and even though he’s very white looking and highly educated, Tony is having none of it:

Of course I don’t want to give the impression that only Italians are guilty of this.  Sadly, many Arabs, South Asians, Jews and East Asians also go ballistic when their daughters or sisters date blacks, and in rare cases Muslim girls can be murdered by their fathers for doing so.

Upper-class WASPs were often more subtle.  Instead of getting violent, they would often just pay the black boy to stay away from their daughter.