It was the use of the word lynching that especially rankles John DiBattista, who serves on the Maryland chapter of the Commission for Justice, the OSIA's anti-defamation arm.
"We were on the receiving end of that throughout American history," DiBattista said. The "we" he referred to are Italian-Americans. The "that" is, yes, lynching. There were Italian-Americans who were lynched. In fact, the victims of what's been called America's greatest mass lynching weren't black.
They were Italian-Americans.
It happened in New Orleans in 1891, According to Edward W. Knappman's Great American Trials, a lynch mob stormed a jail in the Big Easy and murdered 11 Italian-Americans who were accused of killing police Superintendent David Hennessy a year earlier. At least one of the defendants, according to the book, might have been innocent.
"Most of the accused were poor men whose arrests were based on circumstantial evidence or outright hysteria," Knappman writes. One of those "poor men" was a shoemaker named Pietro Monasterio. He lived in a shack near the spot from which Hennessy's killers fired their guns. That was enough to get him arrested - and lynched.
Perhaps Wright can be forgiven for not knowing that history. He lives in a country that doesn't just ignore anti-Italian bigotry. Hell, we embrace it. We celebrate it. Hollywood honchos have made a ton of money off ruthlessly stereotyping Italian-Americans as gangsters and mafiosos.
When Bernard McGuirk, the former producer of the Don Imus Show, called Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito a "meatball-sucking wop" during a satirical skit - he didn't get fired from the show.
But when McGuirk and Imus called members of Rutgers University women's basketball team "hos," they both got canned.
"It's been hard to communicate that [anti-Italian bigotry] to the media," DiBattista said. "We've had letters to the editors in different markets, and it's been hard to get that printed. Maybe it's because we're not an anointed minority."
But bigotry is bigotry, whether the target is an "anointed minority" or not. And bigotry is still bigotry when it comes from a man in the pulpit. With men of the cloth like Wright around, one thing is certain.
Expect God to make an official statement endorsing atheism any day now.
greg.kane@baltsun.com
