I dunno if it's racism or not (but in America everything is "racism" even claiming the most obvious things), but real Italian actors (including Southerners you dislike so much) in Italy look normal European, while "Italians" in Jewish mass medias (yes Jews controll 90% of American medias, even kids know that) look totally alien to an Italian. I was watching this Italian film with Turturro and he sticked out like a sore thumb among the Italians, both actos and random people in the streets. On the other hand in Italy we often see German and French films and Italians in them are represented quite well. I guess that since we get tens of millions of European tourists every year from Germany, Sweden,... it's harder to make them believe that we Italians look like some kind of MENA mixed with hispanics...
Yes, I dislike southern Italians so much that I fell in love with one, married him, and had children with him. I know and appreciate his ancestry more than he does, to the extent that I have researched his family tree, found his ancestral villages and brought him and his family to them and to a reunion with their distant relatives in Campania and Calabria. I love his family as my own. You are the one who seems to not love his own people, if you are indeed a southern Italian,
Siegfried.
The vast majority of the Italians who immigrated to the U.S. came from southern Italy. Americans have formed their perception of what Italians look like from therm. There's nothing conspiratorial about it.
There are a variety of looks among these Italian-Americans; John Turturro's, who's a great actor and seems like a great guy, is just one of them.
None of them look Swedish. If you don't like what they look like, that's you're problem, not theirs, not that of Americans, and not mine.
Some representative SouthernItalian-Americans, none of them admixed with
anything:
Two of the nine Supreme Court Justices are Italian/American:
Scalia:
Allito:
There are many, many great Italian American jurists, but this is a particularly famous one, John Sirica, who presided at the Watergate Hearings:
Some Southern Italian-American political figures:
John Pastore, Senator and Governor of Rhode Island:
John Volpe, Governor of Massachusetts
Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York, darling of the Democrat Party:
Andrew Cuomo, his son, also Governor of New York:
Was there a conspiracy to elect them based on some desire to denigrate southern Italians? This kind of world view is not only ridiculous, it displays a self-hatred on a par with that exhibited by some of our Spanish posters.
I just hope that other posters and readers realize that these views are not representative of the views of these peoples as a whole.
As for the representation of Italian Americans in American films, most of them, from The Godfather, to Goodfellas, to The Sopranos, were made by Italian Americans. Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and David Chase cast people who looked like the people among whom they grew up. Martin Scorsese was born and grew up in Little Italy, New York. He portrays in his movies the world with which he was familiar. When he wanted to cast his movie Goodfellas, Scorsese went to Rao's, a wonderful restaurant in New York where a lot of "mobbed up" guys like to hang to find people for the smaller parts.
Now, if you want to say that perhaps the areas from which these people immigrated, or the class from which they were drawn were not totally representative, in terms of phenotype, of all of southern Italy, then that is a possibility. However, foreign, or admixed with Hispanics or black Americans they're not; that's an absolute falsehood, although such people of course exist.