17 Nov 2023, 2:05 am
naturalplastic wrote:
Interesting. Not familiar with that case ^.
Am familiar with Iron Eyes Cody...who not only played Amerinds on TV (including in this iconic ad) and in a 1948 Bob Hope movie "Paleface", but claimed to be one in real life. Like Buffy he claimed to be a member of different tribes at different times. And like Buffy (probably) was...the actor born Espera De Coti was actually a member of the Italian tribe.
Am familiar with Iron Eyes Cody...who not only played Amerinds on TV (including in this iconic ad) and in a 1948 Bob Hope movie "Paleface", but claimed to be one in real life. Like Buffy he claimed to be a member of different tribes at different times. And like Buffy (probably) was...the actor born Espera De Coti was actually a member of the Italian tribe.
Interesting.
It should be noted that Italians, especially southern Italians, have not always been considered "white" here in the U.S.A. (See the section on Italian Americans in the Wikipedia artcle on Definitions of whiteness in the United States.)
17 Nov 2023, 8:01 am
Mona Pereth wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Interesting. Not familiar with that case ^.
Am familiar with Iron Eyes Cody...who not only played Amerinds on TV (including in this iconic ad) and in a 1948 Bob Hope movie "Paleface", but claimed to be one in real life. Like Buffy he claimed to be a member of different tribes at different times. And like Buffy (probably) was...the actor born Espera De Coti was actually a member of the Italian tribe.
Am familiar with Iron Eyes Cody...who not only played Amerinds on TV (including in this iconic ad) and in a 1948 Bob Hope movie "Paleface", but claimed to be one in real life. Like Buffy he claimed to be a member of different tribes at different times. And like Buffy (probably) was...the actor born Espera De Coti was actually a member of the Italian tribe.
Interesting.
It should be noted that Italians, especially southern Italians, have not always been considered "white" here in the U.S.A. (See the section on Italian Americans in the Wikipedia artcle on Definitions of whiteness in the United States.)
Exactly. In 1900 they were not considered "White". The US government even considered southern Italians to be a separate (and even worse) "race" than northern Italians. And then later Italy joined the Axis powers in WWII (Buffy was born the same year as Pearl Harbor)which didnt help the image of Italians to Americans either. The marriage of singers Louis Prima and Keely Smith were considered a "racially mixed marriage" back then (because it was between a WASP an an Italian).
As a side note: A certain young woman singer had huge hit song in circa 1970 about a girl growing up as a half White half Native entitled "Half Breed". My teen kid self assumed that she wrote the song herself and that the heart breaking tale was autobiographical. Turned out that she didnt write it, and that the record company just assigned her the song just to exploit her exotic looks for promotional videos. The singer was Cher. From what I gathered from internet research Cher was open that "though I do have SOME Cherokee blood I am mostly Italian American". Cher didnt claim to be a real half-breed, and never denied that she just played one on (the forerunners of) MTV.
The moral of the story? If you're Italian...pretend that your Native American! Because we WASPs cant tell the difference
