The Sopranos is, among other things, an extensive exploration of the failure of group identities of various kinds in turn-of-the-millennium America. Race and ethnicity, of course, have long been crucial to American group identities, and it is certainly the case that the series is dominated by characters for whom being Italian American is central to their sense of who they are. Indeed, one often gets the sense that these characters are clinging (with varying degrees of desperation) to their ethnic identities, which they seem to feel are in danger of being swallowed up by the American melting pot. This blurring of ethnic identities is part of a general blurring of boundaries that is typical of the postmodern condition. At times, of course, it has been seen as a good thing, especially given the severe social problems that racial divisions have created over the course of the history of the United States. For example, David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, first published in 1995, just a few years before the premiere of The Sopranos, saw great potential in a movement beyond the fixed affiliations of ethnic identities toward more fluid voluntary affiliations, though Hollinger did not argue that this movement has been achieved. The treatment of ethnic identity in The Sopranos shows that a movement beyond ethnic identities had not in fact been achieved by the time of the series, while at the same time demonstrating that race- and ethnicity-based identities were no longer as stable or reliable as they once might have been.
In a key moment in episode 2.9 (“From Where to Eternity,” March 12, 2000), Tony Soprano attempts to justify (in a session with Jennifer Melfi) his participation in organized crime by arguing that the Mafia serves as a way for Italian Americans to protect their threatened ethnic identities from being swallowed up in the American mainstream. He argues that Italian immigrants were only allowed into the United States in the first place so that they could be used as cheap labor to make “the “Carnegies and the Rockefellers” richer. “But some of us,” he explains, “didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, family, and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. We weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J. P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers, too, but that was their business, right? The American Way.”
It seems clear from this speech that the attitudes of Tony and his fellow Italian American gangsters toward their own ethnic identities is rooted in the experience of their forefathers who came over in the massive wave of immigration that transformed the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, providing a workforce to support the explosive growth of consumer capitalism that marked the first decades of the new century. Much has been written about this phenomenon and about the ways in which various ethnic groups jockeyed for position, competing for space with other immigrant groups while at the same time negotiating with the existing Anglo-American hierarchy for acceptance into American society. Of course, these early-twentieth-century immigrants arrived in a context that was already complicated by a long history of racial competition, with the twin phenomena of the enslavement of African Americans and the genocidal extermination of Native Americans lying at the center of a constellation of issues that made race inseparable from class and from the reality of social and economic inequality and domination. Scholars such as Theodore Allen, for example, have detailed the ways in which the very concept of the “white” race evolved historically (beginning in the colonial era) as a category that helped to justify and perpetuate the uneven distribution of resources and the exploitation of some groups by others. Noel Ignatiev has detailed the process by which Irish Americans often succeeded by distancing themselves from African Americans and aligning themselves with the white elite, while David Roediger, in The Wages of Whiteness, has documented the way a white American working class helped to define (and elevate) its subaltern cultural identity in opposition to African Americans in the nineteenth century. And, in Working toward Whiteness, Roediger has traced this development forward through the twentieth century as a white working class increasingly dominated by immigrants (including Italian Americans) sought to solidify its position in American society by defining itself as white.[1]
As Tony’s discourse to Melfi demonstrates, this process was complex and two-sided. The process of whitening that Roediger traces is clearly part of the dynamic that has landed Tony and his family in their posh home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, a borough that (according to the 2010 U.S. Census) is 92 percent white. But Tony’s obvious bitterness toward “the Carnegies and the Rockefellers” shows a clear resistance to giving up his Italian ethnic heritage, and some of his strongest ethnic hostilities in the series are directed toward Italian Americans who have essentially given up that heritage in order to become fully assimilated and fully “white” “Medigans.” Thus, while Tony can take a haughty position of racial superiority in relation to African Americans, he also at times seems to want to separate himself from the white American mainstream (which he defensively feels has taken the same position with regard to him), as when—in episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999)—he calls a white family up the street “mayonnaises.” Later in this episode he mentions “white people” to Melfi, who asks, “So am I to understand that you don’t consider yourself white?” Tony explains that whiteness is more than a matter of skin color: “I don’t mean white like Caucasian. I mean a white man like our friend Cusamano. Now he’s Italian, but he’s Medigan. It’s what my old man would have called a Wonderbread WOP.”
All in all, the complex racial dynamics of The Sopranos serve as a microcosmic allegorical embodiment of the history of American race relations within a working-class context as traced by scholars such as Allen, Ignatiev, and Roediger. The Italian American gangsters of Tony’s circle constantly compete for space in the criminal marketplace with Jews, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and African Americans—though the latter two are somewhat marginalized, relegated to despised realms such as drug dealing and sometimes being hired as subcontractors to perform particularly disagreeable tasks. Irish Americans, incidentally, are largely missing from this list, though Christopher Moltisanti’s vision of Italian hell as an Irish bar where it is always Saint Patrick’s Day—in episode 2.9 (“From Where to Eternity,” March 12, 2000)—is indicative of a particular disdain for the Irish, perhaps because the latter (employing strategies detailed by Ignatiev and others) have more thoroughly assimilated in America than have certain Italian Americans.
Given the frequent defensiveness that marks his attitudes about being Italian American, it should come as no surprise that, when a group of FBI agents comes to search the Soprano home in episode 1.8 (“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” February 28, 1999), Tony is particularly incensed to learn that one of them (an Agent Grasso) is apparently Italian. That night at dinner, he complains to his family that Grasso is playing for the wrong team. “They probably frisk him at night before he goes home,” says Tony. “Because he has a vowel at the end of his name. What’s he think? He’s gonna make it to the top by arresting his own people?” Tony then launches into a general discourse on the mistreatment of Italians, a refrain that runs through the attitudes of many of the Italian Americans in the series, who clearly feel that they have been discriminated against because of their ethnic backgrounds. “Jesus Christ,” grouses Tony. “You’d think there never was a Michelangelo.” Carmela then pipes in with her own reminder of the achievements of Italians: “Did you know that an Italian invented the telephone?” Son A. J. reacts with surprise: “Alexander Graham Bell was Italian?” An exasperated Tony then responds, “Do you see? Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, and he got robbed.” Meadow then can’t resist asking, in an oh-yeah-by-the-way manner, “Who invented the Mafia?”
Of course, Meadow is here referring back to her discussion with her father in episode 1.5 (“College,” February 7, 1999), in which he admitted to her for the first time that he might be involved in a certain amount of illegal activity. He tries to explain to her, though, that this activity is part of their ethnic heritage, given that Italian immigrants were denied opportunities in more respectable venues: “There was a time, Med, when the Italian people didn’t have a lot of options.” Meadow then skeptically recalls that an Italian American had been governor of New York from 1983 to 1994: “You mean like Mario Cuomo?” Tony seems to grant that she might have a point and responds with a weary I’m-doing-my-best argument: “You know, I put food on the table. My father was in it. My uncle was in it. Maybe I was too lazy to think for myself.”
One of the clearest ways in which Tony Soprano and most of his associates are “old school,” as they like to claim, is in their tendency to identify themselves and others in terms of race and ethnicity, often in the most stereotypical manner. In the key episode 2.13 (“Funhouse,” April 9, 2000), for example, Tony gets sick and blames it on food from an Indian restaurant, subsequently wondering if the chicken in the chicken vindaloo was really a “fuckin’ cocker spaniel.” Meanwhile, the Italian Americans of The Sopranos often seem a bit confused about the ethnic identities of others, as when, in the pilot episode, Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero relates a problem with the “Kolar Brothers,” a rival garbage hauling firm that is cutting into the Sopranos’ business. “They’re some kind of Czechoslovakian immigrants,” says Bonpensiero. “These Polacks, they haul paper, plastic, and aluminum, for $7,000 a month less.” Meanwhile, the Kolars are not intimidated when Tony’s crew demands a cut of their action. Bonpensiero conveys Kolar’s message that “if he can tell the Commie bosses back in Czechoslovakia to go fuck themselves, he can tell us.” Tony shrugs in exasperation at the difficulties of the “fucking garbage business,” and Bonpensiero agrees: “Yeah, I know. It’s all changing.” Later, we find that Christopher also has trouble distinguishing between Polish and Czech ethnic identities. He thus tells the Czech Emil Kolar just before he executes him: “Czechoslovakian: that’s a type of Polack, right?”
Eastern Europeans in general seem to be providing increasing competition for Italian American gangsters in The Sopranos, no doubt because the breakdown of social structures in the Soviet bloc after the fall of communism both triggered increases in crime there and encouraged increased immigration to the West. The most prominent Eastern European characters in the series are Russians, of course, and Tony and his family are very conscious that they now must share their territory with Russian gangsters, who are depicted as particularly formidable. Tony and his crew thus seek cooperation with the Russians, both because it opens new business opportunities and because it clearly seems preferable to be friends, rather than enemies, with the Russians.
Tony, of course, is particularly friendly with one Russian, beautiful young Irina Peltsin, who begins the series as his latest gumar. As the series goes on, it seems clear, in fact, that Tony (despite a vague preference for keeping with his own kind in most areas) sometimes seems especially attracted to women of other ethnicities.[2] He clearly likes, for example, that the half-Italian Valentina La Paz is also half Cuban. And at one point he has a brief encounter with Irina’s one-legged Ukrainian cousin, Svetlana Kirilenko. Not surprisingly, given their association with Tony, Irina and Svetlana have connections with the Russian mob, a fact that comes into play in the season 3 sequence in which Tony’s sister Janice steals Svetlana’s artificial leg and holds it hostage in an attempt to force Svetlana to return a vintage record collection that the now-deceased Livia Soprano had given to Svetlana when she served as Livia’s nurse. In response, Russian gangsters rough up Janice and force her to return the leg, leading to a crisis in which Tony must tread very carefully in an ultimately successful attempt to avenge his family honor without overly damaging his relations with the Russian gangsters who are operating in the area.
The most extended interaction between Italian and Russian gangsters in The Sopranos occurs in episode 3.11 (“Pine Barrens,” May 6, 2001), when Christopher and Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri confront a Russian gangster, Valery, in his home in order to collect a payment. Valery is clearly not intimidated by Paulie, who flies into a rage and slugs the Russian, apparently killing him. Christopher and Paulie decide to dispose of the body on the sly in order to avoid repercussions from other Russian gangsters, so they take the “body” to the remote Pine Barrens area to bury it in the woods. When they arrive, they discover that the ultra-tough Valery (a former Russian special services commando) is still alive. They try to make him dig his own grave, but he mocks them for their inability to deal with the cold weather, then escapes. Paulie at one point declares the hard-to-kill Valery to be “fuckin’ Rasputin” and in general shows a grudging respect for the man’s hardiness, which is clearly associated in Paulie’s mind with his Russianness.
The encounter with Valery clearly echoes the run-in of Tony and his crew in episode 1.3 (“Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” January 24, 1999) with a Hasidic Jew, Ariel (Ned Eisenberg), who turns out to be surprisingly hard to intimidate, though he himself is not a gangster and presumably has little experience with such people. This encounter is clearly couched as a confrontation with an ethnic Other, even though Tony’s gang is in this case working for another Hasidic Jew, Ariel’s father-in-law, Shlomo Teittleman (Chuck Low) in an attempt to intimidate him into granting Teittleman’s daughter a divorce. When the gangsters are impressed with Ariel’s resistance, he tells them the story of the Battle of Masada, where “for two years, 900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. The Romans? Where are they now?” Tony seems to take this as a sort of ethnic slur on his Italian heritage and immediately responds, “You’re looking at them, asshole.”
There is, in fact, a vague anti-Semitism in the attitudes of Tony and many of the other Italian American characters in The Sopranos. In episode 1.7 (“Down Neck,” February 21, 1999), Tony’s son A. J. tells his grandmother Livia that he is being tested by psychiatrists. Livia scoffs at the idea and declares that psychotherapy is “nothing but a racket for the Jews.” Similarly, in episode 2.7 (“D-Girl,” February 27, 2000), when Christopher learns that Amy Safir, the Hollywood production assistant he is trying to woo, attended Yale, he says: “Fuckin’ Yale, I swear to God. You Jews have your own Cosa Nostra hidden in that Ivy League.” Tony, in fact, also associates Jews with the Ivy League. In episode 3.7 (“Second Opinion,” April 8, 2001), a Columbia dean tries to convince Carmela to donate $50,000 to the university, and Carmela tells Tony that they should make the donation to ensure that their daughter Meadow can have the “best possible university experience.” Tony smirks and suggests, “Those Jew pricks are holding her hostage.” When Carmela points out that the dean is actually Italian, Tony simply says, “Jews with better food.”
However sarcastic, this last statement, by conflating Jews with Italians, suggests that Tony’s anti-Semitism might not be all that strong. It also suggests Tony’s sense of being embattled and oppressed because of his ethnic identity, an experience with which Jews are all too familiar. Indeed, even Paulie Walnuts, one of the more racist characters in The Sopranos, seems to feel that Jews and Italians naturally go together. In episode 2.10 (“Bust Out,” March 19, 2000), the cops seem to be closing in on Tony as they investigate a murder in which he participated. Wondering if he might have to go on the lam, Tony recalls a gangster who had to flee unprepared and ended up with no resources, hiding out in “Elvis country.” Furio Giunta, confused, asks where that is, and Paulie responds that it is “anywhere where there’s no Jews or Italians”—in other words, probably somewhere in the deep South where the ethnicities Paulie is accustomed to being surrounded by in New Jersey would be out of place. But it also suggests that, in Paulie’s mind, Jews and Italians tend to inhabit the same cultural space, centered in the American Northeast.
Of course Paulie, too, has a sense that Italian Americans have been oppressed, much in the way that Jews have suffered oppression throughout history. The aging Jewish gangster Hesh Rabkin also supports the notion that Jews have much in common with other oppressed peoples. Thus, unlike his Italian American friends, he is somewhat sympathetic to the complaints by Native Americans in episode 4.3 (“Christopher,” September 29, 2002) that celebrating Columbus Day is tantamount to celebrating genocide. Cuban American gangster Reuben Santiago (Yul Vasquez) then chips in that Columbus and those who followed him in colonizing the Americas were the original terrorists. On the other hand, Hesh becomes incensed when Santiago suggests that Columbus was as bad as Hitler, arguing that by making this analogy Santiago is “trivializing the Holocaust.” He then accuses Santiago of being anti-Semitic, and the two nearly come to blows, but Tony intervenes.
In any case, Hesh is one of Tony’s oldest and most trusted associates, though it is also true that Hesh operates on the margins of organized crime. He has, in fact, made much of his own wealth in the music business, though sometimes in unscrupulous ways, as when he seems to have scored his greatest successes by cheating black artists and songwriters out of their share of the profits from their work. Hesh himself seems more of an opportunist than a racist—he has a beloved African American mistress—but in fact (and perhaps not surprisingly), African Americans are the butt of the worst racism in The Sopranos. Christopher, Paulie, and the other particularly racist characters in the series comfortably and casually toss around racist epithets such as “nigger” and “shine,” as well as more Italianate versions, such as “moulinyan” or “ditzune.”
In episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999) Christopher and Adriana go in a burger joint that caters to blacks; he makes outrageous (and gratuitous) racist remarks as he complains about the service, apparently just to prove how tough he is. Trouble seems to be brewing, but they meet (black) show-biz mogul Massive Genius (Bokeem Woodbine) at the restaurant and are invited back to a party at his ornate crib, where he asks Christopher to arrange a meeting with Hesh, whom he claims owes royalties to a certain black songwriter, whose mother needs the money. Meanwhile, Massive G, fondling a fancy handgun and trying to make a connection, expresses a fondness for Italian American gangster culture: “You people are all right. Godfather? I seen that movie 200 times. And Godfather II was definitely the shit. The third one, a lot of people didn’t like it, but I think it was just misunderstood.” This attitude perhaps wins Christopher over just a bit, but the young gangster clearly remains resentful that African Americans seem to have assumed a prominence in the music industry that was once reserved for Italian Americans. This attitude is part of the general note of nostalgia that runs through the series, though Christopher also seems particularly incensed that African American hip-hop artists have appropriated a “gangster” label that he feels he himself more legitimately deserves. Thus, of Massive G, he declares, “That guy’s a gangster? I’m a gangster! I’m an O.G. original gangster, not him, fuckin’ lawn jockey. He’s got the fly Hamptons house—Alec Baldwin comes over, Whitney Houston. What do I got? I sit in a fuckin’ pork store, for chrissake. But the moolies, they got it goin’ on and they’re on TV.”
Tony may be a notch or two ahead of Christopher and Paulie in terms of his overall enlightenment, but he nevertheless has one of his ugliest moments in the series in “Proshai, Livushka,” when he discovers Meadow watching a film (his beloved Public Enemy) in the Soprano home with a young man from her class at Columbia. So far so good, but Tony quickly gages that the man, Noah Tannenbaum, is at least part black—and the young man does indeed turn out to have a Jewish father and an African American mother. The Jewish part doesn’t seem to worry Tony very much, but the African American part is a big problem for him. He starts to make racist remarks, then later makes it very clear that he does not approve of Meadow’s relationship with Noah.[3] Indeed, soon after his meeting with Noah, Tony has a panic attack when he sees an Uncle Ben’s box in a kitchen cabinet, indicating just how threatened he feels by the idea of Meadow dating an African American.[4]
Tony is clearly less racist than his mother, but more racist than his daughter, suggesting that racism in general is on the decline from one generation of Sopranos to the next.[5] This is surely a sign of progress, though Tony and others manage to make it an aspect of the general narrative of loss and decline that informs the series. For Tony, a decline in racialist thinking signals a blurring of boundaries that is concomitant with a general loss of standards and that serves as a threat to his cherished Italian American identity. As he tells Carmela soon after finding out about Meadow’s relationship with Noah, “If one of my sisters ever brought home a fuckin’ butterhead, do you know what my father would do?” And he clearly does not evoke this generational change as a sign of progress. Then again, he is a bit more open-minded where his son A. J. is concerned. Thus, when A. J. becomes romantically involved with the Domenican (which seems preferable in the Soprano world to being Puerto Rican) Blanca Selgado (Dania Ramirez), Tony points out that she is at least Catholic and decides tentatively to go along with the relationship.[6]
Racial boundaries are definitely under siege in the world of The Sopranos. Nevertheless, the fact that the Italian and Russian gangsters of the series operate essentially in their own separate (though slightly overlapping) spheres suggests that the world of organized crime remains more ethnically segregated at the end of the twentieth century than does American society as a whole. But the business of organized crime is business and that world is multicultural and multiracial in its own way, with the different ethnically segregated crime organizations finding ways to work together to create bigger profits for all. Even Tony is willing to put aside his devotion to his ethnic heritage if that devotion gets too much in the way of business.
Thus, despite his continual claims concerning the importance of his Italian heritage, Tony values profits over pride in “Christopher,” the episode that explores ethnic identity perhaps more thoroughly than any other in the series. As the episode begins, Tony’s crew lounges outside Satriale’s Pork Store, when Bobby Baccalieri discovers a newspaper story announcing that Native Americans plan to protest the upcoming Columbus Day parade in Newark. The gang becomes incensed, and Silvio Dante declares the protest an example of “anti-Italian discrimination” and promises to “take action.” On the other hand, the shared vision of Columbus as an Italian hero is somewhat undermined in this initial scene by Furio Giunta (the only actual Italian among them) who notes that, as a native of Genoa (in northern Italy), Columbus is not well thought of in Furio’s own native Naples (in southern Italy).
The Native Americans begin their protest as Rutgers anthropology professor Del Redclay (Larry Sellers) goes on TV and calls Columbus a “genocidal colonial general,” while another guest, representing the Italian Anti-Defamation League, defends Columbus as a great Italian. Initially, host Montel Williams seems sympathetic to the Italian position, until the Italian guest proclaims that his ancestors braved the perilous Middle Passage to come to America, for which Williams understandably takes him to task and basically makes him look like an idiot. Indeed, Italians who radically defend Columbus in this episode tend to come off badly, which no doubt contributed to complaints from Italian American organizations that the series in general is insulting to Italian Americans.
The representation in The Sopranos of ethnic pride as often being disingenuous and self-serving could be taken as a response to such critics. For example, when Richard LaPenna (the estranged husband of Jennifer Melfi) watches TV news footage of Italian Americans attacking Native American demonstrators, he is shocked and shamed. “My god, this is tragic. Could be scored with Albinoni’s Adagio.” To make matters worse, his snobbish, out-of-touch attitude is both reinforced and undercut by the fact that Albinoni’s Adagio is itself somewhat spurious, not having actually been written by Albinoni. In any case, the pretentious LaPenna is representative of precisely the Medigan types whom Tony sees as having abandoned their ethnic heritage in order to pursue mainstream respect and success in America—except that LaPenna wants to have it both ways and continue to claim Italian ethnicity as well.
Meanwhile, along these lines, it is also worth noting that a subplot in this episode involves a church-organized women’s luncheon on “Italian pride” that is organized by Father Phil Intintola in conjunction with the Columbus Day holiday. The luncheon features a Medigan woman speaker who is a professor at Montclair State, Carmela’s alma mater. The speaker notes that Italian American women have made great strides, despite the fact that they are still popularly viewed as “pizza makers and Mama Leones.” She pretentiously urges the women in the audience, if confronted by the stereotypes that they are consumers of smelly cheese and cold wine, to declare that they are from the land of “aromatic Asiago and supple Barolo.” “If they say ‘spaghetti and meatballs,’” she tells her audience, “you tell them, ‘Orecchietta with broccoli rabe.’”
In short, she urges the women in her audience to deny their working-class backgrounds and to shoot for Medigan status. Most importantly, from the point of view of certain members of her audience, she advises them, “If they say ‘John Gotti,’ you tell them ‘Rudolph Giuliani.’” At this point, Carmela and the other mob wives in the audience start to squirm. The speaker then goes on to cite a Princeton study that showed that 74 percent of Americans associated Italian Americans with organized crime. “It is our job,” she proclaims, “to make sure people know the other side of Italian American culture,” that is, the respectable, law-abiding side, a suggestion that rejects the culture of organized crime as a means of defending a positive vision of Italian American cultural identity. After the speech, Father Phil asks the professor about another study that showed most Americans recognize that Mafia narratives are fictional portrayals, but she waffles on the answer, and Father Phil’s feeble intervention is not enough to prevent the mob wives from being furious both at the speaker and at Father Phil, who is “forgettin’ who his friends are.” In particular, Gabriella Dante (Maureen Van Zandt), the wife of Silvio Dante, excoriates Father Phil for embarrassing Carmela (whose high-profile husband is so associated in the public mind with organized crime) and for forgetting just who it is that keeps his parish alive.
One of the most interesting aspects of this episode is the dual attitude displayed by Tony. While at home with his wife and kids, Tony insists that Columbus is an Italian hero who must be honored. Thus, he is outraged when he learns that A. J.’s history teacher, Mr. Cushman, has told him that, if Columbus were alive today, he would go on trial for crimes against humanity. “Like Milosevic,” Carmela explains, “in, you know . . . Europe.” A. J. confirms that his history book, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, agrees with his teacher. “Great,” Tony says. “You finally read a book, and it’s bullshit.” He explains that Columbus was working under difficult conditions, and finally explodes: “He was a brave Italian explorer! And in this house Christopher Columbus is a hero! End of story.”
Outside the home, though, Tony takes a much more pragmatic attitude. After violence breaks out between Native American protestors and a group of Italian Americans who show up to break up the protest, Tony reacts angrily to the bad publicity that the event generates. When Sil explains that he simply “can’t turn the other cheek” when Italian American ethnic pride is at stake, Tony is sympathetic, but adamant that now is a bad time for negative attention in the press. “I know,” Tony says, concerned about a possible public-relations disaster when the family is already under intense public scrutiny due to Uncle Junior’s racketeering trial. “But we’re runnin’ a business here.”
In response, Sil promises to be more subtle and to fight the battle on the level of images. So he sends Ralph to visit Redclay, who is heading up the anti-Columbus protest. Ralph (posing as one “Henry Caruso” and definitely lacking in subtlety) tries to intimidate the Native American leader by hinting that he represents the mob (“family people,” as he puts it) and suggesting that it is not in Redclay’s “best interest” to go through with the protest. When that doesn’t work, Ralph threatens to reveal to the public that famed Indian actor Iron Eyes Cody was a second-generation Sicilian from Louisiana named Espera de Corti. After Ralph leaves, Redclay anxiously asks his assistant about the charge, and she confirms Ralph’s story, but suggests that Cody was of mixed Indian and Italian descent. In any case, she notes, his ethnicity is old news, already public knowledge. She herself, she reveals, is one-eighth Italian, suggesting just how tenuous ethnic identities can be in this postmodern age.
Later, when Tony and Sil meet with Chief Doug Smith (Nick Chinlund), tribal chairman of the Mohonk Indians and CEO of Mohonk Enterprises, the chief seems more willing to negotiate because he hopes to attract Italian American customers to his tribe’s new casino. Like Tony, he is running a business. “People like Redclay,” he says, “they’re outta touch. They’re in their ivory towers. They don’t understand the economic opportunity that funds much of the Native American community.” Sil points out that Smith doesn’t look much like an Indian, in response to which Smith explains, “Frankly, I passed most of my life as white, until I had a racial awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father’s side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.” Smith is thus one-thirty-second Mohonk, which means very little in terms of genetics, but it is enough to get him into the casino business. Tony nods knowingly, understanding exactly what motivated Smith’s ethnic awakening: “And all this happened when the casino bill got passed, right?” Smith shrugs, “Better late than never.” As elsewhere in The Sopranos, it’s all about the money.
For Sil, though, it remains about ethnic pride. He still insists that “they discriminate against all Italians as a group when they disallow Columbus” and sees Columbus as central to the development of positive images for Italian Americans. Tony responds with an appeal to individualism (and to his individualist idol, Gary Cooper) that seems to reject the very notion of group-based identities: “Will you fuckin’ stop? Group. Group. What the fuck happened to Gary Cooper? That’s what I’d like to know.” Sil: “He died. . . . Oh you mean ’cause he fought the Sioux in all those Westerns.” Tony: “No, fuck that. Gary Cooper. Now there was an American. The strong, silent type. He did what he had to do. He faced down the Miller gang, when none of those other assholes in town would lift a finger to help him. And did he complain? Did he say ‘Oh, I came from this poor Texas-Irish illiterate fuckin’ background or whatever the fuck, so leave me the fuck out of it because my people got fucked over’?” Sil seems perplexed by Tony’s intermixture of real life with the movie High Noon: “T . . . you’re gettin’ a little confused here. A: That was the movies.” Tony becomes furious at Sil’s seemingly intentional refusal to understand what he is saying: “Now what the fuck difference does that make? Columbus was so long ago he might as well have been a fuckin’ movie. Images, you said.” Sil then responds with a clear indication of his view that Irish Americans like Cooper are more American than Irish and thus not subject to the kind of ethnic discrimination that has consistently been aimed at Italian Americans: “The point is, Gary Cooper, the real Gary Cooper, or anybody named Cooper never suffered like the Italians. The Medigan like him, they fucked everybody else. The Italians, the Polacks, the Blacks.” Tony: “Alright, if he was a Medigan around nowadays, he’d be a member of some victims’ group. The fundamentalist Christians. The abused cowboys. The gays. Whatever the fuck.” Christopher, in the backseat, suddenly bolts to attention: “He was gay, Gary Cooper?” Tony: “No! Are you listening to me?” Sil: “Hey, people suffered.” Tony: “Did you? Except for maybe the Feds?” Sil: “My grandparents got spit on because they were from Calabria.”
This exchange between Sil (bristling with ethnic pride) and Tony (given to a more individualist ethos that is more in tune with the practical, profit-seeking ideology of capitalism) indicates one of the central tensions lying at the heart of The Sopranos. Tony is clearly meant to seem the more sensible of the two in this conversation, even if Sil is perfectly right that Tony seems to be confusing real life and the movies. Such confusions are, of course, part of the texture of our postmodern world. But Tony seems to miss a major point when he diagnoses the ills of his contemporary world as arising from an excessive reliance on group-based identities. It might, in fact, be precisely the breakdown in such identities that is a key factor in the dissolution of the stable subject associated by Jameson with postmodernism. The pressures of late capitalism, after all, seem to be forcing Tony to loosen his own grip on his Italian American identity. Meanwhile, those pressures have virtually dismantled his working-class identity altogether, which should come as no surprise given the vexed state of the whole category of class in contemporary American society. We address this topic in the next chapter.
See Gibson for an argument that the racial anxieties expressed in The Sopranos are intricately entangled with issues of gender as well as race. Gibson argues, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, that a “gay and racial panic” runs through Tony’s attitudes in the series (194).
On the other hand, in the “Pine Barrens” episode, Tony reveals to Melfi that he is seeing Gloria Trillo, who is also one of Melfi’s patients. “Why Gloria?” asks Melfi. Tony, who is clearly hoping to make Melfi jealous, responds, “Why not? She’s smart. She’s sexy. She’s Italian.” Melfi: “Italian?” Tony: “Stick to your own kind, you know?” Melfi then sardonically expresses her own sense that this kind of thinking is retrograde: “What is this, West Side Story now?”
Meadow remains angry at her father’s racism for much of the rest of the series. In episode 3.5 (“Another Toothpick,” March 25, 2001) she admits that a black guy stole her bike at school. Tony reacts with a pleased smirk, causing her to react angrily. In return, he yells, “You stay with your own people!”
Note, however, Tony’s seeming rapport with the African American Rev. James Jr.—and his clear respect for Rev. James Sr.—in episode 2.2 (“Do Not Resuscitate,” January 23, 2000).
This generational change even holds with the thoroughly racist Christopher, who at one point takes on an African American mistress but keeps the fact a secret from the older Paulie, whom he knows will make racist jokes about it.
Another important interaction with Hispanics in the series occurs in episode 6.3 (“Mayham,” March 26, 2006), when Paulie and a henchman attack, kill, and rob two Colombian drug dealers who are operating in Soprano territory. Paulie disdainfully regards the Colombians as engaged in activities that are beneath the dignity of Italian American gangsters. While all this is going on, Tony lies in a coma in the midst of a vision in which he is confused with an Irish American salesman, further complicating the racial texture of the episode.