Ethnic Groups and American Institutions

Description

I chose to write about the first assignment 1)   Ethnic Groups and American Institutions.    I HAVE TO ANSWER EACH QUESTION IN Paragraph form based on the readings and video below. Also using outside information

Project 3: Choose One of Two research projects.

How has a specific ethnic group imprinted on some area of American life? Here are some suggestions:

Readings/Video

Read: Cornell and Hartmann, Chapters 5, 6, 7

Supplementary:

Agrelo, Justin. “The Messy Racial Politics of the Super Bowl Halftime Show”, Mother Jones (2.7.20).

Dreisinger, Baz. “Run-DMC, Aerosmith and the Song That Changed Everything”. NYT (2.13.19).

M.B. Elian and E. Bristow, Street Style: Afropunk 2018”, NYT (8.28.18).

Eligon, John and Julia Moskin. “16 Black Chefs Changinig Food”, NYT (7.17.19).

Gordiner, Jeff, “Beyond Labels: A New Generation of African American Chefs is Fusing History and Innovation”, NYT (1.27.16).

Morris, Wesley. “Why is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music”, NYT (8.16.19).

Pirani, Lenan (photos by Daniel Jack Lyons). “”The New Punks of Los Angeles”, NYT (11.14.18).

Randle, Aaron. “How a Hip-Hop Party Went From a Harlem Basement to Packing Barclay’s”, NYT (12.24.19).

Questlove, “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems: How Hip Hop Failed Black America, Part II”, Vulture (4.29.14).

Samuels, Alana. “The White Flight From Football, The Atlantic (2.1.19).

Shapiro, Eliza. “New York’s Most Selective Public High School Has 895 Spots. Black Students Got 7.”, NYT (3.19.19).

Wilner, Brandon. “A Reggae Heart Beating in the Bronx”, NYT (1.6.20). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/arts/music/wackies-reggae-lloyd-barnes.html

Video: “Somewhere South: Porridge for the Soul”, Vivian Howard, PBS (4.3.20) [Black influence on American food in the South];  “The Greek Diner Story” (Youtube); “The Fab Five” (ESPN/Youtube); “Magic and Bird” (ESPN/Youtube); “A Short History of the Blues” and “Nothing But the Blues – Part 1” (Youtube)

Discussion:

Ethnic groups have not just disappeared into American life. You have to first decide on an ethnic group and the example of its imprint on mainstream American life. For example, Greeks entered the diner business in places like New York where they arrived in large numbers. These diners were not just for other Greek immigrants, nor did they serve Greek food. Moreover, they have persisted beyond the immigrant generation. You can see this in “The Greek Diner Story”. Another great example is the influence of African Americans on professional basketball. In addition to the video mentioned on the course outline in this area, I recommend looking into video on New York City’s The Rucker Tournament. The questions copied below should be asked of this relationship”

What historical circumstances shaped entry into this area? Consider the types of “capital” brought into the situation (e.g., cultural heritage) and the structure of opportunity in the larger society.
Is the group over-represented in membership numbers?
Does the group or group members exert disproportionate power or enjoy privilege?
Has the group’s culture been imparted to the institution?

A Case Study: Jamaican Runners

The questions that you are asked to address are answered by the sociologist Orlando Patterson regarding the proficiency of Jamaicans in track, in particular, sprinting:

Among the most enigmatic features of Jamaica, an island of only 2.8 million people, is its astonishing supremacy in running. Currently, the world’s fastest man and woman are both Jamaicans. Nineteen of the 26 fastest times ever recorded in 100 meter races were by Jamaicans. The list goes on.

Jamaica’s global dominance is broad and deep, both male and female, and started to emerge over half a century ago. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Jamaica was ranked 13th by the International Olympic Committee. By the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, it was first in sprints, with Usain Bolt winning three gold medals, and an unprecedented clean sweep of the women’s 100 meters.

How do Jamaicans do it? It’s not because of genetics, as some claim. A vast majority of Jamaicans’ ancestors are from West Africa, which has relatively few outstanding sprinters. Nor can genetics explain why Jamaicans outperform other blacks in the Americas, especially in Brazil, which has 36 times as many of them.

Ask a Jamaican like me (I was born and raised there), and we’ll give you a very different answer: Champs. Officially called the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association Boys and Girls Athletics Championship, Champs is an annual competition attended by 30,000 wildly enthusiastic fans. Jamaica is perhaps the only country in the world where a track and field meet is the premier sporting event.

But it’s not just Champs. The competition is one part of a broader framework — track and field is huge at every educational level, with periodic regional meets drawing athletes of all ages from the most remote rural areas. So the real question is, why is Jamaica nuts for track?

Part of the answer is institutional. The British first introduced organized and informal athletics, and interscholastic competition, to Jamaica and other colonies in the late 19th century. One of Jamaica’s founding fathers, N. W. Manley, was the greatest student athlete of his generation; later, as the revered head of state, he tirelessly promoted track and field.

Jamaica quickly stood out from other Caribbean islands in extending these competitions from elite white schools to those of the nonwhite classes. Starting early in the 20th century, several outstanding athletes, like G. C. Foster, emerged as role models, mentors and promoters of the sport, and they identified and trained the next generation of talent.

By the time I went to high school, in the ’50s, track and field was as popular among my friends as baseball was among kids my age in Brooklyn. My heroes were the runners who had triumphed at Helsinki. Noel A. White, one of our country’s most revered coaches, joined Foster to coach my high school to Champs victory in 1957. White was also my homeroom and history teacher, and he coached me after school, free of charge, to the top of my graduating class and a university scholarship.

But the institution is only part of the answer. These efforts succeeded because of an abundance of very healthy children and young people — the result not of Jamaica’s mountainous terrain, as some have claimed, but of the extraordinary success of a public health campaign partly spearheaded in the 1920s by specialists from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The program began in the small town of May Pen, where I later grew up. It emphasized hygiene, clean water and fecal and mosquito control. The old mantras “healthy bodies, healthy minds” and “cleanliness is next to godliness” took hold in our communities and primary schools, whose teachers were recruited in the public health campaign. Running, as the cheapest sport, was the natural beneficiary of this movement. As a child, Usain Bolt received his initial training at a remote, poorly equipped rural grade school.

The result was what the historical demographer James Riley calls the Jamaican paradox: one of the rare instances of a poor country with the life expectancy of an advanced society, a health transition that began in the 1920s and improved at one of the fastest paces on record, from 36 years at birth in 1920 to 70 by 1977. It’s no accident that the oldest individual medalist in Olympic track history is a Jamaican woman, Merlene Ottey, who was still sprinting in international meets at age 52.

Yet another factor is Jamaicans’ combative individualism, the dark side of which is the country’s chronic violence. Its bright side, though, is extreme self-reliance — which, along with effective health policy, is Riley’s main explanation for the life-expectancy paradox. But it also dovetails nicely with running, in which performance is entirely up to the athlete. Jamaican track is a far cry from the British ethic of winning with grace. One Olympic medalist and alumnus of one of the dominant schools at Champs was quoted by the writer Richard Moore as telling young athletes: “One thing we go out there for, and that’s to win. To win. To win. To win. To win. To dominate. To crush them!”

The world got a taste of Jamaica’s cutthroat track culture in Beijing, where Bolt, on the verge of winning the 100 meters in record time, slowed down, thumped his chest and spread his arms in a taunting, triumphant gesture. “We are a confident people,” he later told the BBC.

This self-assuredness can lead to reckless behavior. Although Bolt has a clean slate, several Jamaican athletes have tested positive for prohibited substances. Some are no doubt guilty, and the recent disclosure that Nesta Carter tested positive for a banned substance as a result of a retest of samples from Beijing has caused consternation in Jamaica — though, to be fair, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport has overturned or reduced penalties imposed on Jamaican runners on the grounds that there were nondoping explanations for the results. (Jamaicans have a long tradition of taking herbal supplements to promote good health.)

Jamaica has also creatively exploited its proximity to the United States. Some of our best runners went to college there on athletic scholarships, and they stayed and even competed for America, as many now do for Britain and Canada. But a critical number of them, like the world-record holders Dennis Johnson and Herb McKenley, who was also an Olympic medalist and a former Jamaican national coach, returned to train generations of new stars. Jamaican student athletes also acquired international experience by participating in American meets like the annual Penn Relays, where they frequently excel.

Until recently, Jamaican athletes who didn’t get scholarships or coaching jobs tended to leave the sport after high school. But even that is changing. Beginning nearly 20 years ago, Jamaicans started establishing for-profit track and field clubs, which have brought American-style sports entrepreneurship to the island. Now nearly all the island’s major track stars are being trained locally, greatly reducing the talent drain and shifting the focus to adult runners, lengthening their careers and, with their greater local visibility and wealth, intensifying the island’s passion for the sport.

The remarkable success of Jamaicans in building the institutions of a globally dominant sports enterprise and a complementary system of public health is a positive story, but it raises another question: Why have they failed so badly in developing a successful economy?

The answer is complex and incomplete. But it might lie in a deeper truth about the island. Political and economic successes are often top-down, relying on leadership that adapts and manages appropriate institutions that also benefit the non-elite. But things like health reform and sports success — and the reggae industry, for that matter — are largely bottom-up. Jamaica is yet to acquire the leadership for national development it deserves. But it has no lack of talent, energy and self-reliance — qualities as evident in health statistics as they are on the track.

Patterson, O. “The Secret of Jamaica’s Runners”, NYT (8.14.16) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-secret-of-jamaicas-runners.html

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African Americans were excluded from the NBA until the middle of the 20th century. Their inclusion changed the way the game was played. See this excerpt from an article by Heather Gilligan:

When the Harlem Globetrotters and the Minneapolis Lakers played an exhibition game in Chicago in 1948, critics dismissed the contest as a publicity stunt. There was no way the all-Black Globetrotters — a comedy team of sorts — could beat the Lakers, the reigning champions of the all-White National Basketball League, a precursor to today’s NBA.

Instead, the match changed basketball forever.

At the time, basketball was in trouble. Despite their winning record, the Lakers, like all teams playing in the NBL, had trouble drawing an audience. The league itself was losing money.

Like most cultural institutions in the United States, basketball had a long tradition of racial tension. At the time of the matchup, teams were nearly always all White or all Black, but that wasn’t always the case. The sport had been integrated in 1942, five years before Jackie Robinson did the same for major-league baseball — but that didn’t mean the effort was going well. In one instance, a Black player lost his temper and threw a punch at a White player who’d been shoving him throughout the game; White fans swarmed the court, and the National Guard had to be called in to prevent a riot. “That scared all of the basketball promoters,” the late sports writer Frank Deford explained in the 2005 PBS documentary The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World. There were just four Black players in the league at the time, and all of them were cut by the end of the year.

Cementing the segregation of the league were typical racist arguments — Black athletes did not have the intellect needed to win in a fast-paced sport like basketball; they had small lungs and heavy bones and an inability to jump; they weren’t coachable. (Writer John Christgau, author of Tricksters in the Madhouse, a seminal book about the game, also appeared in The Team That Changed the World, and marveled at the thought. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “They couldn’t jump.”)

Although it was an exhibition game, it proved to be the beginning of the end for segregation in basketball. “All of the racist arguments for keeping [Black athletes] out of basketball began to be undone with that game,” Christgau said in The Team That Changed the Game.

The sport integrated for good two years after the Globetrotters/Lakers game,when the NBA was formed. League officials and team owners were influenced not just by the talent they would otherwise miss out on, but also by the White crowds that had turned out to see the all-Black Globetrotters in 1948, and again in a second matchup in 1949. The Globetrotters won that game, too. So it was only fitting that Globetrotter Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first Black athlete to sign with an NBA team when he joined the New York Knicks in 1950.

Some argue that the Globetrotters saved the sport. Their popularity drew a cross-section of America to basketball and provided a fan base for the newly developed NBA. What had been a relatively monotonous game of men running up and down a court became a game of showmanship, cleverness, and a newer, nimbler brand of sport. The Globetrotters’ flair with the ball eventually became part of the fabric of basketball. In their hands, basketball became a sport where Black and White fans alike could cheer together for a common team.

The Black-Versus-White Basketball Game That Integrated the Sport

Heather Gilligan, Level (2,27,18) https://level.medium.com/globetrotters-mn-lakers-game-segregation-basketball-874bf15f832

Also see “Where Are All the White American NBA Players?”, Marc J. Spears, The Undefeated (10.25.16). https://theundefeated.com/features/white-american-nba-players/

For a look at African American’s relationship to America’s food culture, see the article by Julia Moskin in the NYT (8.7.18), “Is It Southern Food, or Soul Food?”

com/2018/08/07/dining/is-it-southern-food-or-soul-food.html”>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/dining/is-it-southern-food-or-soul-food.html Also visit the web site for the Southern Food Alliance at https://www.southernfoodways.org/ In particular, check out the video “Soul of the Kitchen” https://www.southernfoodways.org/film/soul-of-the-kitchen/

Make sure to pay attention to the types of capital or resources that groups bring with them. Immigrants are noted for a work ethic (i.e., cultural capital) and are able to draw on family and communal connections (i.e., social capital).

The historical context also matters: groups take advantage of opportunities that present themselves at the time. Gujurati Indians were able to enter the motel business because Americans were leaving it. Listen to the NPR podcast interview with Pawan Dhingra here.

https://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153988290/life-behind-the-lobby-indian-american-motel-owners
Basketball has been significantly imprinted by the critical mass of African American players in the second half of the 20th century. African Americans players brought a culture to the NBA that is embedded in the inner city. For a look at the famous Rucker Tournament in Harlem see “The Blackout”

See the way African American music (e.g., Hip Hop, gospel, rhythm and blues) has changed the American popular songbook. You can investigate the influence of African American blues musicians on establishment rock and roll. See this article by Jack Hamilton, “How Rock and Roll Became White”, in Slate Magazine com/culture/2016/10/race-rock-and-the-rolling-stones-how-the-rock-and-roll-became-white.html”>https://slate.com/culture/2016/10/race-rock-and-the-rolling-stones-how-the-rock-and-roll-became-white.html Listen to the music of Black bluesman Robert Johnson by The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. com/2020/03/covering-robert-johnsons-seminal-blues-became-a-rite-of-rock-n-roll-passage.html”>http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/covering-robert-johnsons-seminal-blues-became-a-rite-of-rock-n-roll-passage.html Also see https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-eric-clapton-robert-johnson-crossroads/

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For this project, you will investigate the framing of ethnic group identity in the mass media. You will focus on a single case reported in media outlets like the press (print media) or a TV show.

Readings

*Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “What Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’?”, NYT (9.21.19).

Peters, Jeremy et al. “How the El Paso Gunman Echoed The Words of Right Wing Pundits”, NYT (8.12.19).

Brooks, Caryn, “Italian Americans and the G Word: Embrace or Reject”, Time, (12.14.09).

Buckley, C. “In Actors’ Walkout, Anger Over Stereotypes”. NYT (5/5/15).

Castle, S. and R. Mackey, “Fox News Beats a Retreat After Gaffes About Islam”, NYT (1/13/15).

Gold, Michael. “Called ‘Fredo’, CNN’s Cuomo Erupts”, NYT (8.14.19).

Robbins, Liz, “A CUNY Law Professor Didn’ Like TV’s ‘Homeland’. Now He’s Advising It”., NYT (3.16.17).

Ryzik, Melena “Can Television Be Fair to Muslims?”, NYT (12.4.16).

Scott, A.O. “Young, Geeky and Black” (film review), NYT (6.18.15).

Staples, Brent. “The Radical Blackness of Ebony Magazine”, NYT (8.12.19).

Discussion:

You are focusing on a particular media text such as The BET Hip Hop Awards Show, a Jersey Shore or South Park episode, a film like “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”.

How is ethnicity represented – what themes construct ethnicity? Use the perspective developed in class which relies on the work of Cornell and Hartmann. In particular, what identities were invoked? For example, were the characters defined by race or nationality or some new ethnicity (e.g., Latino, Desi)?

Also, what did these identities mean? Here, pay attention to prominent themes or motifs like “criminality” assigned to Italian Americans by Hollywood. In “The Last Black Man in S.F.” Black men can be cerebral, emotionally complex, competent, self-reliant, etc. In Big Fat Greek Wedding, Greek Americans are portrayed as standing up to assimilation although with closeknit family ties that are stultifying for the individual.

To what extent are these media representations ethnic stereotypes? A stereotype is an exaggeration. Generalizations about groups can be valid. However, a stereotype is an overgeneralization; it exaggerates the relationship between two variables, such as Muslims and terrorism or the Mafia and Italians. Thus, while the Mafia is Italian, specifically Sicilian, all Italians are not in the Mafia. The example above is not stereotypical in that Blackness is constructed in opposition to racist themes. “Jersey Shore”, by contrast has been criticized for promoting negative stereotypes of Italian Americans.

Is there a pattern of mass media stereotypes for this ethnic group that can found in other texts and widely accepted? In the case of Italian Americans, there is an entire genre of Mafia stories in the mass media. “Jersey Shore” promotes stereotypes of Italian Americans as not intelligent and well-educated, quick to argue and fight, superficial and materialistic, etc. See the classic Saturday Night Live skit from 1978 that parodies Greek Americans in the diner business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo

Why do you think these representations and perspectives are used to tell the story? In particular, is there a media agenda or ideology? Ethnic groups are minority groups in that they occupy subordinate or inferior positions in society. The mass media puts into popular culture circulation narratives that reproduce, and therefore justify, their subordinate status. Thus, mass media texts like “Homeland” promote images of Muslim terrorism which justify punitive policies toward Muslim Americans and Muslim countries.

I have copied below a Washington Post article, “News Media Offers Consistently Warped Portrayals of Black Families, Study Finds” by Tracy Jan (12.13.17):

If all you knew about black families was what national news outlets reported, you are likely to think African Americans are overwhelmingly poor, reliant on welfare, absentee fathers and criminals, despite what government data show, a new study says.

Major media outlets routinely present a distorted picture of black families — portraying them as dependent and dysfunctional — while white families are more likely to be depicted as sources of social stability, according to the report released Wednesday by Color of Change, a racial justice organization, and Family Story, an advocate of diverse family arrangements.

“This leaves people with the opinion that black people are plagued with self-imposed dysfunction that creates family instability and therefore, all their problems,” said Travis L. Dixon, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted the study.

Such stereotypes fuel political rhetoric and inform public policy, such as Congress’s consideration to “gut social safety net programs,” he said. Stricter work requirements, drug testing and other welfare restrictions are likely to be supported by a public exposed to inaccurate portrayals of black families, the report said. Legislators can point to media coverage of black families in their zeal to further limit welfare programs and say, “It’s all their fault. They just need to get their ducks in a row,” Dixon said.

Poverty and welfare were not always stigmatized in the media as a predominantly black issue, the report said. White men who benefited from the anti-poverty programs in the 1920s and 1930s were typically thought of as having “run into hard luck” and just needed the support to “help them through the tough times,” it said.

Over time, however, political leaders and the media have “worked to pathologize black families in the American imagination to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, widespread economic inequity and urban disinvestment — as well as to gain and maintain political and social power,” wrote Nicole Rodgers, founder of Family Story.

Researchers reviewed more than 800 local and national news stories and commentary pieces published or aired between January 2015 and December 2016, randomly sampling the most highly rated news programs for each of the major broadcast and cable networks. Those included ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Also included in the study: newspapers of national influence such as The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune as well as regional newspapers, conservative websites such as Breitbart, and Christian news sources like the Christian Post.

The study concluded both ideologically driven news sources as well as traditional newspapers and broadcasts furthered false narratives about black families, helping to shape public assumptions that they are “uniquely and irrevocably pathological and undeserving,” Dixon said.

Black families represent 59 percent of the poor portrayed in the media, according to the analysis, but account for just 27 percent of Americans in poverty. Whites families make up 17 percent of the poor depicted in news media, but make up 66 percent of the American poor, the study said.

Black people are also nearly three times more likely than whites to be portrayed as dependent on welfare, the study showed. Black fathers were shown spending time with their kids almost half as often as white fathers.

Blacks represent 37 percent of criminals shown in the news, but constitute 26 percent of those arrested on criminal charges, the study said. In contrast, news media portray whites as criminals 28 percent of the time, when FBI crime reports show they make up 77 percent of crime suspects.

White people are really confident that things are getting better for black people

“There are dire consequences for black people when these outlandish archetypes rule the day: abusive treatment by police, less attention from doctors, harsher sentences from judges,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, wrote in the report.

Dixon said racial tropes of the absentee black father or family dysfunction were frequently invoked during new shows featuring political commentary. Pundits were often allowed to spout inaccurate generalizations about black families without being challenged by hosts.

“Let’s say the actual topic was the Black Lives Matter movement and police citizen interactions,” Dixon said. “This idea of the problematic black family would keep coming up, almost out of nowhere, even if the topic was not about the black family.”

The report makes several recommendations for the news industry, including setting stronger standards for sourcing information and experts, providing greater social and historical context, and including people of color in setting editorial standards.

Representing Italian Americans: Guido

My research on the Italian American youth culture, Guido, has looked at the issue of mass media representations/stereotypes. One of my articles can be found on my QCC web page. You can find a complete list of my work on the course outline. I have copied and pasted an excerpt from my recent book, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). It focuses on the way MTV represented Guido in the reality-TV show, Jersey Shore.

Merchandising UnCool

Youth culture not only persists in spite of opposition in the mainstream, it typically thrives (Hebdige 1977). The animus of local citizenry did not deter Guido summer scenes in the Hamptons and on the Jersey Shore. The Hamptons scene, more than seventy five miles east of New York City, bustled despite being hemmed in by the zoning laws of the wealthy town of Southampton that legislated against “grouper” housing and kept clubs at a distance from prime residential areas and beaches. However, Guido remained marginalized through the 2000s within the youth scene. Mainstream youth culture spaces on the Internet like Urban Dictionary expose a sustained groundswell of antipathy for Guido as a youth culture. Aside from the extraordinary rant of Get Off Our Island, there have been websites dedicated to trashing Guido like “Guidos Suck” (2008). An attack thread emerged in the form of a stereotype built around images of a young male with spiked hair and an orange tan with the pseudonym “Lee Hotti” (2005). The name “Hotti” which rhymes with “Gotti” (as referenced on the site) has numerous permutations which mock Guido for “homoeroticism” and has earned its own Urban Dictionary entry (“Lee Hotti” 2017).

Guido remained too patently uncool to interest the “merchants of cool”. Douglas Rushkoff (The Merchants of Cool 2001) observes that the youth culture industries and youth cultures are entwined in a “feedback loop” of reciprocal influence. Rushkoff highlights the vast capabilities of MTV in understanding youth culture so it can sell it back to young people who are, in turn, monitoring arbiters of youth culture practice like MTV. Initially, MTV was almost singularly focused on music video. Dance music did not fall under its purview, so outer borough Italian American youth culture was not on its radar, and perhaps vice versa. In the vacuum left by  disinterested corporate cool merchants, there were minor efforts to package Guido that had hyperlocal meaning. The Joe Causi connection to WKTU FM spun off a recording of satirical songs by The HaYaDoin’ Boys like “The 12 Days of Guido Christmas” (2004):

On the twelfth day of Christmas my paesan gave to me,

Twelve globs of hair gel,

Eleven Sinatra CDs,

Ten hand gestures,

Nine balls-a-grabbing,

Eight ha ya doins,

Seven Piazza jerseys,

Six Sergio Tacchinis,

Five pinky rings!

Four fresh cannolis,

All tree Godfadda’s,

Two guinea tees,

And a ride in his IROC-Z.

An Internet site “Guidoland” (2004) marketed Guido as ethnic nostalgia and ethnic nostalgia as entertainment, like an insider parody titled “You Know You’re a Guido Of…”, for example, “You owned or drive a Mustang/IROC/Trans Am” or “You cried when Hot 97 turned to all rap”. In these developments, Guidos attempted to market themselves to other Guidos before someone else did.  

A more committed commercial investment occurred in 2003 when the apparel firm Guido New York merchandised Guido as a hybrid of street and club couture. On the one hand, GNY claimed the prestige of haute fashion design, dressing high-profile celebrities and flaunting notices in international fashion magazines. On the other hand, probably with Hip Hop in mind, it claimed an authentic relationship to the Italian street. Regarding the latter, advertisements on the company website featured photographs of tough posing young males on hardscrabble streets framed by elevated train tracks and warehouses marking the symbolic Guido turf of Bensonhurst and Gravesend. One ad revived the memory of the infamous 1989 racial killing: a young male in a designer track suit leans against a sleek automobile parked at the curb while holding a baseball bat that is a signifier of street culture not baseball. The intent to mine Guido for a “tough-guy sex appeal” in “marked contrast to the metrosexual ambiguity that has dominated the market in recent years” was taken further in the direction of Italian American street culture when one of the grandsons of John Gotti became a runway model for the 2004 collection (Guido New York 2004).

However, GNY was unable to reconcile its many contradictions. Its 2005 collection added the warm-up suit and hoodies that were a signature of Hip Hop fashions. Further, urban street wear clichés were juxtaposed to preppy styles like classic polo shirts and tennis shorts and, even more implausibly, a swimsuit collection modeled by men with lean, “metrosexual” physiques. Perhaps the greatest contradiction was the failure to resolve the meaning of “the name ‘Guido’”, an “image” or “stereotype” that “may be perceived as negative”, “something that is less desirable” and “less than classy.” Guido New York believed it “re-contextualized and appropriated the word and not the stereotype” (Guido New York 3.20.04). In contrast to FuBu, Guido New York repudiated the subculture whose authenticity it was merchandising. The commercial franchise on Guido was still up for grabs although, at the time, it was difficult to see the value of having one. While merchandising Guido would not begin to compete with Hip Hop, and that likely rankled with insiders, it was plausible that Guido could be a marketable ethnic youth style like “Cholo” offering a version of the “inner city vibe” (LaFerla, 2003a).

Guido New York overlapped with the reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti” which was a serious attempt to merchandise Guido in the electronic visual media. It first aired in 2003, winding through three seasons that ended in 2005. While the show never named Guido, the three grandsons of John Gotti personified, if not exemplified, the style, including the demeanor, which explains the value of the endorsement for Guido New York. The brothers possessed Guido street cred because of the family surname and because of plot development that linked back to Howard Beach. The Gotti name was not enough to salvage the 2005 GNY fashion line but it was used to break into the Guido style market on Long Island with the opening of a tanning salon. Alongside the demise of Guido New York, the short shelf life of “Growing Up Gotti” is indicative of the limited commercial success in merchandising Guido to this point. When MTV entered the field, the resources of the premier “merchant of cool” was brought to bear on a youth culture product. Unlike “Gotti” which is really focused on family culture, and the absent family patriarch, MTV produced an unadulterated youth culture narrative.

<Figure 9:1 About Here>

Growing Up Gotti disseminated Guido style in the mass media leading up to Jersey Shore. (Growing Up Gotti: 10 Years Later: The Hair (Season 4, Episode 1) Published by A + E 11.12.14, 1:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAqEuGwPuk8 , accessed 8.21.2018).

MTV and Guido were not destined for each other. Since it began operations in 1982, MTV had a preoccupation with rock followed by Hip Hop which led it to ignore youth subcultures oriented to electronic dance music. While Guido lacked a marketable soundtrack, MTV, was moving away from music which was in its media DNA. It turned out that Guido was highly suitable for the new reality format that MTV was relying on now that the Internet had changed the way young people were consuming music. MTV approached Guido gingerly. It was showing a growing interest in the Guido scene from the early 2000s with the reality TV series called “True Life” which included “I Have a Summer Share” (2004), “I’m a Jersey Shore Girl” (2004), and “I’m a Staten Island Girl” (2006). These series unequivocally recognized the Guido scene outside of Bensonhurst, and was likely read that way in the New York metropolitan area, but did not name Guido perhaps in deference to anti-defamation concerns. While the pursuit of a more “sophisticated” scene led NJGuido to renounce the Guido symbol, MTV filled the vacuum by brazenly announced plans for a reality TV show about Seaside Heights Guido. Not pulling punches this time, the show was originally to be called “Guido” (Fleming 2018). MTV appears to have been mindful of the media narrative to this point and, so, entertained the possibility of including the Gotti brothers with their established Guido credentials and fresh off a reality TV show of their own (Lear 2014).

The casting call posted on the Internet 2.12.09 intended for a particular youth culture constituency, did not mince words:

VH1 Casting hottest GUIDOS and GUIDETTES for a summer in “the shore”!

It’s about freakin time they did this!!!It’s summertime at the Jersey Shore, baby! Bangin’ beats, hot bodies, icy cold booze, and boardwalk bashes … only the hottest pimps and sexiest ladies can handle the heat. Red White and Green, Killer shades, Awesome Hair, Bandanna’s and Bling! Can mean only one thing… So if you’re a loud and proud Italian, and rep the shore the fullest, we want to hear from you!Do you dominate the gym, tear up the club, pump your fist and rule the bedroom? Prove it!Doron Ofir Casting and VH1 are currently seeking the proudest GUIDOS and GUIDETTES to rep the real deal .. be least 21 and appear younger than 30 to star in a long-form docu-series that will prove once and for all, who runs sh*t. Summertime at the Jersey Shore, baby, bring it the f@&% on!

MTV casted four males and four females in their twenties who were “all self-proclaimed ‘guidos and guidettes’” (Moore 2010). Cast members explicitly called attention to the identity symbol; entering a gym, DJ Pauly D exclaims “The Guidos are here!” and “I’m the number 1 Guido” (JS, Season 3, 1.16.11).1 JS also showcased a “Guidette” identity that was empowered in the style, including sexuality, in comparison to earlier representations like SNF. JS portrayed a scene that NJGuido perfected before surrendering the subcultural nomenclature. Although clubbing was the signature public ritual, JS foregrounded the “summer share” as a behind the scenes scene, primarily to showcase the “hook-up culture” that framed the evolved Guido sexual mores. The distinctive visual vernacular was in place, including spiked gelled hair for males and high hair and long painted nails for females. Brand named clothing like Ed Hardy was on display along with a sampling of designer Hip Hop fashions like baggy basketball shorts and athletic shoes. MTV recruited males representing core Guido personas: all were bodybuilders and one was a club DJ. One of the males was prone to fighting in public although the females were also inclined to brawl. None were from the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, most notably Bensonhurst, although three were from Staten Island which is once removed from southern Brooklyn. DJ Pauly D was from Rhode Island with a regional accent in his repertoire, suggesting that Guido was already supra-local. Jersey Shore Guido style displays change and continuity within the style tradition.

MTV highlighted the connection between Guido and Italian ethnicity, which was what was to be expected from the original casting call. Cast members used Guido and Italian interchangeably. In fact, ancestral purity was relaxed as a subcultural criterion as one of the females had non-Italian European ancestry and another was of Chilean (possibly Indio) origin with adoptive Italian American parents. This did not preclude recognition that Guido was (somehow) an “Italian” cultural enterprise, symbolized by the Italian flag painted on the garage door of the beach house, and a reverence for Italian ethnic capital (most notably professed by the Guidette from Chile). The series made explicit references to Italian ethnicity, not just on the surface, but by strategically underscoring ethnic family values like maternal nurturance. The selection of one of the males, Vinny, was made in part because he represented on the casting tape as “close with my family” which, to JS producer Salsano made him “the biggest guido” (Fleming 2018). Jersey Shore Guido style displays change and continuity with the style tradition. Pauly D prominently articulates Italian heritage in style performance: “I was born and raised a Guido. It’s just a life-style. It’s being Italian. It’s representing family…”.

<Figure 9:2 About Here>

Pauly D explaining the connection between Guido and being Italian. (“Welcome to Jersey Shore” recap season 1 episode 1 12/1/2009, 6:27, MTV http://www.mtv.com/video-clips/8go1h7/jersey-shore-welcome-to-jersey-shore, accessed 8.21.2018).

Settling into Popular American Culture

Italian American youth had been appropriating popular American culture for years and Guido was no exception. Now, it was Guido that was being appropriated. JS exploded into the popular culture from the margins, taking Guido along. It grabbed the attention of the mainstream media with the “discovery” of Guido, indicating a vacuum of knowledge about the subject when the series debuted. Initial ratings success created a demand for more information about Guido including an explanation. In clear contrast to the 1989 media spectacle, JS opened a public conversation about the MTV version of “reality”. In the first couple of months after JS debuted, the press asked questions about the meaning of it all, in particular, “the cast’s use of the term “guido” and “guidette” (Moore 2010). The real-life Guidos and Guidettes were in a privileged position to explain, as newfound celebrities, and they reiterated the impression created on the show. Pauly D owned up that

I was born and raised a Guido. It’s just a lifestyle. It’s about being Italian. It’s representing family, friends, tanning, gel, everything. Dude I got a fucking tanning bed in my place, that’s how serious I am about being a Guido and living up to that lifestyle. (Viscusi 2010)

Appearances by cast members on national TV talk shows were informational sessions on “Guido”. Investigative stories proliferated in national publications including Time, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast. Journalists reached out to Italian American Studies scholars and some cited my 1991 article in The Journal of Ethnic Studies that was posted on my college website. Booth Moore’s article in The Chicago Tribune (2010) noted:

The term [Guido] has been bandied about in academic circles for years. (You can Google QCC sociology professor Donald Tricarico’s 1991 paper ‘Guido: Fashioning an Italian American Youth Style’.)

I was invited to interview for national publications, a Philadelphia top 40 radio station, RAI TV, and MTV. I was asked in an email by a New York Post reporter to clarify “the new terms these kids [i.e., JS Guidos] come up with”. The pursuit of textual truth inspired “The Conference on Jersey Shore Studies” at the University of Chicago in October 2011. Organized by graduate students, the conference was called to make sense of a show that “has exposed an entire subculture, lifestyle, and personality type – the Guido – for public appraisal” and as a window on weightier subjects like “gender, ethnicity, celebrity”. With a newfound reputation as a Guidologist in the press, I was invited to present at the conference with a stipend covering travel and lodging.

As reality TV, JS imparted a documentary truth to Guido. Some reporting pursued this angle in the initial round of stories in the mainstream press. The week it debuted, Joshua David Stein (2009) wrote in The Times: “MTV, the music-cum-social anthropology network, recently introduced ‘Jersey Shore’”. Booth Moore (2010) similarly observes that “’JS’ is an introductory course in urban anthropology”. The choice of anthropology rather than sociology is perhaps telling, suggesting that to the mainstream media and its upper middle class bias, they were encountering something exotic. As the premier merchant of cool, MTV was able to establish JS as its own truth about Guido in the popular culture regardless of the scholarship. When MTV aired the JS “reunion” in April 2018, no expert commentary was necessary. Journalistic accounts did not have to go beyond the sphere of popular culture. Guido did not require clarification and was referenced only to the original series (see Caramanica 2018; Zimmerman 2017). Italian American identity politics also sat this one out (see below).

Early on, it was apparent that the truth was in the merchandising. JS introduced what was a marginal local style to a national youth culture market as a new media product. Within a short time, Guido became ensnared in proliferating commodification. It was a valuable commodity because of ratings success of JS that was unprecedented for the reality genre; the commercial success of the first season was leveraged into four more, spanning four consecutive years and a single episode in January 2011, season 3 had almost nine million viewers more viewers than what most network programs were attracting and “the highest-ever viewership for a MTV series” (Denhart 2011). Commercial success has produced spin-off series and has made it the masthead of a TV genre. JS has become a prototype for a “character driven reality  series” that focuses on subcultures marginal to the mainstream because of class and ethnicity. Thus, JS has inspired “Floribama Shore”, produced by Sally Ann Salsano, the “Long Island Italian girl” who produced JS, which “brings together a group of young partyers living together for the Summer, this time in the Florida panhandle”. Like the “iconic franchise”, it showcases a marginalized youth subculture on the “Redneck Riviera” (Angelo 2017).

Branded by MTV, Guido became wholly wrapped around a commodity (i.e., a reality TV show) that sells other commodities; since Guido is oriented to commodity consumption, turnabout is fair play. Guido as a commodity sells other commodities through advertisements aired on JS. The commercial spectacle during one hour-long episode aired in 2016 included advertisements for: Pepsi, designer shoes, Toyota cars, Allstate Auto Insurance, ProActiv skin treatment, the new James Bond film “007”, Xbox 360, 4G Smart Phones, Taco Bell Steak Nachos, Target Credit Cards. Newly minted Guido celebrities accepted a range of product endorsements including hair gel and vitamin supplements. Individual brand-building has cashed in on the popularity of cast members like Snooki whose “Snooki Couture”, items like “a crocodile-shaped stuffed animal and bulbous bedroom slippers in shiny lime green or purple or zebra print” sold out during an initial promotion on the Home Shopping Network (Felder 2012). A cover photo-shoot with the four Guidos in GQ magazine for “gym fashions” like warm-up suits and athletic shoes. Three of the Guidettes did a photo-shoot for Harper’s Bazaar as a tongue-in-cheek didactic about upscale taste imparted by two blonde instructors in a classroom setting (Villareal 2010).

<Figure 9: 3 About Here>

JS meets Pygmalion as the taste makers at Harper’s Bazaar rehabilitate Guidette style. (“The Jersey Shore Goes to Charm School by Harper’s BAZAAR US”, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, 4.14.2010, 2:03,

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/red-carpet-dresses/a527/jersey-shore-makeover-0510/
accessed 8.18.2018).

The rapid transformation of Guido from a category of deviance to a popular culture “icon” with commercial appeal is worth noting. While there is a precedent for this in the case of youth subcultures like Punk and Hip Hop, Guido lacked “cool” or prestige in youth style markets. Prior to JS, Guido was not on the radar of the national media culture. MTV has the resources to add youth culture value (i.e., cool) to the content that it showcases (i.e., cool by association). Guido was amenable to branding for a mass market on a number of levels. Guido is a readymade symbol that identifies the commodity for sale, and which explains the initial preference to call the show “Guidos” rather than JS; Italian ethnicity makes the brand more salient, reinforcing a repository of meanings stored in popular American culture. Guido connects to a style tradition that is well-documented in the mass media going back to SNF and Grease. In particular, it has street culture roots—the element of urban authenticity that sells Black youth culture in the suburbs. MTV exploited the connection to gangsta when it casted Guido as “the hottest pimps.” This positions Guido for a suburban youth market that crosses over to hip-hop, but not blackness. More broadly, merchandising Guido allows MTV to access a market beyond rock and hip-hop. This is a position inhabited by diverse European-ancestry youth in metropolitan New York City not just Italians like Greeks, Russian and Bukharan Jews, and Albanians. Their consumption styles negotiate aspirations to whiteness in relation to blacks and Latinos, on one hand, and class mobility in relation to Manhattan elites and hipsters gentrifying their outer borough neighborhoods, on the other. Guido is an established youth culture paradigm followed by these more recently arrived immigrant groups as suggested in the name “Greedo” used for Greeks in Queens. As the first season Jersey Shore ended, MTV began testing for a new reality show focusing on a “Russian” youth scene in Brighton Beach nightclubs. Still parlaying Jersey Shore into another hit show, MTV debuted “Floribama” in 2017 which showcases the “Redneck Riviera” youth scene (Angelo 2017). With this formula for commercial success in mind, MTV may not welcome a Guido that is too cool and comfortable in the popular culture.

The common currency of this commodified subcultural equivalence is the “party culture”. Whereas American Bandstand sanitized greaser in the 1960s to fit into mainstream youth culture, hooking up is central to the current script. Although reality TV specializes in the depiction of subcultures that seem to invite the disdain of a mainstream audience, MTV presents a version of Guido that is more or less aligned mainstream moral conventions. A party culture, including practices like sexual promiscuity, is within the parameters of mainstream youth culture in particular on college campuses. JS places at the center of Italian American youth culture a “hookup culture” which Wade (2017:49) defines as “a drunken sexual encounter with ambiguous content” as “what you should be doing” (the epicenter of this culture for Wade is the college campus not summer rentals). Risky sex may be a counterpart to risky investments by late capitalist financial institutions too big to fail. While American Bandstand sanitized greaser in the 1960s, JS  imprints Guido with an MTV brand defined by sexualization and commodified consumption. However, the commercial success of the media spectacle goes one step further by establishing the credential of Guido as a pop culture commodity; in particular, young Italian American bodies are the latest addition to the inventory of sexualized images exploited in the expansion of youth markets in advanced capitalism. The chief difference with other party cultures is more in conventions of taste than morality which varies with class and ethnicity; this seems to be what MTV has done with “Floribama Shore”, with a title that infers a lineage with JS. The JS case suggests the likelihood that audiences can identify with youth others if the chemistry is right. Guido and other youth subcultures with ethnic working class roots imprint on the party culture theme more with the sexual objectification of women, and where the latter are “hit on” and occasionally hit  (Zimmerman 2018). The 2011 JS season filmed in Florence allowed Italian audiences to relate the hooking up culture to the sexual narratives in the sensational murder trial of the American exchange student Amanda Knox that was then taking place in Perugia, not to mention the bombastic sexual exploits (“bunga bunga”) of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

As a “merchant of cool”, MTV could ignore Guido because it was uncool as MTV defined it, a performance referenced to rock and, then, Hip Hop. Guido was not cool, in part, because since 1982 MTV never bestowed cool on it. Reality TV specializes in the depiction of cultures that invite the disdain of ranking constituencies of taste. This was evident in the early media response to JS: “People don’t watch these shows to engage in a genuine way. They watch so they look down on those people who make unfortunate choices” (McBride 2010; see also Denhart 2011). While this was construed as “class pornography” (McBride 2010), Italian American organizations preferred a narrative rooted in ethnic bias – that MTV is selling Guido to invite people to “look down” on people with an “unfortunate” ethnicity. MTV has been showcasing marginal youth cultures since True Life in the early 2000s. The True Life Jersey shore episodes were auditions for JS. To this extent, Jersey Shore does not present Guido as a “cool” style but is selling Guido as uncool to cool kids everywhere. It is a good bet that its brand can make uncool cool. By marketing uncool as well as cool, MTV is hedging its bet. MTV crafted a Guido strategy by incorporating a vernacular understanding of a style-based youth subculture recognizable to those knowledgeable in the local scene. It was packaged by a producer, Sally Ann Salsano, who not only has roots in the New York City metropolitan area but claims to have been a Guidette which allows her to reject the view expressed that MTV is inviting its core audience to magnify its cool by looking down on Guidos:

It’s not something that I’m embarrassed of. I was those kids. I was Snooki. I woke up and was like, ‘Oh, that was a crazy night.’ That’s what you do” (Denhart 2011).

Salsano and MTV may have cultivating oppositional youth culture cred in the name of a marginalized audience not to mention loyalty to its “iconic franchise”.

The mainstream popular culture initially regarded Guido with ambivalence. The New York Times Magazine wryly composed “The ‘Jersey Shore’ Handbook the week after the show debuted that counted “heavy tanning, muscular definition, a labor-intensive toiletry regimen, family, and hooking up” among core Guido “values” (Stein 2009). A commercial agenda quickly prevailed in light of ratings success that marketed a sardonic take. The I-Phone app “Jersify” assembled “How to be a Guido: The Definitive Guido Guide” featuring a repertoire of commodified poses that fail to conceal the satire:

THE GYM: You wanna be juiced with a hard-muscled toned body? Well, goombah, that ain’t gonna just happen with you eatin’ all of your Mama’s pasta.

THE CROSS: Gold, silver or filled with stones, it don’t matter. As long as it’s a cross and its worn on a heavy chain around your neck, you’re good to go. (Jersify, The App 2017)

While the style has gained recognition MTV reserves the right to be cynical about Guido. A tongue in cheek approach allows consumers to adopt a Guido pose provisionally, say for Halloween when poses are de rigeur. In 2010 JS inspired one of the most popular costume choices among American college students: “Campuses everywhere will have no shortage of faux “Guidettes” and “Juice Heads” fist pumping the night away.” (College Marketing Tactics and Trends 2010).

There is an opportunity, here, not only for parody but to appropriate a JS “party” sensibility bounded by a social “time-out” , the provisional appropriation of a poached identity for sensory gratification. The pose is not normative when time is back in, every other day of the week or year. The Guido costume may be construed as a form of “slumming”, in this case performing “the other” for fun and pleasure, costumed in leopard skin tops and gelled hair. Festive role play appropriates the culture on the surface without internalizing identity, so precluding a commitment to that culture and even denigrating it like “Blackface”, the appetite of middle class “beats” and “hippies” for lower class Black culture (Mailer 1957). JS Guido merchandises an Italian American “Blackface” that can be appropriated on the surfaces of style (Ewen 1988).

Although JS more than satisfied the demand of a marginal culture for recognition, respect does not necessarily follow. Guido difference is manifest in a dubious performance style. An article in a New Jersey newspaper citing Arnold Toynbee for a paradigm of civilizational “decline” buttressed by Charles Murray’s warning about a slide toward “underclass” values (Goldberg 2009) recapitulated the moral panic surrounding the Bensonhurst racial killing. In addition to Internet sites like Get Off Our Island and Lee Hotti that cast Guido as beyond the pale, their orange tans and bare muscled torsos making them menacing and inhuman, Guido as youth culture outlier is a Netflix film titled “Vinny the Chin” which is a play on the nickname of former Genovese family head Vincenzo Gigante (“Chin” is does not refer to a distinctive facial feature but is a corruption of “cenzo” within Italian neighborhood culture). The film has a backstory referenced to JS, beaten to the punch by MTV which may explain the perverse story that it tells, centered on a 33 year old Italian American, a self-professed Guido, who lives with his mom in a suburban tract house on the south shore of Long Island. His life is aimless except for the Guido party culture centered on the summer gathering in Hampton Bays and a mirror image of Seaside Heights. The depiction of Vinnie’s stunted moral development as a Guido is most painfully realized in a ruse to steal animal steroids from a veterinarian’s office under the pretext of rescuing an abandoned dog so Vinny can “juice” for the Memorial Day weekend.

Vinny may be a caricature but he is recognizably Guido. JS alludes to these practices but stops short of portraying them. Vinny is beyond unruly; it dehumanizes Guido and makes it morally repugnant. It may even represent collective self-loathing. JS takes Guido down that road but manages to stop short. It is not American Bandstand but it is also not the 1950s and MTV arguably represents the contemporary mainstream especially in regard to youth culture. It keeps JS entertaining and leaves “Vinny” dark – the dark side of Guido – too dark for JS. Vinny picks up the thread that connects Guido party culture to social pathology and the 1989 Bensonhurst moral panic. It reinvigorates the external boundary that tends to blur when JS Guido ventures into the mainstream. This occurs for Vinny even though his Guido eschews ethnicity altogether, notably as symbolic capital. Vinny may remain the pretender as long as MTV holds the franchise to sell the Guido narrative in the popular culture. JS offers a body of work that has become institutionalized as a pop culture text, and this includes a franchise on Guido.

JS and Subcultural Ideology

If Guido is a franchise on popular American culture for a style of consumption in the name of ethnicity, it can be asked if JS is “empowering” for the subcultural agenda (see Kellner 1995:3). Appropriation as a mass media commodity by a subsidiary of the global communications conglomerate Viacom is an overarching event in any subcultural trajectory (see “Merchants of Cool”). JS validates the hedonistic turn taken outside the outer boroughs and, specifically, the emergence of summer resort scenes at the Jersey and Long Island shores. In particular, it reconciles a local vernacular youth subculture with a global brand of hedonistic youth culture consumption. Credentialed by MTV, JS now fits in the commercial mainstream with youth culture programming of Spring Break and newly released music videos.. Guido’s arrival at the shore during the summer is the pop culture credential for youth who are not living the “college experience” (as pitched by high school college advisers) called “Spring Break” and a staple televised by MTV. While recognition by what is arguably the main arbiter of commercial youth popular culture can be empowering, respect is another matter and, as we have seen, the reviews are mixed. Guido is not about to please upscale, upper middle class arbiters of adult taste like the New York Times. It is possible that Guido can accept the ambivalence of MTV that is built into a genre that merchandises unruly subcultures with dubious taste.

The MTV brand secures a veritable franchise on the youth subculture which, in turn, effectively exercises a franchise on Italian American youth culture. However, validation can be found elsewhere in the popular culture. The October 2010 GQ cover shoot suggested that Guido had made it, and in their own terms as well. GQ was their “fashion bible” in the late 1980s and now it had created something idolatrous of Guido. This feedback loop was closed. Never mind that New York Guido was a bust. Guidos never wore their fashions anyway. More broadly, Guido was formed around a commitment to a popular culture that has become increasingly commodified. Its commodification is enhanced to the extent that it can appropriate its own commodified symbols like GQ fashions endorsed by Jersey Shore Guido celebrities. Guido has become a pop culture trend in its own right, comparable to disco. SNF ushered in the “disco movement” within the mainstream but JS did that for Guido. We have already seen that Guido imprinted on the American institution of Halloween. The mainstream pop culture institution TV Guide deployed JS Guido to recommend “love tips” for readers on Valentine’s Day (Silberman 2012).

The branding of Guido by MTV provides Guido with highly visible style leaders who can figure in commercial endorsements for commodities appropriated by youth themselves like Armani Exchange and Ed Hardy T-shirts. Celebrities are enlisted to sell signature styles to young people who identify with the brands irrespective of the organic connections to ethnicity, class, and place. Merchandising contributes to the blurring of subcultural boundaries. While this is anathema to youth preoccupied with the distinction of insider membership, it might be expected that a subculture that historically wished for incorporation into the commercial popular culture is prepared to consume images of itself as a late capitalist commodity. Commodified Guido consumption, endorsed by JS, has set a new bar for the subcultural pose that requires increased discretionary spending. Commodities are visual signifiers that can be readily marked in identity transactions; this makes it possible to read a Guido label into style surfaces. JS brought notoriety to Guido style including a “backlash” against signature designer brands like Ed Hardy and Affliction: “If It’s On The Jersey Shore, It’s Not Coming In the Door” (Lambert 2010).

Is a “backlash” possible by “self-proclaimed Guidos and Guidettes”, turning against a commodified style that is merchandised to “everyone” by MTV and other (un)cool merchants? Echoing Douglas Rushkoff in “The Merchants of Cool”, Kathryn Watson (2018) argues that JS “killed the aesthetic” by bringing Guido in form the margins, affecting the “complete fashion assimilation of the working-class kids in the outer-rim of Manhattan”. At the same time, Watson entertains the possibility of opposition to JS Guido predicated on the acceptance of “what MTV sold it to us as (an exaggerated mockery of the flawed culture that we existed in)”. She argues that Guidos and Guidettes eventually read between the lines and repudiated JS: “Nobody wanted to look like that anymore” (Watson 2018). Watson is making this case for those, like herself, who aged out of youth culture and possess the cultural and economic capitals to choose a “gentrified” style of consumption. However, she does not allow for the possibility that youth can turn against JS to reclaim the authenticity of an expressive youth culture. Watson similarly does not address the role of ethnicity among “the urban un-elite”. However, if Guido is subject to “mockery” because it is “flawed” as a youth style identified with Italian ethnicity, subcultural difference is possible. Guido can still “struggle for recognition and respect” in the space created by the tension between “mockery” and mainstream commercial success.

Jersey Shore as media text also displaces Guido in relation to ethnic neighborhood culture, specifically Bensonhurst, which is stereotyped in ways that inhibit merchandising to mainstream markets (for instance, as a racist community). Staten Island, once removed from Bensonhurst, is as close as JS gets because it is the home of three of the cast members. Now that Guido is a second generation style, with ethnicity thinning, Bensonhurst is not necessary as a source of symbolic ethnic capital. In the present, moreover, the quintessential “home of the Italians” is dealing with ethnic succession. Historically, the symbolism of Bensonhurst Guido articulates unacceptable ethnic difference and older forms of prejudice; mass media accounts in response to the Bensonhurst “racial killing” imputed the moral qualities of the “dago,” which overshadowed a consumption culture. Outfitted in contemporary consumption styles, Guido can still symbolize unacceptable Italian American difference further into the mainstream; a connection to historical epithets is evident in the appropriation—and symbolic reversal—of “guinea” by Guido youth. Excessive youth culture hedonism portrayed on MTV (hooking up, binge drinking) elicited moral panic in the mainstream press, which can serve to activate embedded ethnic prejudice. The MTV business model managed the noise of unacceptable Italian American difference in the interest of hedonistic consumption.

JS has unleashed a spectacle of style that threatens to overwhelm meaningful ethnic difference. Italian ethnicity is salient in Jersey Shore in order to authenticate the “reality” of a style outside the mainstream.However, this is a minimalist ethnicity that frames Guido less by ancestry and culture than by “looking Italian.” A regimen of “gym, tan, and laundry” produces surface differences that explain how non–Italian Americans can also “look Italian” and authentic ancestry takes a back seat to consumption style. JS Guido celebrities intimate that ethnicity can be equated with, not just symbolized by, consumption. Because being Italian is about the fun of consuming, they cannot take ethnic difference seriously; perhaps above all the dominant motif of sexualization effectively trivializes ethnic differences indexed to traditional family values. It is also noteworthy that JS Guido does not insist on Italian ancestry for invidious distinction, a status claim that complicates the building of an inclusive brand name.

There may be an alternate subcultural narrative for Guido, providing a contrast with the hegemony of JS, in the Hip Wop of rappers like Jojo Pellegrino and GFella. They are potential style leaders who have not been coopted by celebrity commercialism although they are trying (see Sciorra 2011: 43). They also contribute to the media record that purports to narrate Italian American difference, rather than assimilation, in the suburbs (see “Mob Wives”, “Staten Island Hustle”, “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and re-runs of “Growing Up Gotti”). Each rapper narrates explicit ethnic difference built into local cultures with roots in ethnic minority culture; the Mafia is foregrounded as an idiom of Italian American neighborhood culture and as a bridge to gangsta Hip Hop. Thus, Jojo drops the names of Tupac and Biggie in a conversation with “Uncle Frank” who uses the vernacular speech of the street (“fugedaboudid”, the title of song published 10.13.08) and can help him get back into “the game” where there is “real money”. Jojo’s homies are more Hip Hop in style featuring oversized sorts and Nike shoes with baseball caps and chains over muscle shirts (guinea tees?).

<Figure 9:4 About Here>

Jojo and his Staten Italy Homies. (“Jojo Pellegrino – Where I’m From Part 2”, 5:43, Published on YouTube by JojoPellegrinoVEVO on Jan. 9, 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlNbAaqWtG0, accessed 8.21.2018).

Neither is grotesque, and therefore easy to dismiss, like Vinny the Chin. Jojo is notable since he speaks about and for Staten Island and its Italian American majority (“Staten Italy”) including 3 of the JS cast members. In “Where I’m From Part 2” (1.9.12) adapts gangsta Hip Hop narrative to Staten Island, suggesting a number of observations about Guido youth culture that is inextricably tied to the ethnic minority group culture of Bensonhurst. Although JS is not mentioned, Staten Island is portrayed as a place “where the Guidos are on steroids” and there are “people bumpin’ to freestyle music like we’re in the 80s”; there are images of guinea-tees and baseball bats. Whereas GFella projects a tongue in cheek confidence, falling short of satire, about Italian American culture Jojo sounds a morally decadent note. He depicts a gilded ghetto where there are mini-mansions with backyard pools, “Prada, Gucci, and Fendi” and kids driving “luxury cars” (i.e., spoiled by consumption). Just below the surface “It seems like everybody is on pills in my neighborhood…where I’m from” and Italian kids dealing to get rich quick (see Del Real 2017). GFella is sanguine about suburban Guido and, in contrast to Jojo, prominently identifies (“I’m a Guido!”), embracing the materialism and the underground economy that abets it (”I gotta a guy”). Adorned in designer track suits and shades, GFella projects a Guido that converges with a Mafia persona that is third generation and suburban.

<Figure 9:5 About Here>

G Fella proclaims “I’m a Guido” in the suburbs.(“Guido – G Fella (Members Only) Published by Gfella on July 22, 2016, 4:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA_KGprJv7k, accessed 8.21.2018).

The “Hip Wop” (Sciorra 2011) of Jojo Pellegrino and Gfella restores the connection of Guido at a late stage of assimilation/mobility to an urban street culture. Guido is more than a party culture performed in on MTV and in club spaces on the Jersey shore and the Hamptons. There is continuity with the urban Italian American neighborhood – one step removed from places like the South Village and Bensonhurst and, thus, the possibility of  authentic Italian ethnicity. With the diaspora out of southern Brooklyn across the Verrazano, Staten Island in particular is the new “home of the Italians” (i.e., “Staten Italy”) and the epicenter of a new Guido newly credentialed by JS.

JS and Ethnic Ideology

JS tendered a pop culture credential that Guido craved in contrast to oppositional youth subcultures like Punk and Grunge. Even if youth culture “cool” was still in doubt, another identity crisis surfaced regarding the other “discourse” that historically furnished subcultural “distinction”: ethnicity. Guido was so successful at the appropriation of ethnicity that it exercised a virtual monopoly in local youth style markets. However, this symbiotic relationship between youth style and Italian ethnicity was challenged by the media spectacle engendered by JS. When MTV named Guido into the popular culture, it sparked a public discourse about Italian American group identity and historic ethnic prejudice that erupted in the popular culture itself. It was not allowed to penetrate the main narrative of youth culture hedonism unfolding in the series, preserving the view for the core audience of youth that the stylized performances occur in a pop culture bubble. However, the reaction of Italian American organizations preoccupied with an anti-defamation agenda was swift and sure. A UNICO spokesperson was out front on this, interviewed in numerous news outlets including MTV News, thus, becoming part of the backstory that fueled the media spectacle engulfing the debut of the show in late 2009. The anti-defamation position was terse and unwavering, that Guido was an ethnic slur and therefore a category of prejudice not an Italian American culture.

The anti-defamation reaction was consistent with previous positions taken in reference to offending mass media texts like The Sopranos. The “NIAF Official Statement on ‘Jersey Shore’” (2010) maintained that “the deliberate association between Italian American identity and the term ‘guidos’ persisted through the season and was unmistakable in the program’s branding and marketing”. While it was problematic that JS presented Guido as “representative of the Italian American community”, the NIAF complaint focused on the symbol itself. UNICO National spokesperson Andrew DiMino stressed an equivalence with “the n-word” (Rohrer 2010). This meaning of Guido is interpreted as a smear on the good name of Italian Americans, “a positive image” referenced to “contributions” to mainstream American life notably “business, government, entertainment, education, science, medicine, and law” (Ibid). “Rather than being a manifestation of Italian identity, it is a youthful expression and lifestyle predominantly visible in the Northeast”, “laden with promiscuity, debauchery, and violence”, that “transcends ethnic lines”. The theme of style as moral decay, however, was overshadowed by charges of ethnic prejudice. NIAF and UNICO National made Guido matter on the level of ethnicity, but by denying an organic connection to Italian American culture. Thus, JS was just the latest episode of negative stereotyping of Italian Americans in the mass media. This time, it was not a “police memo” but a major gateway to the popular culture.

Ironically, while MTV and other merchants of cool want to mute the moral qualities of the “dago” which overshadow a consumption culture, Italian American organizations pursued an opposite tack. The anti-defamation position separates the word, which is historically an ethnic slur, from the youth culture practice that reverses the meaning of that slur as a collective identity symbol. By holding on to a definition of Guido informed by ethnic prejudice, the anti-defamation position precludes the recognition of an Italian American “common culture” that, ironically, opposes a “negatively privileged ethnicity”. Italian American organizations weaponized their protest by pressuring advertisers to “pull out” which is what Domino’s Pizza did as the first season was about to begin ((Fleming 2018). 

JS completely blew the cover off the secret that underlies the anti-defamation interpretation: that there is a youth subculture that calls itself Guido that not only claims to perform Italian ethnicity but to be “taking pride” in it. (Hyman 2009). Jersey Shore Guido is too immersed in the party culture to directly respond to anti-defamation politics. Even in interviews (Eliscu 2011) cast members sidestepped the issue by embracing their core ethos:

Rolling Stone: Some people have said that JS paints an unflattering portrait of Italian Americans.

Mike (The Situation): I love to hear that, because we’re just a bunch of twentysomethings, living, working and partying together.

Speaking about the protests of Italian American organizations on a nationally syndicated talk show, Snooki explained that “Guidos and Guidettes are good-looking people that, you know, like to make a scene and be the center of attention and just take care of themselves” (Viscusi 2010). There were occasions where cast members staked a claim to authentic ethnicity in published interviews. Vinny presents Guido as “someone who likes to party”, sure, but “who’s 100% Italian, someone who has good family morals”, referring to traditional gender roles in which women “cook, they clean, and its just natural to them” (Eliscu 2011). A number of interviews put cast members on the defensive about the issue of ethnic insults but they did not directly refute anti-defamation charges that Guido was an ethnic slur and MTV was “racist”. However, this was defiantly repudiated by the show’s producer, Sally Ann Salsano, by invoking the identity “an Italian girl from Long Island” and a seminal ethnic family culture: “my Dad worked in sanitation, both my parents drive Cadillacs, my dad wears a DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED Yankee symbol around his neck” (Denhart 2011). Salsano later put her finger on the problem, however inadvertently, when she claimed: “It wasn’t like we were out to ruin the guido. We were celebrating it” (Fleming 2018). Salsano, here, misses the point. It was the anti-defamation organizations that were “out to ruin the guido”, or at least erase any trace of its ethnic Italian ancestry.

The anti-defamation claim that JS Guido is a construct of ethnicity does not fit the “’reality’ of Italian Americans” (NIAF 2010) is easier to make than in the 1989 Bensonhurst “racial killing”. The roots of Italian neighborhood culture were more transparent in the latter narrative. This may explain why official Italian American organizations were on the sidelines, not weighing in on the mass media’s characterizations of “Guidoville” in a manner comparable to the response to JS. In particular, there was no official Italian American response in the Op-Ed section of The New York Times that addressed the ethnic stereotypes of Guido and deflected the moral panic targeting the Bensonhurst community. As I argue in the previous chapter, media bias and ethnic prejudice co-existed with the “reality” of vernacular ethnic formations. The Bensonhurst incident was further problematized because the media labeled an Italian American community deviant not just a youth subculture. In one of the few cases where an official Italian American position was represented in The New York Times, the director of the Calandra Institute at the time endorsed the “white underclass” scenario articulated in the mainstream media to justify an affirmative action program to remedy educational inequality in Italian American communities in the city (Lee 1990). Although it does not reduce the issue to media bias, this endorsement of the deviance interpretation fails to appreciate the complexity of urban Italian American culture.

These ethnic entrepreneurs have been unable to recognize local Italian American youth style. Guido and the “new” Italian ethnicity galvanized by political activism both coalesced in the 1970s. They largely occupied parallel universes; although not politicized, expressive youth may have been inspired by the raised consciousness of ethnic assertion and pride both in the mainstream and in the local community (Tricarico 1989). Collective consumption furnished a more meaningful alternative to local political mobilizations of “the new pluralism” manifest in voluntary associations such as The Italian American Civil Rights League, The Congress of Italian American Organizations, and even The Calandra Institute which reached out to youth but with a discourse that privileged formal education. In contrast, Guido deploys a cultural politics that buys into the American Dream of consumption as a path to happiness and self-respect. It is an ethnic mobilization because it mined a shared ancestry for symbolic capital but in relation to certain consumer markets. Local Italian American organizations eschewed an interest in expressive youth culture consumption and, thus, did not engage Guido. Internal cultural differences (i.e., age and class) are evident in the failure of official Italian American organizations to publicly own or at least explain what Guido meant in the context of the Bensonhurst  “racial killing” in 1989 and to flatly deny its ethnic cultural character on the Jersey shore in 2009.

A different tack was followed by The Calandra Institute in response to the Guido controversy sparked by JS in 2009. Guido entered the wider public discourse this time because of MTV. And, it was  greatly expanded by the Internet. The ethnic identity politics of Guido became part of the media spectacle. MTV mined the public controversy, which included an alleged death threat, to publicize the first season. MTV met with antidefamation officials. With the fur flying, I received a personal email in February 2010 from a producer of MTV News to weigh in on “the controversy surrounding our show ‘Jersey Shore’”. I declined when I recognized the likelihood that my contribution would be refracted by the self-referential truth of the media spectacle on the one hand and anti-defamation fervor on the other.

Because the public conversation was joined by Italian American studies scholars interviewed by journalists, views that acknowledged Guido as an Italian American youth subculture stoked the passions of the anti-defamation position. I was in the crosshairs especially because of published research going back to 1991 circulating on the Internet and mentioned in the press. One blogger launched a strident personal attack: ‘Meet Donald Tricarico who regardless of his ancestry does not deserve to be called an Italian American’”. Like Guido, my ethnic credential was revoked but in this case for writing about it. Official Italian American organizations failed to initiate a discussion about the spiraling controversy. This was left toThe Calandra Institute which hastily held a conference, “Guido: An Italian American Youth Style”, in January 2010 as the controversy was still unfolding. Referring to Guido as “a phenomenon that demands attention”, Robert Viscusi (2010) framed Guido in the context of a variety of Italian American ethnicities, in particular “our working class roots”. I addressed JS in the context of a “feedback loop” of appropriation and re-appropriation between youth culture actors and the mass media. Instead of reducing Guido to a slur against Italian ethnicity, I argued that it can be viewed as “ethnogenesis” which Roosens (1989) conceptualizes as “the development and public presentation of a self-conscious ethnic group” that entails a re-evaluation of ethnicity. Following a constructionist approach to ethnic groups, Guido youth were depicted as “active agents” capable of “remaking” their own identities. The conference was also caught up in the JS media spectacle. Most notably, a New York Times reporter (Cohen 2010) assigned to cover the event trivialized the scholarly study of Guido, mocking the panel comprised of an academic researcher (yours truly) and a “self-professed Guido” with a blog called “Cugine Corner” as “Margaret Mead and a Samoan”.

Establishment Italian American organizations are ideologically incompatible with youth subcultures like Guido that are informally produced from the bottom, combining an ethnic minority group culture with new forms of ethnic agency. The former seek to engineer popular support from the top with a mainstream political strategy and a “symbolic ethnicity” compatible with upper middle class adults (Tricarico 1989). The NIAF, in particular, privileges an upper middle-class culture agenda based on higher learning and the mainstream professions and corporate business. While the NIAF agenda privileges high-brow culture (for example, Italian opera rather than electronic dance music like techno), mainstream popular culture is referred to in the form of the contributions of Italian American performers and is thus more a culture of production and work than consumption and pleasure. References to a traditional heritage including fluency in the Italian language, which can be studied at Italian universities, are another way that elite culture is identified with adults rather than the interests of young people. The response of Italian American elites was echoed in the term “tamarri” that the Italian press used to translate “Guido” when Florence became the backdrop of JS for the fourth season and the low-brow mass culture tastes of Italian American “tamarri” were on display when a tanning salon took precedence in the itinerary over the Uffizi Gallery (Latza Nadeau 2011).  Elite ideology is predicated on a class culture that marginalizes Guido as unacceptable ethnic difference—a style identified with Italian Americans with visible roots in ethnic neighborhood culture that have not attained educational and occupational status markers associated with the middle and upper middle classes.

The agenda of Italian American organizations is heavily imprinted by the historical record of prejudice and discrimination. As discussed above, JS was read as corrosive of fundamental American as well as traditional Italian values. Excessive youth culture hedonism portrayed on MTV including hooking up and binge drinking elicited moral panic in the mainstream press, which can serve to activate embedded ethnic prejudice.  Anti-defamation protests from Italian American organizations plausibly anticipated this scenario. From this perspective, JS can incubate harmful stereotypes that can derail the “struggle for recognition and respect” for Italian Americans as a group. Outfitted in youth consumption styles, Guido can symbolize unacceptable Italian American difference further into the mainstream. While these Italian American organizations employ a construct of ethnicity that is unable to recognize an “Italian American youth subculture” let alone accord it respect, Guido was never asking for either including validation for an ethnic credential. The response of JS cast members makes it clear that they construct ethnicity as a youth culture pose, oriented to fun and pleasure especially now that it is further along the route to mainstream consumption. However, refusing to own Guido as an Italian American story, the anti-defamation position ironically preempts an ethnic agency that opposes prejudice and a contaminated ethnicity. 

Guido has been a highly contested identity from the outset. MTV seems to have settled the matter for now,leveraging anti-defamation protest into publicity and establishing a franchise in the popular culture.Attached to the MTV brand, JS, Guido can be read as a party culture for a segment of working and lower middle class, a consumption style that expresses the fundamental hedonism of a mainstream youth culture now in its second generation and centered outside Bensonhurst. Indeed, JS now anchors a genre of reality TV that showcases variations on this theme, broadening the entertainment mainstream to incorporate subcultures hitherto marginalized by ethnicity and class, now unified by commodified fun and pleasure.A target audience may be youth from the margins themselves, buying into the cool that MTV manufactures and merchandises. Also looking in are youth that are too cool to accept, with a wink from the cool merchant, that styles from the margin can be cool. When a “reunion” aired in April 2018, portraying cast members, now in their thirties, as entertainment celebrities who have by no means entirely aged out of the style,the partying as well as the visual vernacular, the public discourse was noticeably without acrimonious ethnic protest. Guido was named without any fanfare by a New York Times reviewer implying a level of familiarity that obviates the need for an explanation.(Caramanica 2018). The smoke cleared and JS Guido was standing secure in the popular culture. 

Notes

1 Pauly D claimed that he was “still” the “No. 1 guido” when MTV aired the JS “reunion” in April 2018: “Killing it, and never fell off” (Caramanica 2018).

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