Speaker? “Wop” means “without papers.” … That is what these people were called, “without papers.” And that is all that these kids are, without papers. It was called “wop,” and people used that as a derogatory term to Italian Americans. N my father’s generation and my grandfather’s generation and my great-grandmother’s generation … there was a term. In February, when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made a marathon floor speech in support of the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, she told much the same story about wop: But Cuomo isn’t the only Italian American politician to make rhetorical hay out of the bogus etymology. This misunderstanding of wop’s origins is fairly common, and it extends far beyond politics. While his Italian immigrant forebears may indeed have had the epithet wop slung at them, there is no evidence that the word originated as an acronym for “without papers.” His historical justification for the parallel is similarly dubious. “You know what they called Italian Americans back in the day? They called them ‘wops.’ You know what ‘wop’ stood for? ‘Without papers.’”Ĭuomo’s attempt to express solidarity was a bit overheated, to say the least: He isn’t really undocumented, of course, and as the son of a former governor, he wasn’t exactly marginalized growing up. “I came from poor Italian Americans who came here,” Cuomo said. What drew less attention was how he explained that provocative conclusion. Why Your To-Do List Never Ends Joe Pinsker
0 kommentar(er)
