By Stephen J. Fortunato, Jr.

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During the last months of 2005, as the nomination of Samuel Alito to the United States Supreme Court by President George W. Bush was ponderously discussed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, political activists and columnists, the background issue of Alito’s Italian heritage occasionally seeped into the discourse, but remained for the most part an issue vital only to those of Italian extraction who saw any criticism of Alito as being driven by antipathy toward his — and their — origins.  Anyone following the nomination process was aware, of course, of Bush’s obligatory nod to Alito’s immigrant provenance, with the usual acknowledgements of parental hard work and sacrifice so that the bright youngster, with his own appropriate self-starting and discipline, could achieve the American dream. And Alito kept to the script when he blandly addressed the members of the Judiciary Committee with opening remarks about his hard-working parents.

Even though one has nothing to do with the selection of one’s parents or ethnic heritage, there is nothing inherently wrong with — and there may be much that is right in —alluding to one’s forbears and directing an expression of gratitude to one’s parents. But what was really at work with the Bush-Alito homage to the nominee’s Italian roots was an unspoken awareness that he had risen above them and happily had forgotten the struggles and humiliations of his parents’ and predecessors’ generation of Italian immigrants and other new arrivals to this country.

Alito was put forward as a candidate for the Supreme Court not as an Italian acutely aware of the past hardships and deprivations endured by his group, which had for many provoked a radical critique and active resistance to economic and political exclusion and exploitation. On the contrary, Alito was appointed because his record since his college days at Princeton, through law school at Yale, and into public life revealed that he had no awareness of, let alone compassion for, his own people or others betrayed by the American promise. For Alito, there was no resonance in his soul from the past, not from the historic strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Patterson, New Jersey, not from the Palmer raids and the subsequent forced deportation of Italians, not from Sacco and Vanzetti, not from the rich tradition of Italian socialist and anarchist writing and agitating. When George W. Bush submitted Samuel Alito’s name to the United States Senate, he knew that Alito was a white male fervently committed to the defense of capitalism, free markets, and imperialism managed by an imperial presidency, all now in their ascendancy.