I was going to do a piece on how Donald Trump is dismantling the EEOC, and I still will, but today I need to circle back to something we already talked about.
Some of you joined my live podcast on The True History of Columbus Day. I will link to it in this newsletter for anyone who missed it, because what I said there deserves a deeper look. Specifically, how people who were not initially seen as white by the United States, in this case Italian Americans, became some of the fiercest guards of white supremacy. The irony is devastating: they are guarding a system that once targeted and murdered them.
The Columbus Day holiday itself exists because of a lynching.
In 1891, eleven Italian immigrants were hung by white mobs in New Orleans. At the time, Italians were not considered white. Newspapers across the country called them criminals and degenerates. The United States nearly went to war with Italy over the killings. To soothe tensions, President Benjamin Harrison declared a one-time national holiday in 1892 honoring Christopher Columbus, an Italian by way of Spain, as a symbolic olive branch. The goal was to convince other white Americans to see Italians as white.
It worked. Columbus Day eventually became a federal holiday in the 1940s.
But the psychological cost was immense.
Instead of rejecting the white supremacy that mutilated and murdered their kin, Italian Americans learned to embrace it, to align with the very ideology that despised them. They developed a kind of racial Stockholm syndrome, desperate to be accepted as white and terrified of being seen as aligned with Black people. Even though their own skin tone, hair texture, and history told a more complicated story, they wanted no part of solidarity.
In the South and North alike, Italians and Black Americans once shared neighborhoods, labor struggles, and even friendships. Those relationships began to fray first during the Civil War, when “ethnics” in the North resisted fighting, and later as racial violence spread through the South. Italians, fearing the same violence, blamed not the mobs who terrorized them, but the proximity to Blackness itself. They saw association as contamination. The victim blamed the victimized.
Fast-forward to today.
That psychological inheritance is alive and well. In the leaked Nazi group chats recently exposed by Politico, one participant with an Italian surname, Giunta, said this:
“If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no-no word.”
“Sicilian” becomes the floor of whiteness, the fragile edge where one shade too dark tips into “Black,” into “enemy.” That is how deep and enduring the sickness is.
And then there is Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old who was nominated to serve as Special Counsel for the United States, responsible for protecting federal whistleblowers. According to The Guardian and Politico, Ingrassia described himself as having a “Nazi streak,” wrote that all holidays related to Black people should be “eviscerated,” and said that Martin Luther King Jr. was “the George Floyd of his day” whose holiday “belongs in the seventh circle of hell.”
This is who is being elevated.
This is who is being normalized.
Again, look at the pattern. The most vicious shock troops of white supremacy are often those who were barely let into whiteness themselves. Italians, Cubans, and others whose ancestry, names, or features were once questioned. Rather than confronting the system that once rejected them, they turn their rage downward toward Black people, believing that domination is the price of acceptance.
Robbie Starbuck, whom SHRM, the national HR association, plans to platform, is another example. Cuban heritage, dark features, no historical understanding of how whiteness works. All he knows is that in America, to be accepted as white, you must prove your loyalty by standing on the necks of Black people. You must show no solidarity, no curiosity, no conscience.
This is the psychological infection that poisons our democracy.
It is not new. It is a loop.
When I said in my Columbus Day live that Italian Americans should lead the charge to end that holiday, I meant it. Not because Italians should not celebrate their heritage, but because they need to reckon with the truth: that Columbus Day exists as a cover-up for their own lynching, their own discrimination, and their own assimilation into whiteness. Ending it would be an act of historical honesty and solidarity.
But history keeps repeating itself.
We are still caught in the same moral loop, the same racial hell cycle. The same logic that birthed Columbus Day, appeasing white supremacy and erasing the victims, is the same logic that now enables actual Nazis in government.
Because yes, that is where we are.
You have self-professed Nazis being nominated for federal positions. You have Politico reporting on this without the national outrage it deserves. And you have Jewish officials such as Stephen Miller, David Friedman, and others turning their faces away from the growing Nazi streak inside their own movement, pretending not to see what is unfolding. The Anti-Defamation League, once a moral watchdog, has gone silent.
Could you imagine if Barack Obama had a single staffer who flirted with Nazi ideology? He would have been dragged out of the White House in handcuffs.
But now there is silence.
Some Jewish organizations and individuals have aligned themselves with conservative forces because they feel pushed by both sides, disillusioned by leftist critiques of Israel, angry at pro-Palestinian movements, and so they side with people who despise them, people who literally deny the Holocaust. These young extremists believe Jewish people control the world, that the Holocaust was a hoax, and that gas chambers are a joke.
And they are being platformed.
By this administration.
By our institutions.
The silence from Jewish and civic organizations on this is going to be one of those moments that history looks back on with horror, just as we now look back on the silence surrounding the lynchings of 1891.
From Columbus Day to Nazis in the White House, it is not just a metaphor.
It is the same story.
The same rot.
The same moral blindness recycled, rebranded, and reinstalled.
The impact of that 1892 “holiday,” the decision to appease white violence rather than confront it, is still shaping us. The legacy of choosing comfort over courage and assimilation over solidarity still echoes through our politics and our power structures today.
This is not history repeating.
This is history continuing.
Until we break that loop, America will keep circling the same drain, painting over its own brutality and calling it progress.
Resources:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/20/trump-nominee-paul-ingrassia-group-chats
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146?fbclid=IwY2xjawNbcJRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHqCkWqbuGqC4mTFm_3n-THm9ESGBjr2aDBgmV4r6BQgBys5p0-JH_WwAUk9p_aem_i5WTZuuLz5mSmqd2iGcsnA
