Someone left a racist comment under our blog post about spleen sandwiches, using the pejorative racial slur against Southern Italians, “w*p.”
Our little company, Palermo Street Food, and this blog are loudly and proudly run by Southern Italians and we will not tolerate hate speech of any kind against any group of people.
Instead of simply deleting the comment (which of course we did), we’d also like to take this opportunity to contextualize the word “w*p” in the landscape of anti-Italian racism and discrimination.
“W*p” has historical significance as a racist term against Italian people in the United States, specifically people from the Southern Italian ethnic group; the Italian regions of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and the two islands of Sicily and Sardegna.
“Wop. The word implies an illiterate Italian immigrant working as a day laborer. This word is a distortion of the Spanish word “guepo’ which means a tough, brave Sicilian. The Italians themselves now use the word ‘guappo’ in a derogatory sense to mean Sicilian. It is one of the most common derogatory designations of the Italian in the USA. This word is typical of the colloquial speech.”
Racist caricature of Italian people in the United States of America, 1911
There is some debate abut the etymology of the word “w*p",” did it come from the Italian word “guappo” or was it an acronym for “With Out Papers,” in the same way that the word “cop” was an acronym for for “Constable On Patrol?” As Ben Zimmer says in this Atlantic article:
The best guess from etymologists is that the source is a southern Italian dialectal word, guappo or guappu, meaning “dandy” or “swaggerer.” That, in turn, is likely from the Spanish word guapo meaning “handsome” or “bold,” imported to Sicily when the island was occupied by Spain. Sicilian immigrants to the United States brought the swaggering word with them. It “connoted arrogance, bluster, and maleficence entwined,” wrote the music journalist Nick Tosches in his 2001 book Where Dead Voices Gather, in a historical exploration of the Italian-flavored pop-music genre once known as “wop songs.” Here is how Tosches describes (with some literary embellishment) the way that guappo and its variants became wop on American shores:
It was these Sicilian words that were commonly used to describe the work-bosses who lured their greenhorn paesani into servitude in New York City in the early years of the twentieth century. In New York and other American seaports, the lowly labor of the Italian immigrants’ servitude—the dockside toil and offal-hauling that others shunned—came to be called … guappu work; and eventually the laborer himself, and not the boss, was known as guappu. The peasant immigrants’ tendency to clip the final vowels from standard Italian and Sicilian—as in paesan’ for paesano—rendered guappu as guapp’, which was pronounced, more or less, as wop.
Whatever the origin of the word, “w*p” came into use as a racial slur that functioned to other the southern Italian ethnic group in the USA. In 1882, the New York Times posted an article titled Our Future Citizens, writing:
“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”
This was the social climate in which the word “w*p” became prevalent.
Sicilians were often at the nucleus of anti-Italian hate. For example, this NYTimes article for 2019 How Italians Became ‘White’ describes the trope of Sicilians as “rattlesnakes.”
“A scabrous Times editorial justified the lynching (of Italians) — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.
“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.”
The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”
To learn more about the history of anti-Italian racism in the USA, we strongly suggest this article How Italians Became ‘White.’