#and tbh the movie doesn't deal with it as deeply as the book does

[purelypacino]

doesn’t change that she’s supposed to represent the middle class WASPS that looked down upon Italians and is xenophobic because gen zers who watch this movie have no idea Italians were extremely discriminated against and it goes hand in hand with the godfather

You're probably aware that we are not living in a utopia. I'm not going to assume that Gen Zers haven't been on the receiving end of some type of discrimination. To say that they're all ignorant of that particular experience (the Italian-American one) is ignorant in itself. The expectation of such knowledge is also rooted in Americentrism, but let me not stray from my point.

I'm confident that there are still immigrants who know, and whose children know, what it's like to be newly arrived and called names and told to go back to where they came from or admonished for their broken English. Immigration didn't end with the closure of Ellis Island.

If they haven't encountered it firsthand, they've been made aware of it through their family history. It's part of mine on all sides: Polish, Italian, even Scottish. My Italian great-grandparents settled in a city that was almost like Little Italy, there were so many of them. Still, they encountered discrimination. We've got stories for days.

Some old ten-gallon-hatted cowboy with an accent like microwaved grits told my dad in 1972 that his Scottish accent would be a problem. He wouldn't hire him. His dearth of Canadian experience stood in his way more than once. He didn't even have to go to the trouble of Anglicizing his first and last name the way the other sides of my family did theirs. So, I know about it! My stories are not unique.

I get that certain events and experiences don't always get the exposure that they deserve and that the further away from them we get, the more important it is to keep their lessons alive. But again, just because you've run across a handful of people who don't know something that you know, it doesn't mean that everyone born after 1997 is clueless. Nobody is born knowing everything.

If any of us ever want to bridge the gap between generations, we can't approach the other with an attitude of superiority and ultimate authority. If they don't know, they can learn, but not if we treat them like close-minded doofuses.

#the godfather #kay adams #and tbh the movie doesn't deal with it as deeply as the book does #you've got older people who hark back to the non-existent good old days when 'nobody cared about colour or creed' #not just boomers but gen xers who think that everything is too woke now and not like the world that they grew up in #when we were raised on socially-conscious tv and after-school specials lmao #everything had a message then too #this isn't strictly a gen z problem #my mom's cousin was also a professor/historian/author who wrote about the italian-canadian immigrant experience from multiple perspectives #because parts of our family settled in the US and became more italian-american than canadian even though some of them were born here