Just the Facts, Please
While serving as president of the Italic Institute, I stormed Bobby De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 – along with John Mancini, Bill Dal Cerro and Lionel Bottari. Our purpose was to shame the perpetrators of Shark Tale at a major media venue. None of our Italian-American academics chose to attend —-except for yours truly. (In fact, I have been an adjunct professor of economics, critical thinking and ethics for nearly two decades.) Indeed few—-if any-—of these self-styled intellectuals have ever left their ivory towers to combat media defamation over the years. But now they see fit to write the history of “anti-Italianism.” (See my review on page 19)
Why did such lofty scholars avoid diving into the shark-infested Hollywood waters to defend our children? As the author of two major anti-Shark Tale articles in the mainstream press –Newsday (March 11, 2004) and The NY Daily News (September 7, 2004) I was asked by Steve Aiello, head of the public relations arm of the anti-Shark Tale coalition (CARRES), to act as national spokesman on several television interview programs. Hill & Knowlton spearheaded the campaign. Because of some backroom dealing the national campaign was aborted.
Such a blatant power play—-(some suspect Columbus Club’s former chairman Lawrence Auriana) —-and the predictable collapse of the Shark Tale effort demonstrated the community’s inherent weakness. The authors and editors of Anti-Italianism have overlooked the subsequent and very real discrimination against an Italian-American student at Batavia, Illinois’s Sam Rotolo Middle School in 2006. They missed it because Messrs. Fred Gardaphe, Jerry Krase and other scholars sat it out. These “honorable men” may take pride in chronicling our trying times, but they ought to hang their homuncular heads in shame.
Rosario A. Iaconis, Vice Chairman East
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