Spike Lee's Hypocrisy, and his Anti Italian Negative Stereotyping Ridiculed by Dr. Dona De Sanctis

Dr. Dona De Sanctis, former Deputy Executive Director of Sons of Italy, and now Editor in Chief of "Italian America Magazine" , the most widely read publication in the U.S. for people of Italian heritage, wrote a Letter to the Washington Post, that in keeping with it's cavalier attitude toward Italian Americans declined to publish it.

RE: Massacre at Sant’Anna di Stazzema OR Miracle at Sant’Anna di Stazzema ???

Did Spike Lee cross WAY over the line when he IGNORED the Massacre of 560 REAL Italians, and DRAMATIZED the Heroism of four FICTIONAL Black American GIs at Sant’Anna di Stazzema ???

Would Spike Lee criticize me for making a Film about the REAL Black Soldiers who fought on the side of the SOUTH in the Civil War ???? In Fact Black Soldiers fought in the Army of the Confederacy TWO YEARS before Blacks were allowed to serve in the Union Army!!!! And contrary to the Union, paid Blacks the same pay as Whites. Estimates range from 30,000, 65,000 to 100,000 Black Confederate Military http://www.scvcamp469-nbf.com/theblackconfederatesoldier.htm and http://www.37thtexas.org/html/BlkHist.html Fascinating !!! Heads up Spike !!!!!!!

To the Editor:

I had to laugh when I read last week in The Reliable Source that Spike Lee was feuding with Clint Eastwood for not including a black Marine raising the flag at Iwo Jima in his movie, Flags of Our Fathers. Eastwood pointed out that the movie was about the lives of these six (real life)heroes, none of whom was black, but Lee argued that historical fact was less important than symbolic multi-culturalism.

Apparently, playing fast and loose with the facts is part of Lee’s approach to movie-making. Witness his latest opus, "Miracle at St. Anna " a $45 million movie, based on a WW II atrocity in the Italian village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema in which the Nazis shot 560 villagers—mostly women, children and old men—, burned their bodies and destroyed the village.

Lee’s version, however, focuses on four fictitious African-American GIs, trapped in the village. Former Italian partisans charge the movie “is a false...reconstruction of events that ignores the real story.” Not surprisingly, Lee dismisses the criticism since he is no friend of things Italian. Three of his movies portray fictitious Italian American characters as uneducated and bigots: “Do the Right Thing,”(1989), “Jungle Fever,”(1991), and “Summer of Sam,”(1999).

Lee’s attacks on Italian Americans have been largely ignored by the media—as was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks last December. According to him, the Italians “looked down their garlic noses” at Christ, and the Crucifixion was “a public lynching Italian style, executed in apartheid Rome.” The media’s excusing such egregious insults to the nation’s fifth largest ethnic group has convinced Italian Americans that we are the last minority it is still permissible to stereotype.

Dona De Sanctis, PHD
Editor-in-Chief Italian America Magazine, the most widely read publication in the U.S. for people of Italian heritage

Sons of Italy in America

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