Things you can learn on the Internet:
Antonin Gregory Scalia is the only child of Salvadore Eugene and Catherine Panaro Scalia. His father emigrated from Sicily as a teenager and came through Ellis Island.
That’s cool. One of my four great-grandfathers emigrated from the very northern tip of Italy through Ellis Island and settled in Hoboken, New Jersey. What’s more, little Antonin Scalia grew up in Hamilton, New Jersey, which is only 15 miles from where I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey.
As everyone who has seen True Romance and believes Quentin Tarantino’s version of history knows, all Sicilians are “part-eggplant.” Ever since that movie came out in 1993, people have been debating the degree to which Sicilians really do have black ancestry. Try battling through the Google results to find any decent scientific data on the subject.
Maybe Antonin saw that movie. Maybe he’s overcompensating a bit. Maybe we should have his mitochondrial-DNA tested to see if he’s white enough to vote in Alabama.
I’d say that if Scalia is any more than 4% black, we should just consider him black and ask him to correctly tell us how many jelly-beans are in a jar before we allow him to register to vote. Maybe he doesn’t know that at the time that Lincoln was running for president that one of the biggest constituencies that Republicans had to pander to were members of the Know Nothing Party who thought that Sicilians were no better than negroes and should be barred from entering the country.
