White Americans lynched Italian immigrants for refusing white supremacy racial norms

Evidence

The anti-Italian sentiment that led white mobs to repeatedly lynch Italians was largely motivated by a desire for retaliation. As new immigrants, Italians did not behave like Southern white men in a most important matter: race. Italians did not come here with the view that black Americans were their inferiors. When they became merchants, they treated their black and white customers equally. Their children went to school with black children (not by choice but by law), and they were willing to work with and take the side of their fellow black workers—not their employers or plantation owners. White Louisianans aided by a complicit justice system used lynching to control Italians—just as white Americans used it to control black Americans, as we will see in Part II. But Italians had one significant advantage that black Americans did not: They had a country and government willing to fight for them. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Ties into Brown’s broader argument in The Whiteness of Wealth about how immigrant groups earn whiteness by distancing from Black Americans — here the reverse: Italians who refused that bargain were punished like Black people.
• ADDENDUM: Lynching of Italians for race-norm violations parallels the ritual violence framing; connects to the broader structural story of how whiteness is policed.