and all those other folks who don't quite fit the template...
Ya, there was always a template. When I was dp trash coming up, the winds of political correctitude weren't what they are today.
Just as a ferinstance, the "n" word may have occasionally been used in reference to folks with a black skin, but it was far more often used to refer to people, usually ourselves, who were condemned to lives of manual labor because we were not born into the ranks of the university bound.
That's what motivated an entire generation of dp immigrants to get their kids into higher education.
A couple of times I had the pleasure of trading stories with the elderly Italian gentleman who owned the main pub up this way. He knew a lot of the Italian folks who had made their mark down in Guelph back when the Italian immigrant community was pivotal in the evolution of that community.
He was personally acquainted with a lot of the folks you run into in those supposed "mafia" stories about old Guelph. He himself had to make a go of it in that world, and he did.
But he had two kids, and one of them is a professor at a university in the US and the other one is a surgeon in a hospital in Toronto.
He came from a world when his people were "wops" and "dagos" and "eye ties."
Somehow his people survived and became doctors and professors and captains of industry and politicians...
My dp father washed ashore in this great land almost 60 years ago. This was truly the land of opportunity. The locals might not have seen it at the time, but the bohunks and the squareheads and the dagos and the kikes sure did.
They were all niggers then.
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