It's Anti-Italian Discrimination

About

It's Anti-Italian Discrimination is an exploitable image macro and reaction image using a captioned still of the character Silvio Dante from an episode of The Sopranos. The meme is used ironically when Italian or Italian-American people are embarrassed, hated or mistreated.

Origin

The meme is a direct quote from season four, episode three of The Sopranos, titled "Christopher," which aired on September 29th, 2002, on HBO. The episode's opening scene (below) features Silvio Dante, played by Steven Van Zandt, saying the line when he learns there will be an organized protest of a local Columbus Day parade.

On January 19th, 2019, a captioned image of this scene was tweeted by the No Context Twitter account @sopranosnocnxt.^[1] The image received more than 1,000 likes and 250 retweets and quote-tweets over two years, with multiple quote-tweets using it as a meme the same day it was posted.^[2]

Spread

On May 23rd, 2021, Twitter^[3] user @spellgage tweeted the image in response to the news that Maneskin, the Italian winners of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, would be required to take a drug test. The reply received more than 800 likes over two months.

The meme was widely circulated in August 2021 during the Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment inquiry that led to Cuomo's resignation as governor of New York state. A Barstool Sports article,^[4] which received over 250 comments in three days, used the image when discussing the news. In addition, several other users used the image to respond to a tweet of a Fox News chyron where Cuomo defended himself as "Not perverted, just Italian."^[5]

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References