On Dean Martin, Stephen Miller, and White Supremacism

I really have been trying to keep my mind off politics and on Christmas this week, but it wasn’t to be.

I’ve been trying to take a few days off from worrying about the political situation in the United States and just wish Jesus a happy birthday. But I don’t get to have nice things. This afternoon I got online to write about something liturgical and pretty, which I’m still working on in a tab.

But I have to take a moment first to remark on a tweet by White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Miller, who is a year younger than me although he looks seventy, is a white supremacist and the primary architect of Trump’s draconian immigration strategy, which has been terrorizing America for the past twelve months. I’m not saying America’s immigration laws were ever very good. There’s plenty of criticism to go around. But things have gone from bad to hideous in 2025 with law-abiding immigrants and even United States citizens terrorized, clerics abused, people thrown in foreign gulags,  and I expect it to get much worse before it gets better.

Miller tweeted: “Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids. Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

For a moment, I was so furious I couldn’t see straight.

Dean Martin himself was the son of an immigrant.

Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crochetti, the son of Gaetano Alfonso Crocetti, who was from Abruzzo. His mother’s name was Angela, and she was born in America, but her father was born in Bergamo, Italy. These were not wealthy business people who could have paid Trump’s steep immigration fees. They were working class people looking for a better life. Gaetano was a barber here in Steubenville and Angela sewed dresses for our department store. They attended and baptized their children at Saint Anthony’s church right here in town. Saint Anthony’s is now owned by the City and used as a public daycare, but it used to be the Italian Catholic parish. All those dilapidated skinny houses cascading up the shale hill to Pleasant Heights behind Saint Anthony’s in Steubenville are a neighborhood that was called “Little Italy,” because that’s where the Italian immigrants lived.

Dino grew up poor, and he grew up in Italian culture. He walked from his family’s rental house to the public school, which is now a parking lot where the City keeps trying to build a Dollar General. The Grant School is where he learned to speak English, from teachers paid by American tax dollars, because his parents only spoke Italian to him at home. Dino sang with local bands to make money here in town, at first. Eventually, he changed his name and got a nose job to sound and look more “American,” and became rich and famous. They even named the stretch of Rout Seven that runs by Steubenville “Dean Martin Boulevard.”  But Dean Martin was Italian.

Italians didn’t count as white people when Dean Martin was young. Italians were viewed as dangerous foreigners with silly names who were probably part of a gang and wanted to hurt “real” Americans. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created in 2003, but if it had existed in the 1920s and Stephen Miller had somehow been the White House chief of staff telling them what to do, they wouldn’t have left Italians alone. Dino may well have come home from elementary school one day to find the house had been raided and Gaetano was on a plane to a South American torture prison, while Angela was still in detention begging for an interpreter and desperately trying to get somebody to believe her birth certificate was real. Or maybe he’d have been detained himself, since he was a tan-skinned boy with dark hair who didn’t speak English walking to an American school.

Yes, I realize that Sinatra was also a son of immigrants and everything I’m saying could apply to him too, but Dean Martin is the one from right here in Steubenville, so that’s the one I’m angriest about just now.

White supremacists like Miller want to take the country back to an imaginary time when America was really America, without all these nasty Black and Brown foreigners from different cultures mucking it up. But that time doesn’t exist, and neither do those people.

In order to get to an America before immigrants, you’d have to go back to before the year 1000 when Leif Ericson stumbled onto Canadian soil– or, if you’re talking about the United States and not the North American continent, at least before 1513 when Ponce de León landed in Florida. Before that, Americans weren’t white people and they certainly didn’t celebrate Christmas. After that, it’s been one wave of immigrants after the other, none of them well behaved, none of them having any more claim to be “real Americans” than anybody else.

White supremacism says there’s some kind of pure, clean, unproblematic species of human who doesn’t do strange things and only does normal things, who doesn’t come from a weird culture but only comes from a bland and harmless culture, who doesn’t cost society resources but rather creates resources. But that human doesn’t exist. White supremacism wants to give that supposedly perfect human the authority to hurt and abuse every other kind of human in order to keep other white people safe and prosperous. That is not only illogical but evil.

White supremacism keeps everyone in a society scrambling to fit behind the moving goalpost of whiteness. That’s why the definition of who counts as a white person and a “real American” changes from time to time, to keep everyone on their toes. No one wants to be thought of as a foreigner, as somebody “un-American” who doesn’t act the right way. People who find that they “count” as real Americans will do anything to stay that way and seem American enough. They won’t complain about what they see happening to their Black or brown or immigrant neighbor, for fear it’ll be done to them too. After awhile they might even come to believe that the violence being committed against their neighbor is really for their safety. But the cause of the danger was never the foreigner.

After awhile, people who used to count as dangerous foreigners might be held up as an example of the good, unproblematic, wholesome sort of human being by white supremacists, so they can target somebody else.

I don’t know how our country is getting out of this mess, but one thing we’ve got to do is keep calling out lies when we see them.

And maybe now I can get back to thinking about Christmas.