The worldview of American white Christian nationalists is simple: America was meant to be and was at its best when dominated by white Christians. Yet just who, exactly, qualifies as “white Christian”?

I ask because until the 1970s, my Sicilian-American Catholic parents weren’t considered either all that white or Christian. On the eve of Columbus Day, honoring Americans of Italian ancestry and their achievements, a history lesson is in order.

My first-generation American parents grew up in the ’20s and ’30s in Niagara Falls. The town was divided into its Italian, Polish and Irish working class immigrant neighborhoods, each with its own Catholic parish.

The immigrant communities got along with each other all right. But if a teen from one ethnic neighborhood got drunk on a Saturday night a

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