It's one of those episodes that wants to discuss its issues quite obviously, which is fair enough, but it's undone by implausible characterisation for me. It's funny and tongue in cheek, but I remain unconvinced that Silvio is suddenly humming and harring over racial stereotyping and going to the lengths that he does in order to defend himself in the name of Italian pride.

That said, it's a very interesting episode and oozes deliberate contradictions. But if Chase and his writers are giving Tony the (surprising?) voice of reason - and perhaps their own? - by finally attacking the notion of 'Ethnicity as Identity' in a world where racial stereotypes are not only 'politically' incorrect but factually incorrect (Paulie claiming to be Napoletan in 'Commendatori' when in fact it's his first visit to Naples!), where perhaps do they suggest social identity does reside?

I'd argue class tensions stem in the first place from the development of private property - ownership of slaves and so on - and with it, the need to turn self-expanding capital into imperialism - that is, exploitation in the guise of 'exploration', or an aggressive foreign policy that seeks to absorb the riches of lesser developed peoples by directly or indirectly destroying them.

Through the historical development of capitalism and its modern form of established bourgeois Liberalism, you get identity politics that arise from false self-perceptions and the tensions between these 'identities' become products of misconception (such as 'racial' tensions arising in real life when workers 'lose jobs to immigrants'); so that you get a lot of working class resentment - and because of the economic instability of capitalism, sometimes the middle classes, as in during inevitable crises - against other working class people with 'race' or 'culture' blamed, when it's the system itself that has fed such communitarianism. Globalisation isn't the same as internationalism; one seeks to exploit the Other and thus turn it against itself, the other seeks to embrace it.

H. Peter Steeves writes, "Inevitably, globalism, free-market capitalism, cosmopolitanism and even democracy as it is practiced for the most part today are but the modern faces of imperialism and colonialism - the same forces that have enslaved the Indians, sent societies out in search of new land and people to conquer, and made it such that people ever felt the need to settle away from their homes in search of better jobs and a higher standard of living."

Steeves is also right to note that "Tony doesn't see this". Given the self-contradictory nature of the show itself, which seemingly argues against ethnic politics whilst being itself indebted to a great deal of Italian-American portrayals before it, and to the gangster genre in particular, I'd have to argue that Chase doesn't either.