An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States

Abstract

An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States is a sobering read, one that reminds its readers that racialized (un)reason is not a discredited part of the social imaginary in either the United States or Europe.In this work of comparative sociology, Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri contend that American and Italian youth share more in common when it comes to conceptualizing racial and ethnic difference than some contemporary scholarship supposes.To do so, they draw on two sets of in-depth interviews that they conducted with small cohorts of university students from the northeastern United States and Italy between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013, respectively.The volume builds on Morning's previous work in The Nature of Race (2011) but adds a comparative element by foregrounding the postimperial ''afterlife'' of racial beliefs in Italy.Acknowledging that their interview cohorts are small and draw from a selective demographic, the authors are quick to stress that they are not attempting to make ''national generalizations'' about how ''race'' or other conceptions of ''descent-based difference'' function (p. 7).Instead, they contend that their interviews speak to key aspects of the social unconscious that shapes these students' thinking about self and Other in each national context.The authors use their empirical work, in turn, to make two theoretical interventions in the sociological literature around ''race.''First, Morning and Maneri challenge the view-first put forward by Martin Barker (1981) and since embraced as a sort of scholarly commonsense-that Europeans tend to embrace a culturalist model of racism, whereas the United States remains trapped within the more traditional ''biological'' paradigm.Many theorists have mapped the transatlantic divide against that biology-