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-culture dichotomy, they point out, and yet little empirical work has been done to test whether that assumption holds at the level of everyday citizens’ beliefs.
Morning and Maneri’s comparative analysis, however, suggests that the primary difference lies at the level of the linguistic norms around “race talk” rather than at the level of cognition. As the authors point out, Americans are more comfortable speaking about and acknowledging “race”; by contrast, the Italian students expressed a deep revulsion towards the “ugly word” (la razza) and conflated it with racism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. But as soon as those linguistic norms and moral injunctions were lifted—by shifting the rhetoric onto the safer ground of “ethnicity,” for example, or by approaching the issue of the Other within depoliticized contexts like sports—the Italian students readily drew on racial stereotypes to frame and reason with group difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nowhere was the specter of “race” more present than in the Black biological essentialism provoked by the discussion of Black athletes. Tasked with explaining Black runners’ dominance in track events, many students produced detailed accounts of the Black body’s distinctive “musculature” and told flawed evolutionary stories (p. 120).
Second, the authors propose a new theoretical framework for analyzing people’s cognitive beliefs about racialized and ethnic difference. Their alternative approach looks beyond “race” to embrace a broader family of related concepts, including ethnicity, caste, and population. Within that more expansive conceptual topography, Morning and Maneri argue that scholars should focus on six aspects of descent-related difference. Namely, (1) the grounds for a group’s presumed identity, whether a common biological trait, cultural praxis or religious belief; (2) the group’s “scope” and “defining Other”; (3) how that shared trait comes to be acquired (i.e., is it essential, primordially cultivated, or deliberately chosen); (4) whether this form of difference is conceptualized hierarchically or horizontally; (5) how fixed or fluid a difference may be; and (6) how deterministic this group trait is perceived to be over social or individual outcomes.
Morning and Maneri are right to push for a more fine-grained conceptual analysis of how commonsense thinking about what Stuart Hall (2017:48) calls the regimes of “power-knowledge-difference” coheres and operates in different social contexts. Doing so, for example, enables us to see how Italian youth today mobilize “culture” as a slippery, catch-all explanandum that often hides a racialized and essentialist explanans. In the interviews, the students stressed that there were no such things as “races” while still relying heavily on generalized claims about the Other’s distinctive “temperament” or “psychological traits.” For example, the Roma were “dishonest” and “unwilling to work,” the Senegalese “friendly,” and the Chinese were “competent” but “lacking warmth” (pp. 74–75). The ontological fallacy at the heart of all raciological reason re-emerges, albeit cast rhetorically in terms that avoid the moral baggage of “race talk.”
And yet the authors leave underspecified the relationship between these kinds of flawed reasoning, on the one hand, and the processes of racialization or racial formation, on the other. Part of this ambiguity lies with the fact that Morning and Maneri adopt a narrow definition of “race” centered on the classic eighteenth-century Linnaean racial taxonomy, with its “black-red-yellow-white symbolic color scheme and a clear hierarchy of bodies” (p. 8). This means that it often remains unclear whether and when the psychological essentialisms or “culture-as-effectively-primordial” logics espoused by their interviewees should be read in racialized terms. Although it seems clear that the authors don’t think it’s productive to argue over which ideas should be understood as “racialized,” restricting “race” to this Linnaean formulation seems ill-adapted to analyzing the ideological products of more contemporary racial projects, including several that they gesture to themselves in their empirical analyses (such as the virulent dehumanization of the Roma or the ontologization of the Muslim terrorist). But perhaps too this speaks to the inherent limits of studying racisms predominantly through the content of cognitive beliefs, rather than analyzing how particular ideas are made into meaningful differentiations in the human in concrete contexts.
That analytical quibble aside, Morning and Maneri have certainly produced a study that contests antiracist optimism on both sides of the Atlantic. They rebuke the U.S. racial exceptionalism argument and instead resituate Italy as a key site of today’s race-making. Such a move is a welcome break from scholarship that treats racism as a hallmark of a European past that has long since been superseded by a more “civilized” egalitarianism. And their work poses a significant challenge to political theorists and sociologists alike who have been quick to adopt “unconscious bias” and aversive racism as the primary sources of discrimination operative today. What their interviews on both sides of the Atlantic point to is not the problem of unreflective prejudice, but instead of reflective and conscious commitments to race thinking.
Perhaps most worrying is how rarely social structure figured in their interviewees’ explanations of racial inequality or perceived cultural antagonisms. In this sense, Morning and Maneri’s book makes a third, more overtly political intervention in that the authors (rightly) call for more sustained commitment to educating students about “race” and racialization as sociological phenomena. Rather than reducing race talk to a moralizing injunction not to be racist, they gesture toward the importance of returning “race” and racism to the specificity of the social. The urgency of such a call certainly should not be overlooked, especially given the far right’s recent electoral victory in Italy and U.S. Republicans’ attempts to forcibly remove any discussion of anti-black racism from school history curricula in Florida.