Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America

This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: White Lies, Dark Truths
Jennifer Guglielmo

I. Learning the U.S. Color Line

1. Color: White/ Complexion: Dark
Louise DeSalvo

2. "No Color Barrier": Italians, Race, and Power in the United States
Thomas A. Guglielmo

3. Race, Nation, Hyphen: Italian-Americans and American Multiculturalism in Comparative Perspective
Donna R. Gabaccia

4. Walking the Color Line: Italian Immigrants in Rural Louisiana, 1880-1910
Vincenza Scarpaci

II. Radicalism and Race

5. Making the Italian Other: Blacks, Whites, and the Inbetween in the 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois Race Riot
Caroline Waldron Merithew

6. "It is Providential That There Are Foreigners Here": Whiteness and Masculinity In the Making of Italian American Syndicalist Identity
Michael Miller Topp

7. "I Delitti della Razza Bianca" (Crimes of the White Race): Italian Anarchists' Racial Discourse as Crime
Salvatore Salerno

8. Surrealist, Anarchist, Afrocentrist: Philip Lamantia Before and After the "Beat Generation"
Franklin Rosemont

9. The Frontlines: Hip-Hop, Life, and the Death of Racism
Mark Vesuvio Guglielmo (aka Manifest)

III. Whiteness, Violence, and the Urban Crisis

10. When Sinatra Came to Italian Harlem: The 1945 "Race Riot" at Benjamin Franklin High School
Gerald Meyer

11. Frank L. Rizzo and the Whitening of Italian Americans in Philadelphia
Stefano Luconi

12. "Italians Against Racism": Yusef Hawkins (R.I.P.) and My March on Bensonhurst
Joseph Sciorra

IV. A Black Italian Imaginary

13. Sangu du Sangu Meu: Growing up Black and Italian in a Time of White Flight
Kym Ragusa

14. Figuring Race
Edvige Giunta

15. Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito: Life in the Borderlands
John R. Gennari

16. Italiani/ Africani
Ronnie Mae Painter and Rosette Capotorto

Afterword: DuBois, Race and Italian Americans
David Roediger

Contributors

Jennifer Guglielmo is Assistant Professor of History at Smith College. Salvatore Salerno is an independent scholar who has taught at University of Massachusetts at Boston, California State University at Sacramento, and Macalester College. David Roediger (afterword) is the Kendrick Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois and the author of many books, including Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.