SOCIOLOGY PUBLIC LECTURE
The Lens of Race: Conceptualizing Difference
in Italy and the United States
19 May, 2016 in S0.11 from 5:00 - 6:30 pm
All welcome
Department of Sociology
Co-hosted by the Inequalities and Social Change &
Economy, Technology, Expertise Research Groups
Ann Morning
Department of Sociology
New York University
Marcello Maneri
Department of Sociology
University of Milan – Bicocca
ABSTRACT
Observing political debates about immigration in the United Kingdom of the late 1970’s, Martin
Barker coined the term “new racism” to describe an emerging discourse that identified cultural
incompatibility rather than undesirable biologically-rooted traits as the problem posed by nonEuropean newcomers. Since then, the notion of new racism has been applied across varied national
settings, and an informal comparative conclusion has been reached: Cultural “new racism”
predominates in Western Europe, while Americans remain mired in biological “old racism.”
Though widespread, this comparative claim has not been the object of systematic empirical analysis.
Our project addresses this evidentiary gap by using Italy as a case study of the extent to which
Europeans draw on cultural, biological, or other axes of difference when they think about what
distinguishes various descent-based groups in their country. Specifically, we report on our in-depth
interviews with 75 college students in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, in conjunction with interviews of
30 students in vocational schools in Milan, and for comparison, interviews of over 50
undergraduates in the north-eastern United States.
Despite the taboo on the mention of race in Italy, we find that beliefs about physical difference that
are widespread in the U.S. are hardly absent among Italians. Similarly, cultural concepts of
difference have a real place in a United States whose ethnoracial diversity, like that of Western
Europe, is now fed primarily by voluntary immigration rather than the slavery and conquest of the
past.