The image of non-white people in the white mind: or, An Ugly Word as a book on the discursive reproduction of whiteness in the US and Italy

ABSTRACT

An Ugly Word is an important and timely work: it takes a frightening picture of our times, using interviews and a opportune sociological and critical race theory-based analysis of them to reveal how race thinking imbues perceptions, ideas, and conceptions of racialized Otherness in the mind of young white Italians. It fills a gap in flourishing research on Italian racism that in the last ten years has focused mostly on racist and colonial archives and how they are reproduced in Italian culture, society, and politics. My contribution to the debate opened by the journal on the book focuses on the pervasiveness of race in Italy, on my critique of categorization circulating within the international debate on race, and concludes advocating the importance of maintaining the concept of race and exploring its visual reproduction in Italian and European critical literature, to see racism and fight against it.

KEYWORDS:

• Race/racisms
• Italy
• white innocence
• colonial archives
• racial capitalism
• visuality

Acknowledgement

The author provides a special thanks to the University of Venice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This publication and the work leading to it have benefited from funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the framework of funding awarded R&D Unit CES (UIDP/50012/2020).