LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Today, on free speech radio, KPFA [1], broadcast an interesting conversation with Smith College Professor Jennifer Guglielmo on Italian anarchists and their relevance to, and importance for, today’s struggles for socioeconomic justice.  Listen here.

Dr. Guglielmo is the author of Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012).  Dr. Guglielmo has also co-edited, alongside Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race Is Created in America (Routledge, 2003).  This is an interesting study of how the fallacy of race is manipulated to preserve class divisions and maintain existing power relations.  Many of us so-called Hispanics experienced this in the USA when we ‘became’ white after the 2000 census [2], when we were informed by the state that we were henceforth white.  This coincided with a national discussion and, perhaps, panic around ‘Hispanics’ outnumbering whites by 2050.  In California, it seemed ‘Hispanics’ had already outnumbered whites.  So, the notion of race and passing for white, is a long-standing mechanism for concentrating and maintaining racial power over people of colour, as Dr. Guglielmo explained on Against the Grain.

Dr. Guglielmo also cited work by Dr. Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2004), in this notable conversation on class, race (phenotype)/ethnicity, labour militancy, and radical feminism.

—Messina

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AGAINST THE GRAIN—Of the Italians who immigrated to the US, many were drawn to anarchism, labor militancy, and radical feminism. Jennifer Guglielmo explains.