An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States with Ann Morning, New York University & NYU Abu Dhabi in New York

CEE General Seminar

Sciences Po, via Zoom, compulsory registration

Scholars, as well as politicians, have often assumed that there is a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think of race. In the US, the thinking goes, the notion of race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe it has disappeared and its legacy of racism targets cultural incompatibilities. Our interviews with young people in Italy and the United States show, however, that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. They also show that the categories “culture” and “biology” are too blunt and limited to capture the subtleties and multiple dimensions of descent-based thought.

To more accurately describe—and compare—such notions of difference across national settings, we argue that social scientists must do two things. First, they have to scrutinize ideas about a wide range of what we call “descent-based groups,” regardless of whether they are known locally as “races,” “ethnicities,” “castes,” etc. Second, they should break down or measure these concepts according to six key elements: the defining or signature trait(s) believed to demarcate descent-based groups; the scope or array of groups to which the concept is applied; any supposed hierarchy among them; the mechanism that ostensibly produces group difference (e.g. biological reproduction? Cultural socialization?); and the permanence and determinism or consequence ascribed to such difference. Only in this way will we have the fuller and more precise understanding of the beliefs about descent-based difference that underpin entrenched inequalities and are at the heart of controversies in both the political and academic spheres in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere. 

Speaker

Ann Morning, New York University & NYU Abu Dhabi in New York

Ann Morning is an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University as well as the Academic Director at 19 Washington Square North, the home of NYU Abu Dhabi in New York. Trained in economics, political science, and international affairs as well as sociology, her research interests include race, demography, and the sociology of science, especially as they pertain to census classification worldwide and to individuals’ concepts of difference. She is the author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (University of California Press 2011), and co-author of An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (Russell Sage Foundation 2022, with Marcello Maneri). Morning was a 2008-09 Fulbright research fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca and a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po in 2019. She was a member of the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations from 2013 to 2019 and has consulted on racial statistics for the European Commission and the United Nations. Morning holds her B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Yale University, a Master’s of International Affairs from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. 

Discussion

Elodie Druez, Université de Strasbourg, SAGE et chercheuse associée à Sciences Po, CEE

Nonna Mayer, Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS

Compulsory Registration

For more information: contact.cee@sciencespo.fr