Volta

I am I and my circumstances.

—Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote

This project began as what I imagined would be an autoethnographic account of my intersection with race as a researcher who had done ethnography in Sicily with Syrian and African refugees. With seven years of research experience and data in this area, I imagined that I was set. I would blend the experiences of migration and juxtapose it with my own family’s history of immigration. I had received a grant and was ready to travel to Sicily, again, to kick start the project and write. But I felt a nagging hesitation, something I can’t quite describe, but it held me back from executing the plans I needed to make to begin. Navigating through the academic year and all of its attendant complications and responsibilities, the time to travel was a slim time frame. And yet, I still couldn’t commit to dates. I was thrilled to receive the grant, a year-long opportunity to investigate an aspect of race that I’d already been committed to for some time.

At the university where I am on faculty, on nearly every level, a transformation of pedagogy and curriculum was taking place with race awareness, particularly combating anti-Black racism, squarely centered in every initiative. This was indeed a “new day”, and we were all engaged in a re-education of sorts, teaching ourselves to see with “new eyes” and listen with “new ears”. I was ready, willing, and able, though I felt that there was much in my own life that I needed to learn regarding race and the framework of white supremacy that I was brought up in. I had fallen prey to all of the protective stances that White People enact in order not to dig too deeply into our own complicity. I learned that my good intentions were meaningless when all of my guard rails, carefully structured to protect me from looking at the reality of race in my world—mainly the culture that I was brought up in, were locked into place.

While exactly what I was heading towards was still obscured from my own knowledge, I came to the realization that a mere “project” would never be enough. I was being led somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where at the time. Looking back, this is not surprising. I had protected myself from thinking about race in a way that would be self-implicative for a very, very long time. Indeed, Allison Bailey (2021) asserts, “White identity is a form of sedimented trauma numbed by privilege” (p. 82). It was something that, on a subconscious level, I knew would open me up to a vulnerability that would take a lot of courage to work through. But like weak dam walls, I could not hold back what was heading right toward me. Because it is important to me to be authentic, and that includes the work that I give myself to, I realized that nothing less than a reckoning would do. I allowed myself to acknowledge what it was that I really wanted and desperately needed: a transformation in thinking, seeing, and being.

A reckoning, as I have sought to engage in it, is a vulnerability writ large. There is no getting around that. Seeking invulnerability would not only be self-deceptive but would defeat the very reason I was engaging in such work—personal transformation that would translate into steps toward social transformation. Bailey argues that fear and entitlement are a toxic combination and that self-repair is an essential part of world repair (p. 83).

What follows is the result of a year of reckoning in all of its various ups, downs, insights, confusion, despairs, and triumphs. I have employed the methodologies of critical and transformative autoethnography, poetic inquiry and phenomenology to evocatively highlight “critical instances” of how I, as an Italian American, have intersected with race drawn from both personal experience(s) and those clashes between Italian Americans and African Americans on the national stage, of which there have been many over time. A central question, though, is why? But I offer a word to the wise which is often said to be sufficient: Italian American culture is not monolithic. What I express here is a cross pollination of sorts between my experience(s) as a white, cisgender, Italian American woman who has both implicitly and explicitly benefitted from white privilege and the institutionalized racism in our country. I am not, however, implicating all Italian Americans or even a particular way of life, so for some—particularly those who have not endured a reckoning—this account will not resonate. I am proud of my culture in all of its many manifestations, but what I account here is my experience, my awakening and my truth. I seek to speak for no other person.