# An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States
**Date de l'événement :** 22/03/2022
* Publié le 22/03/2022

### Image(s)
![Miniature du podcast avec la photographie de Ann Morning et la couverture de son livre "An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States"](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/memory-sp-pr.appspot.com/o/prod%2F1y7CgDOTakHDiB3dgoi0%2FprojectsMedias%2F8xyf1DXrlgNCFEGC5FC6%2Fthumbs%2Fpodcast1_yn6dn_1600x900.png?alt=media&token=86d4b8f2-0185-4f4a-9b4a-11ea82955e17) 

**Écouter l'épisode :**
[Vidéo 1](https://soundcloud.com/contact-cee/ann-morning-sgcee-22-mars-2022?in=contact-cee/sets/sgcee-general-seminar) 

## Description
Ann Morning \[...\] presented her book "An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the USA". 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.

## Intervenant(s)
Ann Morning

## Intervenant(s) secondaires
Elodie Druez, Nonna Mayer

### Date de publication de l'épisode
22/03/2022

### Type(s) de ressource
`#Audio` 

### Discipline(s)
`#Sociologie` 

### Aire(s) géographique(s)
`#Europe` `#Amérique du Nord` 

### Langue(s)
`#Anglais` 

### Famille(s) de contenu
`#Recherche` 

**Type(s) d'accès :** `#Accès libre` 

### Hébergeur(s)
`#SoundCloud` 

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