“An Ugly Word is a terrific book that will make a major contribution to several areas of scholarship. First, it addresses a very important question in comparative race studies—whether the United States and Western Europe have different concepts of race, rooted in biological notions in the Unites States and cultural notions in Europe. Second, the book is a very careful and nuanced empirical study of how Italians think of and talk about descent-based differences. Third, the book revisits Morning’s important groundbreaking earlier work on concepts of descent-based difference in the United States and extends it by putting it in dialogue with the Italian case, bringing new light to understanding the ways in which Americans think and talk about racial and ethnic differences. Fourth, the book provides a new conceptual apparatus and theoretical tools for researching the conceptual underpinnings of descent-based difference. This is difficult work because it involves unpacking taken-for-granted terms such as race, ethnicity, biology, primordialism, culture, and the like, while also using these terms to understand how ordinary people make sense of the diversity they encounter. An Ugly Word is a great example of using empirical social science to advance theory on an incredibly important social and public policy issue. It is a terrific example of the interplay of evidence and theory.”
—MARY C. WATERS, PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences and the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
“By bringing Italian and American ways of thinking and talking (or not talking) about race into fruitful conversation with one another, Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri make a valuable contribution, at once conceptual and empirical, to the comparative study of understandings of descent-based difference.”
—ROGERS BRUBAKER, professor of sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair, University of California, Los Angeles
“An Ugly Word invites us to think more deeply about descent based difference. Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri interrogate in quite fined-grained detail the meanings and nuances to perceived group boundaries and categories in the United States and Italy. In so doing, they advance the cultural sociology and comparative analyses of race as a social phenomena. In an age of global population flows and enduring challenges of inequality, this work will surely engage and prove useful to serious students of racism, identity, and culture.”
—LAWRENCE D. BOBO, Dean of Social Science and W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University