An Ugly Word: Rethinking “Race” in Italy, with Ann Morning

The relevance of race for analyzing and combating social exclusion and stratification worldwide has been a subject of heated controversy. Based on interviews with young people in an aspiring "color-blind" Italy and a United States that has been called "race-obsessed," we propose a framework for analyzing concepts of descent-based difference in comparative perspective that provides more flexible, detailed and precise measures of such beliefs than "race" or "ethnicity" can offer.

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 her articles have appeared in such journals as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Science, Sociological Theory, Ethnic & Racial Studies, and Population Research and Policy Review. Morning was a 2008-09 Fulbright research fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca and a 2014-15 Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and her honors include the 2005 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award as well as a 2017 “Golden Dozen” Teaching Award from New York University. 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. Her current projects include a book entitled An Ugly Word: Rethinking “Race” in Italy (with Marcello Maneri, U. Milan-Bicocca) and an analysis of the generational structure of the U.S. multiracial population (with Aliya Saperstein, Stanford U.). 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.