Though Michelle Reale’s latest book Volta: An Italian-American Reckoning With Race (Peter Lang 2024) was published just a few days shy of Trump’s re-election, it is a timely and illuminating read in our current climate characterized, on one hand, by Trump’s announced resurrection of Columbus Day and, on the other, by the release of blockbusters like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners using the vampire metaphor to allude to race relations, perilous alliances, and the struggle of Black people to maintain their culture and life, against erasure.
Reale’s book is exemplary in indicating tools and possible paths to discern the multitude of currents and rivulets that make up the murky waters of identity and racism. The book is specifically addressed to White people, a call to reckon with a kind of racism that is sometimes invisible to them, but in which they swim all their lives. In her case, the search is multilayered. On one hand, the reckoning starts as auto-ethnography, drawing from her personal circumstances and ancestry – the setting being East Coast Italian-American culture, specifically Philadelphia from the 1970’s to today. Her second observation post is 21st century Sicily, specifically Ortigia, as an ethnographer of race relations between White Sicilians and the African asylum seekers who land there after perilous Mediterranean crossings on rickety boats, only to be placed in ‘reception centers’ to wait for approval or deportation.
The Volta in the title or better “Turn!”, is an exhortation to turn page, to turn your back on, to engage in personal process of recognizing whiteness and one’s own racism, beyond pious anti racist virtue signaling. Having struggled and reckoned with the beast, Reale urges readers to confront it, analyze its manifestations in our personal lives and engage in real practices and behaviors that combat it at a personal and systemic level. In her case, it entailed turning away from a perception of ‘peaceful coexistence’ of the Italian Americans and Black communities in Philadelphia due to the proximity of their living districts and the historically shifting racial status of Italian immigrants. Beyond a deceptive superficial indifference to race (which in Italy is manifested with an outright denial of its existence), it meant reckoning with the insidious nature of a deeply ingrained, systemic racism that manifests itself, in spite of the ambiguity of Italian racial identity, both perceived and actual, in everyday life and transactions. She compresses this concept quite aptly in the words “my Whiteness has been negotiated on my behalf before I was born”.
The methodology for this turning, explicitly summarized in the first chapter, plays out then in the subsequent nine chapters, all of which include a Vignette providing the anecdotal evidence of personal experience, followed by more systematic analysis supported by research and theories, then an Interlude projecting that experience in the fire of more contemporary framing of the issues. Reale uses the compactness of her verse to fill with her poetry the silences and embarrassments that often accompany those awkward moments of averting one’s gaze from the inconvenient realities of race relations. Additionally, she draws from the words of writers and poets such as Gloria Anzaldua, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Diane di Prima, bell hooks. The poetry of this account and its courage in laying bare the author’s own circumstantial racism and her unwitting participation in the effects of racism at large is what specifically differentiates this book from many others that have been published under the aegis of anti-racism and Whiteness studies. Its authenticity and daring make it indeed a worthwhile read in these days of turmoil and tension among potential allies, when it is crucial to find shared visions and paths forward to counter autocracy and the recrudescence of racism and other forms of oppression.
Reale’s keen observational skills often focus on multiple ways of knowing, one of them is the corporeal dimension as she draws on how the body itself reacts to the discomforts of race. She records the flinching, the averting of the gaze, the impetuous grabbing of a glass of water, the artificial creation of physical space to avoid close proximity, the unjustified cheerful chattiness to signal an implied racial complicity, and as a countermeasure, the lifting and holding of a biracial infant on one’s hip, the body’s way to signal that one stands on the other side.
The personal accounts of episodes from her childhood and adolescence in the early chapter tend to focus on how a culture of racism plays out in the family sphere. Later chapters, instead, give way to forays into society at large, the national and international arenas. There, she analyzes episodes such as the Bensonhurst killing of Yusuf Hawkins, Rodney King in L.A., the controversies surrounding Columbus Day and the removal of statues, the practices and policies of personalities such as Frank Rizzo, racist shootings of black refugees in Macerata, Italy, by Luca Traini, the killing of Nigerian street vendor Alika Ogorchkwu in Civitanova. Commission and omission abound and their depths are plumbed. It is a line of research that needs to be deepened and extended to our days, as the political context gets increasingly murky and it is harder to detect a way forward, both in the US and in Italy (as well as worldwide, unfortunately, one might say).
