Dr. Michelle Reale, a professor and Access Services and Outreach Librarian, recently published a new book, “Volta: An Italian-American Reckoning with Race.” In the book, she discusses several cultural touchstones within the Italian-American community, along with local and national flashpoints in Italian-American and African-American relations. 

We asked Dr. Reale several questions to dig deeper into her background and the topics covered in her book.

What prompted you to write this book?
I applied for and received a Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action (CASAA) Scholar Advocates grant for work that I intended to do about racism and refugees in Sicily, a population that I had worked with for several years. As I began my research, I felt something off kilter. I felt like I could definitely do the project I had intended to do, but that somehow it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. 

I started journaling about racism in Italy since I am there often and have observed so much, and then I began relating it to the largely immigrant community I grew up in. It was like a fragile house of cards started falling down. I remember calling Dr. Christopher Varlack in distress. I told him: “I think what I am writing is reckoning!” He encouraged me to take the project where it needed to go, something that I will always be grateful for. 

The writing started coming out in chapters. I was remembering so much. I engaged in long conversations with my father about things, asking questions, poking. He’s 91 years old. He was very uncomfortable. I just kept writing to see where it would go. The writing and research was “self-implicative,” meaning that I did not blame others for racism, but instead, looked within.

What does the term “reckoning” mean in the context of exploring your Italian-American identity? Why should readers take part in this reckoning?
I had a “come to Jesus” moment with myself. I had to grapple and reckon with the racism I was immersed in my entire life. What I really had to reckon with is that so many things just didn’t look like racism—it was just always the way things had been done. I had to pick some things apart and really look at them closely. I was numb to many, many things. When we moved from one house to another, our neighborhood pressured my parents not to put a “sale” sign on the postage-sized front lawn because they didn’t want Black people to try to buy the house. I was well aware of this incident. I knew what it meant. I was 15 years old at the time, but it never, ever registered to me that this was racism. It was predominantly an Italian neighborhood on our side of the street and African-American on the other side under a small bridge. It all made sense to me. That’s just the way things were. There are many incidents in the book similar to this one. I simply was not able to see these incidents as racism while they were happening. I think if I had not decided to put myself through such a reckoning, I never would have seen or come to terms with racism willingly. And ultimately, that is what a reckoning means to me: coming to terms with the truth, not as I see it, but the truth as it really is. It is about taking responsibility.

Readers should contemplate their own reckoning to be able to fight racism, to be a whole person in the world, to increase our capacity for understanding. You have to clean your own house before you can think of cleaning anyone else’s. You have to understand how and why racism lives in you in order to be able to work to eradicate it anywhere else.

The book touches on some tough historical subjects. What do you hope readers learn from these parts?
We tend not to pay attention to things that don’t personally affect us. “Not my problem!” is a common refrain. I wanted to show the long tentacles that racism has beyond ourselves. I wanted to show how easy it is to fall into a dangerous cultural mindset that has the ability to exist for generations, if not questioned and scrutinized. 

When I really started to examine the incidents of Italian-American racism on the national stage, I was struck by how I barely gave them much thought when they were actually happening. Now, of course, they blow my mind. I grew up in the shadow of Mayor Frank Rizzo (in Philadelphia) and as a kid, I would hear his incendiary words on the evening news, and I’d see the headlines on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and saw how so many working class Italians supported him and were proud of him. I never questioned it. He represented “law and order,” which is a sort of racist code phrase —-because of course, everyone knew who committed the most crime in Philadelphia.

Were there any surprising revelations during your research and writing process?
Because I believe a reckoning is full of surprises, suffice it to say that there were many. One of them was that we tell ourselves stories to get by and we are quite adept at obfuscating the truth when it protects our sense of being good people. I use the collective “we” because this is such a widespread phenomenon among white people and a distinct function of white supremacy. I had not realized that I’d been doing this all along. But once you see, you can never unsee again.

Another revelation was that I’d had this narrative about how my relatives peacefully coexisted with their African-American neighbors, but that so-called “peaceful coexistence” was comfortable only for my relatives. I was shamed when I realized what those smiles and “cooperation” of those African-American neighbors must have cost them.

I was blindsided by the emotion(s) I felt during the writing and research. Feelings of deep and great shame, distress, disbelief, and a bit of shock at what I was dredging up. At one point I truly felt the impact of disrupting the order of things as I have known them to be—my inner and defended world. I felt fear, too. When I tried to discuss this with people in my life, there was a lot of denial and defensiveness that left me feeling really lonely and unsure of what I was doing. In a lot of ways I felt that I was coming undone.

Finally, and probably most importantly, it was an absolute revelation to me that in no way could I hope to do any brand of anti-racism work without understanding the racism within me—-I tried! But I couldn’t go ahead with my planned project because something that I can only describe as utterly urgent was coming through. I had to do the hard work. Unfortunately, this is a step many overlook. But it was an organic awakening for me. Digging deep into the depths of my own experience was (in fact still is) extremely painful, but absolutely necessary.

If you could invite one of your ancestors to read Volta, who would that be and why?
Definitely my Sicilian grandfather. For so many reasons. I relay one anecdote in the book about an African-American man in the neighborhood who walks into his shoe repair shop on a very hot day and attempts to drink from one of my grandfather’s cups. It is a story I felt conflicted about telling. But it is the truth. I would want my grandfather to see how far we’ve come, and how the racism that southern Italians and Sicilians, both in Italy and in the United States, have suffered gives us so much in common with African-Americans. I would want him to see that we are more alike than we are different.

Anything else you would like to mention?
I hope that anyone who reads the book will engage fully with it and try to see how culture is such a strong and determining factor in our attitudes toward race. Of course, it’s not the only factor, but it is an influential one. I also hope that rather than people defaulting to the same old story of racism living out there in the world but not within themselves, they will instead understand it for what it is: an ego-preserving lie. We all harbor racism. Everyone of us. To see this as just an Italian-American story would be a grave mistake. This could be anyone’s story—Volta simply tells my version through the lens by which I have viewed the world. And I am always willing to have the tough conversations with people. There is no endpoint to a reckoning. It lasts as long as you live.

To learn more about “Volta: An Italian-American Reckoning with Race,” published by Peter Lang International Academic Publishing, click here.