Customer Reviews

White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945

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This is one of the best books I've read this year. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book powerfully documents how immigrants have experienced and lived race in the US. With chapters on gangsters, race riots, fascism, tensions over public housing, labor unions, and international relations, this book is FILLED with riveting stories that force the reader to consider the role of everyday working-class folks in perpetuating and challenging white supremacy. The author's goal is to make us think critically about how we have arrived at our contemporary reality -- where race structures so much of our daily lives -- by examining how the descendents of impoverished and often marginalized European immigrants have played a role in keeping that structure in place. This is an incredible book!! I recommend it to anyone who loves a good story, but also to those who are looking for historical background to current debates over affirmative action, reparations, and anti-racist collective action.... and anyone who wants some factual info to support your arguments with family & friends who insist that "we" (meaning "white ethnics") had is "as bad" as "them" (people of color). This author finally lays this argument to rest once and for all (thankfully) by showing how the color line ensured that Italians had a leg up, and that their "whiteness" became their most valuable asset in a country so deeply defined by race.

I was expected an account of the problem of the "whiteness " of Italians in Chicago.I found it Good book
Received quickly Good price

A must buy for anyone interested in American history, racial issues and socio-economics. Guglielmo manages to take very complex issues and weave them into a very readable narrative. Books of this nature often are bogged down by pedantic mambajahambo...but not this one.....and woe betide thee that think otherwise!!! Italians and all others that are interested in these issues should rejoice at the arrival of this new work by Thomas Guglielmo!!!! It's is if a combination of Umberto Eco, Moliere, and Charles Dickens has come along to tell the tale of Italian immigration to the U.S. in the 19th century. Buy this book as it will without doubt impart knowledge and perspective beyond measure!!! Hark...for Thomas Guglielmo has arrived on the scene for the benefit of all mankind!!!

I live in Chicago, so I found it interesting. If I didn't live here, I wonder if I could have finished it because of the detailed specific references, names, locales, neighborhoods, union groups, fraternal orgs, parishes, etc.

My view is that Mr. Guglielmo falls into the Noel Ignatiev trap who has anti-White views and wrote a book about Irish people having to "become" White? Huh? Italians are White because they are from Europe, and Italians didn't view differences in peoples and cultures because someone "taught them how" once they got here, that's too simplistic, and makes the immigrants sound like they couldn't even reason on their own.

Italians by and large associated and intermarried with themselves and other European immigrants and Whites because of common cultures, instincts, values, history, and traditions. Not because they "told" or were somehow "brainwashed" into it by a guy checking a box on an immigration form. C'mon already!

Italians, just like any other group in the USA, were naturally attracted towards those with whom they shared similarities, culture, appearance, tradition, and religion. These people tended to be Whites. This happened naturally, not because of a conspiracy against anyone else.