Connected to the episode of the ‘mythology of East Harlem’ is the absurd phenomenon of the ‘white flight’ in which the Ragusas took part in 1975. The term ‘white flight’ describes a strategy of upward mobility enacted by the white middle-class, which, in their attempt to distance themselves from non-white people, moved from the Bronx to other suburbs – the Ragusas moved to New Jersey. For the author’s family, the choice of moving sprang from the desire to finally have a big house and to move away from the
27 Edvige Giunta, ‘Figuring Race’, in Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, ed. by Jennifer
Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 224–33 (p. 231). Passing is a documentary about her grandmother, Miriam, which Ragusa made in 1996. This film will be examined in the following section. We can also notice that the way Ragusa relates to and represents her perception of family and house suggests the Freudian idea of the uncanny or unheimlich – the familiar but strange. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), ‘trans.by Alix Strachey as ‘The Uncanny’, in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, 4 vols (New York: Basic Books, 1959), IV, 368–407.
increasing racial conflicts in the Bronx; it was ‘the culmination of an escape from the desperate poverty of southern Italy. […] It held the promise of assimilation into the dominant white culture, in exchange for a final displacement of the “Old Country” as both home and ideal’.28 While moving to New Jersey, the author, who at the time was nine, did not have a clear perception that her family was trying to move towards whiteness. In remembering, Ragusa questions this moment of her family story in order to gain control over deceiving memories and so to overcome their potential for nostalgia. In this sense, memory, which constitutes the main source for the author’s contestation, ‘distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present’. 29 As Brinda Mehta argues, the act of duplicating the past is a counterproductive action as it can only lead ‘to reinscribe communities within the confines of an archaic timelessness’. As Mehta notes, in order to be future-oriented the act of recovering the past ‘should lead to a dismantling and resituating of the very categories that structure and (im)mobilize the past’.30 Thus, Ragusa denounces the
paradox and the irony of that episode: driving to New Jersey, the Ragusas were moving away from Black and Spanish people while, at the same time, taking with them Kym, born of an African American woman, and Carmen, the author’s stepmother of Puerto Rican origins. Although, as Ragusa writes, ‘I don’t think any of us knew what we were in for’,31 she is aware today that the action of taking part in the white flight can be
28 Kym Ragusa, ‘Sangu du Sangu Meu: Growing Up Black and Italian in a Time of White Flight’, in Are
Italians White? How Race is Made in America, ed. by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 213–23 (pp. 218–19).
29 Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround, 1991), p. 147, see
also Brinda Mehta, Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 78.
30 Mehta, p. 78.
inscribed in the broader strategy known under the label of ‘racial passing’.32 The term ‘passing’ refers to a strategy employed up until the beginning of the twentieth century by Black people, who used their light skin to pass as whites and enjoy the rights normally precluded from African Americans.33 The phenomenon of passing, which foregrounds the ideology of race and proves its deceptive ‘unstable borders’, is an example of the strategy of disordering argued by Ferraro. Disordering, Ferraro explains, brings to light the inconsistencies and contradictions of socially constructed paradigms of race. This strategy in particular implies the racialization of an ethnic group and the expectations held by society in relation to that specific group. The strength of The Skin between Us lies in Ragusa’s ability to show how stereotypes and social expectations
about African American and Italian American people are continuously subverted, thus calling into question the very notion of race. The memoir continuously contests and disorders the myths and social expectations related to the various ethnic groups living in America, and Italian and African Americans in particular. One important aspect of ‘disordering’ in the memoir is ‘racial passing’, insofar as it
creates social chaos […] because it involves the undermining of a rigid system of racial classification. Passing disrupts a social and political order grounded on the expectation of the existence of two distinctive races and, hence, the act of a light- skinned black passing for white is to invite ontological, metaphorical, and
32 The episode of the ‘white flight’ is also described in Kym Ragusa’s short film fuori/outside. See also,
Ragusa, ‘Sangu du Sangu Meu’.
33 Before entering the language of sociology, the term ‘passing’ was used in the field of law in relation to
African American people. According to Radall Kennedy: ‘passing is a reception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct. The classic racial passer in the United States has been the “white Negro”: the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as “white” but whose “black” lineage […] makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules.’ Randall Kennedy, ‘Racial Passing’, Ohio State Journal, 62.1145 (2001), 1–28 (p. 1).
semantic chaos – race becomes unstable, the world seems to escape categorical discipline, and language lacks its capacity to transmit meaning.34
Passing was basically enacted as a strategy of survival and ‘adopted to escape damning
racial identification’.35 Those who passed, however, were often considered traitors to
their own community of belonging. To embrace this strategy implies a betrayal of one’s own origins and the perpetration of white supremacy at the expense of the black community. For this reason, passing was considered unacceptable and frequently punished with isolation.36
For Ragusa, this topic is highly personal. In 1997, the author filmed Passing,37 a
documentary that recounts an episode of racial discrimination (also included in the memoir) whose protagonist is Miriam, the author’s maternal African American grandmother. Partly German and partly African, Miriam has a light complexion. In 1959, Miriam was driving from New York to Florida with her partner at that time. On that occasion, the partner asked her to go into a diner to order some food to take away for their picnic. Once inside the restaurant, Miriam was interrogated by two customers who insistently provoked her with the question: ‘What side of the tracks are you from?’, as in, ‘to which community do you belong?’38 As soon as Miriam realized the actual
34 Anna Camaiti Hostert, Passing: A Strategy to Dissolve Identities and Remap Differences, trans. by
Christine Marciasini (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), p. 10.
35 Giunta, ‘Figuring Race’, p. 228.
36 In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon states that ‘to speak means to be in a position to use […] this
or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture’. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 17. Therefore, to act like the oppressor encourages the persistence of racist ideologies. As Nazneen Kane argues: ‘to co-opt the language of the colonizer is to co-opt racism and to “betray” one’s own self and culture, and to internalize one’s own inferiority.’ Nazneen Kane, ‘Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Racialization: Implications for Globalization, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 5 (2007), 353–62 (p. 357).
37 Passing, dir. by Kym Ragusa (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1997).
38 As Caterina Romeo explains, the train tracks separate the poor areas from the rich areas, but most
meaning of the question, she also understood she was presented with the possibility of passing in order to stay safe, and get away from danger. Nonetheless, she courageously
replied: ‘You’ve just served a nigger!’ As this episode shows, Miriam was a privileged, light-skinned black woman. Her cunning lies in her ability to elude the boundaries of that privilege, to lever it to escape violent forms of racism, which, conversely, people who had dark skin had to face. At the same time, however, Ragusa shows how Miriam is also ready to put it at risk in order to assert her African American identity and to stick to her fight for civil and human rights.
As Livia Tenzer has noted in her interview with Ragusa, Miriam did not really have much of a choice in defining herself as a black or white woman.39 On that
particular occasion, for instance, she could have chosen to pass as white, however, the train tracks that mark the division between the white and black suburbs dissolve any doubts about Miriam’s community of belonging. Ragusa’s film thus highlights her grandmother’s fierce act of refusing to step on the other side of the line to enjoy the privileges of the white community; Miriam chose to remain loyal to the African American community and its struggles. Another interesting point raised by Tenzer is that Gilda, the Italian American grandmother, also seems to enact a strategy of passing traceable in ‘her yearning for safety, for well-defined borders around her family, her house, her neighborhood’ which ‘involve maintaining a certain facade of identity’.40 We can go further by suggesting that passing can be applied to the whole Italian American family of the author and to an extent to the Italian American community at large during
acrobatica’, in Kym Ragusa, La Pelle che ci Separa, trans. by Caterina Romeo and Clara Antonucci (Roma: Nutrimenti, 2008), pp. 249–70 (p. 259).
39 Livia Tenzer, ‘Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses “Passing” and “Fuori/Outside”’,
in Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film (Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30.1/2 (2002)), pp. 213–20 (p. 216).
the eighties. If, in fact, by passing it is usually indicated the strategy of pretending to be ‘the Other’ in order to enjoy the benefits precluded by a prevailing community to a minority group, then we can interpret the ‘white flight’ as a strategy of passing as well. Ahmed considers passing as a chance to escape the yoke of the social classification of races, understanding passing as ‘a possibility of hybridization’.41 Ahmed suggests that
to be identified as either white or black always carries a certain degree of inauthenticity, as the subject is not properly either of these; and could at once be either of these. The strategy of passing, thus, foregrounds the crisis of identity and its unstable ground. The crisis of identity is perceived from both sides: from the side of the person that looks, and from the side of the person who is looked at. In the episode mentioned above, this crisis was indeed perceived by Miriam, and also by the customers of the diner who asked their question and stated their authority as whites. Miriam, for instance, maybe did not consciously turn to passing. As mentioned, however, she had never experienced the violent forms of racism undergone by black people who had darker skin. This can only happen because, although never explicitly mentioned in the memoir, Miriam must have passively passed on other occasions in which her skin never raised questions of racial belonging. What is important when looking at the phenomenon of passing is that this strategy opens a door to be crossed both ways. The person who thinks of him/herself as white can feel safe behind his/her authority; the person who successfully performs the passing has managed to deceive ‘authority’. Moreover, as Hostert has noted, for the
passing to be successful, it is crucial the people who enact it are never unmasked.42 In
41 Sara Ahmed, ‘“She’ll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She’s Turned into a Nigger”: Passing
through Hibridity’, in Performativity and Belonging, ed. by Vikki Bell (London, Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 163–74 (p. 88).
this sense, it is a double win for the ‘tricker’ and the ‘tricked’, who will never know s/he has been conned.
In relation to Ragusa, the crisis of identity related to the colour of her skin is a constant of her childhood and adolescence. As she writes: ‘My skin always caused me trouble – it was always too dark or too light, always a problem.’43 A character of the
family who shares a similar destiny with Ragusa is the author’s African American great- grandmother, Mae. As Ragusa writes: ‘Mae was a marked woman. Marked by the pigment in her skin, which set her apart, especially from her blonde mother and sisters and ultimately from her own light-skinned, red-haired daughter.’44 Mae is Miriam’s mother and the only one who, among all of the female characters of her African American lineage, did not inherit blonde hair and blue eyes from her German mother. As a young woman, Mae used to sneak into white people’s parties with her sisters and dance wildly. She had five husbands and everyone thought the reason for her scarce morality was, without doubt, linked to her black skin. Again, here, we can see the way the skin establishes boundaries and social classification. As Ahmed argues, the skin ‘as a telos’45 can determine the subject’s limits and confines. These boundaries, however, are drawn by the other’s gaze that validates the ‘truth’ of that subject, as this following example will clarify.
Mae, together with her sisters, used to enact the passing to enter exclusive parties. These events were known as ‘paper-bag parties’ organized by the upper-class black African community.46 The paper-bag parties established hierarchies also among the African American community: light-skinned African Americans could, in fact,
43 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 109. 44 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 67. 45 Ahmed, ‘Animated Borders’, p. 50.
46 Audrey Elisa Kerr, ‘The Paper Bag Principle: Of the Myth and the Motion of Colorism’, The Journal of
exercise and display their power over African Americans who had a dark complexion.47 One was allowed in only if his/her skin was no darker than a paper bag hanging on the door. Another way to test people’s whiteness mentioned by Miriam and reported by Ragusa in the memoir was that of the comb. To be allowed to enter the party, one had to be able to comb his/her hair with a fine-toothed comb hanging on the door. Although the passing was considered as a muckraking praxis, Miriam’s aunts used to go to these events and were all able to get in without much trouble. Only Mae ‘would have just made it into those paper-bag parties’, but once inside:
Not only was she the dark one in this setting, but she was fast and reckless, too. She danced and drank and swore like a sailor, and had more lovers than anyone could count. In her pale, hardworking, churchgoing family, this wildness must have been associated with her darkness, as if her visible African blood were an announcement, and indeed the cause, of her moral lapses.48
As de Rogatis argues, Mae is not a black woman; she becomes black because she is not as white as her sisters or her German mother, and she will not be as white as her own daughter is, ‘una profezia dell’identità’ (an identity prophecy),49 that reveals the function of skin ‘as a telos’ as spoken of by Ahmed. Therefore, Mae develops her black identity in opposition to what everyone expected her to be.50 As Ragusa writes: ‘Mae’s rebellion grew out of this emotional exile – in rebelling, she became the very thing that her skin was supposed to determine.’51 Thus the skin takes shape as the ‘site
47 See also Romeo, Una capacità quasi acrobatica, and Tiziana de Rogatis, ‘The Skin Between Us di
Kym Ragusa. Pregiudizio razziale, mito classico e identità femminile’, in identità/diversità, Atti del III convegno dipartimentale dell'Università per Stranieri di Siena (Siena, 4-5 dicembre 2012), ed. by Tiziana de Rogatis and others (Pisa: Pacini, 2013), pp. 39–54.
48 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 68. 49 de Rogatis, p. 45.
50 de Rogatis.
of social crisis and instability’52 and also as the ‘means by which beings are constituted as separate and distinct’.53 The strategy of disordering the boundaries of race, as exemplified by the episode of passing illustrated here, suggests the implication of race as a structure of social oppression.54 Ragusa’s employment of passing shows how ‘race is an exceedingly slippery concept’ as well as ‘hard to pin down’ as race is
[…] riddled with apparent contradictions. For example, while race is a dynamic phenomenon rooted in political struggle, it is commonly considered a fixed characteristic of human populations; while it does not exist in terms of human biology, people routinely look to the human body for evidence about racial identity; while it is a biological fiction, it is nonetheless a social fact.55
Race, moreover, seems to be inseparable from social status. The customers of the diner, in fact, keep asking Miriam, ‘What side of the tracks are you from?’ because this division also served to distinguish poor from rich people. According to Giunta, Ragusa’s Passing reveals ‘one way in which race is socially constructed, as in the exchange between the customers and the woman, who proudly claims as her own that racial identity which stigmatizes her’.56 Informed by a history that divided whites from whites, blacks from blacks, whites from blacks, America at large, and her own two families, Ragusa grows up with a strong desire to not be recognized at all, to vanish, to be the ‘Persephone nusquam’ of Claudian’s memory. The urge the author describes as ‘that feeling, all too familiar, of wanting to climb out of my skin, to be invisible’57 is the
52 Ahmed, ‘Animated Borders’, p. 47. 53 Ahmed, ‘Animated Borders’, p. 52.
54 See David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working
Class History (London: Verso, 1994), p. 2.
55 Angela James, ‘Making Sense of Race and Racial Classification’, Race & Society, 4 (2001), 235–47 (p.
236).
56 Giunta, ‘Figuring Race’, p. 226. 57 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 18.
simple desire to cross the borders of cultural and racial expectations located in the shades of colour that her skin reflects, and to evade the barriers of race.
Aware that differences cannot be ignored or cancelled, Ragusa’s memoir questions the social structures that allow the persistence of difference and social injustices, rather than levering difference to bring people together and create cohesion. In the following section, we will examine one possible way to reconcile differences. This, as Ferraro argues, lies in the opportunity envisioned by Ragusa to enact the strategy of connecting.
4. Connecting: building a transcultural bridge between Africa, America, and