Abstract
Italian American ethnic identity in Syracuse, New York is situated and contextualized within whiteness and white privilege. While the women we interviewed cling to their whiteness, they also differentiate themselves not only from people of color, but from a “whiter,” monolithic, nonethnic American, also referred to as a medigan. The making of Italian American whiteness in the United States is discussed alongside theories of critical whiteness in order to understand how the Italian American women we interviewed use food to mark themselves as distinct from the medigan.
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Dottolo, A.L., Dottolo, C. (2018). “Even a Medigan Could Do It”: Racial Identities and Whiteness. In: Italian American Women, Food, and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74757-6_2
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