Last Friday, Carnegie Mellon hosted a lecture by Dr. Thomas A. Guglielmo, an assistant professor in the department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Guglielmo spoke about the relationship between Italian Americans and African Americans in urban America, focusing on the Chicago area; he has recently published a book, White on Arrival, on the subject. This lecture was presented by The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), which is within Carnegie Mellon's history department.

Guglielmo's lecture dealt primarily with four topics: family, friends, schools, and urban space. He started his talk by recounting his own experience as an Italian American in the New York City area. He recalled an uncle who had been misdiagnosed with sickle cell anemia and a grandmother who traced African American roots back into their family heritage. Through anecdotes like these, Guglielmo related to his audience by removing the context of his lecture from larger historical events and focusing on smaller, everyday occurrences.

Guglielmo recalled a widowed Italian American who had a second marriage to an African American; he subsequently lost all communication from his family because of their racial prejudices, and never got the chance to see any of his grandchildren. Guglielmo also said it was common for Italian American children to sit on their porches and tease, "There goes your mother" if an African American woman walked by. Public schools advocated separation between the races, and even in integrated schools, African Americans were treated as inferior. The integrated public schools refused to have social events, and advocated against interaction between races in classes. The topic of urban space was laid out in Chicago so that schools would be segregated, housing projects would not be mixed, and the various areas of Chicago could easily be referred to as either African American or Italian American, not mixed.

The lecture ended with questions and discussion. Many audience members asked about the overall image of Italian Americans in society. Other attendees directed their questions specifically at Guglielmo's book and were answered with a candid reference to a specific chapter and line or with reference to dramatic historical events that included the two races, such as the Italian-Ethiopian war. Guglielmo responded to more general questions with more examples from his personal experience as well as the experiences of the people he interviewed and read about in his research. Still, he wasn't shy to answer with an "I don't know" or "I haven't done research on that specific topic."

White on Arrival has received the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the most outstanding first book published in 2004.