Memoirs of a Xenophobic Boyhood

Indiana, Gary

Personal essay on the class and racial lines of immigrant, industrial New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the twentieth century, as mirrored in the dynamics of the author's family. Explains where the Civil Rights Movement and McCarthyism fit into the way working-class people in certain New England towns thought about themselves and others in terms of race. How such a conversation itself illuminates the role of race in places of little racial diversity, and among families like the author's, whose class conditions seemed to preclude the speaking authority afforded wealthier New Englanders. Featured in a special issue of the independent news weekly, The Village Voice, dedicated to exploring questions of "whiteness." Also published in a reader entitled, Identity Matters: Rhetorics of Difference (Prentice Hall, 1998).

1993 May 18

English

Newspaper Article

1696813;44669040

20th century, Coles Grove, New Hampshire

New York, New York

The Village Voice