Caroline Merithew will discuss her work, "Making the Italian Other: Blacks, Whites and the Inbetween in the 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois Race Riot" a chapter in the forthcoming collection, "Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America" (Routledge). The paper takes the Spring Valley race riot and observes how Blacks, Italians, and other new immigrants attempted to empower themselves by highlighting prejudice and oppression, however, was open to interpretation. While African-American residents used citizenship and the precarious racial placement of new immigrants to define the other, ethnic groups, in turn, tried to exploit an assumed white identity to bolster their status. In the end, the riot became a type of social prism in which the meaning and consequences of racism refracted.

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