Research
Research
Interzine
I published an article on Interzine in September which uses Cleveland's Little Italy neighborhood to explore the anti-Black racism of people who weren't always considered white and address what that can teach us about racism and whiteness in America.
StoryCorps
As a freelance fact-checker for StoryCorps, I conducted research to confirm every detail in the segment. This means conducting phone interviews with the participants’ friends and family and with doctors, police departments, reporters, historians, subject-matter experts, etc., depending on the needs of the segment. It also means reading available literature, finding dates, and citing statistics.
The following are a few selected segments I fact-checked for StoryCorps which aired on NPR’s Morning Edition or Weekend Edition Saturday:
“One Woman’s Story of Mental Illness, Recovery, and Doing Her Own Dishes”
“As a 10-year-old, He Played an Unexpected Role in Apollo 11”
“A Woman Providing Life-Saving Aid at the Mexico-Arizona Border”
“Nation’s First Active-Duty Military Contingent Marches in Pride”
“104-year-old WWII Veteran Remembers Fake Tanks, Sound Effects in Top-Secret ‘Ghost Army’”
“Community” episode of Delta’s To and From podcast
Abuse to Acceptance: Cleveland's Italian Community from 1880-1920
Abstract:
Each successive wave of immigrants to America has faced prejudice founded in fear and uncertainty. Immigrants from Italy were particularly discriminated against in the early years of their arrival, from 1880 to 1920. They faced violence, racial slurs, and media attacks based on an unsubstantiated stereotype of criminality. This project set out to discern how the Italian immigrant community in America, through the case study of the city of Cleveland, evolved from being despised and racialized to being accepted as white Americans. Archival research, historical newspaper articles, and manuscripts such as letters and Americanization pamphlets largely inform the writing, in addition to secondary scholarship and memoirs. The paper lays out first the context in which Italian immigrants came to Cleveland and where in the ethnic fabric they fit, then the negative reputation and stereotyping that the Italian population faced, and finally the Americanization processes of the community. Economic mobility, support from hometown societies, individual community leaders, and the racial dynamics of Italians' white skin and subsequent discrimination against African Americans each contributed to the evolution of Americanization for Italian immigrants. That trajectory is a pattern that every European ethnic group has faced to some degree through the history of American immigration. The arc of shifting whiteness and gradual Americanization may provide a framework for understanding present-day immigration and ethnically based discrimination.
ACLU 100
In 2018, I worked with the curator of the ACLU’s centennial exhibition to research, organize, and plan the historical components of the event.