Scholars from different parts of the world often have difficulty communicating when it comes to the topic of race. This term—and others like it, such as “ethnicity”--are conceptualized and articulated differently in various places (and at various times). How then can we draw meaningful comparisons across diverse cultural settings? I propose two strategies for cross-national discussion of race. First, we must understand that race is just one member of a broader family of classifications grounded in shared ancestry or “co-descent.” Paradoxically, then, researchers must let go of rigid preconceptions of what constitutes race, and cast a wide net to explore a range of adjacent notions of difference that they and the people around them may or may not label as “race.” This leads to the second strategy: the decomposition of any given concept of co-descent into key components in order to describe and compare it more precisely. Drawing on examples from over 150 interviews conducted in the United States and in Italy with Marcello Maneri (University of Milan-Bicocca), I show how concepts of descent-based difference vary across the two settings along key dimensions. Finally, I suggest that the distinctions between the U.S. and Italian cases help us build a framework for broader, global studies of co-descent that can bridge myriad worlds of meaning-making and boundary-drawing, including those suffused with a notion of race.
