Gil Fagiani is a storyteller by nature and by craft, both of which he employs in his essay My Muli-Metamorphoses, a version of which originally appeared in the anthology What Does it Mean to Be White in America (Two Leaf Press). Fagiani traces the dramatic arc of his transformation from a clueless White suburban middle class boy from Connecticut to a left-wing urban revolutionary who co-founded White Lightning, a Bronx-based organization that sought to radicalize white, working-class people. By working side by side with minority ethnic groups as an aide at the Bronx Psychiatric Center; a first marriage to a woman of color; and as the Director of a substance abuse program, Fagiani paves a path that binds his ethnicity with his progressive politics. As a writer, much influenced by Puerto Rican and Black writers, his work reflects the thorny racial separateness that makes trust and understanding distant goals.

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• Fagiani, G., (2025), "What Does it Mean to Be White in America: My Multi-Metamorphoses", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Bronx
2. civil rights
3. Ethnicity
4. Italian Canadiana
5. minority
6. progressive
7. racism
8. radicalize
9. separateness
10. storyteller
11. Whiteness

Original publication: Fagiani, Gil. "What Does it Mean to Be White in America: My Multi-Metamorphoses." Italian Canadiana 34: 2021. 77-82. DOI: 10.33137/ic.v34i0.37452. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Italian Canadiana. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Italian Canadiana under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.