In her essay “Shades, Color and Internal Dialogues in White America,” from which the present contribution is taken, Maria Lisella takes a savvy streetwise approach to balancing feminism with political consciousness. By sifting through the nuances and politics of her own body language in what appears to be a moment of imminent danger, she takes the long view by educating herself. She achieves this through listening to others’ individual experiences some of which depict white liberals trapped in a web of well-meaning gestures that can endanger them. From the human stories behind racism and prejudice in the Italian American community, she illustrates that dogmatic formulas do not address all situations; understanding among races can only be achieved through direct interaction with each other.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Lisella, M., (2025), "Blindsided by the American Dream", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. African-American
2. body language
3. education
4. feminist
5. intuition
6. Italian-American
7. Italian Canadiana
8. progressive
9. racial profiling
10. understanding

Original publication: Lisella, Maria. "Blindsided by the American Dream." Italian Canadiana 34: 2021. 89-93. DOI: 10.33137/ic.v34i0.37454. 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/.