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.

Los investigadores deben citar este trabajo de la siguiente manera:

• 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/.