Mixed Race Studies

Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy

University of Nebraska Press
2017-08-01
234 pages
5 illustrations, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2543-5

Katherine Ellinghaus, Hansen Lectureship in History
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne

Blood Will Tell reveals the underlying centrality of “blood” that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government’s unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.

Ellinghaus explores on-the-ground case studies of Anishinaabeg, Arapahos, Cherokees, Eastern Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Lakotas, Lumbees, Ojibwes, Seminoles, and Virginia tribes. Documented in these cases, the history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation’s implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership. Blood Will Tell is an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.

Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot

University of Massachusetts Press
January 2017
310 pages
16 b&w illustrations
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-1-62534-259-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-62534-258-4

Drew Lopenzina, Associate Professor of English
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia

New insights on an important Native American writer

The life of William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its “Indian question” in favor of extinction.

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess’s key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.

Is science racist?

Polity
January 2017
140 pages
122 x 188 mm / 5 x 7 in
Hardback ISBN: 9780745689210
Paperback ISBN: 9780745689227
Open eBook ISBN: 9780745689258

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues – chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb – and genetics has had a troubled history with race. As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races.

The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories. Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically.

This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. How science invented race
3. Science, race, and genomics
4. Racism and biomedical science
5. What we know, and why it matters

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Fifth Edition

Rowman & Littlefield
June 2017
360 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-7622-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-7623-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-7624-6

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Features

• Provocative and engaging—praised by adopters as a book that students actually read
• Adopters say the book challenges many of their white students to see themselves and their attitudes towards race differently, while helping minority students find language to talk about their experiences
• Highlights the problems with many of the phrases students often use to talk about race in America, such as “I don’t see race,” or “Some of my best friends are black”
• Features a new chapter that is often requested by students—how to challenge racism on both the individual and the structural levels
• Includes new material on the Black Lives Matter movement, the impact of the Obama presidency and its aftermath, the rise of Donald Trump and the 2016 elections, and more

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society. The fifth edition includes a new chapter addressing what students can do to confront racism—both personally and on a larger structural level, new material on Donald Trump’s election and the racial climate post-Obama, new coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, and more.

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940 Revised Edition

University of Nebraska Press
2017-07-01
516 pages
7 illustrations, 1 table, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9591-9

Gregory D. Smithers, Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples.

Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book’s original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia.

Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War

Potomac Books (an imprint of University of Nebraska Press)
April 2005
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-57488-864-5
Papberback ISBN: 978-1-57488-865-2

Trin Yarborough

Surviving Twice is the story of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Unfortunately, they were not among the few thousand Amerasian children who came to the United States before the war’s end and grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools. Instead, this group of Amerasians faced much more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. Surviving Twice raises significant questions about how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated and the ways in which the shifting laws, policies, social attitudes, and bureaucratic red tape of two nations affect them their entire lives.

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2017-05-09
1472 pages
Trimsize: 6.25 in (w) x 9.25 in (h) x 2.703 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062641830
E-book ISBN: 9780062641854
Digital Audiobook Unabridged ISBN: 9780062671745

David J. Garrow, Professor of Law & History and Distinguished Faculty Scholar
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Rising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama’s formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross

Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as America’s first African-American president. In this penetrating biography, David J. Garrow delivers an epic work about the life of Barack Obama, creating a rich tapestry of a life little understood, until now.

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama captivatingly describes Barack Obama’s tumultuous upbringing as a young black man attending an almost-all-white, elite private school in Honolulu while being raised almost exclusively by his white grandparents. After recounting Obama’s college years in California and New York, Garrow charts Obama’s time as a Chicago community organizer, working in some of the city’s roughest neighborhoods; his years at the top of his Harvard Law School class; and his return to Chicago, where Obama honed his skills as a hard-knuckled politician, first in the state legislature and then as a candidate for the United States Senate.

Detailing a scintillating, behind-the-scenes account of Obama’s 2004 speech, a moment that labeled him the Democratic Party’s “rising star,” Garrow also chronicles Obama’s four years in the Senate, weighing his stands on various issues against positions he had taken years earlier, and recounts his thrilling run for the White House in 2008.

In Rising Star, David J. Garrow has created a vivid portrait that reveals not only the people and forces that shaped the future president but also the ways in which he used those influences to serve his larger aspirations. This is a gripping read about a young man born into uncommon family circumstances, whose faith in his own talents came face-to-face with fantastic ambitions and a desire to do good in the world. Most important, Rising Star is an extraordinary work of biography—tremendous in its research and storytelling, and brilliant in its analysis of the all-too-human struggles of one of the most fascinating politicians of our time.

Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

State University of New York Press
April 2017
202 pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4384-6513-5

Vanessa K. Valdés, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
City College of New York, New York, New York

Examines the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg through the lens of both Blackness and latinidad.

A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder.

While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg’s life as an Afro-Latino suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Silence and the Meaning of It All
• 1. “Patria y Libertad”: Schomburg and Puerto Rico
• 2. The Diasporic Race Man as Institution Builder
• 3. Afro-Latinx Chronicles: Schomburg’s Writings
• 4. “Witness for the Future”: Schomburg and His Archives
• 5. “Furtive as He Looks”: The Visual Representation of Schomburg
• Conclusion: The Dynamics of Afro-Latinx Subjectivity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols and Hope

Manchester University Press
160 pages
June 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5261-0501-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5261-0502-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-5261-0503-5

Andra Gillespie, Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Emory University, Atlanta Georgia

• Employs a novel comparative analysis of the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations to determine if Obama’s performance on racial issues differed significantly from his immediate predecessors
• Does distinct analyses of Barack Obama’s performance on substantive and symbolic issues of importance to African Americans
• Uses a commissioned public opinion data set of black voters to probe attitudes toward President Obama and explanations for his performance on racial issues
• Encourages readers to consider the ways that institutional constraints on the presidency and candidates’ campaign choices limit the role of the president to address racial issues

The election of Barack Obama marked a critical point in American political and social history. Did the historic election of a black president actually change the status of blacks in the United States? Did these changes (or lack thereof) inform blacks’ perceptions of the President?

This book explores these questions by comparing Obama’s promotion of substantive and symbolic initiatives for blacks to efforts by the two previous presidential administrations. By employing a comparative analysis, the reader can judge whether Obama did more or less to promote black interests than his predecessors. Taking a more empirical approach to judging Barack Obama, this book hopes to contribute to current debates about the significance of the first African American presidency. It takes care to make distinctions between Obama’s substantive and symbolic accomplishments and to explore the significance of both.

Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

Beacon Press
2017-06-06
232 pages
6 x 9 Inches
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0807058275

Sheryll Cashin, Professor of Law
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

How interracial love and marriage changed history, and may soon alter the landscape of American politics.

Loving beyond boundaries is a radical act that is changing America. When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “White Supremacy” to describe such racism.

Drawing from the earliest chapters in U.S. history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of non-white blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday, and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good.

Cashin argues that over the course of the last four centuries there have always been “ardent integrators” who are now contributing to the emergence of a class of “culturally dexterous” Americans. In the fifty years since the Lovings won their case, approval for interracial marriage rose from 4% to 87%. Cashin speculates that rising rates of interracial intimacy—including cross-racial adoption, romance and friendship—combined with immigration, demographic and generational change will create an ascendant coalition of culturally dexterous whites and people of color.

Loving is both a history of white supremacy and a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, challenging the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness, but a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.