Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race Youth and Schooling: The Fifth Minority

Routledge
2016-02-26
256 pages
10 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-13-802191-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-13-802193-8

Sandra Winn Tutwiler, Professor of Education
Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas

This timely, in-depth examination of the educational experiences and needs of mixed-race children (“the fifth minority”) focuses on the four contexts that primarily influence learning and development: the family, school, community, and society-at-large.

The book provides foundational historical, social, political, and psychological information about mixed-race children and looks closely at their experiences in schools, their identity formation, and how schools can be made more supportive of their development and learning needs. Moving away from an essentialist discussion of mixed-race children, a wide variety of research is included. Life and schooling experiences of mixed-raced individuals are profiled throughout the text. Rather than pigeonholing children into a neat box of descriptions or providing ready made prescriptions for educators, Mixed-Race Youth and Schooling offers information and encourages teachers to critically reflect on how it is relevant to and helpful in their teaching/learning contexts.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part I: Being Mixed-Race in Society
  • Chapter 1: The Context of Race for Mixed-Race People
  • Chapter 2: Mixed-Race People in Society Over Time
  • Chapter 3: Racial Identity: Multiple Perspectives on Racial Self-Understanding
• Part II: Family, Community, and Peers
  • Chapter 4: Structures, Practices, and Socialization in Interracial and Multiracial Families
  • Chapter 5: Community, Social Class and Sociocultural Interactions
  • Chapter 6: Peer Relations and Friendship Formations
• Part III: Education and Schooling: People, Places, and Practices
  • Chapter 7: Teachers’ (Mixed) Race Constructions and Teaching in Multiracial Classrooms
  • Chapter 8: The Racial Context of Schooling and Mixed-race Youth
  • Chapter 9: Schooling Supportive of Mixed-Race Youth
• Index

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America

Oxford University Press
2016-02-03
232 pages
10 illustrations
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780190241216

Kali Nicole Gross, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

• A true crime account that offers a glimpse of the racially volatile world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia
• Unearths historical experiences of traditionally marginalized, taboo subjects
• Combines narrative prose with rigorous historical research

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest.

As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial-which spanned several months-were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants exacerbated anxieties over the purity of whiteness in the post-Reconstruction era.

In Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, historian Kali Nicole Gross uses detectives’ notes, trial and prison records, local newspapers, and other archival documents to reconstruct this ghastly whodunit crime in all its scandalous detail. In doing so, she gives the crime context by analyzing it against broader evidence of police treatment of black suspects and violence within the black community.

A fascinating work of historical recreation, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso is sure to captivate anyone interested in true crime, adulterous love triangles gone wrong, and the racially volatile world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• Chapter 1: “Handle With Care”
• Chapter 2: “The Woman Found”
• Chapter 3: “To Do Him Bodily Harm”
• Chapter 4: “Wavy Hair and Nearly White Skin”
• Chapter 5: “Held for Trial”
• Chapter 6: “The Defense Opens”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

I Heart Obama

University Press of New England
2016-02-09
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61168-536-7
Ebook IBSN: 978-1-61168-967-9

Erin Aubry Kaplan

A personal and cultural exploration of Barack Obama as black president, black icon, and black folk hero

In his nearly two terms as president, Barack Obama has solidified his status as something black people haven’t had for fifty years: a folk hero. The 1960s delivered Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, forever twinned as larger-than-life outsiders and truth tellers who took on racism and died in the process. Obama is different: Not an outsider but president, head of the most powerful state in the world; a centrist Democrat, not the face of a movement. Yet he is every bit a folk hero, doing battle with the beast of a system created to keep people like him on the margins. He is unique among presidents and entirely unique among black people, who never expected to have a president so soon.

In I Heart Obama, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan offers an unapologetic appreciation of our highest-ranking “First” and what he means to black Americans. In the process, she explores the critiques of those in the black community who charge that he has not done enough, been present enough, been black enough to motivate real change in America. Racial antipathy cloaked as political antipathy has been the major conflict in Obama’s presidency. His impossible task as an individual and as a president is nothing less than this: to reform the entire racist culture of the country he leads. Black people know he can’t do it, but will support his effort anyway, as they have supported the efforts of many others. Obama’s is a noble and singular story we will tell for generations. I Heart Obama looks at the story so far.

Contents

• Introduction
• Obama the Folk Hero: What He Means to Us
• Obama Represents
• Obama Leads
• Who Is This Guy?
• Is Obama Bad for Us?
• Epilogue: I Heart Obama
• Bibliography

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

Alfred A. Knopf
2016-02-02
480 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0679446521
eBook ISBN: 978-1101946923

Patricia Bell-Scott, Professor of Child and Family Development and Women’s Studies
University of Georgia

Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

A groundbreaking book—two decades in the works—that tells the story of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist, granddaughter of a mulatto slave, and the first lady of the United States, whose ancestry gave her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, forged an enduring friendship that changed each of their lives and helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.

Pauli Murray first saw Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933, at the height of the Depression, at a government-sponsored, two-hundred-acre camp for unemployed women where Murray was living, something the first lady had pushed her husband to set up in her effort to do what she could for working women and the poor. The first lady appeared one day unannounced, behind the wheel of her car, her secretary and a Secret Service agent her passengers. To Murray, then aged twenty-three, Roosevelt’s self-assurance was a symbol of women’s independence, a symbol that endured throughout Murray’s life.

Five years later, Pauli Murray, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer, wrote a letter to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt protesting racial segregation in the South. The president’s staff forwarded Murray’s letter to the federal Office of Education. The first lady wrote back.

Murray’s letter was prompted by a speech the president had given at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, praising the school for its commitment to social progress. Pauli Murray had been denied admission to the Chapel Hill graduate school because of her race.

She wrote in her letter of 1938:

“Does it mean that Negro students in the South will be allowed to sit down with white students and study a problem which is fundamental and mutual to both groups? Does it mean that the University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students . . . ? Or does it mean, that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that again we are to be set aside and passed over . . . ?”

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Murray:

“I have read the copy of the letter you sent me and I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly . . . The South is changing, but don’t push too fast.”

So began a friendship between Pauli Murray (poet, intellectual rebel, principal strategist in the fight to preserve Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cofounder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African American female Episcopal priest) and Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady of the United States, later first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women) that would last for a quarter of a century.

Drawing on letters, journals, diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and interviews, Patricia Bell-Scott gives us the first close-up portrait of this evolving friendship and how it was sustained over time, what each gave to the other, and how their friendship changed the cause of American social justice.

The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic

University of Georgia Press
2016-01-15
248 pages
8 b&w photos
Trim size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8203-4896-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-4897-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-5384-5

Lisa Ze Winters, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

Exploring the geographies, genealogies, and concepts of race and gender of the African diaspora produced by the Atlantic slave trade

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.

Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

Baylor University Press
February 2016
190 pages
9in x 6in
Hardback ISBN: 9781602587342

Sheldon George, Professor of English
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

African American identity is racialized. And this racialized identity has animated and shaped political resistance to racism. Hidden, though, are the psychological implications of rooting identity in race, especially because American history is inseparable from the trauma of slavery.

In Trauma and Race author Sheldon George begins with the fact that African American racial identity is shaped by factors both historical and psychical. Employing the work of Jacques Lacan, George demonstrates how slavery is a psychic event repeated through the agencies of racism and inscribed in racial identity itself. The trauma of this past confronts the psychic lack that African American racial identity both conceals and traumatically unveils for the African American subject.

Trauma and Race investigates the vexed, ambivalent attachment of African Americans to their racial identity, exploring the ways in which such attachment is driven by traumatic, psychical urgencies that often compound or even exceed the political exigencies called forth by racism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Race Today, or Alterity and Jouissance
• 1. Race and Slavery: Theorizing Agencies beyond the Symbolic
• 2. Conserving Race, Conserving Trauma: The Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois
• 3. Approaching the Thing of Slavery: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• 4. The Oedipal Complex and the Mythic Structure of Race: Ellison’s Juneteenth and Invisible Man
• Conclusion: Beyond Race, or The Exaltation of Personality

Bridging the Divide: My Life

Rutgers University Press
2006-11-09
352 pages
16, 5.75 x 8.75
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3905-8

Senator Edward W. Brooke (1919-2015)

President Lyndon Johnson never understood it. Neither did President Richard Nixon. How could a black man, a Republican no less, be elected to the United States Senate from liberal, Democratic Massachusetts-a state with an African American population of only 2 percent?

The mystery of Senator Edward Brooke’s meteoric rise from Boston lawyer to Massachusetts attorney general to the first popularly elected African American U.S. senator with some of the highest favorable ratings of any Massachusetts politician confounded many of the best political minds of the day. After winning a name for himself as the first black man to be elected a state’s attorney general, as a crime fighter, and as the organizer of the Boston Strangler Task Force, this articulate and charismatic man burst on the national scene in 1966 when he ran for the Senate.

In two terms in the Senate during some of the most racially tormented years of the twentieth century, Brooke, through tact, personality, charm, and determination, became a highly regarded member of “the most exclusive club in the world.” The only African American senator ever to be elected to a second term, Brooke established a reputation for independent thinking and challenged the powerbrokers and presidents of the day in defense of the poor and disenfranchised.

In this autobiography, Brooke details the challenges that confronted African American men of his generation and reveals his desire to be measured not as a black man in a white society but as an individual in a multiracial society. Chided by some in the white community as being “too black to be white” and in the black community as “too white to be black,” Brooke sought only to represent the people of Massachusetts and the national interest.

His story encompasses the turbulent post-World War II years, from the gains of the civil rights movement, through the riotous 1960s, to the dark days of Watergate, with stories of his relationships with the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and future senator Hillary Clinton. Brooke also speaks candidly of his personal struggles, including his bitter divorce from his first wife and, most recently, his fight against cancer.

A dramatic, compelling, and inspirational account, Brooke’s life story demonstrates the triumph of the human spirit, offering lessons about politics, life, reconciliation, and love.

How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

University of California Press
January 2014
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520280076
Paperback ISBN: 9780520280083
Adbobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520957190
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520957190

Natalia Molina, Associate Dean for Faculty Equity, Division of Arts; Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies
University of California, San Diego

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I. Immigration Regimes I: Mapping Race and Citizenship
  • Chapter One: Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the U.S.
  • Chapter Two: “What is a White Man?”: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship
  • Chapter Three: Birthright Citizenship Beyond Black and White
• Part II. Immigration Regimes II: Making Mexicans Deportable
  • Chapter Four: Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability: Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s
  • Chapter Five: Deportations in the Urban Landscape
• Epilogue: Making Race in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography

Shapes & Disfigurements of Ramond Antrobus

Burning Eye Books
2013-11-03
36 pages
12.9 x 0.3 x 19.8 cm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1909136076

Raymond Antrobus

This third book in the Burning Eye pamphlet series (following Sally Jenkinson’s Sweat-borne Secrets and Mairi Campbell-Jack’s This Is A Poem…) presents Raymond Antrobus, a poet from Hackney with a talent for plucking poetry from the mouths of ordinary people. Whether a strawberry seller in Sweden, a homeless man on a London street or a taxi driver in South Africa, Raymond channels their voices through his own. This is the work of a confident young poet with an exceptional ear for language.

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race

Wiley
January 2015
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-118-95872-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-119-24198-0
E-book ISBN: 978-1-118-95965-7

Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education
Columbia University, New York, New York

Turn Uncomfortable Conversations into Meaningful Dialogue

If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that “colorblindness” is the preferred approach, you must read this book. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

This significant work answers all your questions about discussing race by covering:

• Characteristics of typical, unproductive conversations on race
• Tacit and explicit social rules related to talking about racial issues
• Race-specific difficulties and misconceptions regarding race talk
• Concrete advice for educators and parents on approaching race in a new way

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• SECTION ONE: THE CHARACTERISTICS, DYNAMICS, AND MEANING OF RACE TALK
  • CHAPTER ONE What Is Race Talk?
    • Race Talk Represents a Potential Clash of Racial Realities
    • Race Talk Pushes Emotional Hot Buttons
    • Race Talk Evokes Avoidance Strategies
    • Why Is Successful Race Talk Important?
  • CHAPTER TWO The Characteristics and Dynamics of Race Talk
    • What Are Characteristics of Race Talk?
    • How Do Societal Ground Rules (Norms) Impede Race Talk?
    • Why Is Race Talk So Difficult and Uncomfortable for Participants?
    • Conclusions
  • CHAPTER THREE The Stories We Tell: White Talk Versus Back Talk
    • Race Talk: Narratives and Counter-Narratives
    • Telling on Racism: Unmasking Ugly Secrets
• SECTION TWO: THE CONSTRAINING GROUND RULES FOR RACE TALK
  • CHAPTER FOUR “The Entire World’s a Stage!”
    • The Politeness Protocol and Race Talk
    • The Academic Protocol and Race Talk
  • CHAPTER FIVE Color-Blind Means Color-Mute
    • Color-Evasion: “We Are All the Same Under the Skin”
    • Stereotype-Evasion: “I Don’t Believe in Those Stereotypes”
    • Power-Evasion: “Everyone Can Make It in Society, If They Work Hard Enough”
    • Myth of the Melting Pot
• SECTION THREE: WHY IS IT DIFFICULT FOR PEOPLE OF COLOR TO HONESTLY TALK ABOUT RACE?
  • CHAPTER SIX “What Are the Consequences for Saying What I Mean?”
    • Ethnocentric Monoculturalism
    • Power and Oppression
  • CHAPTER SEVEN “To Speak or How to Speak, That Is the Question”
    • Communication Styles
    • Nonverbal Communication
    • Nonverbal Communication in Race Talk: Sociopolitical Considerations
    • Being Constrained and Silenced: Impact on People of Color
    • Conclusions
• SECTION FOUR: WHY IS IT DIFFICULT FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO HONESTLY TALK ABOUT RACE?
  • CHAPTER EIGHT “I’m Not Racist!”
    • Cognitive Avoidance—Racism Denial
    • Emotional Avoidance—Fear, Guilt, and Other Feelings
    • Behavioral Avoidance—Helplessness and Hopelessness
    • Emotional Roadblocks to Race Talk
  • CHAPTER NINE “I’m Not White; I’m Italian!”
    • What Does It Mean to Be White?
    • The Invisibility of Whiteness: What Does It Mean?
    • The Fear of Owning White Privilege
    • Fear of Taking Personal Responsibility to End Racism: Moving From Being Nonracist to Becoming Antiracist
• SECTION FIVE: RACE TALK AND SPECIAL GROUP CONSIDERATIONS
  • CHAPTER TEN Interracial/Interethnic Race Talk: Difficult Dialogues Between Groups of Color
    • Interracial/Interethnic Relationship Issues
    • Race Talk: Fears of Divide and Conquer
    • Sources of Conflict Between People of Color
  • CHAPTER ELEVEN Race Talk and White Racial Identity Development: For Whites Only
    • Developing a Nonracist and Antiracist Racial Identity
    • White Racial Identity Development and Race Talk
• SECTION SIX: GUIDELINES, CONDITIONS, AND SOLUTIONS FOR HAVING HONEST RACIAL DIALOGUES
  • CHAPTER TWELVE Being an Agent of Change: Guidelines for Educators, Parents, and Trainers
    • Talking to Children About Race and Racism
    • Guidelines for Taking Personal Responsibility for Change
  • CHAPTER THIRTEEN Helping People Talk About Race: Facilitation Skills for Educators and Trainers
    • Ineffective Strategies: Five Things Not to Do
    • Successful Strategies: Eleven Potentially Positive Actions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index