Mixed Race Studies

Race, Power, and the Obama Legacy

Routledge
2015-10-09
174 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781612058788
Paperback ISBN: 9781612058795

Pierre Wilbert Orelus, Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction
New Mexico State University

This book critically examines Obama’s presidency and legacy, especially in regard to race, inequality, education, and political power. Orelus depicts an “interest convergence factor” that led many White liberals and the corporate media to help Obama get elected in 2008 and 2012. He assesses Obama’s political accomplishments, including parts of his domestic policies that support gay rights and equal pay for women. Special attention is given to Obama’s educational policies, like Race to the Top, and the effects of such policies on both the learning and academic outcome of students, particularly linguistically and culturally diverse students. In a race and power framework, Orelus relates domestic policies to the effects of Obama’s foreign policies on the lives of people in poorer countries, especially where innocent children and women have been killed by war and drone strikes authorized by Obama’s administration. The author invites readers to question and transcend the historical symbolism of Obama’s political victory in an effort to carefully examine and critique his actions as reflected through both his domestic and foreign policies.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Mike Cole
• Introduction by Curry Malott
• 1. Race, Power, Obama’s Presidency and Legacy
• 2. Obama Dancing with Voucher Capitalism and White Hegemony
• 3. Obama Caught at the Crossroad of Black Masculinity and White Patriarchy
• 4. Obama: A Black Face of the US Imperialist and Neocolonial Power?
• 5. Obama Trapped in Professor Luis Gates’s and Sgt. Crowley’s Racial Storm
• 6. Beyond Obama’s Historical Symbolism: A Conversation with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• 7. Obama’s Foreign Policy and Its Implications for His legacy
• Afterword by Paul R. Carr

President Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union

Routledge
2010
272 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781594514777

John K. Wilson

Barack Obama’s “improbable quest” has become a fact of American life and a benchmark in American history. Striving now toward “a more perfect union,” Obama and the nation confront obstacles unforeseen at the outset of the 2008 electoral campaign. John K. Wilson tracks the sweep of this progress from the beginning of Obama’s political career through his move into the White House. With his critical journalistic eye and his sympathetic “native son” perspective, Wilson shows us a side of Obama we haven’t seen as well as a view of the media we need to understand-even more now as the Obama administration begins to govern. The paperback edition of this popular book includes a new introduction, updates throughout, and two new chapters on the electoral victory and the transition from campaigning into governing. New photos and new insights include a focus on the continued importance of race in American politics.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• Chapter 1: Generation Obama: The Youth Movement for Barack
• Chapter 2: Are You Experienced? Obama and the Media
• Chapter 3: Race and the President: Is Obama Black Enough?
• Chapter 4: The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: The Conservative Attack on Obama
• Chapter 5: Why Leftists Hate A Liberal: The Far Left Attacks on Obama
• Chapter 6: “This Is My House, Too”: Obama and the Liberal God
• Chapter 7: From Quest to Reality: Politics and Policy in an Obama Administration
• Chapter 8: The Victory: Barack Obama’s Improbable Triumph
• Chapter 9: The Obama Administration: Turning Hope into Change Conclusion: Obama’s Hopes and Dreams
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams: The Age of Obama and Beyond

Broadview Press
2016-01-05
190 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781554813162

Julius Bailey, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio

Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams is a moral call, a harkening and quickening of the spirit, a demand for recognition for those whose voices are whispered. Julius Bailey straddles the fence of social-science research and philosophy, using empirical data and current affairs to direct his empathy-laced discourse. He turns his eye to President Obama and his critics, racism, income inequality, poverty, and xenophobia, guided by a prophetic thread that calls like-minded visionaries and progressives to action. The book is an honest look at the current state of our professed city on a hill and the destruction left on the darker sides of town.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Rev. Dr. Michael L. Pfleger
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “I, Too, Sing America”
• Chapter 1: “I Can’t Breathe!” “So What! F??? Your Breath”
• Chapter 2: Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America
• Chapter 3: Racism: The Long March to Freedom and the New Jim Crow
• Chapter 4: Xenophobia: America Inside Out
• Chapter 5: Poverty: A Load Too Heavy to Bear
• Chapter 6: Income Inequality: The Unbridgeable Gap
• Chapter 7: Repositioning the Moral Arc
• Works Cited

The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City

University Press of Mississippi
January 2016
208 pages (approx.)
1 map, bibliography, index
6 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496804860

Dianne Guenin-Lelle, Professor of French
Albion College, Albion, Michigan

Why New Orleans is considered America’s distinctly French city

What is it about the city of New Orleans History, location, and culture, continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City.

The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the antebellum south, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase.

New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

On Obama

Routledge
2015-11-04
134 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780415525473
Hardback ISBN: 9780415525466

Paul C. Talyor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

On Obama examines some of the key philosophical questions that accompany the historic emergence of the 44th US president. The purpose of this book is to take seriously the once common thought that the Obama presidency had ushered in a post-historical age. Three questions organize the argument of the book: What’s living and dead in the idea of post-racialism? Did Mr. Obama’s preference for problem-solving over ideological warfare mark him not just as a post-partisan figure but as a philosophical pragmatist? Did the US become post-imperial when the descendants of slaves and of British imperial subjects inhabited the White House? In addition to taking up these questions, the book considers Mr. Obama’s own relationship to the post-historical idea and explores the ethical implications of certain ways of entertaining that idea.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Post-Historical Presidency
• 1. On Post-Racialism: The President as Racial Project
• 2. On Post-Partisanship: The President as Pragmatist
• 3. On Post-Imperialism: The World’s Moses, America’s Zipporah
• 4. Conclusion: The End of the End

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

New York University Press
April 2014
273 pages
12 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9781479812981
Paper ISBN: 9781479859498

Ellen Samuels, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Crisis of Identification
• Part I Fantasies of Fakery
  • 1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
  • 2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
  • 3. The Disability Con Onscreen
• Part II Fantasies of Marking
  • 4. The Trials of Salomé Müller
  • 5. Of Fiction and Fingerprints
• Part III Fantasies of Measurement
  • 6. Proving Disability
  • 7. Revising Blood Quantum
  • 8. Realms of Biocertification
  • 9. DNA and the Readable Self
• Conclusion: Future Identifications
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Race in Mind: Critical Essays

University of Notre Dame Press
2015
408 pages
ISBN: 978-0-268-04148-9

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

With contributions by Jeffrey Moniz and Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly

Race in Mind presents fourteen critical essays on race and mixed race by one of America’s most prolific and influential ethnic studies scholars. Collected in one volume are all of Paul Spickard’s theoretical writings over the past two decades. Ten of the articles have been revised and updated from previous publications. Four appear here for the first time. Spickard’s work embraces three overarching themes: race as biology versus race as something constructed by social and political relationships; race as a phenomenon that exists not just in the United States, but in every part of the world, and even in the relationships between nations; and the question of racial multiplicity.

These essays analyze how race affects people’s lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawaiʻi to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard’s trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

• The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
• Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
• 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
• 3. Enumerating Nations
• 4. The Race to Progress
• 5. Constructing Natural Orders
• 6. From Race to Culture
• 7. We All Count
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance

SUNY Press
March 2013
Harcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4559-5
Electronic ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4561-8

Robert C. Smith, Professor of Political Science
San Francisco State University

Fascinating look at the challenges faced by John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama in their quests to win the presidency.

Political analysts and journalists often draw analogies between John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic Irish president, and Barack Obama, the first African American president. Their election to the nation’s highest office was historic, but for reasons not fully appreciated. In John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance, Robert C. Smith provides a fascinating comparison of the challenges both men faced in their bid for the presidency, while at the same time providing comparative histories of the Catholic Irish and African American struggles to overcome racial and religious subordination in America. Kennedy’s Catholicism was an explicit issue in the 1960 election, and once elected he was extremely careful to avoid appearing either “too Irish” or “too Catholic.” While Obama’s race was not an explicit issue in the 2008 election, he was just as careful to avoid appearing “too black.”  Paradoxically religion—thanks to rumors and lies about whether Obama was a Muslim—became a substitute for race, allowing Republican strategists to “otherize” Obama by raising the issue of religion in the context of national security and terrorism.

The Cry of Black Rage in African American Literature from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright

Edwin Mellen Press
2013
176 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-4077-1; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4077-7

Steven Troy Moore, Assistant Professor of Language and Literature
Abilene Christian University, Abilene Texas

This book examines the contrasting experiences of black rage that is exhibited in the writings of male and female African American authors. It boldly captures the compelling theme of the white silence and the black rage that battled each other from the early days of slavery up to the pre-Civil Rights Movement. It exposes the birth of black rage and the African American experience through such writers as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs. Next, it gives a painful glimpse into the complicated experience of the biracial in the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen. Finally, this study concludes with an astounding view of the modern state of black rage through the controversial writings of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. Currently, many studies present a one-dimensional analysis of black rage; however, this book provides a comprehensive examination of this phenomenon. From the viewpoint of African American authors, it traces the gender differences of black rage that span one hundred years and includes valuable insights from such brilliant scholars as bell hooks, Cornel West, Barbara Christian, Martha J. Cutter, Deborah E. McDowell, and James Baldwin.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Maureen Honey
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• “Get Over It”
• Chapter 1: Examining a Century of Silence and Rage in African American Literature, 1865-1946
  • Introduction
  • Literature Review
  • The Duality of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs
  • The Biracial Worlds of Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen
  • Richard Wright’s Explosive Rage
• Chapter 2: Silent Trees: Personal Reflections on Silence and Rage
  • The Silence
  • Silence and Rage
  • Mark
  • Blackness: Silence and Identity
  • Words from bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X
• Chapter 3: Witnessing the Birth of Black Rage in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Ann Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
  • The Enduring Pain of Slavery
  • The Autobiographical Rage of Frederick Douglass
  • Impotent Rage
  • Black Female Rage in Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • The Slave Girl and the Sexual Predator
  • The Female Slave’s Alternative Retribution
  • Lasting Blow: The Lingering Influences of Slavery
• Chapter 4: The Phenomenon of Biracial Rage in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)
  • The Biracial Identity
  • The White Mask in The House Behind Cedars Chesnutt’s Biracial Female
  • Black Female Rage in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand A Place to Belong: Location and Helga’s Biracial Identity
  • The Biracial Female in Passing Differed Rage
• Chapter 5: Exploring the Explosive Urban Rage in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946)
  • Brutal Clarity
  • “Like a Red-Hot Iron”: Bigger Thomas’s Burning Rage
  • The White Cat and the Black Rat
  • Native Son’s Perpetuating Rage
  • The Furious Hell of Ann Petry’s The Street
  • The White Heaven: Petry’s Contrasting Spaces
  • The White Ideal and the Black Other
  • Blackness and Claustrophobic Spaces
  • Explosive Black Female Rage
• Bibliography
• Index