Mixed Race Studies

The Color of Our Future: Race in the 21st Century

HarperCollins
1999
288 pages
6.125 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 0 (d)
Paperback ISBN: 780688175801

Farai Chideya

Two years ago, Newsweek named Farai Chideya to its “Century Club” of a hundred people to watch as we approached the year 2000. Beautiful, savvy, and wired for sound, she’s an ideal guide to the new, multiracial America that’s emerging as the next generation grows up and begins to shape our society. From coast to coast, from urban ‘hoods to Indian reservations to lily-white small towns, she talks to young men and women about their views on race, painting a vivid portrait of a notion in transition, as America ceases to be defined by the black/white divide and enters a more complex multiethnic era. Most of all, she allows the voices of the next generation — black, while, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity.

Since the Civil Rights movement, most Americans have thought of race as a black and white issue. That won’t be the case for long. By the year 2050, there will be more nonwhite than white Americans, and most of the nonwhite population will be Asian and Latino, not black. Increasingly, America is becoming a multiracial society. Americans in their teens and twenties are at the forefront of this cultural revolution. In The Color of Our Future, young journalist Farai Chideya explores how members of the next generation deal with race in their own lives and how the decisions they make determine America’s ethnic future.

From urban hoods to Native American reservations to lily-white small towns, Chideya talks to young men and women about their personal views of race, painting a vivid portrait of a nation in transition. In clear, compelling language, she describes young people dealing with the complexities of diversity in their everyday lives. She writes of a young interracial couple pitted against their community in the South and of the white teens in Indiana, birthplace of the Klan, who get their black, hip-hop aesthetic from MTV. She interviews a Native American who wants to be the next Bill Gates, bringing computer access to his reservation in Montana, and a Mexican-American woman, working for the border patrol in El Paso, who catches the destitute Mexicans who flock into the United States to work for affluent white Texans. All these young people have clear, strong ideas about the impact of race on everything from education to pop culture. They are honest, sometimes brutally so, about their own prejudices. Their moving stories are the blueprint for the future of America. With a discerning ear and sharp insight, Chideya allows the voices of the next generation — black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity and guide us to the kaleidoscope of our future.

The Souls of Black Folk

Yale University Press
2015-06-30 (Originally published in 1903)
240 pages
18 b/w illus.
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paper ISBN: 9780300195828

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

Introduction and Chronology by:

Jonathan Scott Holloway, Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies; Dean of Yale College
Yale University

This collection of essays by scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality. These essays on the black experience in America range from sociological studies of the African American community to illuminating discourses on religion and “Negro music,” and remain essential reading in our so-called “post-racial age.” A new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway explores Du Bois’s signature accomplishments while helping readers to better understand his writings in the context of his time as well as ours.

Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba

Duke University Press
2015
376 pages
27 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5918-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5937-1

Jalane D. Schmidt, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
University of Virginia

Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, also called Cachita, is a potent symbol of Cuban national identity. Jalane D. Schmidt shows how groups as diverse as Indians and African slaves, Spanish colonial officials, Cuban independence soldiers, Catholic authorities and laypeople, intellectuals, journalists and artists, practitioners of spiritism and Santería, activists, politicians, and revolutionaries each have constructed and disputed the meanings of the Virgin. Schmidt examines the occasions from 1936 to 2012 when the Virgin’s beloved, original brown-skinned effigy was removed from her national shrine in the majority black- and mixed-race mountaintop village of El Cobre and brought into Cuba’s cities. There, devotees venerated and followed Cachita’s image through urban streets, amassing at large-scale public ceremonies in her honor that promoted competing claims about Cuban religion, race, and political ideology. Schmidt compares these religious rituals to other contemporaneous Cuban street events, including carnival, protests, and revolutionary rallies, where organizers stage performances of contested definitions of Cubanness. Schmidt provides a comprehensive treatment of Cuban religions, history, and culture, interpreted through the prism of Cachita.

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City

Temple University Press
November 2015
198 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43991-119-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43991-118-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43991-120-4

Michael T. Maly, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Policy Research Collaborative
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

Heather M. Dalmage, Professor of Sociology; Director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

For many whites, desegregation initially felt like an attack on their community. But how has the process of racial change affected whites’ understanding of community and race? In Vanishing Eden, Michael Maly and Heather Dalmage provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s. They pay particular attention to examining how young people made sense of what was occurring, and how this experience impacted their lives.

Using a blend of urban studies and whiteness studies, the authors examine how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained—often in subtle and unreflective ways. Vanishing Eden also considers how race is central to the ways social institutions such as housing, education, and employment function. Surveying the shifting social, economic, and racial contexts, the authors explore how race and class at local and national levels shaped the organizing strategies of those whites who chose to stay as racial borders began to change.

“Mixed Race” Identities in Asia and the Pacific: Experiences from Singapore and New Zealand

Routledge
2015-10-28
188 pages
2 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-13-893393-4

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and The Asian Journal of Social Science

“Mixed race” is becoming an important area for research, and there is a growing body of work in the North American and British contexts. However, understandings and experiences of “mixed race” across different countries and regions are not often explored in significant depth. New Zealand and Singapore provide important contexts for investigation, as two multicultural, yet structurally divergent, societies. Within these two countries, “mixed race” describes a particularly interesting label for individuals of mixed Chinese and European parentage.

This book explores the concept of “mixed race” for people of mixed Chinese and European descent, looking at how being Chinese and/or European can mean many different things in different contexts. By looking at different communities in Singapore and New Zealand, it investigates how individuals of mixed heritage fit into or are excluded from these communities. Increasingly, individuals of mixed ancestry are opting to identify outside of traditionally defined racial categories, posing a challenge to systems of racial classification, and to sociological understandings of “race”. As case studies, Singapore and New Zealand provide key examples of the complex relationship between state categorization and individual identities. The book explores the divergences between identity and classification, and the ways in which identity labels affect experiences of “mixed race” in everyday life. Personal stories reveal the creative and flexible ways in which people cross boundaries, and the everyday negotiations between classification, heritage, experience, and nation in defining identity. The study is based on qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with people of mixed heritage in both countries.

Filling an important gap in the literature by using an Asia/Pacific dimension, this study of race and ethnicity will appeal to students and scholars of mixed race studies, ethnicity, Chinese diaspora and cultural anthropology.

Contents

• 1. Finding the “Mixed” in “Mixed Race”
• 2. Mixed Histories in New Zealand and Singapore
• 3. The Personal in the Political
• 4. Being and Belonging
• 5. Roots, Routes and Coming Home
• 6. Conclusion

Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
March 2013
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1451635867
Paperback ISBN: 978-1451635874
eBook ISBN: 978-1451635881

Raquel Cepeda

In 2009, when Raquel Cepeda almost lost her estranged father to heart disease, she was terrified she’d never know the truth about her ancestry. Every time she looked in the mirror, Cepeda saw a mystery—a tapestry of races and ethnicities that came together in an ambiguous mix. With time running out, she decided to embark on an archaeological dig of sorts by using the science of ancestral DNA testing to excavate everything she could about her genetic history.

Digging through memories long buried, she embarks upon a journey not only into her ancestry but also into her own history. Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in the Paraíso (Paradise) district in Santo Domingo while still a baby. It proved to be an idyllic reprieve in her otherwise fraught childhood. Paraíso came to mean family, home, belonging. When Cepeda returned to the US, she discovered her family constellation had changed. Her mother had a new, abusive boyfriend, who relocated the family to San Francisco. When that relationship fell apart, Cepeda found herself back in New York City with her father and European stepmother: attending tennis lessons and Catholic schools; fighting vicious battles wih her father, who discouraged her from expressing the Dominican part of her hyphenated identity; and immersed in the ’80s hip-hop culture of uptown Manhattan. It was in these streets, through the prism of hip-hop and the sometimes loving embrace of her community, that Cepeda constructed her own identity.

Years later, when Cepeda had become a successful journalist and documentary filmmaker, the strands of her DNA would take her further, across the globe and into history. Who were her ancestors? How did they—and she—become Latina? Her journey, as the most unforgettable ones often do, would lead her to places she hadn’t expected to go. With a vibrant lyrical prose and fierce honesty, Cepeda parses concepts of race, identity, and ancestral DNA among Latinos by using her own Dominican-American story as one example, and in the process arrives at some sort of peace with her father.

A Colored Woman in a White World

Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books)
2005 (originally published in 1940)
488 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59102-322-7

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

With a New Foreword by Debra Newman Ham

Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.

Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women’s suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women’s rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women’s rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.

With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women’s studies and African American history.

Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American

Liveright (an imprint of W. W. Norton & Company)
November 2015
320 pages
9.4 × 12.4 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87140-468-8

John Stauffer, Professor of English, American studies, and African American Studies
Harvard University

Zoe Trodd, Professor of American Literature
Department of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Professor of African American Studies
Department of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

A landmark and collectible volume—beautifully produced in duotone—that canonizes Frederick Douglass through historic photography.

Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer whose fiery speeches transformed him into one of the most renowned and popular agitators of his age. Now, as a result of the groundbreaking research of John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Douglass emerges as a leading pioneer in photography, both as a stately subject and as a prescient theorist who believed in the explosive social power of what was then just a nascent art form.

Indeed, Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of Civil War, he wrote more extensively on the subject than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were “riveted” by the war and wanted a speech only on “this mighty struggle.” He frequented photographers’ studios regularly and sat for his portrait whenever he could. To Douglass, photography was the great “democratic art” that would finally assert black humanity in place of the slave “thing” and at the same time counter the blackface minstrelsy caricatures that had come to define the public perception of what it meant to be black. As a result, his legacy is inseparable from his portrait gallery, which contains 160 separate photographs.

At last, all of these photographs have been collected into a single volume, giving us an incomparable visual biography of a man whose prophetic vision and creative genius knew no bounds. Chronologically arranged and generously captioned, from the first picture taken in around 1841 to the last in 1895, each of the images—many published here for the first time—emphasizes Douglass’s evolution as a man, artist, and leader. Also included are other representations of Douglass during his lifetime and after—such as paintings, statues, and satirical cartoons—as well as Douglass’s own writings on visual aesthetics, which have never before been transcribed from his own handwritten drafts.

The comprehensive introduction by the authors, along with headnotes for each section, an essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an afterword by Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.—a direct Douglass descendent—provide the definitive examination of Douglass’s intellectual, philosophical, and political relationships to aesthetics. Taken together, this landmark work canonizes Frederick Douglass through a form he appreciated the most: photography.

Featuring:

• Contributions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. (a direct Douglass descendent)
• 160 separate photographs of Douglass—many of which have never been publicly seen and were long lost to history
• A collection of contemporaneous artwork that shows how powerful Douglass’s photographic legacy remains today, over a century after his death
• All Douglass’s previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics

White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

New York University Press
October 2006
236 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780814736944

Ian Haney López, John H. Boalt Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

White by Law was published in 1996 to immense critical acclaim, and established Ian Haney López as one of the most exciting and talented young minds in the legal academy. The first book to fully explore the social and specifically legal construction of race, White by Law inspired a generation of critical race theorists and others interested in the intersection of race and law in American society. Today, it is used and cited widely by not only legal scholars but many others interested in race, ethnicity, culture, politics, gender, and similar socially fabricated facets of American society.

In the first edition of White by Law, Haney López traced the reasoning employed by the courts in their efforts to justify the whiteness of some and the non-whiteness of others, and revealed the criteria that were used, often arbitrarily, to determine whiteness, and thus citizenship: skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and, most importantly, popular opinion.

Ten years later, Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance. In a new, original essay written specifically for the 10th anniversary edition, he explores this racial paradigm and explains how it contributes to a system of white racial privilege socially and legally defended by restrictive definitions of what counts as race and as racism, and what doesn’t, in the eyes of the law. The book also includes a new preface, in which Haney López considers how his own personal experiences with white racial privilege helped engender White by Law.

Table of Contents

• Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Whiteness
• 1. White Lines
• 2. Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship
• 3. The Prerequisite Cases
• 4. Ozawa and Thind
• 5. The Legal Construction of Race
• 6. White Race-Consciousness
• 7. The Value to Whites of Whiteness
• 8. Colorblind White Dominance
• Appendix A. The Racial Prerequisite Cases
• Appendix B. Excerpts from Selected Prerequisite Cases
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Table of Legal Authorities
• Index
• About the Author

Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

New York University Press
October 2013
244 pages
17 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814717226
Paper ISBN: 9781479892174

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children.

Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: International Adoption Nation
• 1 Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History
• 2 The Hong Kong Project: Chinese International Adoption in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s
• 3 A World Vision: The Labor of Asian International Adoption
• 4 Global Family Making: Narratives by and about Adoptive Families
• 5 To Make Historical Their Own Stories: Adoptee Narratives as Asian American History
• Conclusion: New Geographies, Historical Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author