Mixed Race Studies

The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama

New York University Press
May 2014
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780814760543

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Gregory S. Parks, Assistant Professor of Law
Wake Forest University School of Law, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

On November 5, 2008, the nation awoke to a New York Times headline that read triumphantly: “OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.” But new events quickly muted the exuberant declarations of a postracial era in America: from claims that Obama was born in Kenya and that he is not a true American, to depictions of Obama as a “Lyin African” and conservative cartoons that showed the new president surrounded by racist stereotypes like watermelons and fried chicken.

Despite the utopian proclamations that we are now live in a color-blind, postracial country, the grim reality is that implicit racial biases are more entrenched than ever. In Wrongs of the Right, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks set postracial claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at Obama, his administration, and African Americans. They provide an analysis of the political Right and their opposition to Obama from the vantage point of their rhetoric, a history of the evolution of the two-party system in relation to race, social scientific research on race and political ideology, and how racial fears, coded language, and implicit racism are drawn upon and manipulated by the political Right. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the Right’s replaying of the race card remains a potent resource for othering the first black president in a context rife with Nativism, xenophobia, white racial fatigue, and serious racial inequality. And as Hughey and Parks show, race trumps politics and policies when it comes to political conservatives’ hostility toward Obama.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Grand Old Party and African Americans: A Brief Historical Overview
• 2. Unsweet Tea and Labor Pains: The Tea Party, Birthers, and Obama
• 3. A Fox in the Idiot Box: Right-Wing Talking Heads
• 4. Political Party, Campaign Strategy, and Racial Messaging
• 5. The Social Science of Political Ideology and Racial Attitudes
• 6. Unconscious Race Bias and the Right: Its Meaning for Law in the Age of Obama
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors

Does Anybody Else Look Like Me?: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Multiracial Children

Da Capo Press
2003
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780756793401
Paperback ISBN: 9780738209500

Donna Jackson Nakazawa

“Am I black or white or am I American?” “Why don’t my eyes look like yours?” “Why do people always call attention to my ‘different’ hair?” Helping a child understand his mixed racial background can be daunting, especially when, whether out of honest appreciation or mean-spiritedness, peers and strangers alike perceive their features to be “other.” Drawing on psychological research and input from over fifty multiracial families, Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? addresses the special questions and concerns facing these families, explaining how we can best prepare multiracial children of all ages to make their way confidently in our color-conscious world. From the books and toys to use in play with young children, to advice on guiding older children toward an unflappable sense of self, Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? is the first book to outline for parents how, exactly, to deflect the objectifying attention multiracial children receive. Full of powerful stories and counsel, it is sure to become the book adoptive and birth parents of different races alike will look to for understanding as they strive to raise their children in a changing world.

Read an excerpt here.

The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2014
268 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137484093
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137484116
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137484109

Nico Slate, Associate Professor of History
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Born a Eurasian ‘half-caste‘ in Calcutta in 1904, Cedric Dover died in England in 1961 a ‘colored’ man. One of the foremost experts on race in his generation and a leading figure in the movement toward Afro-Asian solidarity, Dover encountered in his own life the central paradox of race in the contemporary world: he knew that race did not exist in blood or bone, even as he knew that the color of a child’s skin determined everything from where he could go to school to how long he would live. Dover strove to be, in his words, ‘both ‘racial’ and antiracial at the same time.’ His life and work stand at the heart of one of the most creative and politically significant redefinitions of racial identity in the twentieth century—the invention of the colored world. This innovative ‘biography of race’ explores the concept of colored solidarity as enacted in Dover’s life as well as the ideas and relationships that connected him and four of his closest African American friends and colleagues: W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson. In doing so, it illuminates a fascinating episode in the intellectual histories of race and cosmopolitanism while offering powerful insights into ongoing debates surrounding racial and ethnic identity today.

Table of Contents

• Preface: Of Color
• Introduction: The Prism of Race
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Cedric Dover’s Colored Cosmopolitanism
• 2. W.E.B. Du Bois and Race as Autobiography
• 3. Langston Hughes and Race as Propaganda
• 4. Paul Robeson and Race as Solidarity
• 5. The Black Artist and the Colored World
• 6. The Death and Rebirth of the Colored World
• Epilogue: Barack Obama and Race as Freedom
• Afterward: The Library of the Colored World
• Notes
• Index

Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies

Stanford University Press
January 2015
552 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804750929
Paper ISBN: 9780804750936
Digital ISBN: 9780804793209

Ann Twinam, Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

• Winner of the 2016 Bryce Wood Book Award, sponsored by the Latin American Studies Association.
• Winner of the 2016 Ligia Parra Jahn Award, sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS).
• Winner of the 2016 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History, sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS).

The colonization of Spanish America resulted in the mixing of Natives, Europeans, and Africans and the subsequent creation of a casta system that discriminated against them. Members of mixed races could, however, free themselves from such burdensome restrictions through the purchase of a gracias al sacar—a royal exemption that provided the privileges of Whiteness. For more than a century, the whitening gracias al sacar has fascinated historians. Even while the documents remained elusive, scholars continually mentioned the potential to acquire Whiteness as a provocative marker of the historic differences between Anglo and Latin American treatments of race. Purchasing Whiteness explores the fascinating details of 40 cases of whitening petitions, tracking thousands of pages of ensuing conversations as petitioners, royal officials, and local elites disputed not only whether the state should grant full whiteness to deserving individuals, but whether selective prejudices against the castas should cease.

Purchasing Whiteness contextualizes the history of the gracias al sacar within the broader framework of three centuries of mixed race efforts to end discrimination. It identifies those historic variables that structured the potential for mobility as Africans moved from slavery to freedom, mixed with Natives and Whites, and transformed later generations into vassals worthy of royal favor. By examining this history of pardo and mulatto mobility, the author provides striking insight into those uniquely characteristic and deeply embedded pathways through which the Hispanic world negotiated processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation

Routledge
2015-05-08 (orginally published in 1969)
122 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781138785007
Hardback ISBN: 9781138784994

Franklin J. Franco (1936-2013)

Introduction by:

Silvio Torres-Saillant, Dean’s Professor in the Humanities
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation is the first English translation of the classic text Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana by esteemed Dominican scholar Franklin J. Franco. Published in 1969, this book was the first systematic work on the role of Afro-descendants in Dominican society, the first society of the modern Americas where a Black-Mulatto population majority developed during the 16th century. Franco’s work, a foundational text for Dominican ethnic studies, constituted a paradigm shift, breaking with the distortions of traditional histories that focused on the colonial elite to place Afro-descendants, slavery, and race relations at the center of Dominican history.

This translation includes a new introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse University) which contextualizes Franco’s work, explaining the milieu in which he was writing, and bringing the historiography of race, slavery, and the Dominican Republic up to the present. Making this pioneering work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this is a must-have for anyone interested in the lasting effects of African slavery on the Dominican population and Caribbean societies.

Table of Contents

• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction to Franklin Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation Silvio Torres-Saillant
• Prologue Juan I. Jiménez Grullón
• 1. The Black Population
• 2. The Black Population and the National Consciousness
• 3. The Constitution of 1801
• 4. The Other Face of the Reconquest
• 5. “Foolish Spain” and “Rebellious Africa”
• 6. Complete Unity and National Unity
• Bibliography

Geographies Of Cubanidad: Place, Race, and Musical Performance in Contemporary Cuba

University Press of Mississippi
2005-07-10
328 pages
6 x 9 inches, 14 b&w illustrations, 1 map, 3 tables, glossary, bibliography, index
Hardback ISBN: 9781628462395

Rebecca M. Bodenheimer

A study of how notions of place and race inform the identities and performances of musicians in contemporary Cuba

Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic national discourse. Given that the music is a prominent symbol of Cubanidad, musical practices play an important role in constructing regional, local, and national identities.

This book suggests that regional identity exerts a significant influence on the aesthetic choices made by Cuban musicians. Through the examination of several genres, Bodenheimer explores the various ways that race and place are entangled in contemporary Cuban music. She argues that racialized notions which circulate about different cities affect both the formation of local identity and musical performance. Thus, the musical practices discussed in the book—including rumba, timba, eastern Cuban folklore, and son—are examples of the intersections between regional identity formation, racialized notions of place, and music-making.

Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Penguin Press
2009 (First published in 1859)
176 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780143105763
Ebook ISBN: 9781440649141

Harriet E. Wilson (1825-1900)

Introduction and Notes by:

P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ned B. Allen Professor of English
University of Delaware

Reginald Pitts

For the 150th anniversary of its first publication, a new edition of the pioneering African-American classic, reflecting groundbreaking discoveries about its author’s life

First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit. This edition incorporates new research showing that Wilson was not only a pioneering African-American literary figure but also an entrepreneur in the black women’s hair care market fifty years before Madame C. J. Walker’s hair care empire made her the country’s first woman millionaire.

Read the book at Project Gutenberg here.

The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts

Harvard University Press
April 2015
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
11 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674967625

Amber D. Moulton, Researcher
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts chronicles a grassroots movement to overturn the state’s ban on interracial unions. Assembling information from court and church records, family histories, and popular literature, Amber D. Moulton recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify what, in the eyes of the state’s antislavery constituency, appeared to be an indefensible injustice.

Initially, activists argued that the ban provided a legal foundation for white supremacy in Massachusetts. But laws that enforced racial hierarchy remained popular even in Northern states, and the movement gained little traction. To attract broader support, the reformers recalibrated their arguments along moral lines, insisting that the prohibition on interracial unions weakened the basis of all marriage, by encouraging promiscuity, prostitution, and illegitimacy. Through trial and error, reform leaders shaped an appeal that ultimately drew in Garrisonian abolitionists, equal rights activists, antislavery evangelicals, moral reformers, and Yankee legislators, all working to legalize interracial marriage.

This pre–Civil War effort to overturn Massachusetts’ antimiscegenation law was not a political aberration but a crucial chapter in the deep history of the African American struggle for equal rights, on a continuum with the civil rights movement over a century later.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Amalgamation and the Massachusetts Ban on Interracial Marriage
• 2. Interracial Marriage as an Equal Rights Measure
• 3. Moral Reform and the Protection of Northern Motherhood
• 4. Anti-Southern Politics and Interracial Marriage Rights
• 5. Advancing Interracialism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up As A Multiethnic, Multicultural, and “multiracial” American

Routledge
1998
280 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0805825756

Teja Arboleda, President/Creative Director
Entertaining Diversity, Inc.

My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese…
My father’s mother was African American-Native American…
My mother’s father was German-Danish…
My mother’s mother was German…
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…

For once it’s not just black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Arboleda has presented his story around the United States through his one-man performance-lecture Ethnic Man! Now, in this book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural and racial identity and the American identity crisis.

To facilitate its use as a course text, In the Shadow of Race is offered with a Teacher’s Guide written by Christine Clark. Topics for discussion include:

• the social construction of race
• racial separatism vs. diversity
• racial, ethnic, and cultural identity development
• the politics of racial categorization
• mixed “race” peoples
• cultural identity vs. identity by heritage
• the concept of a “cultural home
• changing identities within cultures

Contents:

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Race Is a Four Letter Word
• Chapter 2: Among the Trees
• Chapter 3: Four Walls and a Cellar
• Chapter 4: Checkmate
• Chapter 5: Carrots?
• Chapter 6: Plastic Armies
• Chapter 7: Old Fence, New Paint
• Chapter 8: Paper Houses, Horses, and Swords
• Chapter 9: Squares in a Circle
• Chapter 10: Shuffle
• Chapter 11: The Connection
• Chapter 12: The Adjustable Pedestal
• Chapter 13: Hokkaido
• Chapter 14: Two Steps Back
• Chapter 15: The Official Proxy
• Chapter 16: “You’re From China, Right?”
• Chapter 17: The Awakening
• Chapter 18: This Land Is Your Land
• Chapter 19: Top of the Hill
• Chapter 20: Letting Go
• Chapter 21: Check One Only
• Chapter 22: Losses
• Chapter 23: The Testimony
• Chapter 24: One
• Chapter 25: Cool Winds Return Home
• Chapter 26: Home
• About the Author
• Ancilary Materials for Educators

The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

Johns Hopkins Univesity Press
August 2012
240 pages
1 halftone, 1 line drawing
Hardback ISBN: 9781421407005

Rebecca Anne Goetz, Associate Professor of History
New York University

In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of “hereditary heathenism,” the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom.

Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America.