Mixed Race Studies

Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora

Arte Público Press
2012-04-30
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55885-746-9

Edited by: Marta Moreno Vega, Alba Marinieves and Yvette Modestin

Afro-Latina women relate their personal stories and advocacy for racial equality

“My housewife mother turned into a raging warrior woman when the principal of my elementary school questioned whether her daughter and the children of my public school had the intelligence to pass a citywide test,” Marta Moreno Vega writes in her essay. She knew then she was loved and valued, and she learned that to be an Afro-Puerto Rican woman meant activism was her birth right.

Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America—Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela—and they write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a black Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was when her mother’s bosses told her she didn’t need to go to school after the fourth grade, “because blacks don’t need to study more than that.”

The contributors span a range of professions, from artists to grass-roots activists, scholars and elected officials. Each is deeply engaged in her community, and they all use their positions to advocate for justice, racial equality and cultural equity. In their introduction, the editors write that these stories provide insight into the conditions that have led Afro-Latinas to challenge systems of inequality, including the machismo that is still prominent in Spanish-speaking cultures.

A fascinating look at the legacy of more than 400 years of African enslavement in the Americas, this collection of personal stories is a must-read for anyone interested in the African diaspora and issues of inequality and racism.

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience

Rowman & Littlefield
January 2016
350 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0942-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-0943-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0944-2

Edited by:

Tina Fernandes Botts, Visiting Professor of Philosophy
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience is a collection of essays by mixed race philosophers about the mixed race experience. Each essay is meant to represent one of three possible things: (1) what the philosopher sees as the philosopher’s best work, (2) evidence of the possible impact of the philosopher’s mixed race experience on the philosopher’s work, or (3) the philosopher’s philosophical take on the mixed race experience. The book has two goals: (1) to collect together for the first time the work of professional, academic philosophers who have had the mixed race experience, and (2) to bring these essays together for the purpose of adding to the conversation on the question of the degree to which factical identity (that is, situated, phenomenological experience) and philosophical work may be related (i.e., in terms of theme, method, assumptions, traditions, etc.).

Table of Contents

• Foreword, by Linda Martín Alcoff
• Editor’s Introduction: Toward a Mixed Race Theory, by Tina Fernandes Botts
• Part 1: Mixed Race Political Theory
  • Chapter 1: Responsible Multiracial Politics, with a new postscript, by Ronald Robles Sundstrom
  • Chapter 2: Mixed Race Identity in Britain: Finding Our Roots in the Post Racial Era, by Gabriella Beckles-Raymond
• Part 2: Mixed Race Metaphilosophy
  • Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass: What Philosophy Looks Like from the Inside When You’re Not Quite There, by Marina Oshana
  • Chapter 4: Being and Not Being, Knowing and Not Knowing, by Jennifer Lisa Vest
  • Chapter 5: A Mixed Race (Philosophical) Experience, by Tina Fernandes Botts
• Part 3: Mixed Race Ontology
  • Chapter 6: The Fluid Symbol of Mixed Race, by Naomi Zack
  • Chapter 7: On Being Mixed, by Linda Martín Alcoff
  • Chapter 8: Race and Ethnic Identity, by J.L.A. Garcia
• Part 4: Mixed Race and Major Figures
  • Chapter 9: Through a Glass, Darkly: A Mixed-Race Du Bois, by Celena Simpson
  • Chapter 10: German Chocolate: Why Philosophy is So Personal, by Timothy J. Golden
• Part 5: Mixed Race Ethics
  • Chapter 11: Who is Afraid of Racial and Ethnic Self-Cleansing? In Defense of the Virtuous Cosmopolitan, by Jason D. Hill
• Afterword, by Naomi Zack
• Epilogue, by Tina Fernandes Botts

“I Don’t See Color” Personal and Critical Perspectives on White Privilege

Pennsylvania State University Press
2015
280 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-06499-4

Edited by:

Bettina Bergo, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Tracey Nicholls, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois

Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to speak English. Whiteness is an allegorical category before it is demographic.

This volume gathers together some of the most influential scholars of privilege and marginalization in philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, literature, and history to examine the idea of whiteness. Drawing from their diverse racial backgrounds and national origins, these scholars weave their theoretical insights into essays critically informed by personal narrative. This approach, known as “braided narrative,” animates the work of award-winning author Eula Biss. Moved by Biss’s fresh and incisive analysis, the editors have assembled some of the most creative voices in this dialogue, coming together across the disciplines.

Along with the editors, the contributors are Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Nyla R. Branscombe, Drucilla Cornell, Lewis R. Gordon, Paget Henry, Ernest-Marie Mbonda, Peggy McIntosh, Mark McMorris, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Victor Ray, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Louise Seamster, Tracie L. Stewart, George Yancy, and Heidi A. Zetzer.

Table Contents

• Preface / Eula Biss
• Introduction / Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls
• Part I. What is White Privilege?
  • Chapter 1: Deprivileging Philosophy / Peggy McIntosh
  • Chapter 2: White Privilege and the Problem with Affirmative Action / Lewis R. Gordon
  • Chapter 3: Revisioning “White Privilege” / Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
• Part II. The Images and Rhetoric of White Privilege
  • Chapter 4: The Very Image of Privilege: Film Creation of White Transcendentals in Vienna and Hollywood / Bettina Bergo
  • Chapter 5: Painting and Negotiating Colors / Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
  • Chapter 6: I Was an Honorary White Man: Reflections on Space, Place, and Origin / Mark McMorris
• Part III. Troubling Privilege
  • Chapter 7: Whiteness as Insidious: On the Embedded and Opaque White Racist Self / George Yancy
  • Chapter 8: White Privilege: The Luxury of Undivided Attention / Heidi A. Zetzer
  • Chapter 9: The Costs of Privilege and Dividends of Privilege Awareness: The Social Psychology of Confronting Inequality / Tracie L. Stewart and Nyla R. Branscombe
  • Chapter 10: Unpacking the Imperialist Knapsack: White Privilege and Imperialism in Obama’s America / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Victor Ray, and Louise Seamster
• Part IV. Other Perspectives on White and Western Privilege
  • Chapter 11: Whiteness and Africana Political Economy / Paget Henry
  • Chapter 12: The Great White North: Failing Muslim-Canadians – Failing Us All / Tracey Nicholls
  • Chapter 13: Rethinking Ethical Feminism through uBuntu / Drucilla Cornell
  • Chapter 14: The Afrocentrist Critique of Eurocentrism: The Decolonization of Knowledge /Ernest-Marie Mbonda
• Contributor Biographies

Mothering, Mixed Families and Racialised Boundaries

Routledge
2014-02-10
120 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781138953697
Hardback ISBN: 9780415733748

Edited by:

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy
Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom

Vicki Harman, Senior Lecturer
Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom

This pioneering volume draws together theoretical and empirical contributions analyzing the experiences of white mothers in interracial families in Britain, Canada and the USA. The growth of the mixed race population reflects an increasingly racially and culturally heterogeneous society, shaped by powerful forces of globalisation and migration. Mixed family formations are becoming increasingly common through marriage, relationships and adoption, and there is also increasing social recognition of interracial families through the inclusion of mixed categories in Census data and other official statistics. The changing demographic make-up of Britain and other Western countries raises important questions about identity, belonging and the changing nature of family life. It also connects with theoretical and empirical discussions about the significance of ‘race’ in contemporary society.

In exploring mothering across racialised boundaries, this volume offers new insights and perspectives. The notion of racialisation is invoked to argue that, while the notion of race does not exist in any meaningful sense, it continues to operate as a social process. This crucial resource will appeal to academics, researchers, policy makers, practitioners and undergraduate and postgraduate students.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Ravinder Barn and Vicki Harman
2. ‘Doing the right thing’: transracial adoption in the USA / Ravinder Barn
3. The experiences of race in the lives of Jewish birth mothers of children from black/white interracial and inter-religious relationships: a Canadian perspective / Channa C. Verbian
4. Researching white mothers of mixed-parentage children: the significance of investigating whiteness / Joanne Britton
5. Social capital and the informal support networks of lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children / Vicki Harman
6. Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working class mothers with mixed-race children / Lisa McKenzie

Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

New York University Press
August 2001
283 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781227
Paper ISBN: 9780814781234

Edited by:

María C. Sánchez, Associate Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Linda Schlossberg, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University

Passing for what you are not—whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women–can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing’s radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion.

Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan’s mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class.

Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines—from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies—Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity.

Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O’Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez, Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.

Intergroup Dialogue: Engaging Difference, Social Identities and Social Justice

Routledge
2013-05-13
24 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-81970-1

Edited by:

Ximena Zuniga, Associate Professor in Social Justice Education
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Gretchen Lopez, Director of the Intergroup Dialogue Program and Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Kristie Ford, Director of the Intergroup Relations Program and Associate Professor of Sociology
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

Intergroup dialogue is a form of democratic engagement that fosters communication, critical reflection, and collaborative action across social and cultural divides. Engaging social identities is central to this approach. In recent years, intergroup dialogue has emerged as a promising social justice education practice that addresses pressing issues in higher education, school and community settings. This edited volume provides a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of intergroup dialogue spanning conceptual frameworks for practice, and most notably a diverse set of research studies which examine in detail the processes and learning that take place through dialogue.

This book addresses questions from the fields of education, social psychology, sociology, and social work, offering specific recommendations and examples related to curriculum and pedagogy. Furthermore, it contributes to an understanding of how to constructively engage students and others in education about difference, identities, and social justice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education.

CONTENTS

• Part I. Introducing The Practice of Intergroup Dialogue
  • 1. Intergroup Dialogue: Critical Conversations about Difference Ximena Zúñiga, Gretchen E. Lopez and Kristie A. Ford
• Part II. Intergroup Dialogue in Higher Education
  • 2. “I now harbor more pride in my race”: The Educational Benefits of Inter- and Intraracial Dialogues on the Experiences of Students of Color and Multiracial Students Kristie Ford and Victoria Malaney
  • 3. From Dialogue to Action: The Impact of Cross-Race Intergroup Dialogue on the Development of White College Students as Racial Allies Craig Alimo
  • 4. Fostering a Commitment to Social Action: How Talking, Thinking, and Feeling Make a Difference in Intergroup Dialogue Chloé Gurin Sands, Patricia Gurin, Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda and Shardae Osuna
  • 5. Engaged Listening in Race/Ethnicity and Gender Intergroup Dialogue Courses Ximena Zúñiga, Jane Mildred, Rani Varghese, Keri DeJong and Molly Kheen
  • 6. White Educators Facilitating Discussions About Racial Realities Stephen John Quaye
• Part III. Intergroup Dialogue in Schools and Communities
  • 7. Raising Ethnic-Racial Consciousness: The Relationship Between Intergroup Dialogues and Adolescents’ Ethnic-Racial Identity and Racism Awareness Adriana Aldana, Stephanie Rowley, Barry Checkoway and Katie Richards-Schuster
  • 8. Writing the Divide: High School Students Crossing Urban-Suburban Contexts Gretchen E. Lopez and A. Wendy Nastasi
  • 9. Critical Education in High Schools: The Promise and Challenges of Intergroup Dialogue Shayla R. Griffin, Mikel Brown and Naomi M. Warren
  • 10. Racial Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Critical Interracial Dialogue for Teachers of Color Rita Kohli
  • 11. Supporting Critical Dialogues Across Educational Contexts Tasha Tropp Laman, Pamela Jewett, Louise B. Jennings, Jennifer L. Wilson and Mariana Souto-Manning
  • 12. Speaking Across Difference in Community Dialogue on Affirmative Action Policy Kristen L. Davidson and Michele S. Moses
• Part IV. Considering Directions for Intergroup Dialogue: Research and Practice
  • 13. Intergroup Dialogue: Research Perspectives Across Educational Contexts Gretchen E. Lopez, Kristie A. Ford and Ximena Zúñiga

Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives

Cambridge University Press
January 2015
Paperback ISBN: 9780521154260

Edited by:

Karim Murji, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
The Open University, United Kingdom

John Solomos, Professor of Sociology
University of Warwick, United Kingdom

How have research agendas on race and ethnic relations changed over the past two decades and what new developments have emerged? Theories of Race and Ethnicity provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge collection of theoretically grounded and empirically informed essays. It covers a range of key issues in race and ethnicity studies, such as genetics and race, post-race debates, racial eliminativism and the legacy of Barack Obama, and mixed race identities. The contributions are by leading writers on a range of perspectives employed in studying ethnicity and race, including critical race feminism, critical rationalism, psychoanalysis, performativity, whiteness studies and sexuality. Written in an authoritative yet accessible style, this volume is suitable for researchers and advanced students, offering scholars a survey of the state of the art in the literature, and students an overview of the field.

• A unique set of views on race and ethnicity by writers committed to advancing scholarship
• Covers some of the latest issues and debates in the field, including genetics, post-race eliminativism and mixed race identities from a range of perspectives
• Opening and closing editorial chapters provide a route map of shifts in the field of race and ethnicity studies, and return to some recurring debates to demonstrate how the field changes and has continuing and persisting questions in theorising race and ethnicity

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: situating the present Karim Murji and John Solomos
• Part I. Debates: Introduction to Part I
  • 2. Race and the science of difference in the age of genomics Sandra Soo-Jin Lee
  • 3. Colour-blind egalitarianism as the new racial norm Charles A. Gallagher
  • 4. Getting over the Obama hope hangover: the new racism in ‘post-racial’ America Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (with Victor E. Ray)
  • 5. Does a recognition of mixed race move us toward post-race? Miri Song
  • 6. Acting ‘as’ and acting ‘as if’: two approaches to the politics of race and migration Leah Bassel
  • 7. Can race be eradicated? The post-racial problematic Brett St Louis
• Part II. Perspectives: Introduction to Part II
  • 8. Superseding race in sociology: the perspective of critical rationalism Michael Banton
  • 9. Critical race feminism Adrien K. Wing
  • 10. Performativity and ‘raced’ bodies Shirley Tate
  • 11. Racism: psychoanalytic and psycho-social approaches Simon Clarke
  • 12. The sociology of whiteness: beyond good and evil white people Matthew W. Hughey
  • 13. (Sexual) whiteness and national identity: race, class and sexuality in colour-blind France Éric Fassin
  • 14. Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method David Theo Goldberg
• 15. Conclusion: back to the future Karim Murji and John Solomos

Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness

Northwestern University Press
May 2006
488 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paper ISBN: ISBN 978-0-8101-1971-0

Edited by:

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture
Barnard College
Columbia University, New York, New York

Nicole Svobodny, Assistant Dean, College of Arts & Sciences; Senior Lecturer, International & Area Studies
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

Ludmilla A. Trigo

Foreword by:

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University

Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter’s godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia’s greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin’s African ancestry has played the role of a “wild card” of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal’s legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin’s biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia’s self-definition.

The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin’s blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin’s era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

Mariage et métissage dans les sociétés coloniales: Amériques, Afrique et Iles de l’Océan Indien (XVIe–XXe–siècles) (Marriage and misgeneration [miscegenation?] in colonial societies: Americas, Africa and islands of the Indian ocean (XVIth–XXth centuries))

Peter Lang
2015
357 pages
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-0343-1605-7
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0352-0295-3

Edited by:

Guy Brunet, Vice President
Société de Démographie Historique, Paris, France
also: Professor of History, University Lyon

La conquête de vastes empires coloniaux par les puissances européennes, suivie par des mouvements migratoires d’ampleur variable selon les territoires et les époques, a donné naissance à de nouvelles sociétés. Les principaux groupes humains, indigènes, sous différentes appellations, colons d’origine européenne et leurs descendants, et parfois esclaves arrachés au continent africain, se sont mélangés parfois rapidement et avec une forte intensité, parfois plus tardivement ou marginalement. Les unions, officialisées par des mariages ou restées consensuelles, provoqué l’apparition de nouvelles générations métisses et ainsi qu’un phénomène de créolisation. L’effectif de chacun de ces groupes humains, et l’existence éventuelle de barrières entre eux, ont produit des degrés de métissage très divers que les administrateurs des sociétés coloniales ont tenté de classifier. Les seize textes réunis dans cet ouvrage abordent la manière dont les populations se sont mélangées, ainsi que la position des métis dans les nouvelles sociétés. Ces questions sont abordées dans une perspective de long terme, du XVIe au XXe siècle, et à propos de nombreux territoires, du Canada à la Bolivie, des Antilles à Madagascar, de l’Algérie à l’Angola.

The conquest of large colonial empires by European powers, followed by migratory flows, more or less important depending on places and periods, gave birth to new societies. The most important human groups, indigenous, European born settlers and their descendants, and sometimes slaves snatched from the African continent, mixed, more or less early, more or less intensely. Unions, legally registered or not, and misgeneration [miscegenation?] lead to the appearance of mixed-blood generations and to a process of creolisation. The numerical strength of these human groups, and the existence of barriers between them, produced various degrees of misgeneration that the authorities of the colonial societies tried to identify and to classify. The sixteen texts gathered in this book study the way that these populations got mixed, and the place of mixed-blood people in the new societies. These issues are tackled in a long-term perspective, about various territories, from Canada to Bolivia, from the French West Indies to Madagascar, from Algeria to Angola.

44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

Third World Press
2011-03-29
319 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0883783177

Edited by: Lita Hooper, Sonia Sanchez, and Michael Simanga

To give voice to the historic election of President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, this anthology of essays, poetry, and creative non-fiction documents the conversation on President Obama’s campaign within the African American community, and the dialogue after his election and since he has taken the Oath of Office. Included are perspectives on the historical moments during President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the finale of the 2008 general election, and Obama’s new plans and policies since he took office in January 20, 2009. Editors Lita Hooper, Michael Simanga, and Sonia Sanchez have assembled an impressive list of forty-four contributors to capture the energy and excitement, the expectation and hope. Featured are works from Lita Hooper, Michael Sigmanga, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, Quincy Troupe, Chuck D, Pearl Cleage, Natasha Trethewey, Tony Medina, Jessica Care Moore, Nathan McCall, Jasmine Guy, Farai Chideya, Keith Gilyard, Opal Moore, Sharan Strange, and Tina McElroy Ansa.