Mixed Race Studies

When It Counts—More On Obama and the Census

InterfaithFamiliy.com
2010-05-03

Ruth Abrams

Elizabeth Chang wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, “Why Obama should not have checked ‘black’ on his census form,”

Although I knew Obama self-identifies as African American, I was disappointed when I read that that’s what he checked on his census form. The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked “some other race.” Instead, Obama went with black alone.

I understand why Chang wrote this, and even though I’m mostly on the same page with her about a lot of this, I think she’s wrong.

Chang identifies as the mother of biracial children in an interfaith family, and as someone raising biracial Jewish children. The whole Jewish community is behind her in wanting her children to be able identify as more than one thing. Jewish and Chinese and Hawaiian? Beautiful, we are so on board with that.

But on the other hand, I think there is something to Chang’s phrase, “when it counts, he is black.” When it counts, stand up for the people who need you. Based on his experiences, Obama judged this was the time to count as an African American. I read the piece in Newsweek last September on the work ahead of parents who want to raise anti-racist children. Parenting “colorblind”—pretending that racism doesn’t exist and that people aren’t different—doesn’t make racism go away or make your children accept difference. In fact it demonstrably does the opposite…

Read the entire article here.

Sigmund Feist and the End of the Idea of the Jews as a Mixed Race

Shpilman Institute for Photography
Blog
2011-12-04

Amos Morris Reich, Senior Lecturer of Jewish History
University of Haifa

Sigmnud Feist (1865-1943) is mostly remembered because of the orphanage for Jewish children that he directed in Berlin, as well as for his work in German linguistics. A collection of recently published letters written to him by 77 of his pupils during their service in the German military during the Great War has brought him back to public attention. But in 1925 he published a widely circulating book entitled Stammeskunde der Juden: Die jüdischen Stämme der Erde in alter und neuer Zeit. Historisch-anthropologisch Skizzen (A History of the Jewish Stock: ancient and modern Jewish tribes of the world. Historical-anthropological Sketches).

While “race” and “type” are central to Feist’s 1925 book on the Jews, in no place does he define them. Indeed, biological and, most notably, Mendelian principles are absent from his discussion. The chapters move from discussion of the Jews as a race in ancient times and the Jews in the Diaspora to a discussion of geographically ordered Jewries, including chapters on the Jews of Palestine, Near East, China, India, Ethiopia, North Africa, Spain, and Ashkenazy Jews, before turning to pseudo- and cryptic- Jews, and ending with a discussion of modern Jews as a race. The book’s structure, therefore, corroborates the argument concerning the heterogeneity of the Jews as geographically spread and as anthropologically diverse and the photographic appendix indicates similarity between Jews and their environments and Jewish anthropological variation…

….After providing historical evidence for mixture between non-Jews and Jews throughout history, his basic thesis throughout the book, Feist asked whether this process had already in ancient times aligned Jews with the peoples among whom they lived. This question, Feist wrote, is not easy to answer because of the scarcity of visual material (Bildmaterial). Feist’s assumption, therefore, was that the question was a visual one.

If we follow Feist’s argumentation here, we see the degree of internalization of widespread assumptions concerning the realistic status of photography with regard to race. Franz Boas, to whom he turns explicitly in his conclusion, ruled out on methodological grounds the ability to know what previous types looked like. Feist here argues differently. Because of the state of empirical evidence, according to Feist, the question pertains to the appearance of Jews in the medieval period. Instead of viewing medieval depictions as proof of the degree of Jewish mixture, Feist asserts that, as opposed to ancient Hittite, Assyrian, and Egyptian monuments, medieval Christian and Muslim chronicles and illustrated Bibles do not provide “truthful depictions of Jewish types” (naturgetreue jüdische Typen). He here mentions several medieval sources, in which, he claims, depicted Jews cannot be identified through their physiognomic features but only through social markers attached to them. While this, precisely, could corroborate his argument concerning Jewish mixture, Feist in fact chooses to rule out the realism of these images. While he does not say so explicitly, it is likely that the reason for this is that the depictions do not resemble the photographs of the old monuments of and the modern photographs of Jews. Based on the assumption that medieval images did not depict Jews realistically, Feist declares that only with early modern painting, specifically with Rembrandt, Rubens, and van Dijk, did representations of Jews regain an ancient realism; only here did the realistic character of Jewish faces and Jewish forms (jüdische Gestalten) reappear in art. The Jewish type, then, is constant – change was only the attribute of artistic representation…

Read the entire article here.

The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition

University Press of Colorado
2000
136 pages
8.2 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
Paper ISBN:978-0-87081-576-8

Virgilio Elizondo, Professor of Pastoral and Hispanic Theology; Fellow, Institute for Latino Studies and Kellogg Institute
Notre Dame University

Twelve years after it was first published, The Future is Mestizo is now updated and revised with a new foreword, introduction, and epilogue. This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.

Contents
Contents

• Foreword by Sandra Cisneros
• Preface The Great Border
• Introduction The Future Is Mestizo: We Are the Shades by David Carrasco
• 1. A Family of Migrants
  • My City
  • My Family
  • My Neighborhood and Parish
• 2. Who Am I?
  • Moving into a “Foreign Land”
    vAcceptance, Belonging, and Affirmation
  • Experiences of Non-Being
  • Neither/Nor but Something New
• 3. A Violated People
  • The Masks of Suffering
  • The Eruption
  • The Eruption Continues
  • Going to the Roots
• 4. Marginality
  • Festive Breakthrough
  • Institutional Barriers
  • Invisible Mechanisms
• 5. My People Resurrect at Tepeyac
  • The Dawn of a New Day
  • From Death to New Life
  • First “Evange!ium” of the Americas
  • Beginning of the New Race
• 6. Galilee of Mestizos
  • Is Human Liberation Possible?
  • Conquest or Birth
  • The Unimagined Liberation
  • From Margination to Unity
• 7. Toward Universal Mestizaje
  • From Unsuspected Limitations to Unsuspected Richness
  • A New Being: Universal and Local
  • Continued Migrations
  • Threshold of a New Humanity
  • The Ultimate Mestizaje
• Epilogue: A Reflection Twelve Years Later
  • The Negative
  • The Challenge

Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

Zygon Center for Religion and Science
Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
2011-03-25
13 pages

Kevin Patrick Considine
Loyola University, Chicago

My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

Read the entire paper here.

Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America

The Journal of American History
Volume 17, Issue 3 (Fall 2005)
pages 420-437
DOI: 10.1093/alh/aji024

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino de Nueva España (“Auspices of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the Kingdom of New Spain”) (Fig. 1) is an eighteenth-century canvass by an anonymous Mexican painter that rather vividly captures Creole discourses in colonial Mexico. A garlanded Our Lady of Guadalupe stands on top of a fountain from which four kneeling nobles, two indigenous, two Hispanic, drink.

Fountains had long been associated with salvation and purity in Christian discourse. For example, in their 1596 Ghent altarpiece, Fountain of Life and Mercy, Gerard Horenbout (1467–1540) and his son Lucas Horenbout (d. 1544) have the community of the pious drink of a fountain whose source is the body of Christ (Fig. 2). Believers eucharistically partake of the blood of Christ, whose wounds refill the well. Some princes and clerics, including a turbaned potentate and a tonsured friar, who stand for the Turks and Luther, respectively, turn their backs on the fountain as they gather to worship Dame World. To reinforce the Counter-Reformation message, the Flemish Horenbouts have angels hovering over the pious and demons over the infidels and heretics.

The same theological and compositional principles organize the Mexican painting, but the fountain’s spring is Our Lady of Guadalupe and both natives and Hispanics kneel to drink from the well. Using this virgin as the source of the “fountain of life and mercy” came naturally to those who thought of Our Lady of Guadalupe as an immaculate conception, for some of the imagery underlying the belief in the immaculate conception came from the Song of Songs, one of the strangest books of the Old Testament. According to Christian theology, the Song of Songs prefigures the mystery of St. Mary’s conception by describing a woman, the lover of God, as a walled garden (hortus conclusus) and a fountain (“You are like a private garden, my treasure, my bride! You are like a spring that no one can drink from, a fountain of my own” [Song of Solomon 4.12]). The most striking difference between the Mexican painting and Horenbout’s is that in the former no party turns its back on the fountain: both Indians and Europeans belong in the same community of the pious…

…I have chosen the painting Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino deNueva España to introduce this essay because it summarizes much of what I believe to be distinct about Creole discourse in colonial Spanish America: Creoles saw their lands to be equally rooted in the indigenous and Hispanic pasts. In their imagination, colonial Spanish American societies were kingdoms, ancien regime societies made up of social estates and corporate privileges, with deep, ancient dynastic roots in both the New World and Spain. For heuristic purposes, I have divided this essay to coincide with the compositional elements of the painting: Creoles and Indians; Creoles and religion, particularly Our Lady of Guadalupe: and Creoles and Spain. But before turning to my tripartite analysis, we need first to clarify who the Creoles were.

1. Criollos

The self-styled Criollos or Creoles were local elites who presided over racially mixed colonial societies of Indians, blacks, Spaniards, and castas (mixed bloods). Creoles felt entitled to rule over these racially and culturally heterogeneous societies, as part of a loosely held Catholic composite monarchy whose center was back in Madrid. By and large they succeeded in their efforts to obtain autonomy vis-a-vis Spain, but their rule over these local “kingdoms” was always precarious and negotiated. Although Peninsular newcomers, including representatives of the sprawling lay and religious bureaucracies that the crown created in Spanish America, were usually marshaled into serving Creole interests either through bribes or marriage, Creoles felt voiceless and discriminated against. To be sure, they were right to complain. Back in Spain, the Indies were seen as corrupting, degenerating environments: frontier societies where one could get rich but sorely lacking in sophistication and culture. Upon arrival in the Indies. Peninsulares felt naturally entitled to hold political, religious, and economic power, and Creoles resented such pretensions…

…2. Creole and Indians

How could an ancien regime society where social and racial estates overlapped produce a painting like Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino de Nueva España, in which both Indians and Hispanic nobilities are held to be equal participants in the ideal Christian commonwealth? The answer lies precisely in the very nature of the ancien regime the Creole elites envisioned. Creoles saw themselves as the product of the biological, racial amalgamation of Indian and Spanish elites that took place during the first years of colonization.

Clerical writers considered the miscegenation of Spaniards and Indians appropriate only when it brought elites together. The initial colonial sexual embrace of Indian elites and Spanish conquerors was. therefore, welcomed and praised. The type of “vulgar” miscegenation that brought later commoners of different races together was another matter. The vulgar mestizaje was seen as a threat to the existence of idealized hierarchical polities. Mestizos were consistently portrayed as evil, out-of-control individuals responsible for bringing sinful lifestyles, including a culture of lies and deception, into Indian communities that the clergy sought to keep unsoiled…

Read the entire article here.

Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings

University of Texas Press
2003
216 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.
12 color and 60 b&w illus., 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-71245-4

Magali M. Carrera, Professor of Art History
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Visual Practices in Late-Colonial Mexico
• Chapter One: Identity by Appearance, Judgment, and Circumstances: Race as Lineage and Calidad
• Chapter Two: The Faces and Bodies of Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Mexico: An Overview of Social Context
• Chapter Three: Envisioning the Colonial Body
• Chapter Four: Regulating and Narrating the Colonial Body
• Chapter Five: From Popolacho to Citizen: The Re-vision of the Colonial Body
• Epilogue: Dreams of Order
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

New Christians/’New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760-1789

Chapter (pages 314-332) in: The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
Berghahn Books
2001
592 pages
Pb ISBN 978-1-57181-430-2; Hb ISBN 978-1-57181-153-0

Edited by: Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering

Chapter Author:

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

The case of Saint-Domingue’s Sephardim illustrates that the story of Jews in Europe’s expansion westward is about more than the survival or mutation of deeply rooted family traditions. Old World questions about Jewish political identity did not disappear in the Americas. Rather, these persistent issues forced colonists and their children born in the New World to reconcile European philosophies with American conditions. In the case of the largest slave colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue’s Jews helped translate emerging French nationalism into an attack on racial prejudice that eventually produced the Haitian revolution. By raising complex issues of national identity and citizenship in French America after 1763, Sephardic merchants and planters provided a model for another group whose place in colonial society was equally ambiguous: Saint-Domingue’s free people of color.

In the mid-1780s, the self-proclaimed leaders of the colony’s “mulattos” adopted many of the techniques that colonial Jews used to fight for legal rights. Their challenge to a racial hierarchy that had only recently acquired full legitimacy threatened the ideological basis of plantation society. By 1791 political and military struggles between colonial “whites” and “mulattos” had become so vicious that a great slave rebellion was possible.

The civil positions of colonial Jews and free people of mixed European and African parentage were parallel because elites in France began to construct new definitions of French citizenship in the mid-eighteenth century. In Paris and elsewhere, Jansenist judges and Protestant leaders pushed royal administrators to recognize that property, loyalty, and civic utility, not orthodox Catholicism, defined French identity. At the same time, royal bureaucrats eager to open France to wealthy families born outside its borders began to free these influential immigrants from traditional legal disabilities. By 1789, therefore, the continuum of rights and disabilities separating non-French residents and native-born subjects of the French monarchy was increasingly simplified into two mutually exclusive categories: citizen and foreigner…

Read the entire chapter here.

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World

Texas A&M University Press
2010-07-12
168 pages
6 x 9, Illus.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-192-6

Edited by:

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Christopher Morris, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With the recent election of the nation’s first African American president—an individual of blended Kenyan and American heritage who spent his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia—the topic of transnational identity is reaching the forefront of the national consciousness in an unprecedented way. As our society becomes increasingly diverse and intermingled, it is increasingly imperative to understand how race and heritage impact our perceptions of and interactions with each other. Assumed Identities constitutes an important step in this direction.

However, “identity is a slippery concept,” say the editors of this instructive volume. This is nowhere more true than in the melting pot of the early trans-Atlantic cultures formed in the colonial New World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the studies in this volume show, during this period in the trans-Atlantic world individuals and groups fashioned their identities but also had identities ascribed to them by surrounding societies. The historians who have contributed to this volume investigate these processes of multiple identity formation, as well as contemporary understandings of them.

Originating in the 2007 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures presented at the University of Texas at Arlington, Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World examines, among other topics, perceptions of racial identity in the Chesapeake community, in Brazil, and in Saint-Domingue (colonial-era Haiti). As the contributors demonstrate, the cultures in which these studies are sited helped define the subjects’ self-perceptions and the ways others related to them.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race and Identity in the New World; Franklin W. Knight
• “Thy Coming Fame, Ogé! Is Sure”: New Evidence on Ogé’s 1790 Revolt and the Beginnings of the Haitian Revolution; John D. Garrigus
• “The Child Should Be Made a Christian”: Baptism, Race, and Identity in the Seventeenth-century Chesapeake; Rebecca Goetz
• West Indian Identity in the Eighteenth Century; Trevor Burnard
• Illegal Enslavement and the Precariousness of Freedom in Nineteenth-century Brazil; Sidney Chalhoub
• Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard
• In Memoriam, Evan Anders
• About the Contributors
• Index

History and the (Un)making of Identifications in Literary Representations of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics

University of British Columbia
September 2000
465 pages

Marian Josephine Gracias

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English)

This dissertation examines selected literature by and about Anglo-Indians (Eurasians) and Goan Catholics from India and the Indian diaspora, focusing on its preoccupation with the history of these communities as a site of contested identifications. Especially polemical are perceptions (due to communalist stereotypes or internalisation) of Anglo Indians and Goan Catholics as mimic or intermediary communities who ended up capitulating to British and/or Portuguese colonialist structures respectively. Larger issues for both communities in India and in the diaspora also involve questions of racial or cultural hybridity, and the slippage between religion and culture, particularly the linking of conversion to Christianity with colonisation, Westernisation, denationalisation, and non-Indianness.

I argue for a more layered understanding of the concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and resistance in relation to identifications from these communities. By choosing literature set in times of national crisis and historical change (in India, and in East Africa for the Goan diaspora), I have been attentive to the varying ways in which literary characters and narrators confront, project, or elide contradictions of proximity and difference in the production of racial, cultural, and national identity. The main literary texts in the discussion of Anglo- Indian identifications include John Masters’ “Bhowani Junction”, Manorama Mathai’s “Mulligatawny Soup”, Stephen Alter’s “Neglected Lives” and Allan Sealy’s “The Trotter-Nama”. In these texts, I have examined how the narrative opens up or circumscribes the agency and racial identifications of Anglo-Indian characters. As well, I make some references to Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” and selected work by Ruskin Bond. The central literary texts in the discussion of Goan Catholic and diasporic identifications include Lambert Mascarenhas’ “Sorrowing Lies My Land”, Kiran Nagarkar’s “Ravan and Eddie”, João da Veiga Coutinho’s “A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History”, selected writing by damian lopes, and Peter Nazareth’s “In a Brown Mantle” and “The General is Up”. I also dwell in some detail on selected short stories by Lino Leitão, and Violet Dias Lannoy’s “Pears from the Willow Tree”. I examine the role of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholic women literary characters, making the case that, for the most part, it is male characters who are given political and narrative complexity in terms of negotiating colonialism and nationalism, and that women characters, when central, are imaged as mediating grounds to advance or block access to male characters who are competing over nationalist and colonialist discourses about race and sexuality. An exception is the poetry of Eunice de Souza where there is critical reflection on the position of Goan Catholic women.

Where relevant, I draw from particular areas of cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist theories (including those dealing with psychoanalysis), and writings about Indian history and nationalism. Writings from these areas offer pertinent insights on ambivalence in the production of subjectivity, and on the construction of Indianness in relation to arguments on colonialism, gender, caste, class, secularism, and the religious right (especially the discourses of Hindutva). While the identifications and identity of Anglo-Indians and Goan Catholics appear in the genre of history, these communities are largely absent or peripheral in the area of literary analysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory pertaining to India. Therefore, I hope that a study of these communities will contribute to the discussion of religious and multiracial identifications that is increasingly relevant to the field of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Copy Cat Copy Cat?
• Chapter 1: “A Certain Way of Being There”
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Proximity and Distance: Colonialism and the Construction of Mimic Subjectivity
  • 1.3 Forms of Mimic Subjectivity and the Question of Subversion
  • 1.4 Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indianness
• Chapter 2: Negotiating Classifications: Writing an Anglo-Indian History
  • 2.1 Introducing Mixed Race Classifications
  • 2.2 Anglo-Indians and the Discourse of Mixed Races under British Colonialism
  • 2.3 Scientific Racialism and Other Discourses of Mixed Races
  • 2.4 Conclusion: (Dis)placing Anglo-Indian Classifications and Affiliation
• Chapter 3: (By) Passing Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications in Literature
  • 3.1 Literary Antecedents: Representations of Mixed Race People
  • 3.2 “Species Loyally”: Anglo-Indian Identifications in John Masters’ Bhowani Junction
  • 3.3 Between Homes: Manorama Mathai’s Mulligatawny Soup
  • 3.4 Escaping from History: Stephen Alter’s Neglected Lives
  • 3.5 Interracial Relationships in Bhowani Junction, Mulligatawny Soup and Neglected Lives: Possibilities and Closures
• Chapter 4: Beyond Doom and Gloom: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
  • 4.1 Introduction: Alternatives to Stereotypes of Anglo-Indian Identifications
  • 4.2 Contending with “The Grey Man’s Burden”: Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama
• Chapter 5: Writing Identity in Goan History
  • 5.1 Claims in the Writing of Goan History.
  • 5.2 Early History of the Portuguese in India and Goa
  • 5.3 Mixing Trade, Religion, and Race
  • 5.4 Conversion to Christianity and the Practice of Religion Under British and Portuguese Colonialism
  • 5.5 Caste, Conversion, and National Identity in Portuguese Goa and British India
  • 5.6 Placing the Politics of Resistance to Portuguese Rule
  • 5.7 Claiming Goa: Liberation or Invasion?.
  • 5.8 The Impact of Language and Migration in the Construction of Goan Identity Today
  • 5.9 Colonial and Caste Effects in Locating Conversion to Christianity Within Communal and Secular Debates in Contemporary India
• Chapter 6: Identifications in Crisis: Goan Catholics in Literature
  • 6.1 The Question of Goan Identity
  • 6.2 Writing Against Colonialism: Lambert Mascarenhas’ Sorrowing Lies My Land, Lino Leitão’s “The Miracle” and “Armando Rodrigues”
  • 6.3 The Crisis of Leadership: Violet Dias Lannoy’s Pears from the Willow Tree and Lambert Mascarenhas’ A Greater Tragedy
  • 6.4 Interrogating Gender: The Poetry of Eunice de Souza
  • 6.5 Hindus and Catholics: Where Parallel Worlds of Difference Meet in the Horizon of Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie
• Chapter 7: “The Intimate Outsider”: History and Location in Literature from the Goan Catholic Diaspora
  • 7.1 Introductory Issues in Writing Diaspora
  • 7.2 The Search for a Theory of Goan History: João da Veiga Coutinho’s A Kind of Absence: Life in the Shadow of History.
  • 7.3 East African Goan Catholics: Narrating the Third That Walks Between Black and White in Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle and The General Is Up
  • 7.4 Intermediary Positions and Peter Nazareth’s Narrators
  • 7.5 Navigating Historical Legacies in damian lopes’ Writing
• Chapter 8: Epilogue: The Politics of Engagement
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race and Ethnicity in Society: The Changing Landscape, 3rd Edition

Cengage Learning
2012
480 pages
ISBN-10: 1111519536; ISBN-13: 9781111519537

Edited by

Elizabeth Higginbotham, Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Criminology
University of Delaware

Margaret L. Andersen, Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Sociology
University of Delaware

This engaging reader is organized in four major thematic parts, subdivided into thirteen different sections. Part I (“The Social Basis of Race and Ethnicity”) establishes the analytical frameworks that are now being used to think about race in society. The section examines the social construction of race and ethnicity as concepts and experience. Part II (“Continuity and Change: How We Got Here and What It Means”) explores both the historical patterns of inclusion and exclusion that have established racial and ethnic inequality, while also explaining some of the contemporary changes that are shaping contemporary racial and ethnic relations. Part III (“Race and Social Institutions”) examines the major institutional structures in contemporary society and investigates patterns of racial inequality within these institutions. Persistent inequality in the labor market and in patterns of community, residential, and educational segregation continue to shape the life chances of different groups. Part IV (“Building a Just Society”) concludes the book by looking at both large-scale contexts of change, such as those reflected in the movement to elect the first African American president.

• Major themes include coverage showing the diversity of experiences that now constitute “race” in the United States; teaching students the significance of race as a socially constructed system of social relations; showing the connection between different racial identities and the social structure of race; understanding how racism works as a belief system rooted in societal institutions; providing a social structural analysis of racial inequality; providing a historical perspective on how the racial order has emerged and how it is maintained; examining how people have contested the dominant racial order; exploring current strategies for building a just multiracial society.
• Each section includes several pages of analysis that outline the main concepts to be covered, providing a clear initial roadmap for reading and a convenient resource students can use with assignments and while preparing for exams.
• The text’s unique organization according to overarching themes and relevant subtopics, including identity, social construction of race, why race matters, inequality, and segregation, places the articles into a broader context to promote greater understanding.
• This innovative text looks beyond a simple black/white dichotomy and focuses more broadly on an extremely wide range of ethnic groups, providing a much more realistic and useful exploration of key topics that is more relevant and compelling for today’s diverse student population.

Table of Contents

• PART I: THE SOCIAL BASIS OF RACE AND ETHINICITY
  • 1. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 1. Howard F. Taylor, “Defining Race”
    • 2. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., “The Race Myth”
    • 3. Abby Ferber, “Planting the Seed: The Invention of Race”
    • 4. Karen Brodkin, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?”
    • 5. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “On Racial Formation”—Student Exercises
  • 2. What Do You Think? Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Racism
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 6. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, “American Racism in the Twenty-First Century”
    • 7. Charles A. Gallagher, “Color-Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post Race America”
    • 8. Judith Ortiz Cofer, “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria”
    • 9. Rainier Spencer, “Mixed Race Chic”
    • 10. Rebekah Nathan, “What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student”—Student Exercises
  • 3. Representing Race and Ethnicity: The Media and Popular Culture
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 11. Craig Watkins, “Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism”
    • 12. Fatimah N. Muhammed, “How to NOT Be 21st Century Venus Hottentots”
    • 13. Rosie Molinary, “María de la Barbie”
    • 14. Charles Springwood and C. Richard King, “‘Playing Indian’: Why Native American Mascots Must End”
    • 15. Jennifer C. Mueller, Danielle Dirks, and Leslie Houts Picca, “Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Order”—Student Exercises
  • 4. Who Are You? Race and Identity
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 16. Beverly Tatum, interview with John O’Neil, “Why are the Black Kids Sitting Together?”
    • 17. Priscilla Chan, “Drawing the Boundaries”
    • 18. Michael Omi and Taeku Lee, “Barack Like Me: Our First Asian American President”
    • 19. Tim Wise, “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son”—Student Exercises
• PART II: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE: HOW WE GOT HERE AND WHAT IT MEANS
  • 5. Who Belongs? Race, Rights, and Citizenship
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 20. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequality”
    • 21. C. Matthew Snipp, “The First Americans: American Indians”
    • 22. Susan M. Akram and Kevin R. Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law After September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims”
    • 23. Peggy Levitt, “Salsa and Ketchup: Transnational Migrants Saddle Two Worlds”—Student Exercises
  • 6. The Changing Face of America: Immigration
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 24. Mae M. Ngai, “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America”
    • 25. Nancy Foner, “From Ellis Island to JFK: Education in New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration”
    • 26. Charles Hirschman and Douglas S. Massey, “Places and Peoples: The New American Mosaic”
    • 27. Pew Research Center, “Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America”—Student Exercises
  • 7. Exploring Intersections: Race, Class, Gender and Inequality
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 28. Patricia Hill Collins, “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection”
    • 29. Yen Le Espiritu, “Theorizing Race, Gender, and Class”
    • 30. Roberta Coles and Charles Green, “The Myth of the Missing Black Father”
    • 31. Nikki Jones, “From Good to Ghetto”
    • 32. Gladys García-Lopez and Denise A. Segura, “‘They Are Testing You All the Time’: Negotiating Dual Femininities among Chicana Attorneys”—Student Exercises
• PART III: RACE AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
  • 8. Race and the Workplace
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 33. William Julius Wilson, “Toward a Framework for Understanding Forces that Contribute to or Reinforce Racial Inequality”
    • 34. Deirdre A. Royster, “Race and The Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs”
    • 35. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Families on the Frontier”.
    • 36. Angela Stuesse, “Race, Migration and Labor Control”—Student Exercises
  • 9. Shaping Lives and Love: Race, Families, and Communities
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 37. Joe R. Feagin and Karyn D. McKinney, ”The Family and Community Costs of Racism”
    • 38. Dorothy Roberts, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare”
    • 39. Kumiko Nemoto, “Interracial Relationships: Discourses and Images”
    • 40. Zhenchao Qian, “Breaking the Last Taboo: Interracial Marriage in America”—Student Exercises
  • 10. How We Live and Learn: Segregation, Housing, and Education
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 41. John E. Farley and Gregory D. Squires, “Fences and Neighbors: Segregation in the 21st Century”
    • 42. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe”
    • 43. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, “Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies”
    • 44. Heather Beth Johnson and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools: Race and the ‘Good Choices’ of White Families”—Student Exercises
  • 11. Do We Care? Race, Health Care and the Environment
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 45. H. Jack Geiger, “Health Disparities: What Do We Know? What Do We Need to Know? What Should We Do?”
    • 46. Shirley A. Hill, “Cultural Images and the Health of African American Women”
    • 47. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, “Poisoning the Planet: The Struggle for Environmental Justice”
    • 48. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, “Race, Place and the Environment”—Student Exercises
  • 12. Criminal Injustice? Courts, Crime, and the Law
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 49. Bruce Western, “Punishment and Inequality”
    • 50. Rubén Rumbaut, Roberto Gonzales, Goinaz Kamaie, and Charlie V. Moran, “Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment among First and Second Generation Young Men”
    • 51. Christina Swarns, “The Uneven Scales of Capital Justice”
    • 52. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record”—Student Exercises
• PART IV: BUILDING A JUST SOCIETY
  • 13. Moving Forward: Analysis and Social Action
    • Introduction by Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen
    • 53. Thomas F. Pettigrew, “Post-Racism? Putting Obama’s Victory in Perspective”
    • 54. Frank Dobbins, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly, “Diversity Management in Corporate America”
    • 55. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Ways to Fight Hate”—Student Exercises