Mixed Race Studies

Black in Appalachia: Project unearths black history

The Daily Times: Blount County’s Newspaper of Record Since 1883
Maryville, Tennessee
2020-01-25

Linda Braden Albert, Daily Times Correspondent

Kenson Isom, great-great-grandfather of William Isom II, is pictured with his family. William Isom, director of the Black in Appalachia Project, discovered more about his ancestor’s history while researching a slave cemetery in Virginia.

William Isom II had been searching for his great-great-grandfather, Kelson Isom, for 20 years. He finally broke through the brick wall as a result of his work with the Black in Appalachia Project, researching a slave cemetery in Lee County, Virginia.

“I just so happened to find the record of my great-great-granddad as a slave in Scott County, Virginia,” Isom said. “He was listed as property in a will. The slave owner had died and listed him and his brothers as property in the will. Once you can find the slave owner you can find other records. For me, that was one of the most amazing finds that benefited me personally.”

William Isom II, director of the Black in Appalachia Project, will present a program at 7 p.m. Monday at the Blount County Public Library.

At 7 p.m. Monday, Isom, director of community outreach for East Tennessee PBS and director of Black in Appalachia, will speak about the project at the Blount County Public Library’s next program in its Southern Appalachian Studies Series. Admission is free, and the public is invited to attend…

Read the entire article here.

Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science

Stanford University Press
January 2018
200 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804795401
Paper ISBN: 9781503610095
Digital ISBN: 9781503604377

Terence Keel, Associate, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics
University of California, Los Angeles

Winner of the 2018 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.

Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history.

Keel’s study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

Such a Fun Age, a Novel

G.P. Putnam’s Sons (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2019-12-31
320 Pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9780593152379
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525541905
Ebook ISBN: 9780525541929

Kiley Reid

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store’s security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family,” and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

A Storm Blew in from Paradise

World Editions
2019-11-05
252 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64286-044-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64286-051-1

Johannes Anyuru
Translated by: Rachel Willson-Broyles

A storm blew in from paradise. That storm was life.’

P’s greatest dream is to fly. While training to become a Ugandan fighter pilot in an academy outside Athens, the 1971 Idi Amin coup in his homeland, Uganda, disrupts his plans. He defects and becomes a man on the run. In this extraordinary novel based on his own father’s fate, Anyuru evokes P’s struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, as a military-camp prisoner, and as an exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of a life as a pilot. Told across two generations in a language that simmers with lyrical longing, this search for identity and purpose soars from a world in which nowhere is home.