Mixed Race Studies

Reflections: An Anthology of African-American Philosophy, 1st Edition

Cengage Learning
2000
464 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0534573932  ISBN-13: 9780534573935

Edited by:

James Montmarquet, Professor of Philosophy
Tennessee State University

William Hardy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Tennessee State University

This anthology provides the instructor with a sufficient quantity, breadth, and diversity of materials to be the sole text for a course on African-American philosophy. It includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes which instructors can effectively employ to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the “nationalist” focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Introduction.
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS-RACE AND RACISM.
  • 1. W.E.B. DuBois: From The Souls of Black Folk.
  • 2. Molefi K. Asante: Racism, Consciousness, and Afrocentricity.
  • 3. Kwame Anthony Appiah: Racisms.
  • 4. J. L. A. Garcia: The Heart of Racisms. Contemporary Issue: Views on “Mixed Race”.
  • 5. Naomi Zack: Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy.
  • 6. Lewis R. Gordon: Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race-In Theory.
• PART TWO: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-NATIONALISM, SEPARATISM, AND ASSIMILATION.
  • 7. Martin R. Delaney: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Peoples of the United States.
  • 8. Frederick Douglass: The Future of the Negro, The Future of the Colored Race, The Nation’s Problem, and On Colonization.
  • 9. Marcus Garvey: From Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
  • 10. Maulana Karenga: The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and Message.
  • 11. Molefi K. Asante: The Afrocentric Idea in Education.
  • 12. Cornel West: The Four Traditions of Response. Contemporary Issue: “Ebonics”.
  • 13. Geneva Smitherman: Black English/Ebonics: What it Be Like?
  • 14. Milton Baxter: Educating Teachers about Educating the Oppressed. Feminism, Womanism, and Gender Relations.
  • 15. Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?
  • 16. Patricia Hill Collins: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.
  • 17. bell hooks: Reflections on Race and Sex.
  • 18. Angela P. Harris: Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.
  • 19. Charles W. Mills: Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women? Contemporary Issue: Women’s Rights and Black Nationalism.
  • 20. E. Francis White: Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism.
  • 21. Amiri Baraka: Black Woman. Violence, Liberation, and Social Justice.
  • 22. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
  • 23. Malcolm X: Message to the Grass Roots.
  • 24. Howard McGary: Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression.
  • 25. Laurence M. Thomas: Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity. Contemporary Issue: Affirmative Action.
  • 26. Bernard Boxill: Affirmative Action.
  • 27. Shelby Steele: Affirmative Action. Ethics and Value Theory.
  • 28. Alain Locke: Values and Imperatives.
  • 29. Michele M. Moody-Adams: Race, Class, and the Social Construction of Self-Respect.
  • 30. Laurence M. Thomas: Friendship.
  • 31. Cornel West: Nihilism in Black America.
  • 32. Katie G. Cannon: Unctuousness as a Virtue: According to the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary Issue: A Classic Question of Values, Rights, and Education.
  • 33. Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address.
  • 34. W.E.B. DuBois: The Talented Tenth.
• PART THREE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELATED DISCIPLINES.
  • 35. Patricia J. Williams: Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.
  • 36. Regina Austin: Sapphire Bound!
  • 37. Derrick Bell: Racial Realism-After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch.
  • 38. John Arthur: Critical Race Theory: A Critique. Contemporary Issue: Racist Hate Speech.
  • 39. Charles Lawrence and Gerald Gunther: Prohibiting Racist Speech: A Debate. Aesthetics.
  • 40. James Baldwin: Everybody’s Protest Novel.
  • 41. Larry Neal: The Black Arts Movement.
  • 42. Angela Y. Davis: Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: Music and Social Consciousness.
  • 43. Ralph Ellison: Blues People. Contemporary Issue: Rap Music.
  • 44. Crispin Sartwell: Rap Music and the Uses of Stereotype.
  • 45. Kimberle Crenshaw: Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew. Philosophy and Theology.
  • 46. David Walker: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United stated.
  • 47. James H. Cone: God and Black Theology.
  • 48. Victor Anderso: Ontological Blackness in Theology.
  • 49. Anthony Pinn: Alternative Perspectives and Critiques. Contemporary Issue: Womanist Theology and the Traditionalist Black Church.
  • 50. Cheryl J. Sanders: Christian Ethics and Theology in a Womanist Perspective.
  • 51. Delores Williams: Womanist Reflections on “the Black Church,” the African-American Denominational Churches and the Universal Hagar’s Spiritual Church.
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.

The one-drop aesthetic: How literary formalism reinvented race in the United States

Harvard University
2009
233 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3365201
ISBN: 9781109254617

Kevin Brian Birmingham

A dissertation presented by Kevin Brian Birmingham to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English.

The One-Drop Aesthetic argues that late twentieth-century theories of race and identity are translations of the early twentieth century’s aesthetic formalism, the New Criticism. The first cohesive formalism in the United States was an aesthetic ideology shaped by the imperfections of the South, which the southern New Critics took as a social model for their aesthetic ideals. They imagined literature not as a solid structure or an organic wholeness but as a welter of contingencies—a terrain that, like the South, was besieged by science and industry and whose beauty resided in fragments and ashes. The New Criticism was largely a dialogue between Allen Tate’s faith in transcendent wholeness and Ransom’s attention to art’s “infinite residue.”

Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Angelo Robinson, Associate Professor of English

“Am I Black or White? Am I Straight or Gay? CONTROVERSY?”  Since its founding, and long before recording artist Prince penned these lyrics in the 1980s, America has been a space and a place demanding and mandating polarized definitions of race and sexuality. This course will examine the reasoning behind and ramifications of these dichotomies from the Colonial Period to the present in genres that include literature, film, and music.  We will also explore how these binaries affect people who identify as biracial and bisexual.

This discussion-based course requires intensive reading, viewing, and listening and will foster your critical thinking and analytical writing.  Topics of discussion will include the “one-drop rule,” the slavery debate, miscegenation, racial passing, segregation, integration, interracial desire, and sexual passing.  Special attention will be given to individuals who and organizations that refuse to follow racial and sexual dictates. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Adrienne Rich, E. Lynn Harris, and Barack Obama.

Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

Ohio State University Press
July 2008
224 pages
6×9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8142-5168-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1091-8
CD ISBN: 978-0-8142-9171-9

Margo Natalie Crawford, Associate Professor of English
Cornell University

After the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post–Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.

Read excerpts from the book here.