Mixed Race Studies

The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

Random House, Inc.
2011-08-16
336 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-45555-0

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency.
 
Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.
 
Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history.
 
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

The Human Stain

Random House
May 2000
384 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-72634-7

Philip Roth

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk’s astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “magnificently” interwoven with “the larger public history of modern America.”

Read an excerpt here.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Crown an Imprint of Random House
July 1995
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-38341-9 (0-307-38341-5)

Barack Obama, President of the United States

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

Take One Candle, Light a Room: A Novel

Pantheon Books an Imprint of Random House
2010-10-12
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-37914-6 (0-307-37914-0)

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her southern California home most of the time. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her close friend Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-one-year-old son, Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor— Fantine’s godson—has fled to Louisiana. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.
 
But Fantine’s own fate will be altered on this journey as well: her father will reveal the wrenching secrets of his past, and she will be compelled to question the most essential choices she’s made in her life. And all three characters will come face-to-face with the issues of race that beset them: Fantine, whose light black skin has eased her way in the world; her father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South; and Victor, whose fall into violence mirrors the path of so many other black men his age.
 
Take One Candle, Light a Room is a powerfully moving story about the intricacies of human connection, and about the ways in which we find a place for ourselves within our families and the world.

White Teeth: A Novel

Vintage an imprint of Random House
2001-06-12
464 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-70386-7 (0-375-70386-1)

Zadie Smith

On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie–working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt–is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.

Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families–one headed by Archie, the other by Archie’s best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for “no problem”). Samad–devoutly Muslim, hopelessly “foreign”–weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire’s worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.

Zadie Smith’s dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes–faith, race, gender, history, and culture–and triumphs.

Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption

Vintage an imprint of Random House, Inc. Academic Resources
2003
688 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70264-8 (0-375-70264-4)

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

From the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and Race, Crime, and the Law—a tour de force about the controversial issue of personal interracial intimacy as it exists within ever-changing American social mores and within the rule of law.

Fears of transgressive interracial relationships, informed over the centuries by ugly racial biases and fantasies, still linger in American society today. This brilliant study—ranging from plantation days to the present—explores the historical, sociological, legal, and moral issues that continue to feed and complicate that fear.

In chapters filled with provocative and cleanly stated logic and enhanced by intriguing historical anecdotes, Randall Kennedy tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics and of race in sexual politics, the prominence of legal institutions in defining racial distinction and policing racial boundaries, the imagined and real pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy, and the competing arguments around interracial romance, sex, and family life throughout American history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• One – In the Age of Slavery
• Two – From Reconstruction to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
• Three – From Black-Power Backlash to the New Amalgamationism
• Four – Race, Racism, and Sexual Coercion
• Five – The Enforcement of Antimiscegenation Laws
• Six – Fighting Antimiscegenation Laws
• Seven – Racial Passing
• Eight – Passing the the Schuyler Family
• Nine – Racial Conflict and the Parenting of Children: A Survey of Competing Approaches
• Ten – The Tragedy of Race Marching in Black and White
• Eleven – White Parents and the Black Children in Adoptive Families
• Twelve – Race, Children, and Custody Battles: The Special Status of Native Americans
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Read an excerpt of the book here.