Mixed Race Studies

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body

Oxford University Press
2015-12-01
240 Pages
53 images
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199968169
Paperback ISBN: 9780199968176

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Senior Lecturer in Dance
Royal Holloway University of London

• Weaves together historical method, auto-ethnographic, and performative writing
• Sits at the precipice of scholarly and public interest in Cuban cultural history

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

Table of Contents

• Prologue, Entre Familia/Between Family
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historicizing Hip(g)nosis
• Interlude 1: Echando Cuentos/Telling Stories
• Chapter 2: Hip(g)nosis at Work: Rumors, Social Dance and Cuba’s Academias de Baile
• Interlude 2: A Marriage Proposal
• Chapter 3: Hip(g)nosis as Pleasure: The Mulata in Film
• Interlude 3: Lost Baggage
• Chapter 4: Hip(g)nosis as Brand: Despelote, Tourism and Mulata Citizenship
• Conclusion or Rear Endings
• Index

Correcting the conversation about race

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2015-11-20

Carlos Hoyt

On 6 November 2015, the New York Times featured a poignant five-minute documentary called “A Conversation About Growing Up Black,” produced by Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz. Brewster and Peltz present Rakesh, Miles, Malek, Marvin, Shaquille, Bisa, Jumoke, Maddox, and Myles. The youngest are 10 and the eldest is 25 years old. These nine individuals are very different from one another (hair, height, weight, skin color, voice, manner of speech, body language… all those things that combine to make each of us unique). As with all human beings, each of them is his own universe of individuality and each occupies several universes of other individuals known as family, friends, teammates, school mates, colleagues, and the like.

But we never learn much about the individuality of these individuals: where they live; where they go to school or work; what their worldviews might be on faith, politics, or the environment; what are their talents, their challenges; what they love, and what they dislike. Instead we are introduced to them as racialized human beings, adversely racialized nominally black males to be specific, who by dint of this social relegation are subject to suspicion, discrimination, degradation, and brutality.

We encounter them as living, breathing targets of racism.

We are graced with their eloquent and compelling meditations on racism, their narratives of being misrepresented, misunderstood and mistreated, and their heroic resolve to successfully navigate the mine-infested landscape of the racist country in which they live – for themselves and for their loving, protective, and worried parents.

It is a heartbreaking five-minutes of film.

And it will change nothing…

Read the entire article here.

Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Oxford University Press
2014-01-27
336 Pages | 9 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199313501

Katy L. Chiles, Associate Professor of English
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• First detailed study of “literary race” in eighteenth-century America
• Brings together the scholarly discourses on American Indian identity, the racial regime of African slavery, and the developing discourse of race in eighteenth-century natural history with convincing literary analysis
• Covers canonical texts by Ben Franklin, Samson Occum, Phillis Wheatley, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, “How could a person of one race come to be another?” Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, Transformable Race is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of “transformable race” structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Charles Brockden Brown, Transformable Race demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.

The Hip Hop & Obama Reader

Oxford University Press
2015-10-14
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199341801
Paperback ISBN: 9780199341818

Edited by:

Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Erik Nielson, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts
University of Richmond

• Offers a comprehensive, scholarly analysis of the relationship between hip hop and politics in the era of Obama.
• The first hip hop anthology to center on contemporary politics, activism, and social change.
• Features contributions from distinguished scholars, award-winning journalists, and public intellectuals.

Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop–often regarded as politically radioactive–in his presidential campaigns. Just as important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists embraced him in return. This new relationship fundamentally altered the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what will it look like in the decades to come?

The Hip Hop & Obama Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and activists offer new perspectives on hip hop’s role in political mobilization, grassroots organizing, campaign branding, and voter turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial, and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting readers to reassess how Obama’s presidency continues to be shaped by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop music and politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader critically examines hip hop’s potential to effect social change in the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting relationship between democracy and popular culture.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Foreword Tricia Rose, Brown University
• Introduction: The State of Hip Hop in the Age of Obama / Erik Nielson, University of Richmond; Travis L. Gosa, Cornell University
• PART I: MOVE THE CROWD: HIP HOP POLITICS IN THE U.S. AND ABROAD
  • 1. Message from the Grassroots: Hip Hop Activism, Millennials, and the Race for the White House / Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, University of Connecticut
  • 2. It’s Bigger Than Barack: Hip Hop Political Organizing, 2004-2013 / Elizabeth Méndez Berry, New York University; Bakari Kitwana, Author and CEO, Rap Sessions
  • 3. “There Are No Saviors”: Hip Hop and Community Activism in the Obama Era / Kevin Powell, Author and Activist
  • 4. “Obama Nation”: Hip Hop and Global Protest / Sujatha Fernandes, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
  • 5. “Record! I am Arab”: Paranoid Arab Boys, Global Cyphers, and Hip Hop Nationalism / Torie Rose DeGhett, Columbia University
• PART II: CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN? THE CONTESTED DISCOURSE OF OBAMA & HIP HOP
  • 6. Obama, Hip Hop, African American History, and “Historical Revivalism” / Pero G. Dagbovie, Michigan State University
  • 7. “Change That Wouldn’t Fill a Homeless Man’s Cup Up”: Filipino-American Political Hip Hop and Community Organizing in the Age of Obama / Anthony Kwame Harrison, Virginia Tech
  • 8. Obama/Time: The President in the Hip-Hop Nation / Murray Forman, Northeastern University
  • 9. One Day It Will All Make Sense: Obama, Politics and Common Sense / Charlie Braxton, Author and Activist
  • 10. “New Slaves”: The Soul of Hip-Hop Sold to Da Massah in the Age of Obama / Raphael Heaggans, Niagara University
• PART III: REPRESENT: GENDER AND LANGUAGE IN THE OBAMA ERA
  • 11. YouTube and Bad Bitches: Hip Hop’s Seduction Of Girls and The Distortion Of Participatory Culture / Kyra D. Gaunt, City University of New York
  • 12. A Performative Account of Black Girlhood / Ruth Nicole Brown, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • 13. The King’s English: Obama, Jay Z, and the Science of Code Switching / Michael P. Jeffries, Wellesley College
  • 14. My President is Black: Speech Act Theory and Presidential Allusions in the Lyrics of Rap Music / James Peterson and Cynthia Estremera, Lehigh University
  • Afterword: When Will Black Lives Matter? Neoliberalism, Democracy, and the Queering of American Activism in the Post-Obama Era / Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago
• Subject Index

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

Oxford University Press
June 2015
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199383092

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina
also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

• The first full-length study of how color intersected with polity, society and economy in the nineteenth-century South
• Pulls together and expands on previous research on the connection between color and wealth and health
• Compiles empirical economic research on how color affected plantation life, including which slaves ran away and were chased, or how color influenced entrepreneurship or education and the accumulation of human capital

Despite the many advances that the United States has made in racial equality over the past half century, numerous events within the past several years have proven prejudice to be alive and well in modern-day America. In one such example, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina dismissed one of her principal advisors in 2013 when his membership in the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read “God is the one who divided mankind into different races…. Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God.” This episode reveals America’s continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing-a problem that has plagued the United States since its earliest days as a nation.

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South demonstrates that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represent a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Economist Howard Bodenhorn presents the first full-length study of the ways in which skin color intersected with policy, society, and economy in the nineteenth-century South. With empirical and statistical rigor, the investigation confirms that individuals of mixed race experienced advantages over African Americans in multiple dimensions – in occupations, family formation and family size, wealth, health, and access to freedom, among other criteria.

The Color Factor concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing. The text is an ideal resource for students, social scientists, and historians, and anyone hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the historical roots of modern race dynamics in America.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Legal constructions of race and interpretations of color
• Chapter 2: Race mixing and color in literature and science
• Chapter 3: The plantation
• Chapter 4: Finding freedom
• Chapter 5: Marriage and the family
• Chapter 6: Work
• Chapter 7: Wealth
• Chapter 8: Height, health and mortality

The Evolution of the Idea of Race: From Scientific Racism to Genomics

Oxford University Press Webinar
Oxford University Press
Friday, 2015-03-20, 18:00-19:00Z, 14:00-15:00 EDT

Join Oxford University Press on Friday, March 20th for a Webinar featuring Tanya Golash-Boza.

Tanya Golash-Boza is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Mereced, and the author of the acclaimed textbook, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach.

In 1735, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus divided the world into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Europeanus, and Africanus. In the 1850s, Samuel George Morton measured human skulls to prove European superiority. His successor, Paul Broca, compared brain sizes. Psychologist R. M. Yerkes used IQ tests to the same end in the early 20th century, as did Herrnstein and Murray in the late 20th century. Today, scientists use genomics to prove there are biological differences between the races. What has changed and what has not? In this webinar, we will develop a sociological analysis of the evolution of the idea of race and of the persistence of racism.

For more information, click here.

The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era

Oxford University Press
2014-10-14
320 Pages
30 half-tones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199778805

Michael A. Ross, Associate Professor of History
University of Maryland

• Offers a glimpse into the volatile racial world of Reconstruction era New Orleans
• Guides readers through one of the first sensationalized kidnapping trials of the late 19th Century
• Offers fresh insights on the complexities and possibilities of the Reconstruction era

In June 1870, the residents of the city of New Orleans were already on edge when two African American women kidnapped seventeen-month-old Mollie Digby from in front of her New Orleans home. It was the height of Radical Reconstruction, and the old racial order had been turned upside down: black men now voted, held office, sat on juries, and served as policemen. Nervous white residents, certain that the end of slavery and resulting “Africanization” of the city would bring chaos, pointed to the Digby abduction as proof that no white child was safe. Louisiana’s twenty-eight-year old Reconstruction governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, hoping to use the investigation of the kidnapping to validate his newly integrated police force to the highly suspicious white population of New Orleans, saw to it that the city’s best Afro-Creole detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, was put on the case, and offered a huge reward for the return of Mollie Digby and the capture of her kidnappers. When the Associated Press sent the story out on the wire, newspaper readers around the country began to follow the New Orleans mystery. Eventually, police and prosecutors put two strikingly beautiful Afro-Creole women on trial for the crime, and interest in the case exploded as a tense courtroom drama unfolded.

In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, Michael Ross offers the first full account of this event that electrified the South at one of the most critical moments in the history of American race relations. Tracing the crime from the moment it was committed through the highly publicized investigation and sensationalized trial that followed, all the while chronicling the public outcry and escalating hysteria as news and rumors surrounding the crime spread, Ross paints a vivid picture of the Reconstruction-era South and the complexities and possibilities that faced the newly integrated society. Leading readers into smoke-filled concert saloons, Garden District drawing rooms, sweltering courthouses, and squalid prisons, Ross brings this fascinating era back to life.

A stunning work of historical recreation, The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is sure to captivate anyone interested in true crime, the Civil War and its aftermath, and the history of New Orleans and the American South.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Ch 1 A Kidnapping in the Back of Town
• Ch 2 Detective John Baptiste Jourdain and His World
• Ch 3 A Trace of a Missing Child?
• Ch 4 A Knock at the Digbys’ Door
• Ch 5 The Arrest of the Alleged Accessories
• Ch 6 The Woman in the Seaside Hat
• Ch 7 The Recorder’s Court
• Ch 8 A Highly Unusual Proceeding
• Ch 9 Unveiling the Mystery
• Ch 10 The Case “That Excited All New Orleans”
• Afterword and Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis

Oxford University Press
1997-06-05
336 pages
1 linecut, 5 maps
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780195097115
Paperback ISBN: 9780195097122

Peter Bakker, Associate professor
Department of Aesthetics and Communication
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The Michif language—spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada—is considered an “impossible language” since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.

Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach

Oxford University Press
2014-08-01
528 pages
7-1/2 x 9-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780199920013

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach engages students in critical questions related to racial dynamics in the U.S. and around the world. Written in accessible, straightforward language, the book discusses and critically analyzes cutting-edge scholarship in the field. Organized into topics and concepts rather than discrete racial groups, the text addresses:

• How and when the idea of race was created and developed
• How structural racism has worked historically to reproduce inequality
• How we have a society rampant with racial inequality, even though most people do not consider themselves to be racist
• How race, class, and gender work together to create inequality and identities
• How immigration policy in the United States has been racialized
• How racial justice could be imagined and realized

Centrally focused on racial dynamics, Race and Racisms also incorporates an intersectional perspective, discussing the intersections of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.

Table of Contents

• List of Excerpts
• Letter from the Author
• About the Author
• Preface
• Part I: The History of the Idea of Race
  • 1. The Origin of the Idea of Race
    • Defining Race and Racism
    • Race: The Evolution of an Ideology
    • Historical Precedents to the Idea of Race
    • Slavery Before the Idea of Race
    • European Encounters with Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
    • Voices: The Spanish Treatment of Indigenous Peoples
    • The Enslavement of Africans
    • The Need for Labor in the Thirteen Colonies
    • The Legal Codification of Racial Differences
    • Voices: From Bullwhip Days
    • The Rise of Science and the Question of Human Difference
    • European Taxonomies
    • Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century
    • The Indian Removal Act: The Continuation of Manifest Destiny
    • Freedom and Slavery in the United States
    • Global View: The Idea of Race in Latin America
  • 2. Race and Citizenship from the 1840s to the 1920s
    • The Continuation of Scientific Racism
    • Measuring Race: From Taxonomy to Measurement
    • Intelligence Testing
    • Eugenics
    • Voices: Carrie Buck
    • Exclusionary Immigration Policies
    • The Chinese Exclusion Act
    • The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
    • Birthright Citizenship for Whites Only
    • Naturalization for “Free White People”
    • How the Irish, Italians, and Jews Became White
    • The Irish: From Celts to Whites
    • The Italians: From Mediterraneans to Caucasians
    • The Jews: From Hebrews to White
    • African Americans and Native Americans: The Long, Troubled Road to Citizenship
    • African Americans and the Long Road to Freedom
    • Native Americans: Appropriating Lands, Assimilating Tribes
• Part II: Racial Ideologies
  • 3. Racial Ideologies from the 1920s to the Present
    • Voices: Trayvon Martin
    • The 1920s to 1965: Egregious Acts in the Era of Overt Racism
    • Mass Deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans
    • Internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans
    • Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
    • Voices: Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu
    • The Civil Rights Movement and the Commitment to Change
    • Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
    • Sit-Ins
    • Freedom Rides
    • Old Versus New Racism: The Evolution of an Ideology
    • Biological Racism
    • Cultural Racism
    • Color-Blind Universalism
    • Global View: Cultural Racism in Peru
    • The Maintenance of Racial Hierarchy: Color-Blind Racism
    • Four Frames of Color-Blind Racism
    • Rhetorical Strategies of Color-Blind Racism
    • The New Politics of Race: Racism in the Age of Obama
  • 4. The Spread of Ideology: “Controlling Images” and Racism in the Media
    • Portrayals of People of Color on Television and in Other Media
    • Portrayals of Blacks
    • Portrayals of Latino/as
    • Research Focus: The Hot Latina Stereotype in Desperate Housewives
    • Portrayals of Arabs and Arab Americans
    • Portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans
    • Portrayals of Native Americans
    • Racial Stereotypes in Films
    • Global View: Racial Stereotypes in Peruvian Television
    • New Media Representations
    • Video Games
    • Social Media
    • Voices: I Am Not Trayvon Martin
    • Media Images and Racial Inequality
    • Raced, Classed, and Gendered Media Images
  • 5. Colorism and Skin-Color Stratification
    • The History of Colorism
    • Research Focus: Latino Immigrants and the U.S. Racial Order
    • The Origins of Colorism in the Americas
    • Does Colorism Predate Colonialism? The Origins of Colorism in Asia and Africa
    • The Global Color Hierarchy
    • Asia and Asian Americans
    • Latin America and Latinos/as
    • Voices: The Fair-Skin Battle
    • Africa and the African Diaspora
    • Voices: Colorism and Creole Identity
    • Skin Color, Gender, and Beauty
  • 6. White Privilege and the Changing U.S. Racial Hierarchy
    • White Privilege
    • Research Focus: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
    • Whiteness, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
    • Whiteness and Racial Categories in Twenty-First-Century America
    • Latino/as and the Multiracial Hierarchy
    • The Other Whites: Arab Americans, North Africans, Middle Easterners, and Their Place in the U.S. Racial Hierarchy
    • Multiracial Identification and the U.S. Racial Hierarchy
    • Voices: Brandon Stanford: “My Complexion Is Not Black but I Am Black”
    • Will the United States Continue to Be a White-Majority Society?
    • Global View: Social, Cultural, and Intergenerational Whitening in Latin America
    • Changes in Racial and Ethnic Classifications
    • Revisiting the Definitions of Race and Ethnicity
• Part III: Policy & Institutions
  • 7. Understanding Racial Inequality Today: Socio logical Theories of Racism
    • Racial Discrimination, Prejudice, and Institutional Racism
    • Individual Racism
    • Voices: Microaggressions
    • Institutional Racism
    • Global View: Microaggressions in Peru
    • Systemic and Structural Racism
    • Systemic Racism
    • Structural Racism
    • Research Focus: Systemic Racism and Hurricane Katrina
    • Racial Formation: Its Contributions and Its Critics
    • White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism
    • Research Focus: Applying Settler Colonialism Theory
    • Intersectional Theories of Race and Racism
  • 8. Educational Inequality
    • The History of Educational Inequality
    • Indian Schools
    • Segregation and Landmark Court Cases
    • The Persistence of Racial Segregation in the Educational System
    • Affirmative Action in Higher Education
    • Educational Inequality Today
    • Research Focus: American Indian/Alaska Native College Student Retention
    • The Achievement Gap: Sociological Explanations for Persistent Inequality
    • Global View: Affirmative Action in Brazil
    • Parental Socioeconomic Status
    • Cultural Explanations: “Acting White” and Other Theories
    • Tracking
    • Social and Cultural Capital and Schooling
    • Hidden Curricula
    • Voices: Moesha
    • Research Focus: Rosa Parks Elementary and the Hidden Curriculum
  • 9. Income and Labor Market Inequality
    • Income Inequality by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
    • Dimensions of Racial Disparities in the Labor Market
    • Disparities Among Women
    • Disparities Among Latinos and Asian Americans
    • Underemployment, Unemployment, and Joblessness
    • Voices: Jarred
    • Sociological Explanations for Income and Labor Market Inequality
    • Voices: Francisco Pinto’s Experiences in 3-D Jobs
    • Individual-Level Explanations
    • Structural Explanations
    • Research Focus: Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market
    • Affirmative Action
    • Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment 260
    • Global View: Racial Discrimination in Australia
  • 10. Inequality in Housing and Wealth
    • Land Ownership After Slavery
    • Residential Segregation
    • The Creation of Residential Segregation
    • Discriminatory and Predatory Lending Practices
    • Research Focus: The Role of Real Estate in Creating Segregated Cities
    • Neighborhood Segregation Today
    • Voices: A Tale of Two Families
    • Wealth Inequality
    • Inequality in Homeownership and Home Values
    • Wealth Inequality Beyond Homeownership
    • Explaining the Wealth Gap in the Twenty-First Century
  • 11. Racism and the Criminal Justice System
    • Mass Incarceration in the United States
    • The Rise of Mass Incarceration
    • Mass Incarceration in a Global Context
    • Race and Mass Incarceration
    • Global View: Prisons in Germany and the Netherlands
    • The Inefficacy of Mass Incarceration
    • Voices: Kemba Smith
    • Mass Incarceration and the War on Drugs
    • Race, Class, Gender, and Mass Incarceration
    • Institutional Racism in the Criminal Justice System
    • Racial Profiling
    • Sentencing Disparities
    • The Ultimate Sentence: Racial Disparities in the Death Penalty
    • Voices: Troy Davis
    • The Economics of Mass Incarceration
    • Private Prisons
    • The Prison-Industrial Complex
    • Beyond Incarceration: Collateral Consequences
    • The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Families and Children
    • The Lifelong Stigma of a Felony: “The New Jim Crow”
    • Research Focus: Can Felons Get Jobs?
  • 12. Health Inequalities, Environmental Racism, and Environmental Justice
    • The History of Health Disparities in the United States
    • Involuntary Experimentation on African Americans
    • Free Blacks as Mentally and Physically Unfit
    • Explaining Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity Today
    • Socioeconomic Status and Health Disparities by Race/Ethnicity
    • Segregation and Health
    • Research Focus: Health and Social Inequity in Alameda County, California
    • The Effects of Individual Racism on the Health of African Americans
    • Life-Course Perspectives on African American Health
    • Culture and Health
    • Global View: Health and Structural Violence in Guatemala
    • Genetics, Race, and Health
    • Voices: Race, Poverty, and Postpartum Depression
    • Environmental Racism
    • Movements for Environmental Justice
    • Voices: The Holt Family of Dickson, Tennessee
  • 13. Racism, Nativism, and Immigration Policy
    • Voices: Robert Bautista-Denied Due Process
    • The Racialized History of U.S. Immigration Policy
    • Race and the Making of U.S. Immigration Policies: 1790 to 1924
    • Global View: Whitening and Immigration Policy in Brazil
    • Nativism Between 1924 and 1964: Mass Deportation of Mexicans and the McCarran Internal Security Act
    • The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the Changing Face of Immigration
    • Illegal Immigration and Policy Response
    • The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA ) and Nativism
    • Proposition 187 and the Lead-Up to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (II RIRA)
    • The 1996 Laws and the Detention and Deportation of Black and Latino Immigrants
    • Voices: Hector, a Guatemalan Deportee
    • Nativism in the Twenty-First Century
• Part IV: Contesting & Comparing Racial Injustices
  • 14. Racial Justice in the United States Today
    • Perspectives on Racial Justice
    • Recognition, Responsibility, Reconstruction, and Reparations
    • Civil Rights
    • Human Rights
    • Moving Beyond Race
    • Intersectional Analyses: Race, Class, Gender
    • Racism and Capitalism
    • Struggles for Racial Justice
    • Racial Justice and the Foreclosure Crisis
    • DREAMers and the Fight for Justice
    • Voices: Fighting Against Foreclosures: A Racial Justice Story
    • Racial Justice and Empathy
  • 15. Thinking Globally: Race and Racisms in France, South Africa, and Brazil
    • How Do Other Countries Differ from the United States in Racial Dynamics?
    • Race and Racism in France
    • French Colonies in Africa
    • The French Antilles
    • African Immigration to France
    • Discrimination and Racial and Ethnic Inequality in France Today
    • Voices: The Fall 2005 Uprisings in the French Banlieues
    • Race and Racism in South Africa
    • Colonialism in South Africa: The British and the Dutch
    • The Apartheid Era (1948-1994)
    • The Persistence of Inequality in the Post-Apartheid Era
    • Research Focus: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa
    • Race and Racism in Brazil
    • Portuguese Colonization and the Slave Trade in Brazil
    • Whitening Through Immigration and Intermarriage
    • The Racial Democracy Myth in Brazil and Affirmative Action
    • Racial Categories in Brazil Today
    • Research Focus: Racial Ideology and Black-White Interracial Marriages in Rio de Janeiro
• Glossary
• References
• Credits
• Index

Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America

Oxford University Press
2010-02-16
352 Pages
15 b/w photos
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780195379792
Paperback ISBN: 9780199794454

Sharon Davies, Professor of Law; Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer’s motive? The priest had married Stephenson’s eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.

Sharon Davies’s Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson’s crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and “foreigners” as well. In one of the case’s most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson’s defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.

Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Best Laid Plans
• 2. A Parish to Run
• 3. Until Death Do Us Part
• 4. A City Reacts
• 5. A Killer Speaks
• 6. The Building of a Defense
• 7. The Engines of Justice Turn
• 8. Black Robes, White Robes
• 9. Trials and Tribulations
• 10. A Jury’s Verdict
• Epilogue