The Last Plantation: Color, Conflict, and Identity: Reflections of a New World BlackPosted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United States on 2013-02-17 19:23Z by Steven |
The Last Plantation: Color, Conflict, and Identity: Reflections of a New World Black
Houghton Mifflin
1997-02-10
307 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 0395771919; ISBN-13: 978-0395771914
In the 1980s, when most Americans considered “black” a racial reference, many multiracial people began to see themselves as part of a heterogeneous ethnic group linked by history, culture, and blood—a distinction that has led to considerable conflict. Prompted by the comment “You look like an ordinary Negro to me,” Itabari Njeri, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, decided to take a look at her own family in order to explore racism within her community. What she discovered is disturbing. Referring to incidents in the news—the Rodney King beating, the black boycott of Korean grocers in Los Angeles, the killing of a black teenager by a Korean immigrant—as well as to her family, Njeri lays out with precision and power how limited racial definitions contribute to the psychological slavery that makes the mind the last plantation. She provides telling evidence that the recognition of a larger, multiracial identity—which would substantially define most Americans—we can challenge marginalizing concepts and the way in which the racial debate is now framed.