Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families, this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out was written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who may soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black, then white, then black again within a few generations. And even when Americans are not genetically mixed, they live in a mixed society at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

Zadie Smith, “Getting In and Out,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2017. https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/getting-in-and-out/.

No Man’s Nightingale: An Inspector Wexford Novel

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Religion, United Kingdom on 2015-01-15 02:22Z by Steven

No Man’s Nightingale: An Inspector Wexford Novel

Scribner (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
November 2013
288 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781476744483
Paperback ISBN: 9781476747132

Ruth Rendell

A female vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham vicarage. A single mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was working in a male-dominated profession. Moreover, she was of mixed race and wanted to modernize the church. Could racism or sexism have played a factor in her murder?

Maxine, the gossipy cleaning woman who discovered the body, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. Wexford is intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, and when he is invited by his old deputy to tag along with the investigators, he leaps at the chance.

As Wexford searches the Vicar’s house, he sees a book on her bedside table. Inside the book is a letter serving as a bookmark. Without thinking much, Wexford puts it into his pocket. Wexford soon realizes he has made a grave error in removing a piece of valuable evidence from the scene without telling anybody. Yet what he finds inside begins to illuminate the murky past of Sarah Hussein. Is there more to her than meets the eye?

Tags: Inspector Wexford, Ruth Barbara Rendell, Ruth Rendell, Scribner

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No Man’s Nightingale: An Inspector Wexford Novel

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