Mixed Race Studies

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City

Temple University Press
November 2015
198 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43991-119-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43991-118-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43991-120-4

Michael T. Maly, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Policy Research Collaborative
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

Heather M. Dalmage, Professor of Sociology; Director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

For many whites, desegregation initially felt like an attack on their community. But how has the process of racial change affected whites’ understanding of community and race? In Vanishing Eden, Michael Maly and Heather Dalmage provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s. They pay particular attention to examining how young people made sense of what was occurring, and how this experience impacted their lives.

Using a blend of urban studies and whiteness studies, the authors examine how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained—often in subtle and unreflective ways. Vanishing Eden also considers how race is central to the ways social institutions such as housing, education, and employment function. Surveying the shifting social, economic, and racial contexts, the authors explore how race and class at local and national levels shaped the organizing strategies of those whites who chose to stay as racial borders began to change.

Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns

Temple University Press
January 2011
272 pages
6 x 9
38 tables, 23 halftones
paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-276-9
cloth: ISBN: 978-1-43990-275-2
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-43990-277-6

Charlton D. McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

Stephen M. Caliendo, Professor of Political Science
North Central College in Naperville, Illinois

Why, when, and how often candidates use race appeals, and how the electorate responds

In our evolving American political culture, whites and blacks continue to respond very differently to race-based messages and the candidates who use them. Race Appeal examines the use and influence such appeals have on voters in elections for federal office in which one candidate is a member of a minority group.

Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Caliendo use various analysis methods to examine candidates who play the race card in political advertisements. They offer a compelling analysis of the construction of verbal and visual racial appeals and how the news media covers campaigns involving candidates of color.

Combining rigorous analyses with in-depth case studies-including an examination of race-based appeals in the historic 2008 presidential election—Race Appeal is a groundbreaking work that represents the most extensive and thorough treatment of race-based appeals in American political campaigns to date.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Political Landscape of Race-Based Appeals
• Part I The Empirical Evidence on Race Appeals
  • 1. Producing Race Appeal: The Political Ads of White and Minority Candidates
  • 2. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Deploying Racist Appeals among Black and White Voters
  • 3. Neither Black nor White: The Fruitless Appeal to Racial Authenticity
  • 4. Competing Novelties: How Newspapers Frame the Election Campaigns of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans
• Part II: Case Studies in Race Appeal
  • 5. Racializing Immigration Policy: Issue Ads in the 2006 Election
  • 6. Harold Ford Jr., Mel Martinez, and Artur Davis: Case Studies in Racially Framed News
  • 7. Barack Obama, Race-Based Appeals, and the 2008 Presidential Election
• Epilogue. Racialized Campaigns: What Have We Learned, and Where Do We Go from Here?
• Notes
• References
• Index

Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity

Temple University Press
May 2013
218 pages
5.5 x 8.25; 1 halftone
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-980-5
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-979-9
eBook EAN: 978-1-43990-981-2

Edited by:

Jeffrey A. Brune, Assistant Professor of History
Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.

Daniel J. Wilson, Professor of History
Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Passing—an act usually associated with disguising race—also relates to disability. Whether a person with a psychiatric disorder struggles to suppress aberrant behavior to appear “normal” or a person falsely claims a disability to gain some advantage, passing is a pervasive and much discussed phenomenon. Nevertheless, Disability and Passing is the first anthology to examine this issue.

The editors and contributors to this volume explore the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality as these various aspects of identity influence each other and make identity fluid. They argue that the line between disability and normality is blurred, discussing disability as an individual identity and as a social category. And they discuss the role of stigma in decisions about whether or not to pass.

Focusing on the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, the essays in Disability and Passing speak to the complexity of individual decisions about passing and open the conversation for broader discussion.

Contributors include: Dea Boster, Allison Carey, Peta Cox, Kristen Harmon, David Linton, Michael Rembis, and the editors.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction • Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson
• 2. Passing in the Shadow of FDR: Polio Survivors, Passing, and the Negotiation of Disability • Daniel J. Wilson
• 3. The Multiple Layers of Disability Passing in Life, Literature, and Public Discourse • Jeffrey A. Brune
• 4. The Menstrual Masquerade • David Linton
• 5. “I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb”: Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum American South • Dea H. Boster
• 6. Passing as Sane, or How to Get People to Sit Next to You on the Bus • Peta Cox
• 7. Athlete First: A Note on Passing, Disability, and Sport • Michael A. Rembis
• 8. The Sociopolitical Contexts of Passing and Intellectual Disability • Allison C. Carey
• 9. Growing Up to Become Hearing: Dreams of Passing in Oral Deaf Education • Kristen C. Harmon
• Contributors
• Index

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Temple University Press
March 2006
312 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59213-494-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-59213-493-9
Electronic Book ISBN:  978-1-59213-495-3

George Lipsitz, Professor of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Outstanding Books Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, 1999

In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.

Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city’s image as a tourist party town.

Contents

• Introduction: Bill Moore’s Body
• 1. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
• 2. Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege
• 3. Immigrant Labor and Identity Politics
• 4. Whiteness and War
• 5. How Whiteness Works: Inheritance, Wealth, and Health
• 6. White Desire: Remembering Robert Johnson
• 7. Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics
• 8. “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”: Antiblack Racism and White Identity
• 9. “Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army”: Beyond the Black-White Binary
• 10. California: The Mississippi of the 1990s
• 11. Change the Focus and Reverse the Hypnosis: Learning from New Orleans
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order

Temple University Press
December 2001
280 pages
7×10; 1 figure
Paperback: EAN: 978-1-56639-909-8, ISBN: 1-56639-909-2

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

In the United States, anyone with even a trace of African American ancestry has been considered black. Even as the twenty-first century opens, a racial hierarchy still prevents people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. In this book, G. Reginald Daniel argues that we are at a cross-roads, with members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality.

Tracing the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, Daniel shows how race has been constructed and regulated in the United States.  The so-called one-drop rule (i.e., hypodescent) obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. For most of our history, many mixed-race individuals of African American descent have attempted to acquire the socioeconomic benefits of being white by forming separate enclaves or “passing.”  By the 1990s, however, interracial marriages became increasingly common, and multiracial individuals became increasingly political, demanding institutional changes that would recognize the reality of multiple racial backgrounds and challenging white racial privilege.

More Than Black? regards the crumbling of the old racial order as an opportunity for substantially more than an improvement in U.S. race relations; it offers no less than a radical transformation of the nation’s racial consciousness and the practice of democracy.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Part I: White Over Black
  • 1. Eurocentrism: The Origin of the Master Racial Project
  • 2. Either Black or White: The United State and the Binary Racial Project
• Part II: Black No More
  • 3. White by Definition: Multiracial Identity and the Binary Racial Project
  • 4. Black by Law: Multiracial Identity and the Ternary Racial Project
• Part III: More than Black
  • 5. The New Multiracial Identity: Both Black and White
  • 6. The New Multiracial Identity: Neither Black nor White
  • 7. Black by Popular Demand: Multiracial Identity and the Decennial Census
• Part IV: Black No More or More than Black?
  • 8. The Illusion of Inclusion : From White Domination to White Hegemony
  • 9. The New Millennium: Toward a New Master Racial Project
• Epilogue: Beyond Black or White: A New United States Racial Project
• Notes
• Index

The contrast between the multigenerational and first-generation experiences is further underscored by the fact that the latter is frequently viewed as a more legitimate basis for multiracial identity. The reasons for this are related to the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the liberalization of social attitudes on race over the past three decades. Moreover, the first-generation experience originates in the context of interracial marriage and thus includes an element of choice. Marriages confer equal legal status on both parties and, by extension, equal legitimacy on both parents’ identities. The one-drop rule, therefore, has been less consistently enforced, both in theory and in practice, in the case of their offspring. This is particularly true of policies at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and to a lesser extent of the Census Bureau. Before the 1980s, the NCHS ciassified racially blended children in terms of the “minority” parent, while the Census Bureau classified them in terms of the father’s racial or ethnic identity. Since the 1980s both agencies have based the children’s race on the racial identity of the mother. Many multiracial  children of European American mothers have therefore been designated as “white” rather than as “biracial.” Since the mid-1960s, however, adoption agencies have tended to describe blended children as “racially mixed” or “biracial” in order to attract white adoptive parents by appealing to their Eurocentric bias.

Such flexibility has not been extended so readily to multi generational individuals. Their experience carries with it the implicit stigma of concubinage, rape, and illegitimacy; and the parents and families of these individuals have typically been seen as African American. Attitudes toward Native Americans and Latinos—two other populations that have experienced significant miscegenation with European Americans—provide a point of contrast. The European American, as well as the Native American and Latino communities, have more openly acknowledged multiple racial and cultural backgrounds in the discourse on identity. In these populations as well, however, the same divisive and pernicious “colorism” that has infected African-descent Americans has arisen, with the result that  lighter-skinned and otherwise more European-appearing Latinos and Native Americans are  treated preferentially within and outside their communities. Nevertheless,  greater openness among these groups to multiracialism has mitigated the generational differences as the primary factor determining the legitimacy of multiracial identity. Multigenerational individuals of European American and African American decent, therefore, find themselves at odds not only with the larger society and the African American community, but often with first-generation individuals as well. Since most African-descent Americans have some European American ancestry in their genealogy but identify themselves as black, blacks often accuse multigenerational individuals of trying to escape the stigma attached to “blackness.”  Some first-generation individuals contend that their own biracial experience is the legitimate starting point for a blended identity…

Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 104-105.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

Temple University Press
May 2012
230 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-184-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43990-183-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43990-185-4

Kristi Brian, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology and Director of Diversity Education and Training
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family.

Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called “colorblind” adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses.

Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.

Contents

• Preface: The Personal and the Political
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Adoption Matters: Beyond Catastrophe and Spectacle
• 2. Adoption Facilitators and the Marketing of Family Building: “Expert” Systems Meet Spurious Culture
• 3. Navigating Racism: Avoiding and Confronting “Difference” in Families
• 4. Navigating Kinship: Searching for Family beyond and within “the Doctrine of Genealogical Unity”
• 5. Strategic Interruptions versus Possessive Investment: Transnational Adoption in the Era of New Racism
• Notes
• References
• Index

Black Power, White Blood: The Life and Times of Johnny Spain (With a New Epilogue by the Author)

Temple University Press
December 1999
352 pages
5.5×8.25; 36 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-56639-750-6

Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology
IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law

A struggle to transcend race and find justice

Originally published in hardcover to much acclaim, this vividly written biographical drama will now be available in a paperback edition and includes a new epilogue by the author. Conceived within a clandestine relationship between a black man and a married white woman, Spain was born (as Larry Michael Armstrong) in Mississippi during the mid-1950s. Spain’s life story speaks to the destructive power of racial bias. Even if his mother’s husband were willing to accept the boy—which he was not—a mixed-race child inevitably would come to harm in that place and time.

At six years old, already the target of name-calling children and threatening adults, he could not attend school with his older brother. Only decades later would he be told why the Armstrongs sent him to live with a black family in Los Angeles. As Johnny came of age, he thought of himself as having been rejected by his white family as well as by his black peers. His erratic, destructive behavior put him on a collision course with the penal system; he was only seventeen when convicted of murder and sent to Soledad.

Drawn into the black power movement and the Black Panther Party by a fellow inmate, the charismatic George Jackson, Spain became a dynamic force for uniting prisoners once divided by racial hatred. He committed himself to the cause of prisoners’ rights, impressing inmates, prison officials, and politicians with his intelligence and passion. Nevertheless, among the San Quentin Six, only he was convicted of conspiracy after Jackson’s failed escape attempt.

Lori Andrews, a professor of law, vividly portrays the dehumanizing conditions in the prisons, the pervasive abuses in the criminal justice system, and the case for overturning Spain’s conspiracy conviction. Spain’s personal transformation is the heart of the book, but Andrews frames it within an indictment of intolerance and injustice that gives this individual’s story broad significance.

This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature

Temple University Press
November 2010
216 pages
5.5 x 8.5
1 halftone
paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-217-2
cloth ISBN: 978-1-43990-216-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43990-218-9

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies (founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).)
San Francisco State University

An introduction to the themes of a still-evolving American ethnic literature

In the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud probes the complexities of Vietnamese American identity and politics. She provides an analytical introduction to the literature, showing how generational differences play out in genre and text. In addition, she asks, can the term Vietnamese American be disassociated from representations of the war without erasing its legacy?

Pelaud delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains of the writing as well as the critical receptions and responses to them. She moves beyond the common focus on the Vietnam war to develop an interpretive framework that integrates post-colonialism with the multi-generational refugee, immigrant, and transnational experiences at the center of Vietnamese American narratives.

Her readings of key works, such as Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala and Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge show how trauma, race, class and gender play a role in shaping the identities of Vietnamese American characters and narrators.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Inclusion
  • 1. History
  • 2. Overview
  • 3. Hybridity
• Part II: Interpretation
  • 4. Survival
  • 5. Hope and Despair
  • 6. Reception
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise

Temple University Press
February 1992
276 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Cloth ISBN: 0-87722-892-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-59213-104-4

Edited by

David J. Hellwig, Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

Essays that focus on the authors’ observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s

At the turn of the twentieth century, the popular image of Brazil was that of a tropical utopia for people of color, and it was looked upon as a beacon of hope by African Americans. Reports of this racial paradise were affirmed by notable black observers until the middle of this century, when the myth began to be challenged by North American blacks whose attitudes were influenced by the civil rights movement and burgeoning black militancy. The debate continued and the myth of the racial paradise was eventually rejected as black Americans began to see the contradictions of Brazilian society as well as the dangers for people of color.

David Hellwig has assembled numerous observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s. Originally published in newspapers and magazines, the selected commentaries are written by a wide range of African-American scholars, journalists, and educators, and are addressed to a general audience.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introcution: The Myth of the Racial Paradise
• Part I: The Myth Affirmed (1900-1940)
  • 1. “Brazilian Visitors in Norfolk”
  • 2. “Brazil vs. United States”
  • 3. “Brazil and the Black Race”
  • 4. “Brazil” – W.E.B. Du Bois
  • 5. “Opportunities in Brazil: South American Country Offers First Hand Knowledge of the Solving of the Race Question”
  • 6. “Brazil” – Cyril V. Briggs
  • 7. “Wonderful Opportunities Offered in Brazil for Thrifty People of All Races” – Associated Negro Press
  • 8. “South America and Its Prospects in 1920” – L. H. Stinson
  • 9. “Brazil as I Found It” – E.R. James
  • 10. “Sidelights on Brazil Racial Conditions” – Frank St. Claire
  • 11. “My Trip Through South America” – Robert S. Abbott
  • 12. “Sightseeing in South America” – William Pickens
• Part II: The Myth Debated (1940-1965)
  • 13. “The Color Line in South America’s Largest Republic” – Ollie Stewart
  • 14. “Stewart in Error – No Color Line in Brazil” – James W. Ivy
  • 15. Letter by W.E.B. Du Bois to Edward Weeks, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2, 1941
  • 16. “Brazil Has No Race Problem” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 17. “A Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and the United States” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 18. Excerpt from Quest for Dignity: An Autobiography of a Negro Doctor – Thomas Roy Peyton
  • 19. “Brazilian Color Bias Growing More Rampant” – George S. Schuyler
  • 20. “The Negro in Brazil” – Lorenzo D. Turner
• Part III: The Myth Rejected (1965-)
  • 21. “From Roxbury to Rio-and Back in a Hurry” – Angela M. Gilliam
  • 22. “Brazil: Study in Black, Brown and Beige” – Leslie B. Rout, Jr.
  • 23. “Equality in Brazil: Confronting Reality” – Cleveland Donald, Jr.
  • 24. “‘Mestizaje’ vs. Black Identity: The Color Crisis in Latin America” – Richard L. Jackson
  • 25. “Black Consciousness vs. Racism in Brazil” – Niani (Dee Brown)
  • 26. “Brazil and the Blacks of South America” – Gloria Calomee
  • 27. “In Harmony with Brazil’s African Pulse” – Rachel Jackson Christmas