Mixed Race Studies

Frederick Douglass, A Life in American History

Bloomsbury
2025-02-06
320 pages
235 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9798216170464
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9798216170471
Ebook (ePub & Mobi) ISBN: 9798216170488

Mark Christian, Professor, Urban Education, Africana Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Meet one of the most influential men in the United States’ history of emancipation and Black rights.

Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.

Table of Contents

• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Historical Context
• 2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
• 3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
• 4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
• 5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
• 6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
• 7. Why Frederick Douglass Matters
• Timeline
• Primary Documents
• Bibliography
• Index

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

University of Pennsylvania Press
June 2017
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in, 10 illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812249187
Paperback ISBN: 9780812224603
eBook ISBN:

Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves’ interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners’ medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Contents

• Introduction. Transforming Bodies
• Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
• Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
• Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
• Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
• Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
• Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
• Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
• Conclusion. Transforming Slavery
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments

The Trial of Mrs. Rhinelander

Kensington Books
2024-07-23
336 Pages
5.54 x 8.24 x 0.87 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781496737878
eBook ISBN: 9781496737885

Denny S. Bryce

Inspired by a real-life scandal that was shocking even for the tumultuous Roaring Twenties, this captivating novel tells the story of a pioneering Black journalist, a secret interracial marriage among the New York elite, and the sensational divorce case that ignited an explosive battle over race and class—and brought together three very different women fighting for justice, legitimacy, and the futures they risked everything to shape.

For readers of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a transporting work of fact-based historical fiction from Denny S. Bryce, bestselling author of Wild Women and the Blues, In the Face of the Sun, and Can’t We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.

New York, 1924. Born to English immigrants who’ve built a comfortable life, idealistic Alice Jones longs for the kind of true love her mother and father have. She believes she’s found it with Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the shy heir to his prominent white family’s real estate fortune. Alice too, is “white”, though she is vaguely aware of rumors that question her ancestry—gossip her parents dismiss. But when the lovers secretly wed, Kip’s parents threaten his inheritance unless he annuls the marriage.

Devastated but determined, Alice faces overwhelming odds both legally and in the merciless court of public opinion. But there is one person who can either help her—or shatter her hopes for good: Reporter Marvel Cunningham. The proud daughter of an accomplished Black family, Marvel lives to chronicle social change and the Harlem Renaissance’s fiery creativity.

At first, Marvel sees Alice’s case as a tabloid sensation generated by a self-hating woman who failed to “pass.” But the deeper she investigates, the more she will recognize just how much she and Alice have in common. For Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander will bring to light stunning truths that will force both women to confront who they are, and who they can be, in a world that is all too quick to judge.

Mixed Desis: Stories of Multiracial South Asians

HumSub Global
2024-02-12
176 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 979-8989630202

Rahul Arjun John Yates
Punita Khanna

Embark on an inspiring journey through the captivating narratives of “Mixed Desis,” a book creating community for and gathering the voices of mixed-race individuals, interracial families, and multiracial family researchers. Within these pages, you’ll find the heartfelt stories of trailblazers who dared to defy convention in their pursuit of love and life.

Listen to this community of brave, vulnerable, and perceptive multiracial South Asians as they share their journeys toward happiness, balance, and self-actualization.

Join us in celebrating the resilience, love, and strength of these remarkable individuals. Purchase “Mixed Desis” today and empower yourself with knowledge, empathy, and a deeper connection to the vibrant tapestry of human experience. Your journey to understanding and unity begins here.

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, A Memoir of a Kidnapping

Simon & Schuster
2023-08-01
272 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781668021743
eBook ISBN13: 9781668021767

Shane McCrae

An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America—but also what might heal and make it whole again.

Birding While Indian, A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint Ohio State University Press)
June 2023
246 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
6 Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5872-9
eBook (PDF): ISBN: 978-0-8142-8289-2

Thomas C. Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE: The Lifelook
• March 1965, Piss Hill: Great Horned Owl
• July 1967, Piss Hill: Lewis’s Woodpecker
• January 1968, Rapid Creek: Common Goldeneye
• June 1969, I-90: Western Meadowlark
• April 1970, Fort Pierre/Missouri River: Sandhill Crane
• June 1970, a Fort Pierre slough: Wood Duck
• August 1971, Saskatchewan: Western Grebe
• May 1977, a Rapid City marsh: Red-winged Blackbird
• June 1978, Spearfish Canyon: American Dipper
• June 1979, a Pennington County dirt road: Common Nighthawk
• August 1981, Old Faithful: Common Raven
• June 1983, a Pennington County dirt road: Long-billed Curlew
• June 1985, Skyline Drive: Field Sparrow
• June 1985, Fort Morgan, CO: House Finch
• September 1987, northern Black Hills: Mourning Dove
• December 1987, Belle Fourche, SD: [Species Unknown]
• January 1989, Rapid City, SD: European Starling
• January 1991, Gavins Point Dam: Long-tailed Duck
• April 2001, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Common Grackle
• February 2003, Kirk Funeral Home: Prairie Falcon
• April 2003, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Northern Cardinal
• May 2003, Clay County Park: Bald Eagle
• June 2004, Ardmore, OK: Northern Mockingbird
• June 2005, Folsom Children’s Zoo: White Stork
• June 2006, Crazy Horse Memorial: Turkey Vulture
• July 2008, Kountze Lake: Snowy Egret
• August 2008, Fontenelle Forest: House Wren
• May 2009, the lake beside Lakeside, NE: Black-necked Stilt
• May 2009, Devils Tower: American Goldfinch
• May 2009, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Eurasian Collared-Dove
• May 2009, Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge: Marbled Godwit
• July 2009, Pioneers Park: Brown-headed Cowbird
• June 2010, Idyllwild, CA: Steller’s Jay
• June 2010, Spirit Mound: Dickcissel
• May 2011, Wilderness Park: Veery
• December 2011, Highway 385: Ferruginous Hawk
• May 2012, Indian Cave State Park: Chuck-Will’s-Widow
• June 2012, Custer State Park: Canyon Wren
• June 2012, Millwood State Park: Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
• July 2012, Newton Hills State Park: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
• July 2012, Morrison Park: Lesser Goldfinch
• May 2013, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: Bonaparte’s Gull
• May 2014, El Segundo Beach: Brown Pelican
• March 2015, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: American Robin
• July 2016, Medicine Bow National Forest—Vedauwoo: Dusky Flycatcher
• November 2017, Lewis and Clark Lake: Snowy Owl
• March 2018, West Platte River Drive: Whooping Crane
• May 2018, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Red-tailed Hawk
• CODA: Birding While Indian
• Works Cited and Sources Consulted

Almost Brown, A Memoir

Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-06-06
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443019
Ebook ISBN: 9780593443026
Audiobook ISBN: 9780593740880

Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States in an elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.

Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke. Over time, Gill’s parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she too finds herself distancing from her father—Why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. Is this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What am I? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? Eventually, after years of silence, Gill and her father reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.

In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

HarperCollins
2023-03-14
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063220430

Michelle Miller

The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother’s abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

Convergent Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-05-02
240 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443040

John Blake, Award-Winning CNN Journalist

An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together.

John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of his race.

But at the age of seventeen, Blake had a surprise encounter that uncovered a disturbing family secret. This launched him on a quest to reconcile with his white family. His search centered on two questions: “Where is my mother?” and “Where do I belong?” More Than I Imagined is Blake’s propulsive true story about how he answered those questions with the help of an interracial church, a loving caregiver’s sacrifice, and an inexplicable childhood encounter that taught him the importance of forgiveness.

Blake covered some of the biggest stories about race in America for twenty-five years before realizing that “facts don’t change people, relationships do.” He owes this discovery to “radical integration,” which was the only way forward for him and his family—and is the only way forward for America as a multiracial democracy. More Than I Imagined is a hopeful story for our difficult times.

The Other Mother, A Novel

Counterpoint Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2022-05-03
432 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9781640095045

Rachel M. Harper

An “extraordinary” page-turning generational saga about a young man’s search for a parent he never knew, and a moving portrait of motherhood, race, and the truths we hide in the name of family (Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple)

Jenry Castillo is a musical prodigy, raised by a single mother in Miami. He arrives at Brown University on a scholarship—but also to learn more about his late father, Jasper Patterson, a famous ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. On his search, he meets his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a legendary professor of African American history and a fixture at the Ivy League school, who explodes his world with one question: Why is Jenry so focused on Jasper, when it was Winston’s daughter, Juliet, who was romantically involved with Jenry’s mother? Juliet is the parent he should be looking for—his other mother.

Revelation follows revelation as each member of Jenry’s family steps forward to tell the story of his origin, uncovering a web of secrecy that binds this family together even as it keeps them apart. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, The Other Mother is a daring, ambitious novel that celebrates the complexities of love and resilience—masterfully exploring the intersections of race, class, and sexuality; the role of biology in defining who belongs to whom; and the complicated truth of what it means to be a family.