Mixed Race Studies

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory

Oxford University Press
2017-07-19
328 pages
22 hts
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199731619

Mitch Kachun, Professor of History
Western Michigan University

• Most thorough study of what is known about the life of Crispus Attucks.
• First extended analysis of the role of Attucks in American history and memory.
• Figure has been referenced constantly in popular culture throughout the centuries, inc. current series “Luke Cage.”

First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks’s death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship.

This book traces Attucks’s career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed through commemorations and monuments; institutions and organizations bearing his name; juvenile biographies; works of poetry, drama, and visual arts; popular and academic histories; and school textbooks. There will likely never be a definitive biography of Crispus Attucks since so little evidence exists about the man’s actual life. While what can and cannot be known about Attucks is addressed here, the focus is on how he has been remembered–variously as either a hero or a villain–and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Who Was This Man?
• Chapter 2: The Dustbin of History: Crispus Attucks and American Amnesia, 1770s-1840s
• Chapter 3: First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks and the Struggle for Citizenship in the Civil War Era
• Chapter 4: Crispus Attucks Meets Jim Crow: The Segregation of American Memory, 1870s-1910s
• Chapter 5: Crispus Attucks Meets the New Negro: Black History and Black Heroes between the World Wars
• Chapter 6: Crispus Attucks Meets Dorie Miller: Black Patriotism and Activism in the World War II Era
• Chapter 7: Crispus Attucks and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1950s-1970s
• Chapter 8: Crispus Attucks from the Bicentennial to the Culture Wars, 1970s-1990s
• Chapter 9: Crispus Attucks in Twenty-First Century America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index

Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940

University of Illinois Press
April 2017
278 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
12 black & white photographs, 2 line drawings, 7 maps, 2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-04086-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08234-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-252-09935-9

Jason Oliver Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

The politics of racial difference amid the tumult of modern Mexican history

From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, antichinismo–the politics of racism against Chinese Mexicans–found potent expression in Mexico. Jason Oliver Chang delves into the untold story of how antichinismo helped the revolutionary Mexican state, and the elite in control of it, build their nation.

As Chang shows, anti-Chinese politics shared intimate bonds with a romantic ideology that surrounded the transformation of the mass indigenous peasantry into dignified mestizos. Racializing a Chinese Other became instrumental in organizing the political power and resources for winning Mexico’s revolutionary war, building state power, and seizing national hegemony in order to dominate the majority Indian population. By centering the Chinese in the drama of Mexican history, Chang opens up a fascinating untold story about the ways antichinismo was embedded within Mexico’s revolutionary national state and its ideologies.

Groundbreaking and boldly argued, Chino is a first-of-its-kind look at the essential role the Chinese played in Mexican culture and politics.

Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897

University of California Press
December 1995
365 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520203433

Robert M. Levine (1941-2003), Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
University of Miami

The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization.

In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa’s acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither.

Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil’s attempts to “whiten” itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians’ self-image over the past century.

Real American: A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2017-10-03
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781250137746

Julie Lythcott-Haims

A fearless debut memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a biracial black woman in America.

Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called “micro” aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person’s inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered “the other.”

We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home Across the Atlantic World

Oxford University Press
2014-12-01
224 Pages
32 illustrations
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780199978335

Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania

This colored Creole story offers a unique historical lens through which to understand the issues of migration, immigration, passing, identity, and color-forces that still shape American society today. We Are Who We Say We Are provides a detailed, nuanced account of shifting forms of racial identification within an extended familial network and constrained by law and social reality.

Author Mary Frances Berry, a well-known expert in the field, focuses on the complexity and malleability of racial meanings within the US over generations. Colored Creoles, similar to other immigrants and refugees, passed back and forth in the Atlantic world. Color was the cause and consequence for migration and identity, splitting the community between dark and light. Color could also split families. Louis Antoine Snaer, a free man of color and an officer in the Union Army who passed back and forth across the color line, had several brothers and sisters. Some chose to “pass” and some decided to remain “colored,” even though they too, could have passed. This rich global history, beginning in Europe–with episodes in Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana, and California–emphasizes the diversity of the Atlantic World experience.

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter I: Becoming Colored Creole
• Chapter II: Becoming Americans
• Chapter III: Family Troubles
• Chapter IV: Fighting for Democracy
• Chapter V: Becoming “Negroes”
• Chapter VI: Opportunity and Tragedy in Iberia Parish
• Chapter VII: Mulattoes and Colored Creoles
• Chapter VIII: Just Americans
• Chapter IX: At Home or Away: We Are Who We Say We Are
• Epilogue: Becoming “Black”
• Notes

Black Tudors: The Untold Story

Oneworld Publications
2017-11-14
352 pages
2.8 x 2.8 cm
ISBN-13: 978-1786071842

Miranda Kaufmann, Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study
University of London

A black porter publicly whips a white English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is despatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose… Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England. From long-forgotten records, remarkable characters emerge. They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. Their stories, brought viscerally to life by Kaufmann, provide unprecedented insights into how Africans came to be in Tudor England, what they did there and how they were treated. A ground-breaking, seminal work, Black Tudors challenges the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and forces us to re-examine the seventeenth century to determine what caused perceptions to change so radically.

The Matrix of Race: Social Construction, Intersectionality, and Inequality

SAGE Publishing
October 2017
480 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1452202693

Rodney D. Coates, Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Abby L. Ferber, Professor of Sociology
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia

The Matrix of Race: Social Construction, Intersectionality, and Inequality is a textbook that makes race and racial inequality “visible” in new ways to all students in race/ethnic relations courses, regardless of their backgrounds–from minorities who have experienced the impact of race in their own lives to members of dominant groups who might believe that we now live in a “color blind” society. The “matrix” refers to a way of thinking about race that reflects the intersecting, multilayered identities of contemporary society, and the powerful social institutions that shape our understanding of race. Its goals are to help readers get beyond familiar “us vs. them” arguments that can lead to resistance and hostility; promote self-appraisal; and stimulate more productive discussions about race and racism.

Contents

• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PART I. INTRODUCTION TO RACE AND THE SOCIAL MATRIX
  • Chapter 1. Race and the Social Construction of Difference
    • The Social Construction of Race
    • The Social Matrix of Race
    • The Operation of Racism
    • Our Stories
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 2. The Shaping of a Nation: The Social Construction of Race in America
    • Race Today: Adapting and Evolving
    • Indigenous Peoples: The Americas before Columbus
    • Discovery and Encounters: The Shaping of Our Storied Past
    • The U.S. Matrix and Intersectionality— Where Do We Go from Here?
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
• PART II. THE MATRIX PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
  • Chapter 3. The Social Construction and Regulation of Families
    • Historical Regulation of the Family
    • Family Inequality Theories
    • Family Inequality through the Matrix Lens
    • Transforming the Ideal Family Narrative
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 4. Work and Wealth Inequality
    • Recent Trends in Work and Wealth
    • Theories of Economic Inequality
    • Applying the Matrix to the History of Economic Inequality in the United States
    • Transforming the Story of Race and Economic Inequality
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 5. Health, Medicine, and Health Care
    • Patterns of Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Theorizing Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Applying the Matrix to Health Inequity and Inequality
    • Resisting and Transforming Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 6. Education
    • The Shaping of the Matrix of U.S. Education
    • Theories of Education
    • Examining the Concealed Story of Race and Education through the Matrix
    • Alternative Educational Movements and the Future of Education
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 7. Crime, Law, and Deviance
    • A History of Race, Crime, and Punishment
    • Sociological Stock Theories of Crime and Deviance
    • Applying the Matrix to Crime and Deviance
    • Transforming the Narrative of Race, Crime, and Deviance
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 8. Power, Politics, and Identities
    • Contemporary Political Identities
    • Critiquing Sociological Theories of Power, Politics, and Identity
    • Applying the Matrix of Race to U.S. Political History
    • Building Alternatives to the Matrix of Race and Politics
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 9. Sports and the American Dream
    • The State of Sport Today
    • Examining Stock Sociological Theories of Sport
    • Applying the Matrix to Sports in the United States
    • Creating a New Playing Field
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 10. The Military, War, and Terrorism
    • Class, Gender, and Race in the U.S. Military
    • Military Sociology Stock Theories
    • Applying the Matrix Approach to U.S. Military History, War, and Terrorism
    • A More Inclusive Future
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Conclusion
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

University of North Carolina Press
December 2016
248 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520293793
Paperback ISBN: 9780520293809
Adobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520967151
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520967151

Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Arizona

Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what the author calls Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” where embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features—including skin color, hair texture, and facial features—but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech commonly described as gíria (slang).

Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.

Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. BRAZIL’S “COMFORTABLE RACIAL CONTRADICTION”
• 2. “GOOD” APPEARANCES: RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CITIZENSHIP
• 3. INVESTING IN WHITENESS: MIDDLE-CLASS PRACTICES OF LINGUISTIC DISCIPLINE
• 4. FEARS OF RACIAL CONTACT: CRIME, VIOLENCE, AND THE STRUGGLE OVER URBAN SPACE
• 5. AVOIDING BLACKNESS: THE FLIP SIDE OF BOA APARENCIA
• 6. MAKING THE MANO: THE UNCOMFORTABLE VISIBILITY OF BLACKNESS IN POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS BRAZILIAN HIP-HOP
• CONCLUSION: “SEEING” RACE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821–1871

University of Georgia Press
2017-11-01
258 pages
2 b&w photos, 8 maps
Trim size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8203-5133-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-5163-6

Jason A. Gillmer, John J. Hemmingson Chair in Civil Liberties and Professor of Law
Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington

Riveting trials that exposed conflicting attitudes toward race and liberty

In these absorbing accounts of five court cases, Jason A. Gillmer offers intimate glimpses into Texas society in the time of slavery. Each story unfolds along boundaries—between men and women, slave and free, black and white, rich and poor, old and young—as rigid social orders are upset in ways that drive people into the courtroom.

One case involves a settler in a rural county along the Colorado River, his thirty-year relationship with an enslaved woman, and the claims of their children as heirs. A case in East Texas arose after an owner refused to pay an overseer who had shot one of her slaves. Another case details how a free family of color carved out a life in the sparsely populated marshland of Southeast Texas, only to lose it all as waves of new settlers “civilized” the county. An enslaved woman in Galveston who was set free in her owner’s will—and who got an uncommon level of support from her attorneys—is the subject of another case. In a Central Texas community, as another case recounts, citizens forced a Choctaw native into court in an effort to gain freedom for his slave, a woman who easily “passed” as white.

The cases considered here include Gaines v. Thomas, Clark v. Honey, Brady v. Price, State v. Ashworth, and Webster v. Heard. All of them pitted communal attitudes and values against the exigencies of daily life in an often harsh place. Here are real people in their own words, as gathered from trial records, various legal documents, and many other sources. People of many colors, from diverse backgrounds, weave their way in and out of the narratives. We come to know what mattered most to them—and where those personal concerns stood before the law.

Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific

University of Nebraska Press
September 2017
240 pages
21 photographs, 7 illustrations, 1 map, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-8589-7

Joy Schulz, Instructor of History
Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, Nebraska

Twelve companies of American missionaries were sent to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848 with the goal of spreading American Christianity and New England values. By the 1850s American missionary families in the islands had birthed more than 250 white children, considered Hawaiian subjects by the indigenous monarchy and U.S. citizens by missionary parents. In Hawaiian by Birth Joy Schulz explores the tensions among the competing parental, cultural, and educational interests affecting these children and, in turn, the impact the children had on nineteenth-century U.S. foreign policy.

These children of white missionaries would eventually alienate themselves from the Hawaiian monarchy and indigenous population by securing disproportionate economic and political power. Their childhoods—complicated by both Hawaiian and American influences—led to significant political and international ramifications once the children reached adulthood. Almost none chose to follow their parents into the missionary profession, and many rejected the Christian faith. Almost all supported the annexation of Hawai‘i despite their parents’ hope that the islands would remain independent.

Whether the missionary children moved to the U.S. mainland, stayed in the islands, or traveled the world, they took with them a sense of racial privilege and cultural superiority. Schulz adds children’s voices to the historical record with this first comprehensive study of the white children born in the Hawaiian Islands between 1820 and 1850 and their path toward political revolution.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imperial Children and Empire Formation in the Nineteenth Century
• 1. Birthing Empire: Economies of Childrearing and the Establishment of American Colonialism in Hawai‘i
• 2. Playing with Fire: White Childhood and Environmental Legacies in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i
• 3. Schooling Power: Teaching Anglo–Civic Duty in the Hawaiian Islands, 1841–53
• 4. Cannibals in America: U.S. Acculturation and the Construction of National Identity in Nineteenth-Century White Immigrants from the Hawaiian Islands
• 5. Crossing the Pali: White Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and the Racial Divide in Hawai‘i, 1820–98
• Conclusion: White Hawaiians before the World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index