Mixed Race Studies

The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century

New York University Press
April 2014
256 pages
9 halftones and 7 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780814762899
Paper ISBN: 9780814770603

Catherine R. Squires, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
University of Minnesota

Despite claims from pundits and politicians that we now live in a post-racial America, people seem to keep finding ways to talk about race—from celebrations of the inauguration of the first Black president to resurgent debates about police profiling, race and racism remain salient features of our world. When faced with fervent anti-immigration sentiments, record incarceration rates of Blacks and Latinos, and deepening socio-economic disparities, a new question has erupted in the last decade: What does being post-racial mean?

The Post-Racial Mystique explores how a variety of media—the news, network television, and online, independent media—debate, define and deploy the term “post-racial” in their representations of American politics and society. Using examples from both mainstream and niche media—from prime-time television series to specialty Christian media and audience interactions on social media—Catherine Squires draws upon a variety of disciplines including communication studies, sociology, political science, and cultural studies in order to understand emergent strategies for framing post-racial America. She reveals the ways in which media texts cast U.S. history, re-imagine interpersonal relationships, employ statistics, and inventively redeploy other identity categories in a quest to formulate different ways of responding to race.

Historically Black: Imagining Community in a Black Historic District

New York University Press
July 2014
208 pages
10 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814762882
Paper ISBN: 9780814763483

Mieka Brand Polanco, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia

In Historically Black, Mieka Brand Polanco examines the concept of community in the United States: how communities are experienced and understood, the complex relationship between human beings and their social and physical landscapes—and how the term “community” is sometimes conjured to feign a cohesiveness that may not actually exist. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials from Union, Virginia, Historically Black offers a nuanced and sensitive portrait of a federally recognized Historic District under the category “Ethnic Heritage—Black.” Since Union has been home to a racially mixed population since at least the late 19th century, calling it “historically black” poses some curious existential questions to the black residents who currently live there. Union’s identity as a “historically black community” encourages a perception of the town as a monochromatic and monohistoric landscape, effectively erasing both old-timer white residents and newcomer black residents while allowing newer white residents to take on a proud role as preservers of history. Gestures to “community” gloss an oversimplified perspective of race, history and space that conceals much of the richness (and contention) of lived reality in Union, as well as in the larger United States. They allow Americans to avoid important conversations about the complex and unfolding nature by which groups of people and social/physical landscapes are conceptualized as a single unified whole. This multi-layered, multi-textured ethnography explores a key concept, inviting public conversation about the dynamic ways in which race, space, and history inform our experiences and understanding of community.

Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry: Loving v. Virginia

University Press of Kansas
November 2014
296 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1999-3, $39.95(s)
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-2000-5, $19.95(s)
Ebook ISBN 978-0-7006-2048-7

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

In 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, two young lovers from Caroline County, Virginia, got married. Soon they were hauled out of their bedroom in the middle of the night and taken to jail. Their crime? Loving was white, Jeter was not, and in Virginia—as in twenty-three other states then—interracial marriage was illegal. Their experience reflected that of countless couples across America since colonial times. And in challenging the laws against their marriage, the Lovings closed the book on that very long chapter in the nation’s history. Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry tells the story of this couple and the case that forever changed the law of race and marriage in America.

The story of the Lovings and the case they took to the Supreme Court involved a community, an extended family, and in particular five main characters—the couple, two young attorneys, and a crusty local judge who twice presided over their case—as well as such key dimensions of political and cultural life as race, gender, religion, law, identity, and family. In Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry, Peter Wallenstein brings these characters and their legal travails to life, and situates them within the wider context—even at the center—of American history. Along the way, he untangles the arbitrary distinctions that long sorted out Americans by racial identity—distinctions that changed over time, varied across space, and could extend the reach of criminal law into the most remote community. In light of the related legal arguments and historical development, moreover, Wallenstein compares interracial and same-sex marriage.

A fair amount is known about the saga of the Lovings and the historic court decision that permitted them to be married and remain free. And some of what is known, Wallenstein tells us, is actually true. A detailed, in-depth account of the case, as compelling for its legal and historical insights as for its human drama, this book at long last clarifies the events and the personalities that reconfigured race, marriage, and law in America.

Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America

University of North Carolina Press
October 2014
320 pages
59 figs., 4 maps, 23 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-1783-1

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

and

The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)
Princeton University

Pigmentocracies—the fruit of the multiyear Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)—is a richly revealing analysis of contemporary attitudes toward ethnicity and race in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, four of Latin America’s most populous nations. Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America.

Edward Telles, PERLA’s principal investigator, explains that profound historical and political forces, including multiculturalism, have helped to shape the formation of ethnic identities and the nature of social relations within and across nations. One of Pigmentocracies’s many important conclusions is that unequal social and economic status is at least as much a function of skin color as of ethnoracial identification. Investigators also found high rates of discrimination by color and ethnicity widely reported by both targets and witnesses. Still, substantial support across countries was found for multicultural-affirmative policies—a notable result given that in much of modern Latin America race and ethnicity have been downplayed or ignored as key factors despite their importance for earlier nation-building.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA): Hard Data and What Is at Stake
• 2. The Different Faces of Mestizaje: Ethnicity and Race in Mexico
• 3. From Whitened Miscegenation to Triethnic Multiculturalism: Race and Ethnicity in Columbia
• 4. ¿El pals de todas las sangres? Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Peru
• 5. Mixed and Unequal: New Perspectives on Brazilian Ethnoracial Relations
• 6. A Comparative Analysis of Ethnicity, Race, and Color Based on PERLA Findings
• Notes
• References
• About the Authors
• Index

Philosophy of Science and Race

Routledge
2002-09-20
152 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-94164-8
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94163-1

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reason and Method
• 1. Philosophical Racial Essentialism: Hume and Kant
• 2. Geography and Ideas of Race
• 3. Phenotypes and Ideas of Race
• 4. Transmisson Genetics and Ideas of Race
• 5. Genealogy and Ideas of Race
• 6. Race and Contemporary Anthropology
• 7. Philishophical and Social Implications
• Notes
• Select Bibliography

The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2011
216 pages
Size: 6 3/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-1125-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-1127-8

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Preeminent philosopher, Naomi Zack, brings us an indispensable work in the ethics of race through an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy. Beginning with Plato and a philosophical tradition that has largely ignored race, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy enters into a web of ideas, ethics, and morals that untangle our evolving ideas of racial equality straight into the twenty-first century. The dichotomy between ethics and mores has long aided the separation of what is right with ideas of equality. Zack tackles the co-existence of slavery with the classic moral systems and continues to show how our society has evolved and our mores with it. An ethics of race my not exist yet, but this book gives us twelve discerning requirements to establish it.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ethics, Mores, and Race
• Chapter 1: Plato and Aristotle’s Invention of Race
• Chapter 2: Cosmopolitan Contributions to an Ethics of Race
• Chapter 3: Natural Law and Inequality
• Chapter 4: Moral Law and Slavery
• Chapter 5: Christian Metaphysics and Inequality
• Chapter 6: Social Contract Theory and the Sovereign Nation State
• Chapter 7: Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Rights
• Conclusion: Egalitarian Humanism and Requirements for an Ethics of Race
• Select Bibliography
• About the Author

Interracial Couples, Intimacy, and Therapy: Crossing Racial Borders

Columbia University Press
October 2013
280 pages
6 B&W Photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-13294-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-13295-4

Kyle D. Killian, Couple and Family Therapist; Associate Professor and Research Associate
Centre for Refugee Studies
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Grounded in the personal narratives of twenty interracial couples with multiracial children, this volume uniquely explores interracial couples’ encounters with racism and discrimination, partner difference, family identity, and counseling and therapy. It intimately portrays how race, class, and gender shape relationship dynamics and a partner’s sense of belonging. Assessment tools and intervention techniques help professionals and scholars work effectively with multiracial families as they negotiate difference, resist familial and societal disapproval, and strive for increased intimacy. The book concludes with a discussion of interracial couples in cinema and literature, the sensationalization of multiracial relations in mass media, and how to further liberalize partner selection across racial borders.

Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality

University of British Columbia Press
2014-10-21
288 pages
6 x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7748-2772-0
Library E-Book: ISBN: 978-0-7748-2774-4

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Race and Social Justice
University of British Columbia

Mixed Race Amnesia is an ambitious and critical look at how multiraciality is experienced in the global north. Drawing on a series of interviews she conducted with twenty-four women of mixed race, acclaimed geographer Minelle Mahtani explores some of the assumptions and attitudes people have around multiraciality.

She discovers that, in Canada at least, people of mixed race are often romanticized as being the embodiment of a progressive, post-racial future—an ideal that is supported by government policy and often internalized by people of mixed race themselves. As Mahtani reveals, this superficial celebration of multiraciality is often done without any acknowledgment of the freight and legacy of historical racisms. Consequently, a strategic and collective amnesia is taking place—one where complex diasporic and family histories are being lost while Canada’s colonial legacy is being reinforced.

While noting that our “analytical vocabulary for describing the experience of multiraciality is not yet up to the task of telling a more complex story about whiteness, race, diasporic mobility, and grids of racial intelligibility in a white-settler society within what is understood as a multicultural liberal democracy,” Mahtani nevertheless undertakes to give us the tools we need to do this. The result is a book that takes critical race studies in new and exciting directions.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Disentangling Our Curious Affection with Mutiraciality
• 1. Mixed Race Mythologies: Toward an Anticolonial Mixed Race Studies
• 2. Mixed Race Narcissism? Thoughts on the Interview Experience
• 3. The Model Multiracial: Propping Up Canadian Multiculturalism through Racial Impotency
• 4. Beyond the Passing Narrative: Multiracial Whiteness
• 5. Mongrels, Interpreters, Ambassadors, and Bridges? Mapping Liberal Affinities among Mixed Race Women
• 6. Mixed Race Scanners: Performing Race
• 7. Present Tense: The Future of Critical Mixed Race Studies
• References
• Index

William Wells Brown: An African American Life

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
October 2014
624 pages
6.6 × 9.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-24090-0

Ezra Greenspan, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

A groundbreaking biography of the most pioneering and accomplished African-American writer of the nineteenth century.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights.

Ezra Greenspan’s masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown’s life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada

Duke University Press
2014
368 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5629-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5636-3

Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology, and Spanish and Portuguese
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the “racial” categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as “mixed” were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note on Transcriptions, Translations, Archives, and Spanish Naming Practices
• Introduction
• 1. Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: Defining Race in the Colonial Era
• 2. Mestizo Networks: Did “Mestizo” Constitute a Group?
• 3. Hiding in Plain Sight: Gendering Mestizos
• 4. Good Blood and Spanish Habits: The Making of a Mestizo Cacique
• 5. “Asi lo Paresçe por su Aspeto”: Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Santafé
• 6. The Problem of Caste Conclusion
• Appendix: Cast of Characters
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography