Category: United States

  • New York Times and The American Riddle Only-NeverInSweden 2013-09-03 Larry Lundgren Linköping, Sweden The [New York] Times accepted two comments on OpEd article by Charles Blow: “The Most Dangerous Negro.” Here are the two books that I presently cite in comments on this and related articles Prewitt, Kenneth, 2013, What is Your Race-The Census and…

  • Witnessing Charles Chesnutt: The Contexts of “The Dumb Witness” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2013) pages 103-121 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt045 Benjamin S. Lawson Florida State University The silence and silencing of the character Viney in Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Dumb Witness” (c. 1897), artfully addresses the issue of…

  • Americans of multiracial descent recently have become noticeable, respectable, marketable, and, in the case of Barack Obama, presidential. In the last two decades, a growing body of creative and critical work about multiracial lives and issues has materialized. This social and historical development has become an ideological battleground for advocates, politicians, scholars, journalists, and marketers…

  • Arabs, Hispanics seeking better US Census recognition Aljazeera America 2013-12-17 Haya El Nasser, Los Angeles Digital Reporter  Many community organizations hope for a new Middle East and North Africa category in the next Census. When Hassan Jaber, a Lebanese-American, fills out his Census questionnaire, the race question gives him pause. White? No. Black? No. Asian?…

  • Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature Duke University Press January 2014 176 pages 3 photographs Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5595-3 Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5581-6 Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English; Professor of Law; Professor of Women’s Studies Duke University In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of…

  • Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home Qualitative Inquiry Volume 20, Number 1 (January 2014) pages 51-60 DOI: 10.1177/1077800413508532 Benny LeMaster Southern Illinois University, Carbondale What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we…

  • Obama: I’m Not Interested in Talking About Race in the Abstract The New York Observer New York, New York 2007-11-26 Jason Horowitz During a question-and-answer session in Berlin, New Hampshire last night, Barack Obama received a multi-part question about how he identified himself racially, race relations and his commitment to civil rights from an elderly…

  • “Dreadful Deceit”: Race is a myth Salon Sunday, 2013-12-15 Laura Miller, Staff Writer A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a “social fiction” Jacqueline Jones’ provocative new history, “Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America,” contains a startling sentence on its 265th…

  • In “A Dreadful Deceit,” award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African Americans to illustrate the strange history of “race” in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it— a person’s heritage or skin color—are mere pretexts…

  • Dismissed as a “gaudy liar” by most historians and often discredited by writers who deprecated his mixed blood, James Pierson Beckwourth was one of the giants of the early West, certainly deserving to rank alongside Kit Carson, Bill Williams, Louis Vasquez, and Jim Bridger.