Captivity

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world. Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.).

James Lewis, “How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census,” The American Thinker, (March 17, 2010) http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/how_to_really_be_accurate_on_r.html.

Captivity

Captivity

University of Pittsburgh Press
November 1989
88 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN: 9780822954224

Toi Derricotte, Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God.

View the table of contents here.

Tags: Toi Derricotte, University of Pittsburgh Press

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Mixed Race Studies

Captivity

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