Mixed Race Studies

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience

Rowman & Littlefield
January 2016
350 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0942-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-0943-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0944-2

Edited by:

Tina Fernandes Botts, Visiting Professor of Philosophy
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience is a collection of essays by mixed race philosophers about the mixed race experience. Each essay is meant to represent one of three possible things: (1) what the philosopher sees as the philosopher’s best work, (2) evidence of the possible impact of the philosopher’s mixed race experience on the philosopher’s work, or (3) the philosopher’s philosophical take on the mixed race experience. The book has two goals: (1) to collect together for the first time the work of professional, academic philosophers who have had the mixed race experience, and (2) to bring these essays together for the purpose of adding to the conversation on the question of the degree to which factical identity (that is, situated, phenomenological experience) and philosophical work may be related (i.e., in terms of theme, method, assumptions, traditions, etc.).

Table of Contents

• Foreword, by Linda Martín Alcoff
• Editor’s Introduction: Toward a Mixed Race Theory, by Tina Fernandes Botts
• Part 1: Mixed Race Political Theory
  • Chapter 1: Responsible Multiracial Politics, with a new postscript, by Ronald Robles Sundstrom
  • Chapter 2: Mixed Race Identity in Britain: Finding Our Roots in the Post Racial Era, by Gabriella Beckles-Raymond
• Part 2: Mixed Race Metaphilosophy
  • Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass: What Philosophy Looks Like from the Inside When You’re Not Quite There, by Marina Oshana
  • Chapter 4: Being and Not Being, Knowing and Not Knowing, by Jennifer Lisa Vest
  • Chapter 5: A Mixed Race (Philosophical) Experience, by Tina Fernandes Botts
• Part 3: Mixed Race Ontology
  • Chapter 6: The Fluid Symbol of Mixed Race, by Naomi Zack
  • Chapter 7: On Being Mixed, by Linda Martín Alcoff
  • Chapter 8: Race and Ethnic Identity, by J.L.A. Garcia
• Part 4: Mixed Race and Major Figures
  • Chapter 9: Through a Glass, Darkly: A Mixed-Race Du Bois, by Celena Simpson
  • Chapter 10: German Chocolate: Why Philosophy is So Personal, by Timothy J. Golden
• Part 5: Mixed Race Ethics
  • Chapter 11: Who is Afraid of Racial and Ethnic Self-Cleansing? In Defense of the Virtuous Cosmopolitan, by Jason D. Hill
• Afterword, by Naomi Zack
• Epilogue, by Tina Fernandes Botts

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

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Fourth Edition)

Rowman & Littlefield
July 2013
384 pages
6 1/4 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2054-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-2055-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-2056-0

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how beneath our contemporary conversation about race lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society.

The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism,” which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva’s assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Obama’s presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past.

In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.

Features

• An engaging read that provokes classroom discussion
• Challenges the truth behind the assumption “I don’t see race”
• A new chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls “new racism” in America introduces students to key themes in studying race and ethnicity
• Assesses the impact of Obama’s presidency and reelection on race relations in America

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• 1. The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America
• 2. The New Racism: The U.S. Racial Structure Since the 1960s
• 3. The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism
• 4. The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist
• 5. “I Didn’t Get That Job Because of a Black Man”: Color-Blind Racism’s Racial Stories
• 6. Peeking Inside the (White) House of Color Blindness: The Significance of Whites’ Segregation
• 7. Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives
• 8. Are Blacks Color Blind, Too?
• 9. E Pluribus Unum, or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle? On the Future of Racial Stratification in the United States
• 10. Race Matters in Obamerica: The Sweet (but Deadly) Enchantment of Color Blindness in Black Face
• 11. “The (Color-Blind) Emperor Has No Clothes”: Exposing the Whiteness of Color Blindness
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

But blackness also points to a history of mixed racialization that, although always acknowledged among blacks, is rarely understood or seen among other groups. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that to add the claim of “mixture” to blacks in both American continents would be redundant, because blacks are their primary “mixed” populations to begin with. Mixture among blacks, in particular, functions as an organizing aesthetic, as well as a tragic history. On the aesthetic level, it signifies the divide between beauty and ugliness. On the social level, the divide is between being just and unjust, virtuous and vicious; “fair skin” is no accidental, alternative term for “light skin.” And on the historical level, the divide signifies concerns that often are denied.

Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). 57.

Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory

Chapter in: Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age

Rowman & Littlefield
288 pages
August 1997
Size: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8476-8447-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-585-20172-6
pages 51-71

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

“You, who are a doctor,” said I to my [American] interlocutor, “you do not believe, however, that the blood of blacks has some specific qualities?”

He shrugged his shoulders: “There are three blood types,” he responded to me, “which one finds nearly equally in blacks and whites.”

“Well?”

“It is not safe for black blood to circulate in our veins.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Return from the United States”

An African American couple found themselves taking their child, a few months of age, to a physician for an ear infection. Since their regular physician was out, an attending physician took their care. Opening the baby girl’s files, he was caught by some vital information. The charts revealed a diagnosis of “H level” alpha thalassemia, a genetic disease that is known to afflict 2 percent of northeast Asian populations. He looked at the couple. The father of the child, noticing the reticence and awkwardness of the physician, instantly spotted a behavior that he had experienced on many occasions.

“It’s from me,” he said. “She’s got the disease from me.”

“Now, how could she get the disease from you?” the physician asked with some irritation.

“My grandmother is Chinese,” the father explained.

The physician’s face suddenly shifted to an air of both surprise and relief. Then he made another remark. “Whew!” he said. “I was about to say, ‘But—you’re black.'”

The couple was not amused.

Realizing his error, the physician continued. “I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I know Hispanics who are also Asians, so why not African Americans?”

Yes. Why not?

The expression “mixed race” has achieved some popularity in contemporary discussions of racial significations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is significant that these three countries are marked by the dominance of an Anglo-cultural standpoint. In other countries, particularly with Spanish, Portuguese, and French influences, the question of racial mixture has enjoyed some specificity and simultaneous plurality. For the Anglos, however, the general matrix has been in terms of “whites” and” all others,” the consequence of which has been the rigid binary of whites and nonwhites. It can easily be shown, however, that the specific designations in Latin and Latin American countries are, for the most part, a dodge and that, ultimately, the primary distinctions focus on being either white or at least not being black.

We find in the contemporary Anglophone context, however, a movement that is not entirely based on the question of racial mixture per se. The current articulation of racial mixture focuses primarily upon the concerns of biracial people. Biracial mixture pertains to a specific group within the general matrix of racial mixing, for a biracial identity can only work once, as it were. If the biracial person has children with, say, a person of a supposedly pure race, the “mixture,” if you will, will be between a biracial “race” and a pure one. But it is unclear what race the child will then designate (a mixture of biraciality and X, perhaps, which means being a new biracial formation?).

To understand both mixed race and its biracial specification and some of the critical race theoretical problems raised by both, we need first to understand both race and racism in contemporary race discourse…

…But blackness also points to a history of mixed racialization that, although always acknowledged among blacks, is rarely understood or seen among other groups. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that to add the claim of “mixture” to blacks in both American continents would be redundant, because blacks are their primary “mixed” populations to begin with. Mixture among blacks, in particular, functions as an organizing aesthetic, as well as a tragic history. On the aesthetic level, it signifies the divide between beauty and ugliness. On the social level, the divide is between being just and unjust, virtuous and vicious; “fair skin” is no accidental, alternative term for “light skin.” And on the historical level, the divide signifies concerns that often are denied…

Read the entire chapter here.

Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture

Rowman & Littlefield
May 2009
250 pages
Cloth: 0-7425-6079-1 / 978-0-7425-6079-6
Paper: 0-7425-6080-5 / 978-0-7425-6080-2

Erica Chito Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

There is no teasing apart what interracial couples think of themselves from what society shows them about themselves. Following on her earlier ground-breaking study of the social worlds of interracial couples, Erica Chito Childs considers the larger context of social messages, conveyed by the media, that inform how we think about love across the color line. Examining a range of media—from movies to music to the web—Fade to Black and White offers an informative and provocative account of how the perception of interracial sexuality as “deviant” has been transformed in the course of the 20th century and how race relations are understood today.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Fade to Black and White
• 1. Historical Realities and Media Representations of Race and Sexuality
• 2. The Prime-Time Color-Line: Interracial Couples and Television
• 3. It’s a (White) Man’s World
• 4. When Good Girls Go Bad
• 5. Playing the Color-Blind Card: Seeing Black and White in News Media
• 6. Multiracial Utopias: Youth, Sports and Music
• Conclusion

Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance

University Press of America (an Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
February 2004
182 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 7 3/4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-2775-7

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Brown-skinned men and women move across Mexico’s national stages dancing the folkloric jarocho, a symbolic blend of Spanish, Native American, and African cultures. Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance traces the evolution and transformation of an Afro-Mexican dance form into a national cultural icon. It is an ethnographic study that compares and contrasts Mexican performance of national identity with Untied States dance styles. The book uses the image of the jarocho as a window to explore the phenomena of racial/cultural mixing that is endemic to Mexico and increasingly apparent in the politics and aesthetics of United States cultural performances.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 List of Illustrations
• Chapter 2 Preface
• Chapter 3 Acknowledgments
• Chapter 4 Introduction: Crafting Self; Frames of Reference; Locale and Methodology; Chapter Overviews
• Chapter 5 Cultural Mixing and Mexican Performance: Mapping Art: Cultural Contexts; Studies in Revolutionary Nationalism: Manuel Ponce; Amalia Hernandez; Celestino Gorostiza; A Legacy of Performance Strategies; Provincial Identity
• Chapter 6 Roots of Jarocho Dance
• Chapter 7 Jarocho as Folkloric Dance: State Images Ballet Folklórico del la Universidad Veracruzana; Miguel Velez and the Authenticity Mission; Raices del Pueblo (The Peoples’ Roots)
• Chapter 8 Jarocho as Theater: Company History, Veracruz, Veracruz Interprets Jarocho; Actors’ Interpretive (Re)Circulations in Veracruz, Veracruz; Implications and Interpretations
• Chapter 9 Remembering and Transforming the Past: Fiesta de las Cruces; Rewriting Government Agendas
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Chapter 11 Glossary
• Chapter 12 References
• Chapter 13 Index

Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age

Rowman & Littlefield
288 pages
August 1997
Size: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8476-8447-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-585-20172-6

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

In this exploration of race and racism, noted scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a critique of recent scholarship in postcolonial Africana philosophy and critical race theory, and suggests alternative models that respond to what he calls our contemporary neocolonial age; an age in which cultural, intellectual, and economic forms of colonial domination persist. Through essays that address popular culture, the academy, literature, and politics, Gordon unsettles the notion of race and exposes the complexity of antiblack racism. An important book for philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, cultural critics, and anyone concerned with the overt and subtle ways of injustice.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 Foreword
• Chapter 2 Introduction: Her Majesty’s Other Children
• Part 1
  • Chapter 3 Philosophy, Race, and Racism in a Neocolonial World
  • Chapter 4 Context: Ruminations on Violence and Anonymity
  • Chapter 5 Fanon, Philosophy, and Racism
  • Chapter 6 Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory
  • Chapter 7 Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World
  • Chapter 8 Uses and Abuses of Blackness: Postmodernism, Conservatism, Ideology
  • Chapter 9 In a Black Antiblack Philosophy
  • Chapter 10 African Philosophy’s Search for Identity: Existential Considerations of a Recent Effort
• Part 2
  • Chapter 11 The Intellectuals
  • Chapter 12 Lorraine Hansberry’s Tragic Search for Postcoloniality: Les Blancs
  • Chapter 13 Tragic Intellectuals on the Neocolonial—Postcolonial Divide
  • Chapter 14 Exilic “Amateur” Speaking Truth to Power: Edward Said
  • Chapter 15 Black Intellectuals and Academic Activism: Cornel West’s “Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual.” Right-Wing Celebration, Left-Wing Nightmare: Thoughts on the Centennial of Plessy v. Ferguson
• Part 3
  • Chapter 16 Aisthesis Demokrate
  • Chapter 17 Sketches of Jazz
  • Chapter 18 Aesthetico-Political Reflections on the AMTRAK: Rap, Hip-Hop, and Isaac Julien’s Fanon along the Northeast Line
• Chapter 19 Epilogue: The Lion and the Spider (An Anticolonial Tale)

Beyond White Ethnicity: Developing a Sociological Understanding of Native American Identity Reclamation

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2006
262 pages
Cloth: 0-7391-1393-3 / 978-0-7391-1393-6
Paper: 0-7391-1394-1 / 978-0-7391-1394-3

Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, Professor of Sociology
University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

Through qualitative analysis of individuals, Kathleen J. Fitzgerald studies the social construction of racial and ethnic identity in Beyond White Ethnicity. Fitzgerald focuses on Native Americans, who despite a previously unacknowledged and uncelebrated background, are embracing and reclaiming their heritage in their everyday lives. Focusing on the purpose, process, and problems of this reclamation, Fitzgerald’s research provides an understanding of these issues. She also exposes how institutional power relations are racialized and how race is a social and political construction, and she helps us understand larger cultural transformations. This insightful collection of research sparks the interest of those who study sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

1. Reclaimer Narratives: Exposing the Duality of Structure in Identity Formation
2. Challenging White Hegemony: Reclaimers and the Culture Wars
3. Reclaimer Practices: Religion, Spirituality, Language, Family, and Food
4. “If It Looks Like a Duck”: Physical Appearance and Reclaimer Identity
5. “Wanna-bes” and “Indian Police”: The Battle Over Authenticity

Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide

Rowman & Littlefield
Paper: 0-9700-3841-0 / 978-0-9700-3841-8
June 2005
190 pages

Edited by

Marc Coronado
DeAnza College

Rudy P. Guevarra
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey A. S. Moniz, Associate Professor and Director
University of Hawai’i

Laura Furlan Szanto
University of California, Santa Barbara

Crossing Lines addresses the issues of race and mixed race at the turn of the 21st century. Representing multiple academic disciplines, including history, ethnic studies, art history, education, English, and sociology, the volume invites readers to consider the many ways that identity, community, and collectivity are formed, while addressing the challenges that multiracial identity poses to our understanding of race and ethnicity. The authors examine such subjects as social action, literary representations of multiracial people, curriculum development, community formation, Whiteness, and demographic changes.

List of Contributors
Marc Coronado (DeAnza College), Carina Evans (UC Santa Barbara), Melinda Gandara (UC Santa Barbara), Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. (UC Santa Barbara), Tomas Jimenez (Harvard University), George Lipsitz (UC San Diego), Jeffrey Moniz (University of Hawai’i), Paul Spickard (UC Santa Barbara), Laura Furlan Szanto (UC Santa Barbara), and Nicole Marie Williams (UC Santa Barbara).

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Clueless
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Noises in the Blood: Culture, Conflict, and Mixed Race Identities
  George Lipsitz

• Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap
  Paul Spickard

• “My Father? Gabacho?” Ethnic Doubling in Gloria Lopez Stafford’s A Place in El Paso
  Marc Coronado

• Burritos and Bagoong: Mexipinos and Multiethnic Identity in San Diego, California
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Challenging the Hegemony of Multiculturalism: The Matter of the Marginalized Multiethnic
  Jeffrey A.S. Moniz

• Beyond Disobedience
  Nicole M. Williams

• “Fictive Imaginings”: Constructing Biracial Identity and Senna’s Caucasia
  Carina A. Evans

• The Beginning
  Laura Furlan Szanto

• Los Angeles Museum of Art: Looking Forward
  Melinda Gandara

• Multiethnic Mexican Americans in Demographic and Ethnographic Perspectives
  Tomas R. Jimenez