Mixed Race Studies

The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference

University of California Press
June 2011
328 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520270312
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520270305
Adobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520950146
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520950146

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

What do Americans think “race” means? What determines one’s race—appearance, ancestry, genes, or culture? How do education, government, and business influence our views on race? To unravel these complex questions, Ann Morning takes a close look at how scientists are influencing ideas about race through teaching and textbooks. Drawing from in-depth interviews with biologists, anthropologists, and undergraduates, Morning explores different conceptions of race—finding for example, that while many sociologists now assume that race is a social invention or “construct,” anthropologists and biologists are far from such a consensus. She discusses powerful new genetic accounts of race, and considers how corporations and the government use scientific research—for example, in designing DNA ancestry tests or census questionnaires—in ways that often reinforce the idea that race is biologically determined. Widening the debate about race beyond the pages of scholarly journals, The Nature of Race dissects competing definitions in straightforward language to reveal the logic and assumptions underpinning today’s claims about human difference.

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

University of California Press
November 2003
332 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520240704

David R. Roediger, Babcock Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

David R. Roediger’s powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a “still white” nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book—Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani—insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context. Roediger illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. He shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that “nonwhite” alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo.

Colored White reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race—especially its links to social and economic inequality. This landmark work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible—though far from inevitable—that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Roediger’s clear, lively prose and his extraordinary command of the literature make this one of the most original and generative contributions to the study of race and ethnicity in the United States in many decades.

Table of Contents

• One: Still White
  • 1. All about Eve, Critical White Studies, and Getting Over Whiteness
  • 2. Smear Campaign: Giuliani, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the Critical Study of Whiteness
  • 3. White Looks and Limbaugh’s Laugh
  • 4. White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative Action
  • 5. “Hertz, Don’t It?” White “Colorblindness” and the Mark(et)ings of O.J. Simpson (with Leola Johnson)
• Two: Toward Nonwhite Histories
  • 6. Nonwhite Radicalism: Du Bois, John Brown, and Black Resistance
  • 7. White Slavery, Abolition, and Coalition: Languages of Race, Class, and Gender
  • 8. The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790–1860
  • 9. Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the “New-Immigrant” Working Class (with James Barrett)
  • 10. Plotting against Eurocentrism: The 1929 Surrealist Map of the World
• Three: The Past/Presence of Nonwhiteness
  • 11. What If Labor Were Not White and Male?
  • 12. Mumia Time or Sweeney Time?
  • 13. In Conclusion: Elvis, Wiggers, and Crossing Over to Nonwhiteness
• Notes
• Credits
• Index

As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity

University of California Press
January 1998
282 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520210738

edited by

William S. Penn, Professor of Creative Writing
Michigan State University

The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A “mixblood,” according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions—mostly oral—in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular “I” with the communal “we.” These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction
William S. Penn

Cutting and Pinning Patterns
Erika Aigner-Varoz

Howling at the Moon: The Queer but True Story of My Life as a Hank Williams Song
Craig Womack

Crossing Borders from the Beginning
Alfonso Rodriguez

Knots
Carol Kalafatic

What Part Moon
Inez Petersen

Tradition and the Individual Imitation
William S. Penn

On Mapping and Urban Shamans
Kimberly Blaeser

Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour
Rainier Spencer

Visions in the Four Directions: Five Hundred Years of Resistance and Beyond
Arturo Aldama

Between the Masques
Diane DuBose Brunner

From the Turn of the Century to the New Age: Playing Indian, Past and Present
Shari Huhndorf

Troublemakers
Rolando Romero

Ritchie Valens Is Dead: E Pluribus Unum
Patricia Penn Hilden

Notes on Contributors

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family

University of California Press
May 2001
Paperback ISBN: 9780520227309
321 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 25 b/w photographs, 2 line illustrations

Neil Henry, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley

Pearl’s Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family’s past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family’s rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California.

The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson‘s longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry’s great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book’s stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.