Mixed Race Studies

Race in an Era of Change: A Reader

Oxford University Press
September 2010
544 pages
ISBN13: 9780199752102
ISBN10: 0199752109

Edited By:

Heather Dalmage, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mansfield Institute
Roosevelt University

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology
Baruch College of the City Univerity of New York

Featuring a wide range of classic and contemporary selections, Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is an affordable and timely collection of articles on race and ethnicity in the United States today. Opening with coverage of racial formation theory, it goes on to cover “racial thinking” (including the challenging and compelling concept of “whiteness”) and the idea of “assigned and claimed” racial identities. The book also discusses the relationships between race and a variety of institutions—including healthcare, economy and work, housing and environment, education, policing and prison, the media, and the family—and concludes with a section on issues of globalization, immigration, and citizenship.

Editors Heather Dalmage and Barbara Katz Rothman have carefully edited the selections so that they will be easily accessible to students. A detailed introduction to each article contains questions designed to help students focus as they begin reading. In addition, each article is followed by a “journaling question” that encourages students to share their responses to the piece. Offering instructors great flexibility for course use—the selections can be used in any combination and in any order—Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is ideal for any undergraduate course on race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

PART I: RACIAL FORMATION THEORY

1. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from Racial Formation in the United States
2. Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Racial Formation of American Indians”
3. Nicholas DeGenova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “Latino Racial Formations in the United States: An Introduction”

PART II: RACIAL THINKING

Essentialism

4. Joanne Nagel, “Sex and Conquest: Domination and Desire on Ethnosexual Frontiers”
5. Janell Hobson, “The “Batty” Politics: Towards an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body”
6. Barbara Katz-Rothman, from The Book of Life: A Personal Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Genome Project
A Voice from the Past: Franz Boas, “Race and Progress”

The Social Construction of Race

7. Eduardo Bonilla Silva, David Embrick, Amanda Lewis, “‘I did not get that job because of a Black man…’ The storylines and testimonies of color-blind racism”
8. Margaret Hunter, “The Beauty Queue: Advantages of Light Skin”
9. Heather Dalmage, “Discovering Racial Borders”
A Voice from the Past: W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races”

Outing Whiteness

A Special Introduction by the Editors
10. France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, “Introduction: The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the ‘Third Wave'”
11. Troy Duster, “The Morphing Properties of Whiteness”
12. Jennifer L. Eichstedt, “Problematic Identities and a Search for Racial Justice”
A Voice from the Past: Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line”

PART III: RACIAL IDENTITIES

A Special Introduction by the Editors
13. Joy L. Lei, “(Un) Necessary Toughness?: ‘Those Loud Black Girls’ and Those ‘Quiet Asian Boys'”
14. Nada Elia, “Islamophobia and the ‘Privileging’ of Arab American Women”
15. Nina Asher, “Checking the Box: The Label of ‘Model Minority'”
16. Patty Talahongva, “Identity Crisis: Indian Identity in a Changing World”
17. Juan Flores, “Nueva York – Diaspora City: U.S. Latinos Between and Beyond”
18. Nancy Foner, “The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras”

PART IV: RACIALIZED AND RACIALIZING INSTITUTIONS

Economy and Work

19. Sherry Cable and Tamara L. Mix, “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations: The Rise and Fall of the American Apartheid System”
20. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination”

Housing & Environment

21. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination”
22. Mary Patillo, “Black Middle Class-Class Neighborhoods”
23. Kari Marie Norgaard, “Denied Access to Traditional Foods Including the Material Dimension to Institutional and Environmental Racism”

Education

24. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Race, Inequality, and Educational Accountability: The Irony of ‘No Child Left Behind'”
25. Amanda E. Lewis, Mark Chesler, and Tyrone Forman, “The Impact of ‘Colorblind’ Ideologies on Students of Color: Intergroup Relations at a Predominantly White University”

Policing and Prison

26. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh”
27. David Harris, “U.S. Experiences with Racial and Ethnic Profiling: History, Current Issues, and the Future”

Media

28. Jose Antonio Padin, “The Normative Mulattoes: The Press Latinos. And the Racial Climate on the Moving Immigration Frontier”
29. Jonathan Markovitz, “Anatomy of a Spectacle: Race, Gender, and Memory in the Kobe Bryant Rape Case”

Family

30. Dorothy Roberts, from Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
31. Krista M Perreira, Mimi V Chapman, and Gabriela L Stein, “Becoming an American Parent: Overcoming Challenges and Finding Strength in a New Immigrant Latino Community”

Healthcare

32. Mathew R. Anderson, Susan Moscou, Celestine Fulchon and Daniel R. Neuspiel, “The Role of Race in the Clinical Presentation”
33. Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, “Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity”

PART V: GLOBALIZATION, IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

34. Anupam Chander, “Flying the Mexican Flag in Los Angeles”
35. Patricia Hill Collins, “New Commoditites, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”
36. William I. Robinson, “‘Aqui estamos y no nos vamos!’: Global capital and immigrant rights”

Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960

Oxford University Press
1999
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780198208198; ISBN10: 0198208197

Owen White, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

This book recreates the lives of the children born of relationships between French men and African women from the time France colonized much of West Africa towards the end of the 19th century, until independence in 1960. Set within the context of the history of miscegenation in colonial French West Africa, the study focuses upon the lives and identities of the resulting mixed-race or métis population, and their struggle to overcome the handicaps they faced in a racially divided society. This author has drawn an evaluation of the impact and importance of French racial theories, and offers a critical discussion of colonial policies in such areas as citizenship and education, providing insights into problems of identity in colonial society.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Map of French West Africa and Togo
Introduction
1. Miscegenation in French West Africa
2. Abandonment and Intervention
3. Education and Employment
4. Race and Heredity
5. Paternity and the Mother Country
6. Métis and the Search for Social Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

Oxford University Press
2006
344 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-513735-4
ISBN10: 0-19-513735-3

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center

Winner of the 2009 Frantz Fanon Prize

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martin Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate.

Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martin Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

Table of Contents

• Part One: Identities Real and Imagined
  • Introduction: Identity and Visibility.
  • 1. The Pathologizing of Identity.
  • 2. The Political Critique.
  • 3. The Philosophical Critique.
  • 4. Real Identities.
• Part Two: Gender Identity and Gender Differences
  • 5. The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.
  • 6. The Metaphysics of Gender and Sexual Difference.
• Part Three: Racialized Identities and Racist Subjects
  • 7. A Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.
  • 8. Racism and Visible Race.
  • 9. The Whiteness Question.
• Part Four: Latino/a Particularity
  • 10. Latinos and the Categories of Race.
  • 11. Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary.
  • 12. On Being Mixed.
• Conclusion.
• Notes.
• Bibliography.
• Index.

A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America

Oxford University Press
March 2003
296 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-507523-6
ISBN10: 0-19-507523-4

Edited by

Frank Shuffelton, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Rochester

This collection of new essays enters one of the most topical and energetic debates of our time–the subject of ethnicity. The recent vigorous debates being waged over questions raised by the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America highlight the fact that American culture has arisen out of an unusually rich and interactive ethnic mix. The essays in A Mixed Race suggest that American society was inescapably multicultural from its very beginnings and that this representation of cultural differences fundamentally defined American culture. While recent scholarship has looked extensively at the ethnic formation of modern American culture, this study focuses on the eighteenth century and colonial American values that have been previously overlooked in the debate, arguing that a culture shaped by responses to ethnic and racial difference is not merely a modern circumstance but one at the base of American history. Written by a group of first-class contributors, the essays in this collection discuss the representation of cultural differences between European immigrants and Native Americans, the circumstances of the first African-American autobiographical narratives, rhetorical negotiations among different European-American cultural groups, ethnic representation in the genre literature of jest books and execution narratives, and the ethnic conceptions of Michel de Crevecoeur, Phillis Wheatley, and Thomas Jefferson. A Mixed Race offers agile and original yet scholarly readings of ethnicity and ethnic formation from some of our best critics of early American culture. Moving from questions of race and ethnicity to varieties of ethnic representation, and finally to individual confrontations, this volume sheds light on the confrontations of ethnically diverse peoples, and launches a timely, full-scale investigation of the construction of American culture.

Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law

Oxford University Press
September 2000
560 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780195128574
Paperback ISBN10: 0195128575
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195128567
Hardback ISBN10: 0195128567

Edited by:

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided our nation since its earliest history. This collection explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in our racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies as well as for general readers interested in race relations. By bringing together a selection of historically significant documents and of the best essays and scholarship on the subject of “miscegenation,” interracialism demonstrates that notions of race can be fruitfully approached from the vantage point of the denial of interracialism that typically informs racial ideologies.

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Oxford University Press
March 1997
592 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195052824; ISBN10: 019505282X

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?

Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of “interracial literature.” In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of “either-or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.

Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analyzing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of “mixed race.”

Sollors’ interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of “race,” and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about “race,” and where interracial relations can go from here.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction:
• Black—White—Both—Neither—In-Between xv
• 1. Origins; or, Paradise Dawning 31
• 2. Natus Æthiopus/Natus Albus 48
• 3. The Curse of Ham; or, from “Generation” to “Race” 78
• 4. The Calculus of Color 112
• 5. The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign 142
• 6. Code Noir and Literature 162
• 7. Retellings: Mercenaries and Abolitionists 188
• 8. Excursus on the “Tragic Mulatto”; or, the Fate of a Stereotype 220
• 9. Passing; or, Sacrificing a Parvenu 246
• 10. Incest and Miscegenation 285
• Endings 336
• Appendix A: A Chronology of Interracial Literature 361
• Appendix B: Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation 395
• Notes 411
• Selected Bibliography 523
• Index 561

The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Oxford University Press
October 2009
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195377361; ISBN10: 0195377362

Caroline Rody, Associate Professor of English
University of Virginia

In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures–in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications–a radical interaction has taken place that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, has shifted our understanding of ethnicity away from ‘ethnic in itself’ to ‘ethnic amidst a hybrid collective’.  In light of this, Caroline Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming ‘interethnic’.  Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, The Interethnic Imagination offers sustained readings of three especially compelling examples: Chang-rae Lee‘s ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen‘s comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the transnational imagination of Karen Tei Yamashita‘s Tropic of Orange.  Two shorter “interchapters” and an epilogue extend the thematics of creative “in-betweenness” across the book’s structure, elaborating crossover topics including Asian American fiction’s complex engagement with African American culture; the cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness by Asian American writers; and the history of mixed-race Asian American fictional characters.

Features

• Examines three major yet under-studied contemporary Asian American novelists: Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Gish Jen.
• Considers major Asian American fiction alongside African American and Jewish American authors.
• In lucid writing, provides a valuable and innovative paradigm for interpreting the burgeoning field of ethnic literature in the U.S.