Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Routledge
2010-04-21
256 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-48397-1
Papeback ISBN: 978-0-415-48399-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-203-88373-0

Edited by

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans in highly readable essays from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: What is the connection between class and race? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an ‘honorary white’? What is the connection between social class and culture? Do you need to ‘look’ White or just ‘act’ White in order to be treated as an ‘honorary white’? Can social class influence racial identity? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology, Race and Ethnic Studies, Race Relations, and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Who are Multiracial Americans?

• 1. Multiracial Americans and Social Class, Kathleen Odell Korgen
• 2. In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today, Charles Gallagher
• 3. ‘What’s Class Got to Do with It?’: Images and Discourses on Race and Class in Interracial Relationships, Erica Chito Childs
• 4. Social Class: Racial/Ethnic Identity, and the Psychology of Choice, Peony Fhagen-Smith
• 5. Stability and Change in Racial Identities of Multiracial Adolescents, Ruth Burke and Grace Kao

Part 2: Culture, Class, Racial Identity, and Blame

• 6. Country Clubs and Hip-Hop Thugs: Examining the Role of Social Class and Culture in Shaping Racial Identity, Nikki Khanna
• 7. Language, Power, and the Performance of Race and Class, Benjamin Bailey
• 8. Black and White Movies: Crash between Class and Biracial Identity Portrayals of Black/White Biracial Individuals in Movies, Alicia Edison and George Yancey
• 9. ‘Who is Really to Blame?’ Biracial Perspectives on Inequality in America, Monique E. Marsh

Part 3: Social Class, Demographic, and Cultural Characteristics

• 10. ‘Multiracial Asian Americans’, C. N. Le
• 11. A Group in Flux: Multiracial American Indians and the Social Construction of Race, Carolyn Liebler
• 12. Socioeconomic Status and Hispanic Identification in Part-Hispanic Multiracial Adolescents, Maria L. Castilla and Melissa R. Herman

Part 4: Social Class, Racial Identities, and Racial Hierarchies

• 13. Social Class and Multiracial Groups: What Can We Learn from Large Surveys? Mary E. Campbell
• 14. The One-Drop Rule through a Multiracial Lens: Examining the Roles of Race and Class in Racial Classification of Children of Partially Black Parents, Jenifer Bratter
• 15. It’s Not That Simple: Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and Paul Spickard

Contributors

Benjamin Bailey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research on the interactional negotiation of ethnic and racial identity in US contexts has appeared in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and International Migration Review.

Jenifer L. Bratter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of racial intermarriage, marriage and multiracial populations, and has recently been published in Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum and Family Relations.

David L. Brunsma is Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, and Identity.

Ruth H. Burke is a Graduate Student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on racial inequality in the United States and racial identification.

Mary E. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research.

Maria Castilla earned her BA in 2009 from Dartmouth College, with high honors in sociology. She currently attends Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Erica Chito Childs is an Associate Professor at Hunter College. Her research interests focus on issues of race, black/white couples, gender and sexuality in relationships, families, communities and media/popular culture. Her publications include Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005) and Fade to Black and White (2009).

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly is a historian and lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, whose forth-coming book, By the Least Bit of Blood, examines the uplift potential a vocal Black identity provided mixed-raced leaders during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her analysis extends beyond the U.S. to include the function of race in the process of Latin-American nation-making.

Alicia L. Edison is a Graduate Student at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, biracial identity formation, and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes within the media.

Peony Fhagen-Smith is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Her research centers on racial/ethnic identity development across the life-span and has published in Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, and The Counseling Psychologist.

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, studies how identity affects developmental outcomes among multiracial adolescents. Her current research projects examine perceptions of multiracial people and interracial relationships. Her recent work appears in Child Development, Sociology of Education, and Social Psychology Quarterly.

Charles A. Gallagher is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at La Salle University in Philadelphia. In addition to numerous book chapters, his research on how the media, popular culture and political ideology shapes perceptions of racial and social inequality has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Forces and Race, Gender and Class.

Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology and Education at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race and immigrant differences in educational outcomes. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Research, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly.

Nikki Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her research on racial identity negotiation and gender in group processes has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Advances in Group Processes, and The Sociological Quarterly.

C. N. Le is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He focuses on racial/ethnic relations, immigration, institutional assimilation among Asian Americans, and public sociology through his Asian-Nation.org website.

Carolyn A. Liebler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research on indigenous populations, racial identity and the measurement of race has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, and Social Science Quarterly.

Monique E. Marsh is a Graduate Student of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Conference and at the National Science Foundation’s GLASS AGEP Research Conference.

Paul Spickard teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. The author of fourteen books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. He is currently studying race in Hawaii and in Germany.

George A. Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His work has focused on interracial families and multiracial churches. His latest book is Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies.

Everyday Practice of Race in America: Ambiguous Privilege

Routledge
2010-04-13
128 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-203-85266-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-78055-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-203-85266-8

Utz McKnight, Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of Alabama

An original contribution to political theory and cultural studies this work argues for a reinterpretation of how race is described in US society. McKnight develops a line of reasoning to explain how we accommodate racial categories in a period when it has become important to adopt anti-racist formal instruments in much of our daily lives.

The discussion ranges over a wide theoretical landscape, bringing to bear the insights of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and others to the dilemmas represented by the continuing social practice of race. The book lays the theoretical foundation for a politics of critical race practice, it provides insight into why we have sought the legal and formal institutional solutions to racism that have developed since the 1960s, and then describes why these are inadequate to addressing the new practices of racism in society. The work seeks to leave the reader with a sense of possibility, not pessimism; and demonstrates how specific arguments about racial subjection may allow for changing how we live and thereby improve the impact race continues to have in our lives.

By developing a new way to critically study how race persists in dominating society, the book provides readers with an understanding of how race is socially constructed today, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of political theory, American politics and race & ethnic politics.

Table of Contents

1. Representation: Class Ambiguity and Racial Subjectivity
2. The Everyday and Ordinary: Developing a Theory of Race
3. Cody’s, Foucault, and Race
4. Working Together: Conditional Subjectivity
5. Walking the Streets
6. Passing and Mixing: Challenging the Racial Subject

Communication, Race, and Family: Exploring Communication in Black, White, and Biracial Families

Routledge
1999-08-01
Pages: 264
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2938-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2939-6

Edited by:

Thomas J. Socha

Rhunette C. Diggs

This groundbreaking volume explores how family communication influences the perennial and controversial topic of race. In assembling this collection, editors Thomas J. Socha and Rhunette C. Diggs argue that the hope for managing America’s troubles with “race” lies not only with communicating about race at public meetings, in school, and in the media, but also—and more fundamentally—with families communicating constructively about race at home.

African-American and European-American family communication researchers come together in this volume to investigate such topics as how Black families communicate to manage the issue of racism; how Black parent-child communication is used to manage the derogation of Black children; the role of television in family communication about race; the similarities and differences between and among communication in Black, White, and biracial couples and families; and how family communication education can contribute to a brighter future for all. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the role that family communication plays in society’s move toward a multicultural world, this volume provides a crucial examination of how families struggle with issues of ethnic cultural diversity.

Table of Contents

• M.K. Asante, Foreword. Preface
• T.J. Socha, R.C. Diggs, At the Crossroads of Communication, Race, and Family: Toward Understanding Black, White, and Biracial Family Communication
• J.L. Daniel, J.E. Daniel, African-American Childrearing: The Context of a Hot Stove
• I.B. Ferguson, African-American Parent-Child Communication About Racial Derogation
• S.L. Parks, Race and Electronic Media in the Lives of Four Families: An Ethnographic Study
• R.A. Davilla, White Children’s Talk About Race and Culture: Family Communication and Intercultural Socialization
• R.C. Diggs, African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perceptions of Self-Esteem as Influenced by Parent and Peer Communication and Support Environments
• M. Dainton, African-American, European-American, and Biracial Couples’ Meanings for and Experiences in Marriage. M.P. Orbe, Communicating About “Race” in Interracial Families
• B.K. Alexander, H.P. LeBlanc, III, Cooking Gumbo–Examining Cultural Dialogue About Family: A Black-White Narrativization of Lived Experience in Southern Louisiana
• T.J. Socha, J. Beigle, Toward Improving Life at the Crossroads: Family Communication Education and Multicultural Competence
• K. Galvin, Epilogue: Illuminating and Evoking Issues of Race and Family Communication

Racial Formation in the New Millennium

Routledge
 2008-03-01
256 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-95025-1

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

First published in 1986, and then again in 1994, Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States is considered a classic text on race and ethnicity. Racial Formation in the New Millennium builds upon the ideas set forth in Omi and Winant’s classic text – providing a sophisticated and up-to-date overview of race and ethnicity in the United States. In this volume, they include current issues and controversies related to racism, race/class/gender interrelationships, modern life and racial politics.

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd Edition

Routledge
Publication Date: 1994-03-22
240 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-90864-1

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

First published in 1986, Racial Formation in the United States is now considered a classic in the literature on race and ethnicity. This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant’s groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration’s racial politics and policies.

Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Also published in the United States by Harvard University Press as Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line)

Routledge
2004-08-26
424 pages
Trim Size: 234X156
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-34365-7

Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory
The London School of Economics and Political Science

In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy.  He compels us to see that fascism was the principal political innovation of the twentieth century – and that its power to seduce did not die in a bunker in Berlin.

Between Camps addresses questions such as:

• Why do we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour?
• Did all the good done by the Civil Rights Movement and the decolonization of the Third World have such little lasting effect?

Gilroy examines the ways in which media and commodity culture have become pre-eminent in our lives in the years since the 1960s and especially in the 1980s with the rise of hip-hop and other militancies. With this trend, he contends, much that was valuable about black culture has been sacrificed in the service of corporate interests and new forms of cultural expression tied to visual technologies. He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols.

At its heart, Between Camps is a Utopian project calling for the renunciation of race. Gilroy champions a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, and he offers a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called ‘anti-racism’.

Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation

Routledge
2006-03-02
296 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-35124-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-35125-6
Trim Size: 234X156

Stephen Spencer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Sheffield Hallam University

Broad-ranging and comprehensive, this incisive new textbook examines the shifting meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity and collates the essential concepts in one indispensable companion volume. From Marxist views to post-colonialism, this book investigates the attendant debates, issues and analyses within the context of global change.

Using international case studies from Australia, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Mexico and the UK and examples of popular imagery that help to explain the more difficult elements of theory, this key text focuses on everyday life issues such as:

• ethnic conflicts and polarized states
• racism(s) and policies of multiculturalism
• diasporas, asylum seekers and refugees
• mixed race and hybrid identity

Incorporating summaries, questions, illustrations, exercises and a glossary of terms, this student-friendly text also puts forward suggestions for further project work. Broad in scope, interactive and accessible, this book is a key resource for undergraduate and postgraduate level students of ‘race’ and ethnicity across the social sciences.

Table of Contents

1. ‘Race’/Ethnicity and Representation
2. The Politics of Naming
3. Colonialism: Invisible Histories
4. Theories
5. Identity: Marginal Voices and the Politics of Difference
6. Major Case Study: Indigenous Australians
7. Conflict
8. Living the Contradiction
9. Futures

The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures

Routledge
2009-09-10
416 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-49854-8
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-49713-8

Edited by

Robin Cohen, Professor of Development Studies and Director of the International Migration Institute
University of Oxford

Paola Toninato, Research Fellow in Sociology and Italian Studies
University of Warwick

Increasingly, ‘creolization’ is used to analyse ‘cultural complexity’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘syncretism’ and ‘mixture’, prominent and growing characteristics of the global age. The Creolization Reader captures all these meanings. Attention to the ‘creolizing world’ has enormous potential as a suggestive way of describing our complex world and the diverse societies in which we all now live. The Creolization Reader illuminates old creole societies and emerging cultures and identities in many parts of the world. Areas covered include Latin America, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, West, South and East Africa, the Pacific and the USA. Our authors provide an authoritative review, conspectus and critique of many aspects of creolization. This book is divided into five main sections covering the following key topics:

• Concepts and Theories
• The Creolized World
• Popular Culture
• Kindred Concepts
• The Creolizing World

Each section begins with a brief introduction summarizing the key arguments of the contributors, while the editors provide a provocative and comprehensive introduction to the debates provoked by creolization theory. The Creolization Reader is multi-disciplinary and includes 28 readings and original contributions drawn mainly from history, sociology, development studies, anthropology and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

PART 1: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES 1. Creolité and the Process of Creolization 2. Creoles, Capitalism and Colonialism 3. Creolization and its Discontents 4. Creolization and Creativity 5. In Praise of Créolité PART 2: THE CREOLIZED WORLD 6. The Creolité Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy 7. Creolization and Creole Societies 8. Creolization and Globalization in Réunion 9. Ethnicity and Identity: Creoles of Colour in Louisiana 10. Creolization and Nation-Building in the Hispanic Caribbean 11. The Evolution of a Creole Identity in Cape Verde PART 3: POPULAR CULTURE 12. Calypso Reinvents Itself 13. Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art 14. Louisiana Creole Food Culture 15. African Gods in Contemporary Brazil 16. Architectural Creolization 17. Masquerade Politics PART 4: KINDRED CONCEPTS 18. Hybridity in Cultural Theory: Encounters of a Heterogeneous Kind 19. Mestizaje in Latin America 20. Conceiving Transnationalism 21. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism 22. Syncretism and its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture PART 5: THE CREOLIZING WORLD 23. A Creolizing South Africa? Mixing, Hybridity and Creolization 24. Sacred Subversions? Syncretic Creoles, the Indo-Caribbean, and ‘Cultures in-between’ 25. Creolization in Transnational Japan-America 26. Creolization and Nation-Building in Indonesia 27. Swahili Creolization: The Case of Dar es Salaam 28. The World in Creolization.

Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

Routledge
2000-08-24
320 pages
Trim Size: 234×156
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-19402-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-19403-7

Edited by

Avtar Brah, Professor in Sociology
Birbek University of London

Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture
Birkbeck University of London

Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of ‘hybridity’ – the mixing of peoples and cultures – in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and ‘race’, in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.

The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial ‘contamination’, from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of ‘mixed parentage’, contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture?  The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and ‘race’.

The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

Contributors

Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes, Donna Haraway, Sandra Klopper, John Kraniauskas, Jo Labanyi, Charlie Owen, Anne Phoenix, S. Sayyid, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Anne Stoler, Nicholas Thomas, Amal Treacher, Lola Young

Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
1999-01-14
240 pages
234×156 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-17096-3

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a “Caublinasian”, affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created.  This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms ‘Black’ or ‘White’.

This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Cracking the Coconut:Resisting Popular Folk Discourses on “Race,” “Mixed Race” and Social Hierarchies
• 2. Returning(s):Relocating the Critical Feminist Auto- Ethnographer
• 3. Setting the Stage:Invoking the Griot(te)Traditions as Textual Strategies
• 4. Ruby
• 5. Similola
• 6. Akousa
• 7. Sarah
• 8. Bisi
• 9. Yemi
• 10. Let Blackness and Whiteness Wash Through: Competing Discourses on Bi-Racialization and the Compulsion of Genealogical Erasures
• Epilogue
• Select Bibiographies
• Index