Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (Book Review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Science, United States on 2009-12-22 04:37Z by Steven

Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (Book Review)

Pychiatric Services
May 2003
Volume 54
Page 751
Published by The American Psychiatric Association

Maureen Slade, R.N., M.S., Director of Psychiatry
Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago

Brendan Slade-Smith
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington

Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America
by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma; Thousand Oaks, California, Sage Publications, 2002, 178 pages.

Who is black today, and who will be black tomorrow? Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, two sociologists, decided to initiate a research project to study this complicated and highly controversial question, in part to provide sorely needed empirical data to facilitate informed discussions on multiracialism. The authors also hope that their book can be used as a resource to guide decisions about the inclusion of a multiracial category in the 2010 census. Rockquemore and Brunsma chose to focus specifically on individuals who have one black and one white parent.

Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America is composed of six chapters and is easy reading, while at the same time being intellectually stimulating and challenging. The first chapter lays the groundwork for explaining why it is necessary to study biracial identity formation in a scholarly fashion. This chapter includes a straightforward discussion of the role of slavery, the “one-drop” rule, miscegenation, the Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights era in the rigid categorization of blacks as a racial category in the United States. However, the most fascinating discussion is the identification and in-depth discussion of possible biracial identities…

Read the entire article here.

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