Mixed Race Studies

Racial Theories in Context (Second Edition)

Cognella
2013
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60927-056-8

Edited by:

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters — past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.

The authors of Racial Theories in Context discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:

• First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
• Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
• There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
• The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.

Contents

• Introduction / Jared Sexton
• A Long History of Affirmative Action—For Whites / Larry Adelman
• The Cost of Slavery / Dalton Conley
• Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
• Introduction To Racism: A Short History / George M. Fredrickson
• Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West / Darlene Clark Hine
• Understanding the Problematic of Race Through the Problem of Race-Mixture / Thomas C. Holt
• The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics / Martha Hodes
• The Original Housing Crisis / Derek S. Hoff
• The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America? / Joshua Holland
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American / Michael Hout
• Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco-Roman Antiquity / Benjamin Isaac
• Colorblind Racism / Sally Lehrman
• The Wealth Gap Gets Wider / Meizhu Lui
• Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
• Unshackling Black Motherhood / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Is Race -Based Medicine Good for Us? / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Understanding Reproductive Justice / Loretta J. Ross
• The History of the Idea of Race / Audrey Smedley
• The Liberal Retreat From Race / Stephen Steinberg
• “Race Relations” / Stephen Steinberg

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas

University of Illinois Press
2004
344 pages
6 x 9.25 in. 
Illustrations: 25 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02939-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07194-2

Edited by

David Barry Gaspar, Professor of History
Duke University

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and History
Northwestern University

Black women who were not slaves during the era of slavery

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine’s Beyond Bondage outlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, were forced to carve out their existences. Although their freedom, represented by the acquisition of property, respectability, and opportunity, always remained precarious, the collection supports the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

University of Illinois Press
2009
368 pages
6 x 9 in. 
15 black & white photographs, 1 map
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-252-03467-1
Paper: ISBN 978-0-252-07657-2

Edited by

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies
Northwestern University

Trica Danielle Keaton, Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Multifaceted analyses of the African diaspora in Europe

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and “Black Europe” itself as lived and perceived realities.

Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.