Mixed Race Studies

The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race

Johns Hopkins Univesity Press
August 2012
240 pages
1 halftone, 1 line drawing
Hardback ISBN: 9781421407005

Rebecca Anne Goetz, Associate Professor of History
New York University

In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of “hereditary heathenism,” the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom.

Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America.

Love Imagined: A Mixed Race Memoir

Modern History Press
2014-08-15
158 pages
6.7 x 0.3 x 9.6 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1615992331

Sherry Quan Lee

Love Imagined is an American woman’s unique struggle for identity.

Soul Sister (30th Anniversary Edition)

Crossroads International Publishing
1999 (Originally published in 1969)
212 pages
6.9 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0967401300

Grace Halsell (1923-2000)

The Story of a White Woman Who Turned Herself Black and Went to Live and Work in Harlem and Mississippi Delta.

Grace Halsell changed the color of her skin and sojourned through Black America as a “soul sister.”

Few whites have had the guts to embark on such a hazardous adventure. Grace Halsell’s ordeal as a black-skinned American is a unique and deeply moving story of what it is really like to be black in a white world. From Harlem to the Mississippi delta, her experiences reveal the hard and bitter truth about men and women trapped in a desperate struggle for survival, identity, and originality.

Mislaid: A Novel

Ecco/HarperCollins
2015-05-19
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062364777
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780062364784
E-book ISBN: 9780062364791
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 0.89 in (d)

Nell Zink

A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity

NASW Press
2015
224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-87101-460-3

Edited by:

Elizabeth Pathy Salett, MSW

Diane R. Koslow, PhD

In the past 30 years, the United States has undergone an unprecedented and accelerated growth in the diversity of its population. These changes affect all elements of our society, underscoring the need for an informed and knowledgeable public that can understand, respect, and communicate with people of diverse backgrounds. Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity discusses the relationship between race, ethnicity, sense of self and the development of individual and group identity. It further explores the question of who we are and who we are becoming from the perspective of our multicultural, multilingual, and globally interconnected world. This book offers readers the opportunity to examine the importance of ecological and environmental factors in defining how we experience our lives and the world around us.

The authors introduce and review numerous frameworks and models for understanding racial and ethnic identity development. Each chapter reviews the social, economic, and political processes related to building and preserving racial and ethnic identities and perceptions of self. Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity is a great resource for all social workers.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Elsie Achugbue
• Chapter 1: Identity, Self, and Individualism in a Multicultural Perspective / Alan Roland
• Chapter 2: African American Identity and Its Social Context / Lee Jenkins
• Chapter 3: Children of Undocumented Immigrants: Imperiled Developmental Trajectories / Luis H. Zayas and Mollie Bradlee
• Chapter 4: Racial and Ethnic Identities of Asian Americans: Understanding Unique and Common Experiences / Greg M. Kim-Ju and Phillip D. Akutsu
• Chapter 5: Indigenous Peoples and Identity in the 21st Century: Remembering, Reclaiming, and Regenerating / Sandy Grande, Timothy San Pedro, and Sweeney Windchief
• Chapter 6: White Racial Identity Development: Looking Back and Considering What Is Ahead / Lisa B. Spanierman
• Chapter 7: Growing Up Multiracial in the United States / Robin Lin Miller and NiCole T. Buchanan
• Chapter 8: What It Means to Be American / Jennie Park-Taylor, Joshua Henderson, and Michael Stoyer
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index

The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest

HarperCollins
2002
416 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 0002570653
Paperback ISBN: 0006531261

Aminatta Forna

An evening in 1974 when she was ten years old, Aminatta Forna opened the door to two men, members of the state secret police, come to take her father. A year later he was killed. The Devil that Danced on the Water is Aminatta’s search for the truth of her father’s fate, moving and terrifying in turns, always compelling, it traces events leading to the moment of his arrest. And what happened after he was taken away.

Aminatta Forna’s luminous memoir is a vivid and passionate account of an African childhood, of an idyll which becomes the stuff of nightmares. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father’s stand against tyranny.

Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and great charisma, who quoted Alexander Pope: ‘Honour and shame from no condition arise: Act well your part for there the honour lies.’ As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. Already a political firebrand and a stylish dresser, he stole the heart of Aminatta’s mother to the dismay of her Scottish Presbyterian parents and returned home, one of those Wole Soyinka has called the ‘Renaissance generation.’ But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by the new ways of Western democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed Forna languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience and worse was to follow.

Aminatta’s search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation’s destiny begins among the country’s elite and took her to the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father’s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nations politicians to confront their guilt.

The Devil that Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful precision: a remarkable story of a father, a family, a country and a continent.

North End Love Songs

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing
2012-03-20
108 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-897289-76-1

Katherena Vermette

Winner of the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

A self-described “tuff grrl with two ffs” there is no doubt that after poet Katherena Vermette’s first collection of poetry, North End Love Songs, she will also be known as one “tuff” poet. Chronicling several short lived affairs that follow the break-up of a long term relationship, North End Love Songs recounts a quest for love in all wrong places. In it poet Katherena Vermette pulls out all the stops with gritty stripped down lyrics about the kind of love doesn’t always talk nice, sometimes drinks way too much, smokes when it shouldn’t and winds up in bed with people it barely knows or trusts.

But North End Love Songs is more than just a poetic road trip to the wrong side of love. Described by critics as having “a complicated sense of beauty,” there is undeniable eloquence at work in Katherena Vermette’s poetry. These poems go way deeper than the usual explorations of loss and self discovery, grappling with the destructive social and cultural constructs that often keep women on the hunt for solace and stability outside of themselves instead of finding strength within.

Katherena Vermette is well known in Winnipeg for her spoken word and poetry performances. Her poems often feel like songs, sometimes country in tone, and sometimes dark, urban, and alternative. In North End Love Songs readers will find a fierce honesty, and resonant clarity that is unique to this fresh, new voice.

Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer of poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, including the upcoming Manitoapow—Aboriginal Literary History of Manitoba (Highwater Press 2012). Vermette was the 2010-2011 Blogger in Residence for thewriterscollective.org and recently begun graduate work in the prestigious Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. A member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba since 2004, Vermette lives, works and plays in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

Oxford University Press
June 2015
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199383092

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina
also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

• The first full-length study of how color intersected with polity, society and economy in the nineteenth-century South
• Pulls together and expands on previous research on the connection between color and wealth and health
• Compiles empirical economic research on how color affected plantation life, including which slaves ran away and were chased, or how color influenced entrepreneurship or education and the accumulation of human capital

Despite the many advances that the United States has made in racial equality over the past half century, numerous events within the past several years have proven prejudice to be alive and well in modern-day America. In one such example, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina dismissed one of her principal advisors in 2013 when his membership in the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read “God is the one who divided mankind into different races…. Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God.” This episode reveals America’s continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing-a problem that has plagued the United States since its earliest days as a nation.

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South demonstrates that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represent a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Economist Howard Bodenhorn presents the first full-length study of the ways in which skin color intersected with policy, society, and economy in the nineteenth-century South. With empirical and statistical rigor, the investigation confirms that individuals of mixed race experienced advantages over African Americans in multiple dimensions – in occupations, family formation and family size, wealth, health, and access to freedom, among other criteria.

The Color Factor concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing. The text is an ideal resource for students, social scientists, and historians, and anyone hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the historical roots of modern race dynamics in America.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Legal constructions of race and interpretations of color
• Chapter 2: Race mixing and color in literature and science
• Chapter 3: The plantation
• Chapter 4: Finding freedom
• Chapter 5: Marriage and the family
• Chapter 6: Work
• Chapter 7: Wealth
• Chapter 8: Height, health and mortality

The Somatechnics of Whiteness and Race: Colonialism and Mestiza Privilege

Ashgate
May 2015
186 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4724-5307-5
eBook PDF ISBN: 978-1-4724-5308-2
eBook ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4724-5309-9

Elaine Marie Carbonell Laforteza, Lecturer in Cultural Studies
Macquarie University, Australia

Investigating the emergence of a specific mestiza/mestizo whiteness that facilitates relations between the Philippines and Western nations, this book examines the ways in which the construction of a particular form of Philippine whiteness serves to deploy positions of exclusion, privilege and solidarity.

Through Filipino, Filipino-Australian, and Filipino-American experiences, the author explores the operation of whiteness, showing how a mixed-race identity becomes the means through which racialised privileges, authority and power are embodied in the Philippine context, and examines the ways in which colonial and imperial technologies of the past frame contemporary practices such as skin-bleaching, the use of different languages, discourses of bilateral relations, secularism, development, and the movement of Filipino, Australian and American bodies between and within nations.

Drawing on key ideas expressed in critical race and whiteness studies, together with the theoretical concepts of somatechnics, biopolitics and governmentality, The Somatechnics of Whiteness and Race sheds light on the impact of colonial and imperial histories on contemporary international relations, and calls for a ‘queering’ or resignification of whiteness, which acknowledges permutations of whiteness fostered within national boundaries, as well as through various nation-state alliances and fractures. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and politics with interests in whiteness, postcolonialism and race.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1. Introduction: the Routes of Mestiza Whiteness
• 2. The Use and Limits of Colonial Mentality
• 3. Providing a New Framework: Tracking Colonialism and Imperialism
• 4. Somatechnologies of the Mestiza/o Self: Skin Colour and Language
• 5. Mestiza/o Whiteness and Anglo-Australian Whiteness: Post-9/11 Somatechnologies of State and Secularism
• 6. The Biopolitical Fracture: Deportation and Detention
• 7. Bearing Witness to Racialised Norms: Challenges and Queer Interventions
• Epilogue: To Remember and to Re-member
• References
• Index

Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life

Ashgate
September 2014
148 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4094-4498-5
eBook PDF ISBN: 978-1-4094-4499-2
eBook ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4724-0107-6

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Racial politics of life
• 2. The making of BiDil
• 3. Biosocial citizenship
• 4. Enlightened geneticization of race
• 5. Racial vital value
• 6. Neoliberalization of life
• Bibliography
• Index