Mixed Race Studies

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Michigan State University Press
2013-11-01
310 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611860863
eBook ISBN: 9781609173753

Pancho McFarland, Associate Professor of Sociology
Chicago State University

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ruben O. Martinez
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1. SETTING THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
  • Chapter 1. Quién es más macho? Quién es más Mexicano?: Chican@ and Mexicans Identities in Rap
  • Chapter 2. Barrio Logos: Tlie Sacred and Profane Word of Chicano Emcees
• PART 2. IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW
  • Chapter 3. Sonido Indígena: Mexica Hip-Hop and Masculine Identity
  • Chapter 4. Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop
  • Chapter 5. Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity
• PART 3. MEXICANIDAD, AFRICANIDAD
  • Chapter 6. Multiracial Macho: Kemo the Blaxican’s Hip-Hop Masculinity
  • Chapter 7. The Rap on Chicano/Mexicano and Black Masculinity: Gender and Cross-Cultural Exchange
  • Chapter 8. “Soy la Kalle”: Radio, Reggaetón, and Latin@ Identity
• PART 4. HIP-HOP AND JUSTICE
  • Chapter 9. Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice
  • Afterword. Hip-Hop and Freedom-Dreaming in the Mexican Diaspora
• Appendix. Music Sources
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality: New Visions

Peter Lang Publishing
2013
232 pages
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2327-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-2328-3

Cynthia B. Dillard, Mary Frances Early Endowed Professor in Teacher Education
University of Georgia

Chinwe L. Okpalaoka, Director of Undergraduate Recruitment and Diversity Services in the College of Arts and Sciences
Ohio State University

Engaging Culture, Race and Spirituality addresses a critical question rarely addressed in our conversations and the literature about race, culture and diversity: How might spirituality and our inner lives matter in teaching and teacher education that explicitly engages and addresses race and culture? In ways explicit and embodied, this book focuses on how engaging spirituality and the inner life can serve as radical intervention in our dialogues about race and culture in education. Gathered together are the voices of emerging young scholars whose thinking and research explicitly marshal theories of spirituality as critical interventions in their dialogues and discourses about culture and race in teaching and teacher education. Each chapter is followed by a scholar visionary who points to ways for educators and educational researchers to see the usefulness of such spirituality in engaging research, pedagogy and practices. Their collective visions  all deeply political, sometimes humorous, always insightful, and thoughtfully provocative  call us to a new way of thinking about the «evidence of things unseen», about spirituality in education as a site of profound possibilities for change, equity, and social justice.

Contents

• Cynthia B. Dillard/Chinwe L. Ezueh Okpalaoka: Introduction: Culture, Race, and Dialogue: Toward a Spiritual Praxis in Education
• Tami A. Augustine/Deborah Justice Zurmehly: Conversations about Race: How Embracing Spirituality Opens Space for Dialogues in Teacher Education
• Barbara Dray: Visionary Response: With Mindfulness as a Guide: Engaging Conversations in Teacher Education
• Eyatta Fischer: Writing and Telling: Healing the Pain of Disconnection
• Robin M. Boylorn: Visionary Response: On Teaching and Telling: Two Sides of a Teaching (Cassette) Tape
• Brooke Harris Garad: Spiritually Centered Caring: An Approach for Teaching and Reaching Black Students in Suburbia
• Samara D. Madrid: Visionary Response: Care as a Racialized, Critical, and Spiritual Emotion
• Gilbert Kaburu/Chris Landauer: Less Religion, More Spirituality: Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy in the Global Era
• Khosi Kubeka: Visionary Response: Infusing Identity Enactment as a Component of Spiritually Relevant Pedagogy
• Angela Cartwright Lynskey: Occupy Classrooms: Teaching from a Spiritual Paradigm
• Carmen Liliana Medina: Visionary Response: Spiritual Occupations: Reflections on Pedagogies and Everyday Stories of Globalization
• Ashley N. Patterson: Can One Ever Be Wholly Whole? Fostering Biracial Identity Founded in Spirit
• Bettina L. Love: Visionary Response: Biracial Identity, Spiritual Wholeness, and Black Girlhood
• Erica Womack: Lessons in Love, Literacy, and Listening: Reflections on Learning with and from Black Female Youth
• Marcelle M. Haddix: Visionary Response: Listening Face-to-Face and Eye-to-Eye: Seeing and Believing Black Girls and Women in Educational Practice and Research

The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions

Stanford University Press
2013
240 pages
7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804757713
Paper ISBN: 9780804757720
E-bok ISBN: 9780804787284

Vilna Bashi Treitler, Professor of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies
Baruch College, City University of New York

Race is a known fiction—there is no genetic marker that indicates someone’s race—yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism.

In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups—Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans—she shows how each negotiates America’s racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these “ethnic projects” these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Racism and Ethnic Myths
• 2. How Ethnic and Racial Structures Operate
• 3. Ethnic Winners and Losers
• 4. The Irish, Chinese, Italians, and Jews: Successful Ethnic Projects
• 5. The Native Americans, Mexicans, and Afro-Caribbeans: Struggling Ethnic Projects
• 6. African Americans and the Failed Ethnic Project
• 7. The Future of U.S. Ethnoracism
• Notes
• Index

Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership

Indiana University Press
2013-03-22
344 pages
3 b&w illus
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00804-6
Paper ISBN: 978-0-253-00807-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-253-00811-4

Edited by:

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

In recent years, Europeans have engaged in sharp debates about migrants and minority groups as social problems. The discussions usually neglect who these people are, how they live their lives, and how they identify themselves. Multiple Identities describes how migrants and minorities of all age groups experience their lives and manage complex, often multiple, identities, which alter with time and changing circumstances. The contributors consider minorities who have received a lot of attention, such as Turkish Germans, and some who have received little, such as Kashubians and Tartars in Poland and Chinese in Switzerland. They also examine international adoption and cross-cultural relationships and discuss some models for multicultural success.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Part 1. Orientations
  • 1. Many Multiplicities: Identity in an Age of Movement \ Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 2. Ethnic Identities and Transnational Subjectivities \ Anna Rastas, University of Tampere
• Part 2. The Complexities of Identities
  • 3. Between Difference and Assimilation: Young Women with South and Southeast Asian Family Background Living in Finland \ Saara Pellander, University of Helsinki
  • 4. Doing Belonging: Young Women of Middle Eastern Backgrounds in Sweden \ Serine Gunnarsson, Uppsala University
  • 5. To Be or Not to Be a Minority Group? Identity Dilemmas of Kashubians and Polish Tatars \ Katarzyna Warmińska, Cracow University of Economics
  • 6. “When You Look Chinese, You Have to Speak Chinese”: Highly Skilled Chinese Migrants in Switzerland and the Promotion of a Shared Language \ Marylène Lieber and Florence Lévy, Neuchatel University
• Part 3. Family Matters
  • 7. Intercountry Adoption: Color-b(l)inding the Issues \ Saija Westerlund-Cook
  • 8. The Children of Immigrants in Italy: A New Generation of Italians? \ Enzo Colombo and Paola Rebughini, University of Milan
  • 9. Possible Love: New Cross-cultural Couples in Italy \ Gaia Peruzzi, Sapienza University of Rome
• Part 4. Modes of Multicultural Success?
  • 10. Divided Identities: Listening to and Interpreting the Stories of Polish Immigrants in West Germany \ Mira Foster, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 11. The Politics of Multiple Identities in Kazakhstan: Current Issues and New Challenges \ Karina Mukazhanova, Karaganda State University and University of Oregon
  • 12. Chinese Americans, Turkish Germans: Parallels in Two Racial Systems \ Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (revised edition)

Louisiana State University Press
November 2013 (First published in 1977)
480 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
25 halftones, 3 maps, 3 charts
Paperback ISBN: 9780807137130

Gary B. Mills (1944–2002), Professor of History
University of Alabama

Revised by:

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Foreword by:

H. Sophie Burton

Out of colonial Natchitoches, in northwestern Louisiana, emerged a sophisticated and affluent community founded by a family of freed slaves. Their plantations eventually encompassed 18,000 fertile acres, which they tilled alongside hundreds of their own bondsmen. Furnishings of quality and taste graced their homes, and private tutors educated their children. Cultured, deeply religious, and highly capable, Cane River’s Creoles of color enjoyed economic privileges but led politically constricted lives. Like their white neighbors, they publicly supported the Confederacy and suffered the same depredations of war and political and social uncertainties of Reconstruction. Unlike white Creoles, however, they did not recover amid cycles of Redeemer and Jim Crow politics.

First published in 1977, The Forgotten People offers a socioeconomic history of this widely publicized but also highly romanticized community—a minority group that fit no stereotypes, refused all outside labels, and still struggles to explain its identity in a world mystified by Creolism.

Now revised and significantly expanded, this time-honored work revisits Cane River’s “forgotten people” and incorporates new findings and insight gleaned across thirty-five years of further research. This new edition provides a nuanced portrayal of the lives of Creole slaves and the roles allowed to freed people of color, tackling issues of race, gender, and slave holding by former slaves. The Forgotten People corrects misassumptions about the origin of key properties in the Cane River National Heritage Area and demonstrates how historians reconstruct the lives of the enslaved, the impoverished, and the disenfranchised.

Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose

Dundurn Press
June 2013
240 pages
5.5 in x 8.5 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-45970-426-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-45970-428-2

Pauline Johnson (1861-1913)

Compiled and Introduced by:

Michael Gnarowski

Pauline Johnson was an unusual and unique presence on the literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Mohawk and part European, she was a compelling female voice in the midst of an almost entirely male writing community. Having discovered her talent for public recitation of poetry, Johnson relied on her ancestry and gender to establish an international reputation for her stage performances, during which she appeared in European and native costume. These poems were later collected under the title of Flint and Feather (1912) and form the source of the selections appearing in this volume.

Later, suffering from ill health, Pauline Johnson retired from the stage and devoted herself to the writing of prose, collected in Legends of Vancouver, The Moccasin Maker (1913), and The Shagganappi (1913), gleanings from which form part of this collection.

Master of None: How a Hong Kong high-flyer overcame the devastating experience of imprisonment

Blacksmith Books
October 2011
312 pages
colour photo section
Size: 14.6 x 21.6 cm
Hardback ISBN: ISBN: 978-988-19002-7-2

John Hung

Does a man need a stint in jail to complete his life experiences?

From Stanley Prison, corporate high-flyer John T. Hung recounts his life in a sweep of Hong Kong history over five generations – from his family roots in the 19th century through World War II to the present.

The story tracks the richness of his mixed heritage and upbringing, his steady rise and precipitous fall from the pinnacles of corporate Hong Kong to the life-destroying court case and heartbreaking incarceration.

With wry and subtle humour, Hung describes his colourful yet volatile life, interwoven into the social, commercial, political and sporting tapestry of Hong Kong and South East Asia.

Master of None is a soulful exploration of human achievements, frailties, resilience in the face of adversity, and above all, the importance of family support in overcoming whatever fate may deal us.

Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
July 2013
127 pages
ISBN: 9781611475999

Melissa Coburn, Assistant Professor of Italian and Italian Program Director
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and sociohistorical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and also central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become the organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.

The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium (revised)

Random House
2013-01-08
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-74423-4

Kathy Russell-Cole, Vice President of Sales
Omar Supplies Inc.

Midge Wilson, Associate Dean; Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
DePaul University

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

A provocative exploration of how Western standards of beauty are influencing cultures across the globe and impacting personal, professional, romantic and familial relationships. Processes like skin lightening in India, hair smoothing in Black America, eyelid reconstruction in China, and plastic surgery worldwide continue to rise in popularity for men and women facing discrimination from both within and outside of their own increasingly fluid ethnic groups. Now including a wealth of new information since the first edition of The Color Complex over two decades ago, the authors, through a historical and sociological lens, have measured the impact of recent pop culture events effecting race relations to determine whether colorism has gotten better or worse over time.

Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Emergence of Modern Colorism in the Americas
• Chapter 2: The Global Rise of Colorism
• Chapter 3: The Tiers of Color Prejudice in America
• Chapter 4: The Color of Identity
• Chapter 5: Hair Stories: Politics of the Straight and Nappy
• Chapter 6: Families and Friends: Drawing the Color Lines
• Chapter 7: The Match Game: Colorism and Courtship
• Chapter 8: The (In)Justice of Color: Politics. Policies, and Perceptions
• Chapter 9: The Narrative of Skin Color: Stories in Black and Light
• Chapter 10: #TeamLightskinned: Color and the Media
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index

The Emergence of Modern Colorism in the Americas

We begin in Europe in the late 1400s, when seafaring countries such as England, Spain, and Portugal were financing merchant voyages to find new trade routes to the Far East. The men returned instead with exciting tales of faraway places that were rich with gold, spices, and silks. The very notion that there existed unknown lands beyond the horizon set off a frenzy of empire building on the part of many European nations. This would later be known as the Age of Discovery, and it lasted well into the seventeenth century. After Christopher Columbus reached what he mistakenly believed were the Indies, and it was realized that vast new lands were available for plunder and colonization, European nations began financing more ship captains for even more expeditions with orders to stake claim to as many territories as they could find. It mattered little to the Europeans if indigenous peoples already were living in these “discovered” places. Europeans believed they were the superior race. As such, they saw it as their Christian duty to tame the “savage” natives and bring them civilization, a self-serving rationale that would persist for centuries—Rudyard Kipling would call it “the White man’s burden” as late as 1899.

During the early 1500s, the islands of the Caribbean—or “West Indies,” as they were mistakenly named by Columbus—were popular destinations for Portuguese and Spanish explorers, and other areas of Central and South America soon followed. While the hoped-for gold rarely materialized, it was recognized that the warm climates and rich soil in these new lands had the potential for growing cash crops like sugar and coffee. The crops were labor intensive, however, and for them to be profitable, a source of cheap labor was needed. At first, local indigenous people were captured and forced to work in the colonists’ fields, but there were not enough of them. Some White indentured servants from Europe ventured over, but again, not enough. The Portuguese, who already had explored the east coast of Africa, found the solution by bringing over the first slaves to the New World. This nation would continue to be the largest importer of slaves during the era of Atlantic slave trading.

African slaves poured in to work in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the Caribbean, the British, French, and Dutch had also claimed islands of their own, and they, too, needed slaves to work the sugar plantations. Conditions were ideal for race mixing to take place. Large numbers of individuals from different racial backgrounds were living and working side by side, and doing so under the rule of White plantation owners who were greatly outnumbered. In fact, it has been estimated that throughout the Caribbean, there was an average ratio of one White to ten Blacks and/or mulattoes, and in some of the most remote rural areas there could be as many as fifty slaves and/or mulattoes for every one White male. Finally, there was a significant gender imbalance. During the early years of slave trading, far more African males, with their greater upper-body strength (relative to that of females), were brought to the New World to clear the fields, but females were valued as well, and albeit in smaller numbers, they came too. Predictably, under the extreme conditions in many of these settlement outposts, the White men in charge raped the women who worked for them. But, to be fair, we should note that many romantic relationships and successful unions also came into existence during this time.

Racially mixed individuals, called “mulattoes” (a term considered derogatory by many today), began to make up significant segments of the population throughout Central and South America. They were people of every conceivable variety: those of mixed European and African blood, those of mixed European and indigenous blood, those of mixed African and indigenous blood, and subsequently every combination and permutation created by the mixed-race offspring of the first unions…

Read Chapter 1 here.

Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research

Rutgers University Press
2013-08-12
256 pages
6 figures, 8 tables, 6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-6136-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-6137-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8135-6138-7

Edited by:

Laura E. Gómez, Professor of Law, Sociology, and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Nancy López, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of New Mexico

Forward by:

R. Burciaga Valdez

Researchers commonly ask subjects to self-identify their race from a menu of preestablished options. Yet if race is a multidimensional, multilevel social construction, this has profound methodological implications for the sciences and social sciences. Race must inform how we design large-scale data collection and how scientists utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection argues for the recognition of those implications for research and suggests ways in which they may be integrated into future scientific endeavors. It concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by R. Burciaga Valdez
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Taking the Social Construction of Race Seriously in Health Disparities Research / Laura E. Gómez
• Part I: Charting the Problem
  • 2. The Politics of Framing Health Disparities: Markets and Justice / Jonathan Kahn
  • 3. Looking at the World through “Race”-Colored Glasses: The Fallacy of Ascertainment Bias in Biomedical Research and Practice / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
  • 4. Ethical Dilemmas in Statistical Practice: The Probelm of Race in Biomedicine / Jay S. Kaufman
  • 5. A Holistic Alternative to Current Survey Research Approaches to Race / John A . Garcia
• Part II: Navigating Diverse Empirical Settings
  • 6. Organizational Practice and Social Constraints: Problems of Racial Identity Data Collection in Cancer Care and Research / Simon J. Craddock Lee
  • 7. Lessons from Political Science: Health Status and Improving How We Study Race / Gabriel R. Sanchez and Vickie D. Ybarra
  • 8. Advancing Asian American Mental Health Research by Enhancing Racial Identity Measures / Derek Kenji Iwamoto, Mai M. Kindaichi, and Matthew Miller
• Part III. Surveying Solutions
  • 9. Representing the Multidimensionality of Race in Survey Research / Allya Saperstein
  • 10. How Racial-Group Comparisons Create Misinformation in Depression Research: Using Racial Identity Theory to Conceptualize Health Disparities / Janet E. Helms and Ethan H. Mereish
  • 11. Jedi Public Health: Leveraging Contingencies of Social Identity to Grasp and Eliminiate Racial Health Inequality / Arline T. Geronimus
  • 12. Contextualizing Lived Race-Gender and the Racialized-Gendered Social Determinants of Health / Nancy López
• Notes on Contributors
• Index