Mixed Race Studies

White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach

Pluto Press
2009-11-06
240 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
ISBN: 9780745327488

Steve Garner, Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University

Simon Clarke, Director
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies
University of the West of England

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic.

Whiteness has traditionally been seen as “ethnically transparent” – the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner’s book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas.

Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity.

Contents

• 1. Researching ‘Whiteness’: An Introduction
• 2. Whiteness Studies in the Context of the USA
• 3. Empirical research into white racialised identities in Britain
• 4. Britishness
• 5. Whiteness and Post-Imperial Britain
• 6. Psycho-Social Interpretations of Cultural Identity: constructing the white ‘we’
• 7. Media Representations: constructing the ‘not white’ Other
• 8. Whiteness, Home and Community
• 9. Researching Whiteness: Psycho-Social Methodologies
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away

Viking Press an imprint of the Penguin Group
2006-05-17
320 pages
8.26 x 5.23in
Paperback ISBN: 9780143112112
eBook (Adobe reader) ISBN: 9781429515375
eBook (eReader) ISBN: 9781429517829
eBook (Microsoft Reader) ISBN: 9781429512923

June Cross, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

June Cross was born in 1954 to Norma Booth, a glamorous, aspiring white actress, and James “Stump” Cross, a well-known black comedian. Sent by her mother to be raised by black friends when she was four years old and could no longer pass as white, June was plunged into the pain and confusion of a family divided by race. Secret Daughter tells her story of survival. It traces June’s astonishing discoveries about her mother and about her own fierce determination to thrive. This is an inspiring testimony to the endurance of love between mother and daughter, a child and her adoptive parents, and the power of community.

Visit the official website here.

Visit the PBS Frontline site about Secret Daughter here.

“Obama’s People”: A New Identity for Biracials and Mixed Heritage

Xlibris Press
2009
102 Pages
ISBN: 1-4363-9510-0 (Trade Paperback 6×9 )
ISBN13: 978-1-4363-9510-6 (Trade Paperback 6×9 )
ISBN: 1-4363-9511-9 (Trade Hardback 6×9 )
ISBN13: 978-1-4363-9511-3 (Trade Hardback 6×9 )

Phillip MacFarland

Since President Barack Obama is from a biracial heritage and is now the leader of the free world, he has become an icon for the biracial and mixed person’s ethnic and national identity. The author, also of biracial heritage, illuminates the reader on how he and other Americans of mixed heritage are now,more than ever, proud to be an American. Having high self-esteem,and a challenging, but bright future.Whether one is White, Black, Asian, Latino, Native American or mixed…  President Obama represents all of us. As Americans, we will continue making important contributions to America and the world,with determination and a model for success….Yes We Can! and Yes We Are!… “Obama´s People.”

Read an excerpt here.

Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

University of Georgia Press
2005-03-28
60 pages
Illustrated, Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2731-0

Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men—including traders, soldiers, and government agents—sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as “half-breeds.” The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or “blood.” Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

“Mixed Blood” Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants’ participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation “mixed blood.” In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, “mixed bloods” were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these “half-breeds” often resisted appeals to their “civilized” blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. “Mixed Blood” Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their—or any peoples’—motives.

The Myth of the Human Races

Michigan State University Press
December 1997
210 pages
6.00″ x 9.00″
Notes, bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-87013-439-6; ISBN 13: 978-0-87013-439-5

Alain F. Corcos, Professor Emeritus of Botany
Michigan State University

The idea that human races exist is a socially constructed myth that has no grounding in science. Regardless of skin, hair, or eye color, stature or physiognomy, we are all of one species. Nonetheless, scientists, social scientists, and pseudo-scientists have, for three centuries, tried vainly to prove that distinctive and separate “races” of humanity exist. These protagonists of race theory have based their flawed research on one or more of five specious assumptions:

• humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics
• human characteristics are transmitted “through the blood,”
• distinct human physical characteristics are inherited together,
• physical features can be linked to human behavior,
• human groups or “races” are by their very nature unequal and, therefore, they can be ranked in order of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority.

The Myth of Human Races systematically dispels these fallacies and unravels the web of flawed research that has been woven to demonstrate the superiority of one group of people over another.

Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia

University of Pittsburgh Press
May 2004
240 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 9780822942276

Javier C. Sanjinés, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies
University of Michigan

Mestizaje refers to the process of cultural, ethnic, and racial mixture that is part of cultural identity in Latin America. Through a careful study of fiction, political essays, and visual art, this book defines the meaning of mestizaje in the context of the emergence of a modern national and artistic identity in late-19th- and early 20th-century Bolivia.

A Letter to My Father: Growing up Filipina and American

University of Oklahoma Press
2008
184 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″ x 0″
8 b&w illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8061-3909-8

Helen Madamba Mossman

Going from the jungles of the wartime Philippines to the schoolyards of northwestern Oklahoma is no easy transition. For one twelve-year-old girl, it meant distance not only across the globe but also within her own family.

Born to a Filipino father and an American mother, Helen Madamba experienced terrifying circumstances at a young age. During World War II, her father, Jorge, fought as an American soldier in his native Philippines, and his family camped in jungles and slept in caves for more than two years to evade capture by the Japanese. But once the family relocated to Woodward, Oklahoma, young Helen faced a different kind of struggle.

Here Mossman tells of her efforts to repudiate her Asian roots so she could fit into American mainstream culture—and her later efforts to come to terms with her identity during the tumultuous 1960s. As she recounts her father’s wartime exploits and gains an appreciation of his life, she learns to rejoice in her biracial and multicultural heritage.

Written with the skill of a gifted storyteller and graced with photos that capture both of Helen’s worlds, A Letter to My Father is a poignant story that will resonate with anyone familiar with the struggle to reconcile past and present identities.

Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience

University of Oklahoma Press
1997
368 pages
9.09″ x 6.02″ x 0.83″
14 illus, 6 maps, 1 figure
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8061-2911-2; ISBN(10): 0-8061-2911-5

Christopher H. Lutz

Santiago de Guatemala was the colonial capital and most important urban center of Spanish Central America from its establishment in 1541 until the earthquakes of 1773. Christopher H. Lutz traces the demographic and social history of the city during this period, focusing on the rise of groups of mixed descent. During these two centuries the city evolved from a segmented society of Indians, Spaniards, and African slaves to an increasingly mixed population as the formerly all-Indian barrios became home to a large intermediate group of ladinos. The history of the evolution of a multiethnic society in Santiago also sheds light on the present-day struggle of Guatemalan ladinos and Indians and the problems that continue to divide the country today.

Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880

University of Nevada Press
2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87417-697-1
Hardcover Pages: 272
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87417-778-7
Paperback Pages: 280

María Raquél Casas, Associate Professor of History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California

Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families.  Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.