Mixed Race Studies

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2003
416 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
16 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations/Map/Notes/Index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52951-2, ISBN10: 0-374-52951-5

Henry Wiencek

L.A. Times Book Prize – Winner, History

A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his “only unavoidable subject of regret.” In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father’s engagement with slavery at every stage of his life–as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.

Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington’s attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system’s evil.

Wiencek’s revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington’s determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility–as the oral history of Mount Vernon‘s slave descendants has long asserted–that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.

George Washington’s heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era

The University of Michgan Press
2009
320 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-11450-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-03391-1
Ebook Formats ISBN: 978-0-472-02179-6

John Kenneth White, Professor of Politics
Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C

Research and reflections on the American demographic shift that led to the election of President Barack Obama

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency marks a conclusive end to the Reagan era, writes John Kenneth White in Barack Obama’s America. Reagan symbolized a 1950s and 1960s America, largely white and suburban, with married couples and kids at home, who attended church more often than not.

Obama’s election marks a new era, the author writes. Whites will be a minority by 2042. Marriage is at an all-time low. Cohabitation has increased from a half-million couples in 1960 to more than 5 million in 2000 to even more this year. Gay marriages and civil unions are redefining what it means to be a family. And organized religions are suffering, even as Americans continue to think of themselves as a religious people. Obama’s inauguration was a defining moment in the political destiny of this country, based largely on demographic shifts, as described in Barack Obama’s America.

Read the Q&A with the University of Michigan Press and John Kenneth White here.

University of Michigan Press: Was Barack Obama’s election a reflection of change in American attitudes, or more a change in the type of people who make up the country?

John Kenneth White: …The America of the 1950s through the 1980s has come to an end. Whites will be a minority of all Americans by the middle of the twenty-first century. Hispanics will be nearly a third of the population by 2030. The face of America is turning from white into some form of beige or bronze. Even how we define race is an open question. For much of American history, race was categorized into two categories: black or white. Mixed race was frowned upon and degrading terms such as “quadroon” were invented. Now there are more mixed racial marriages than ever before and the children from those marriages are not easily categorized….

The Ethics of Identity

Princeton University Press
2004
384 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 9780691120362
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-4008-2619-3

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values
Princeton University

• A New York Times Editors’ Choice
• One of Amazon.com’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005
• Winner of the 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional/Scholarly Publishing in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers
• Honorable Mention for the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do “identities” constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.

The Ethics of Identity takes seriously both the claims of individuality–the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.

What sort of life one should lead is a subject that has preoccupied moral and political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill. Here, Appiah develops an account of ethics, in just this venerable sense–but an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities. As he observes, the question who we are has always been linked to the question what we are.

Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clichés and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is “culture” a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of “human rights” been overstretched? In the end, Appiah’s arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism–one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE
• Chapter One: The Ethics of Individuality
  • THE GREAT EXPERIMENT—LIBERTY AND INDIVIDUALITY—PLANS OF LIFE–THE SOUL OF THE SERVITOR—SOCIAL CHOICES—INVENTION AND AUTHENTICITY—THE SOCIAL SCRIPTORIUM—ETHICS IN IDENTITY—INDIVIDUALITY AND THE STATE—THE COMMON PURSUIT
• Chapter Two: Autonomy and Its Critics
  • WHAT AUTONOMY DEMANDS—AUTONOMY AS INTOLERANCE—AUTONOMY AGONISTES—THE TWO STANDPOINTS—AGENCY AND THE INTERESTS OF THEORY
• Chapter Three: The Demands of Identity
  • LEARNING HOW TO CURSE—THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL IDENTITIES—MILLET MULTICULTURALISM—AUTONOMISM, PLURALISM, NEUTRALISM—A FIRST AMENDMENT EXAMPLE: THE ACCOMMODATIONIST PROGRAM—NEUTRALITY RECONSIDERED—THE LANGUAGE OF RECOGNITION—THE MEDUSA SYNDROME—LIMITS AND PARAMETERS
• Chapter Four: The Trouble with Culture
  • MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE—IS CULTURE A GOOD?—THE PRESERVATIONIST ETHIC—NEGATION AS AFFIRMATION— THE DIVERSITY PRINCIPLE
• Chapter Five: Soul Making
  • SOULS AND THE STATE—THE SELF-MANAGEMENT CARD—RATIONAL WELL-BEING—IRRATIONAL IDENTITIES—SOUL MAKING AND STEREOTYPES—EDUCATED SOULS—CONFLICTS OVER IDENTITY CLAIMS
• Chapter Six: Rooted Cosmopolitanism
  • A WORLDWIDE WEB–RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITANS–ETHICAL PARTIALITY–TWO CONCEPTS OF OBLIGATION–COSMOPOLITAN PATRIOTISM–CONFRONTATION AND CONVERSATION–RIVALROUS GOODS, RIVALROUS GODS–TRAVELING TALES–GLOBALIZING HUMAN RIGHTS–COSMOPOLITAN CONVERSATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX

Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America

Basic Books an imprint of The Perseus Books Group
2006-12-28
302 pages
ISBN: 9780786718825
ISBN-10: 078671882X

Elliott Lewis

Television journalist Elliott Lewis weaves his memoirs as a black-and-white biracial American with the voices of dozens of multiracial people who are challenging how we think and speak about race today. “What are you?” This seemingly ordinary but politically charged question has become a touchstone for debate around race and ethnicity. Now, more than ever, mixed race Americans are calling themselves biracial and multiracial rather than feeling forced to choose only one race. Nearly seven million people checked more than one racial category in the 2000 US census, the first time in history Americans had the option to mark more than one box. With Fade, Lewis offers a comprehensive look at the multiracial state of the union. Here he speaks with dozens of individuals, tackling hot button issues such as the often complicated lives of multiracial people in communities of color, interracial dating, transracial adoption, and the birth of the multiracial movement. The author also shares his own moving — and often humorous — firsthand experiences with race, along with intimate stories from those at the forefront of nationwide efforts to formally recognize the multiracial population.

Part Asian, 100% Hapa: Portraits by Kip Fulbeck

Chronicle Books
February, 2006
264 pages
7 x 7 in; 125 color photographs
ISBN 0811849597
ISBN13 9780811849593

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Foreword by Sean Lennon

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

Part Asian, 100% Hapa — Originally a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for half, Hapa is now being embraced as a term of pride by many people of Asian or Pacific Rim mixed-race heritage. Award-winning film producer and artist Kip Fulbeck has created a forum in word and image for Hapas to answer the question they’re nearly always asked: “What are you?” Fulbeck’s frank, head-on portraits are paired with the sitters’ own statements of identity. A work of intimacy, beauty, and powerful self-expression, Part Asian, 100% Hapa is the book Fulbeck says he wishes he had growing up. An introduction to the rest of the world and an affirmation for Hapas themselves—who now number in the millions—it offers a new perspective on a rapidly growing population.

Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics

Stanford University Press
2000
256 pages
4 tables.
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804740135
Cloth ISBN-13: 9780804740135
Paper ISBN-10: 0804740593
Paper ISBN-13: 9780804740593

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This book explores the politics of race, censuses, and citizenship, drawing on the complex history of questions about race in the U.S. and Brazilian censuses. It reconstructs the history of racial categorization in American and Brazilian censuses from each country’s first census in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up through the 2000 census. It sharply challenges certain presumptions that guide scholarly and popular studies, notably that census bureaus are (or are designed to be) innocent bystanders in the arena of politics, and that racial data are innocuous demographic data.

Using previously overlooked historical sources, the book demonstrates that counting by race has always been a fundamentally political process, shaping in important ways the experiences and meanings of citizenship. This counting has also helped to create and to further ideas about race itself. The author argues that far from being mere producers of racial statistics, American and Brazilian censuses have been the ultimate insiders with respect to racial politics.

For most of their histories, American and Brazilian censuses were tightly controlled by state officials, social scientists, and politicians. Over the past thirty years in the United States and the past twenty years in Brazil, however, certain groups within civil society have organized and lobbied to alter the methods of racial categorization. This book analyzes both the attempt of America’s multiracial movement to have a multiracial category added to the U.S. census and the attempt by Brazil’s black movement to include racial terminology in census forms. Because of these efforts, census bureau officials in the United States and Brazil today work within political and institutional constraints unknown to their predecessors. Categorization has become as much a “bottom-up” process as a “top-down” one.

Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation

Stanford University Press
2005
224 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804747288; ISBN-13: 9780804747288
Paper ISBN-10: 0804747296; ISBN-13: 9780804747295

Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Sexual Naturalization offers compelling new insights into the racialized constitution of American nationality. In the first major interdisciplinary study of Asian-white miscegenation from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Koshy traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws, and their role in shaping cultural norms. Not only did these laws foster the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, they were paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas. Miscegenation laws thus turned sex acts into race acts and engendered new meanings for both.

Koshy argues that the cultural work performed by narratives of white-Asian miscegenation dramatically transformed the landscape of desire in the United States, inventing new objects and relations of desire that established a powerful hold over U.S. culture, a capture of imaginative space that was out of all proportion to the actual numbers of Asian residents.

Read an excerpt of chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Sexual Orients and the American National Imaginary
  • Mimic Modernity: “Madame Butterfly” and the Erotics of Informal Empire
  • Eugenic Romances of American Nationhood
• Part Two: Engendering the Hybrid Nation
  • Unincorporated Territories of Desire: Hypercorporeality and Miscegenation in Carlos Bulosan’s Writings
  • Sex Acts as Assimilation Acts: Female Power and Passing in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America

University of Wisconsin Press
December 1989
544 pages
6 x 9, 4 tables
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-299-12114-3
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12114-3

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

Named an “Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States” by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.

Negotiating Social Contexts: Identities of Biracial College Women

Information Age Publishing
2007
79 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59311-596-8
eBook ISBN: 9781607527107

Edited by:

Andra M. Basu, Dean of Adult and Professional Studies
Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania

This book examines the identification choices of a group of biracial college women and explores how these identifications relate to their choices and constructions of different social contexts. It is a qualitative study that draws on recent psychological literature, as well as personal interviews and focus groups with a group of biracial college women. The book includes 1) a review of the relevant literature concerning biracial individuals, 2) a discussion of some of the unique issues facing researchers who work with biracial populations, and 3) an indepth examination of the relationship between identity and different social contexts for a group of biracial women. The book addresses issues critical to educators, counselors, policy makers and researchers who work with biracial students, as well as biracial individuals and their families. For example, it shows how, for this group of biracial college women, identity choices did influence their choices and constructions of social contexts, particularly at the school that they all attended. Yet while identification choices did influence their perceptions about their social contexts, other factors such as social barriers also influenced them. Family members played a role in their identification choices as well, but siblings were found to be more influential than parents. In addition, the book demonstrates how educators and biracial mentors had a significant impact on this particular group of biracial women. The implications of these findings for parents, educators and future researchers are considered, as the number of biracial individuals living in the United States continues to grow.