Mixed Race Studies

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Fifth Edition

Rowman & Littlefield
June 2017
360 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-7622-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-7623-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-7624-6

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Features

• Provocative and engaging—praised by adopters as a book that students actually read
• Adopters say the book challenges many of their white students to see themselves and their attitudes towards race differently, while helping minority students find language to talk about their experiences
• Highlights the problems with many of the phrases students often use to talk about race in America, such as “I don’t see race,” or “Some of my best friends are black”
• Features a new chapter that is often requested by students—how to challenge racism on both the individual and the structural levels
• Includes new material on the Black Lives Matter movement, the impact of the Obama presidency and its aftermath, the rise of Donald Trump and the 2016 elections, and more

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for—and ultimately justify—racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society. The fifth edition includes a new chapter addressing what students can do to confront racism—both personally and on a larger structural level, new material on Donald Trump’s election and the racial climate post-Obama, new coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, and more.

The Beiging of America, Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century

2Leaf Press
June 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-1-940939-55-1

Edited by:

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

Sean Frederick Forbes, Poet and Professor

Tara Betts, Author and Professor

The Beiging of America, Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century, takes on “race matters” and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. Discrimination, instilling pride in family settings, sorting out the terms and names that people call themselves and their relatives, tackling colorism within communities of color, and childhood recollections fill these pages with compelling stories that speak to lived experiences, mapping a new ethnic terrain that transcends racial and cultural division.The Beiging of America was prompted by cultural critic/scholar Hua Hsu, who contemplated the changing face and race of U.S. demographics in his 2009 The Atlantic article provocatively titled “The End of White America.” In it, Hsu acknowledged “steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage” that undergirded assertions about the “beiging of America.”

As one flips through the pages of The Beiging of America, one discovers contributors’ shared exasperation with the inevitable and preposterous question – “What are you?” – simply because they do not fit neatly into any one racial category. This in itself is a reflection of how the black-white paradigm in America continues to obfuscate and distort rigid constructs and systemic racism, reminding readers that race – even in a post-racial imaginary – still matters. The Beiging of America is an absorbing and thought-provoking collection of stories that explore racial identity, alienation, with people often forced to choose between races and cultures in their search for self-identity. While underscoring the complexity of the mixed race experience, these unadorned voices offer a genuine, poignant, enlightening and empowering message to all readers.

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940 Revised Edition

University of Nebraska Press
2017-07-01
516 pages
7 illustrations, 1 table, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-9591-9

Gregory D. Smithers, Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples.

Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book’s original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia.

Author looks back at how interracial couples have stood up to white supremacy

PBS NewsHour
2017-06-15

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which struck down the law prohibiting interracial marriage. Author Sheryll Cashin explores that case and other historical examples in her book “Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy.” Judy Woodruff sits down with Cashin to discuss economic and ideological forces at work.

JUDY WOODRUFF: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Loving vs. Virginia.

In 1967, the justices struck down Virginia’s laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

In her latest book, “Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy,” Georgetown University law Professor Sheryll Cashin explores the history of white supremacy in this country and how relationships between different races challenge that ideology.

As part of our Race Matters series, I sat down with Cashin yesterday…

Watch the interview and read the transcript here.

Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War

C-SPAN: Created by Cable
2005-09-11

Trin Yarborough talked about her book, Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War, published by Potomac Books. She talked about the lives of orphans who weren born to American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Randy Tuan, who was one of many orphans adopted to work on a farm, spoke about his life and music. Following their presentation, Mr. Tuan and Ms. Yarborough responded to questions and comments from members of the audience.

The book told the stories of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Not among the few thousand Amerasian children brought to the U. S. before the war’s end who grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools, this group faced many more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. She wrote that an estimated 100,000 children were born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. She also wrote that many of these children faced difficult lives as a result of racial prejudice or an inability to identify completely with the Vietnamese culture. The book looked at the effects of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, a Congressional program enacted in 1987 that brought 28,000 Vietnamese Americans to the United States before the program was stopped in 1994 because of problems with fraud.

Watch the video (01:12:12) here.

Princess Nokia In Conversation at Brown University

Brown University
2017-04-27 (Published on 2017-05-16)

Facilitated by Sofia Robledo Rower ’18

Destiny Nicole Frasqueri, also known as Princess Nokia, is an Afro-Latina Boricua artist and musician based in New York City. Her music tackles the intersection of gender, race, class, urbanism, and age in captivating sonic and linguistic medleys. This public conversation will focus on spirituality, feminism, and race in her artistic process and performances.

Presented by Women’s History Series 2017

Watch the discussion here.

Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War

Potomac Books (an imprint of University of Nebraska Press)
April 2005
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-57488-864-5
Papberback ISBN: 978-1-57488-865-2

Trin Yarborough

Surviving Twice is the story of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Unfortunately, they were not among the few thousand Amerasian children who came to the United States before the war’s end and grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools. Instead, this group of Amerasians faced much more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. Surviving Twice raises significant questions about how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated and the ways in which the shifting laws, policies, social attitudes, and bureaucratic red tape of two nations affect them their entire lives.

Princess Nokia Is Ready to Reign

The Village Voice
2017-03-29

Ivie Ani

ioulex

I meet up with Destiny Frasqueri — the 24-year-old Nuyorican alternative hip-hop artist known variously as Princess Nokia, Wavy Spice, or simply Destiny — in the East Village. I’m running late; she’s even later, so I get to the Astor Place cube first. Fifteen minutes later she walks up, dressed, as she’d indicated in a text apologizing for being behind schedule, in a beige duster coat and sweats to match, carrying a cherry-print Louis V bag. She’s wearing oversize shades, no makeup, just a touch of mascara. Her dark hair blows in the breeze, caressing a diamond-studded choker.

Frasqueri has appeared in Vogue, modeled for Calvin Klein, and had her song “Tomboy” used for an Alexander Wang runway show. But what makes her a figure of fascination for music aficionados in their teens and early twenties is the way she celebrates the beauty of imperfection, building a hero’s identity out of being a self-described “fucked-up kid.” She’s stunning yet still rough around the edges, rhyming about wearing dirty sneakers, smoking blunts in the stairwell, and proclaiming the power in her heritage. For her followers, her attractiveness lies in her contrasts. “Eczema so bad I’m bleeding,” she raps on “Bart Simpson,” the first track on 1992, the album she put up on SoundCloud last September. Sure enough, I look down and her irritated hands are bleeding slightly.

“I’m just ghetto as hell,” she says once we’ve settled in at San Loco for some chicken nachos. “That’s the only way that I know how to just be myself.”…

…Frasqueri’s mom passed by the time she was nine, and she grew up living in various homes across the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side. She experienced abusive foster care, life in the projects, and brief escapes to camp with wealthy kids from the Upper West Side. She’d skip class but bury herself in books, digging deep into the Black literary canon. (“I am Black Harlem Renaissance,” she says. “I am Walter Dean Myers and Langston Hughes, baby.”) She taught herself, studying Kemetic philosophy, practicing brujería and Santería, claiming her inheritance of Yoruba and Taíno cultures, and falling in love with New York City. Pissy project elevators and breezy summer barbecues in the street suffuse Frasqueri’s memories. She represents a specific kind of New York, what she describes as her own “urban realism.” “What makes life beautiful?” she muses at one point. “The ghetto makes life beautiful. Black people make life beautiful.”…

…“I’m a Brown Afro-indigenous woman. That makes people uncomfortable as it is. The folks that have a problem with me and say, ‘You still live with privilege. You not fully Black.’ I can’t win and I can’t lose, so I’ma just keep going.” She smiles. “Yes, I’m mixed-race. There’s girls who look like me and glorify being exotic. I have a responsibility to my Blackness.”…

Read the entire article here.

I Only Protested the Affordable Care Act Because the President Was Black. Please Don’t Take Away My Health Insurance

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
2017-06-27

David Bradley Isenberg
New York, New York

Back in 2009, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was being debated in Congress, I was fuming with anger. How could I, a fiscal conservative, support a program that would drive down my insurance costs and cover my child’s preexisting condition? It clearly was a flawed bill that would ruin small businesses.

I nearly boiled over for eight years, and rightly so. But now that President Obama has finally left office, and the Republicans want to take away my health insurance options and increase my premiums, I just want to be up front about something.

It was never about the taxes. It was always about the president’s Blackness. It was super related to his race. Arguably, completely and wholly tied to race, alright? And now that the president is normal again, I’d be very grateful to be able to enjoy this health insurance and all these patient protections that have saved my small business and my child’s life. So please, don’t repeal the Affordable Care Act..

Read (and enjoy) the entire article here.

The Afro-Latino Festival NYC Celebrates A Culture That’s Ready To Be Heard

The Village Voice
2017-06-27

Siddhartha Mitter

Two revelers dance at last year’s festival Source: New Visual Collective

At 26, Amara La Negra, the Dominican-American singer, has a string of energetic tropical-funk hits in Spanish, fierce dance moves, a fashion line, hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and rising star power in her hometown of Miami and back in the Dominican Republic. But Amara is also Afro-Latina — a visibly, unapologetically Black woman making her career in worlds where colorism still runs rampant, among them the D.R. with its social hierarchy and the international Latin entertainment industry. With her dark skin, exuberant Afro, and in-your-face “La Negra” stage name, Amara is making a point.

“Change would be more Afro-Latinos in Hollywood, more on magazine covers,” Amara says. “It would be main roles in novelas, which we don’t yet have. They’ll cast you to be either a slave, a gangster, or a prostitute. They stereotype us.” Last year, a light-skinned beauty queen put on blackface and butt pads to parody Amara on Dominican TV. “We’re still a long way [from] seeing big change,” Amara says. “But we’re being more vocal.”…

…In New York City, the flagship venue for the new cultural reassertion is the Afro-Latino Festival, which holds its fifth edition on July 7 and 8. A grassroots project led by Mai-Elka Prado Gil and Amilcar Priestley, a Panamanian couple in Brooklyn, it has ballooned since 2013 from an outdoor afternoon party to a two-day international summit gathering musicians, filmmakers, activists, scholars, and partygoers….

Read the entire article here.