Mixed Race Studies

The Race Talk: Multiracialism, White Hegemony, and Identity Politics

Information Age Publishing
2012-10-25
144 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61735-912-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61735-913-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61735-914-9

Pierre W. Orelus, Assistant Professor of Education
New Mexico State University

Drawing on critical race theory, this book critically examines race through a mosaic lens pointing out various issues directly connected to it, such as racial identity politics, racism, multiracialism, interracial relationships, and the hegemony of whiteness. This book goes further to analyze the manner in which socially constructed racial stereotypes contribute to and are used to justify the poor socio-economic situation and marginalization of People of Color, particularly the poor ones. Designed for a broad range of readers, this book aims to open up democratic spaces for genuine discussions about racial issues.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Race Talk
• 2. Asserting Multiracialism: Beyond the Hegemony of Whiteness
• 3. Racial Identity Politics and Class Divide in The Age of Obamerica
• 4. Unpacking [Inter] Racial Relationships between Whites and People of Color
• 5. Examining the Intricacies of Interracial Relationships
• 6. Being Blacks and Browns in the Twenty-First Century: Challenges and Possibilities
• 7. On Being a Professor of Color: Battling Invisibility and Microaggression
• 8. Black Skin Could Speak: Resistant Narratives for Racial Justice
• 9. The Sociopolitical Weight of Race: A Critical Analysis of President Obama, Professor Gates, and Sgt. Crowley’s Racial Controversy
• References
• About the Author
• Index

The New Southern-Latino Table: Recipes That Bring Together the Bold and Beloved Flavors of Latin America and the American South

University of North Carolina Press
September 2011
320 pages
7.625 x 8.375, 20 color illus., bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3494-7

Sandra A. Gutierrez

In this splendid cookbook, bicultural cook Sandra Gutierrez blends ingredients, traditions, and culinary techniques, creatively marrying the diverse and delicious cuisines of more than twenty Latin American countries with the beloved food of the American South.

 The New Southern-Latino Table features 150 original and delightfully tasty recipes that combine the best of both culinary cultures. 

Gutierrez, who has taught thousands of people how to cook, highlights the surprising affinities between the foodways of the Latin and Southern regions—including a wide variety of ethnic roots in each tradition and many shared basic ingredients—while embracing their flavorful contrasts and fascinating histories.

These lively dishes—including Jalapeño Deviled Eggs, Cocktail Chiles Rellenos with Latin Pimiento Cheese, Two-Corn Summer Salad, Latin Fried Chicken with Smoky Ketchup, Macaroni con Queso, and Chile Chocolate Brownies—promise to spark the imaginations and the meals of home cooks, seasoned or novice, and of food lovers everywhere. Along with delectable appetizers, salads, entrées, side dishes, and desserts, Gutierrez also provides a handy glossary, a section on how to navigate a Latin tienda, and a guide to ingredient sources. The New Southern-Latino Table brings to your home innovative, vibrant dishes that meld Latin American and Southern palates.

A comprehensive and complex look at multiethnic Asian American identities

Nichi Bei: A mixed plate of Japanese American News & Culture
2013-01-01

Ben Hamamoto, Nichi Bei Weekly Contributor

When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities, by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012, 248 pp., $21.95, paperback)

The whole spectrum of the mixed race, multiethnic Asian American experience could never be contained in a single book. That said, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu’s new book, “When Half is Whole,” comes pretty close (without ever setting out to do so). The book is a series of profiles of mixed race and multiethnic Asian and Asian American people, tied together by the author’s personal reflections and explanations of how these people both shape and are shaped by their larger cultural contexts. The people featured in the book have ancestries that include Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, Filipino, Mexican, black and white. They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, grew up in different countries, and have different sexual orientations. Some have Asian mothers, others Asian fathers. Yet each person’s experience is portrayed with nuance and sensitivity…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Socialization of Biracial Youth: Maternal Messages and Approaches to Address Discrimination

Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies
Volume 62, Issue 1 (February 2013)
pages 140–153
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00748.x

Alethea Rollins, Instructor, Child and Family Development
University of Central Missouri

Andrea G. Hunter, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

We explored how mothers of biracial youth prepare their children to navigate diverse racial ecologies and experiences of racism and discrimination. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify racial socialization messages mothers used and emergent racial socialization approaches. Mothers of biracial youth engaged in the full range of racial socialization discussed in the literature, including cultural, minority, self-development, egalitarian, and silent racial socialization. These messages varied by the biracial heritage of the youth, such that mothers of biracial youth with Black heritage were more likely to provide self-development racial socialization messages, whereas mothers of biracial youth without Black heritage were more likely to provide silent racial socialization. On the basis of the array of racial socialization messages mothers delivered, we identified three emergent approaches: promotive, protective, and passive racial socialization.

Read the entire article here.

What does Martin Luther King mean to Latinos today?

Bentley IMPACT – The Power of Ideas
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts
2013-01-17

Donna Maria Blancero, Associate Professor of Management

“I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2013, we must ask ourselves the question: has his dream become a reality for Latinos?

We know that Dr. King inspired many Latinos, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Latinos, just like other Americans, consider Dr. King a great leader of the civil rights movement. If he were alive today, he likely would be working side by side with Latinos to address issues of inequality.

But what does his legacy mean for us today? Has his dream been achieved?…

…When I ask participants in my research to self-identify their race (they all self-identify as Latino), I am typically met with a range of responses. Some are angry at me and state that they are Mexican American or Puerto Rican and that I shouldn’t be asking about race—their race, they say, is Latino! Others have written in comments, such as “I checked off ‘white’ but don’t tell my family, they would be angry at me.” Many Latinos have mixed backgrounds that don’t easily fit into a box. More importantly, many of us don’t want to be put in a box, even if it is “multi-racial.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

HarperCollins
2005
240 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780060761424; ISBN10: 0060761423

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation’s leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from “mongrelization”). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family’s South Carolina plantation.

Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew—one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate—and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before—told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-02-04

Elaine Woo

In 2003 the retired L.A. schoolteacher unburdened herself of a secret: Her father was Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a career as a champion of segregation.

A week before Christmas in 2003, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher stood before a phalanx of news cameras and 250 reporters in a South Carolina ballroom and declared, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
 
After more than 60 years, Washington-Williams had chosen to unburden herself of a secret: that she, a black woman, had been fathered by a white man — Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a long Washington career as a champion of segregation.
 
Thurmond had died five months earlier at age 100, having never acknowledged that his liaison with a family maid when he was 22 had produced a daughter. At 78, Washington-Williams decided she owed it to history to speak up.

“My children ultimately convinced me that history needed to know about Thurmond and that I should set the record straight,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I am not doing this for money. I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
 
Washington-Williams, 87, died Monday of natural causes in Columbia, S.C., said her attorney, Frank K. Wheaton. After more than 40 years in Los Angeles, she moved back to South Carolina a few years ago when her health began to deteriorate…

Read the entire obituary here.

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

University of Minnesota Press
2008
328 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5105-4; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5105-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5104-7; ISBN-10: 0-8166-5104-3

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

Questions the ramifications of multiracialism for progressive social change.

Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiracialism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.

In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.

An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: On the Verge of Race
• 1. Beyond the Event Horizon: The Multiracial Project
• 2. Scales of Coercion and Consent: Sexual Violence, Antimiscegenation, and the Limits of Multiracial America
• 3. There Is No (Interracial) Sexual Relationship
• 4. The Consequence of Race Mixture
• 5. The True Names of Race: Blackness and Antiblackness in Global Contexts
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy

SAGE Publications
2009-06-30
168 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781412975063
Hardcover ISBN: 9781412975056

Bonnie M. Davis

What does it mean to be “in between”?

As more biracial and multiracial students enter the classroom, educators have begun to critically examine the concept of race. Through compelling student and teacher narratives, best-selling author Bonnie M. Davis gives voice to a frequently mislabeled and misunderstood segment of the population. Filled with research-based instructional strategies and reflective questions, the book supports readers in examining:

• The meaning of race, difference, and ethnicity
• How mixed-identity students develop racial identities
• How to adjust instruction to demonstrate cultural proficiency
• Complex questions to help deepen understanding of bi- and multiracial experiences, white privilege, and the history of race in the U.S.

This sensitively written yet practical guide fills a gap in the professional literature by examining the experiences of biracial/multiracial students in the context of today’s classrooms. The author calls upon readers to take a transformational journey toward racial literacy and, ultimately, become empowered by a real understanding of what it means to be biracial or multiracial and enable all students to experience increased self-confidence and believe in their ability to succeed.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Prologue
• 1. Beginning the Journey
• 2. What Is Race?
• 3. What Are You?
• 4. What Are the Challenges for Multiracial Students?
• 5. How Mixed Identity Students Develop Racial Identities
• 6. Outside the School Walls
• 7. The Impact of Skin Color
• 8. Listening to Parents
• 9. Taking It All to the Classroom: Culturally Proficient Instruction
• 10. Future Voices
• 11. The Journey’s End
• References
• Index

The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization

The Gorham Press
1907
281 pages
Library of Congress: E185.61 .S38

R. W. Shufeldt, M.D. (1850-1934)

Contents

• I. Man’s Place in Nature from a Biological Standpoint.
• II. The Ethnological Status of the Negro.
• III. The Introduction of the Negro into the United States.—The African Slave Trade.
• IV. Biological Principles of Interbreeding in Man and Other Animals.
• V. Halfbreeds, Hybridization, Atavism, Heredity, Mental and Physical Characters of Race Hybrids.
• VI. The Effects of Fraternization between the Ethiopian and Anglo-Saxon Paces upon Morals, upon Ethics, and upon the Material Progress of Mankind.
• VII. Passion and Criminality in the Negro: Lynch Law and other Questions.
• APPENDIX

Read the entire book here.