Mixed-Race Identity Politics in Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, Women on 2009-10-29 16:30Z by Steven

Mixed-Race Identity Politics in Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)

Ohio University
English (Arts and Sciences) Department
November 2001
217 pages
Advisor: David Dean McWilliams

Sachi Nakachi

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy.

The dissertation examines how two women authors of mixed-race, Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), resisted American identity politics in their works.  The ideological complexities of mixed-race identity, which is “in-between” races, are the focus of my argument. To discuss what Judith Butler calls “the performativity of identity” in the interracial context, “passing,” “masquerading” and “mimicking” are used as key strategies. I examine whether the space of hybridity, in which the incompatible notions of difference and sameness exist together, opens up the horizon of transformation of significations . In Chapter One, I discuss how Larsen used her “mulatto” heroines to criticize the essentialist notion of identity. I probe how crossing boundaries (passing, geographical crossing and transgressing sexual norms) functions in her novels. In Chapter Two, I examine the works of Winnifred Eaton, who passed as Japanese in her authorship. By crossing the “authentic” ethnic boundaries and placing herself in a fictional identity, Eaton challenged racism and sexism. The dynamics of Orientalism, race and gender in Eaton’s works are examined in this chapter. Postmodern feminist theories and postcolonial theories are used in tandem to support my argument, which tries to discuss how the system of racial oppression operates in multi-racial/multi-ethnic women’s literature.

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Passing

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Novels, Passing, Women on 2009-10-26 20:23Z by Steven

Passing

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
584 pages
5.2 × 8.4 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9

Nella Larsen

Edited by

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University

Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature.

Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston’s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan’s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich “Background and Contexts” section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935—by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others—provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen’s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on “The Tragic Mulatto(a)” in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. “Criticism” provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Text of Passing
Backgrounds and Contexts
REVIEWS

  1. Mary Rennels – “Passing” Is Novel of Longings (April 27, 1929)
  2. Beyond the Color Line (April 28, 1929)
  3. Margaret Cheney Dawson – The Color Line (April 28, 1929)
  4. The Dilemma of Mixed Race: Another Study of Color-line in New York (May 1, 1929)
  5. Alice Dunbar-Nelson – As In a Looking Glass (May 3, 1929)
  6. W. B. Seabrook – Touch of the Tar-brush (May 18, 1929)
  7. Esther Hyman – Passing by Nella Larsen (June 1929)
  8. Aubrey Bowser – The Cat Came Back (June 5, 1929)
  9. Mary Griffin – Novel of Race Consciousness (June 23, 1929)
  10. W. E. B. Du Bois – Passing (July 1929)
  11. Mary Fleming Larabee – Passing (August 1929)
  12. Do They Always Return? (September 28, 1929)
  13. “M. L. H.” – Passing (December 1929)
  14. Passing (December 12, 1929)

CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF PASSING AND RACE

  1. When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian? (March 2, 1911)
  2. [Publisher’s Preface to the 1912 Edition of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man]
  3. Writer Says Brazil Has No Color Line (October 1925)
  4. Blood Will Tell (July 24, 1926)
  5. Don Pierson – Does It Pay to “Pass?” (August 20, 1927)
  6. Juanita Ellsworth – White Negroes (May-June 1928)
  7. Lewis Fremont Baldwin – From From Negro to Caucasian, Or How the Ethiopian Is Changing His Skin (1929)
  8. Emilie Hahn – Crossing the Color Line (July 28, 1929)
  9. Caleb Johnson – Crossing the Color Line (August 26, 1931)
  10. Langston Hughes – Passing for White, Passing for Colored, Passing for Negroes Plus (1931)
  11. 75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day (December 19, 1931)
  12. Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother (January 21, 1932)
  13. Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing‘ (January 23, 1932)
  14. Swedish Negro Baby! (April 28, 1932)
  15. Virginia Is Still Hounding ‘White’ Negroes Who ‘Pass’ (June 29, 1935)

THE RHINELANDER/JONES CASE

  1. Mark J. Madigan – Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1990)
  2. Selected newspaper articles on the case (list pending)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

  1. About Nella Larsen
  2. Miss Nella Larsen Bids for Literary Laurels (May 12, 1928)
  3. Thelma E. Berlack – New Author Unearthed Right Here in Harlem (May 23, 1928)
  4. Mary Rennels – Behind the Backs of Books and Authors (April 13, 1929)
  5. [Letter about Nella Larsen] Jean Blackwell Hutson to Louise Fox (August 1, 1969)
  6. Thadious M. Davis – Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic (1989)
  7. George Hutchinson – Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race (1997)
  8. Larson on birth, Passing, and death
  9. Davis on birth, Passing, and death
  10. Hutchinson on birth, Passing, and death

Author’s Statements

  1. Nella Larsen Imes, “Author Statement,” 1926
  2. Nella Larsen Imes, Guggenheim Application
  3. [In Defense of Sanctuary]

Letters

  1. To Carl Van Vechten [1925]
  2. To Charles S. Johnson [August 1926]
  3. To Eddie Wasserman
  4. To Eddie Wasserman
  5. To Dorothy Peterson
  6. To Dorothy Peterson
  7. To Dorothy Peterson
  8. To Dorothy Peterson
  9. To Langston Hughes
  10. To Gertrude Stein
  11. To Carl Van Vechten
  12. To Carl Van Vechten

THE TRAGIC MULATTO(A)

  1. Lydia Maria Child – The Quadroons (1842)
  2. Williams Wells Brown– From Clotel (1853)
  3. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
  4. William Dean Howells – From An Imperative Duty (1892 or 83?)
  5. Kate Chopin – The Father of Désirée’s Baby (1893)
  6. Mark Twain – From Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
  7. Charles Chesnutt – From The House behind the Cedars (1900)
  8. Georgia Douglass Johnson – The Octoroon (1922)
  9. Countee Cullen – Near White (1925)
  10. Langston Hughes – Mulatto (1927)
  11. Fannie Hurst – From Imitation of Life (1933)

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT PASSING

  1. Frank Webb – From The Gairies and Their Friends (1852)
  2. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
  3. Charles Chesnutt – From House behind the Cedars (1900)
  4. James Weldon Johnson – From Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
  5. Jessie Redmon Fauset – The Sleeper Wakes (1920)
  6. Countee Cullen – Two Who Crossed a Line (1925)
  7. Walter White – From Flight (1926)
  8. Jessie Redmon Fauset – From Plum Bun (1928)
  9. Rudolph Fisher – From The Walls of Jericho (1928)
  10. George S. Schuyler – From Black No More (1931)
  11. Langston Hughes – Passing (1934)

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

  1. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. – The Mulatto to His Critics (1918)
  2. Countee Cullen – Heritage (1925)
  3. W. E. B. Du Bois – Criteria of Negro Art (1926)
  4. Nella Larsen [Pseud. Allen Semi] – Freedom (1926)
  5. George S. Schuyler – The Negro-Art Hokum (1926)
  6. Carl Van Vechten – From Nigger Heaven (1926)
  7. From Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs: A Symposium (1927)

Criticism

  1. Nathan Irvin Huggins – [Schizophrenia from Racial Dualism]
  2. Mary Mabel Youman – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony
  3. Claudia Tate – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation
  4. Mary Helen Washington – Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance
  5. Cheryl A. Wall – Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels
  6. Deborah E. McDowell – [Black Female Sexuality in Passing]
  7. David L. Blackmore – “That Unreasonable Restless Feeling”: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing
  8. Jennifer DeVere Brody – Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing
  9. Helena Michie – [Differences among Black Women]
  10. Judith Butler – Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
  11. Ann duCille – Passing Fancies
  12. Kate Baldwin – The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing
  13. Gayle Wald – Passing and Domestic Tragedy
  14. Catherine Rottenberg – Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire
  15. Miriam Thaggert – Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Nella Larsen: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography

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Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

Posted in Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom, Women on 2009-10-21 04:28Z by Steven

Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
1999-01-14
240 pages
234×156 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-17096-3

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a “Caublinasian”, affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created.  This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms ‘Black’ or ‘White’.

This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

  • Illustrations
  • Prologue
  • Acknowledgements
  • 1. Cracking the Coconut:Resisting Popular Folk Discourses on “Race,” “Mixed Race” and Social Hierarchies
  • 2. Returning(s):Relocating the Critical Feminist Auto- Ethnographer
  • 3. Setting the Stage:Invoking the Griot(te)Traditions as Textual Strategies
  • 4. Ruby
  • 5. Similola
  • 6. Akousa
  • 7. Sarah
  • 8. Bisi
  • 9. Yemi
  • 10. Let Blackness and Whiteness Wash Through: Competing Discourses on Bi-Racialization and the Compulsion of Genealogical Erasures
  • Epilogue
  • Select Bibiographies
  • Index
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Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2009-10-21 01:14Z by Steven

Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Volume 2, Issue 3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
pages 12-14

Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University (of Ohio)

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.” This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”

Read the entire article here.

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Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2009-10-19 01:00Z by Steven

Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes

University of Minnesota
College of Liberal Arts Today
Spring 2002

Judy Woodward

Naomi Pabst (B.A. ’93 summa cum laude, English & African-American Studies) is the intellectual enemy of the stereotype, the easy generalization, and the sweeping statement. As a newly-minted scholar of African-American studies and the history of consciousness, she defines her subject loosely as “what people think of when they say the word ‘black.’”…

…What engages Pabst is what she finds on the margins of the black experience.

It’s a territory that she knows fairly well from personal experience. Although the 33-year-old scholar insists, “I don’t want to reduce what I do to my own experience of marginality,” nevertheless she concedes that, as a biracial child growing up in Canada and Germany, her experience was not typical of conventional definitions of black culture.

But then, her point is that many African-Americans—including black cultural icons—did not have “typical” experiences…

Read the entire article here.

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Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United States, Women on 2009-10-17 20:36Z by Steven

Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community

Penn State Press
1995
206 pages
6 x 9
cloth: ISBN 978-0-271-01430-2
paper: ISBN 978-0-271-02124-9

Judy Scales-Trent, Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar, Professor Emerita
State Univerisity of New York at Buffalo Law School

“I remember one time in particular, after the cab I was in crashed into the car in front, then backed into the one behind. A policeman stopped to help.  As he was taking down my name and address, I noticed that he had checked the ‘white’ box.  ‘Officer,’ I said politely, ‘you made an error on your form. I am not white. I am black.’ He gave me a long, bored look, decided not to discuss it, and said, ‘Sure, lady.  If you say so.’ If I say so? If I say so!  As if it were my idea!  I was enraged at his assumption that all of this—the categories, the racial purity laws, the lives that are stomped, mangled, ruined because of those categories and those laws ïwas based on my say-so.  If I said so, we would do away with all of it ïthe sickness and fear, the need to classify as a way to control, the need to make some appear smaller so that others can appear larger. ‘If I say so’ indeed.”

While the “one-drop rule” in the United States dictates that people with any African ancestry are black, many black Americans have white skin.  Notes of a White Black Woman is one woman’s attempt to describe what it is like to be a “white” black woman and to live simultaneously inside and outside of both white and black communities.

Law professor Judy Scales-Trent begins by describing how our racial purity laws have operated over the past four hundred years.  Then, in a series of autobiographical essays, she addresses how race and color interact in relationships between men and women, within families, and in the larger community.  Scales-Trent ultimately explores the question of what we really mean by “race” in this country, once it is clear that race is not a tangible reality as reflected through color.

Scales-Trent uses autobiography both as a way to describe these issues and to develop a theory of the social construction of race.  She explores how race and color intertwine through black and white families and across generations; how members of both black and white communities work to control group membership; and what happens to relations between black men and women when thelayer of color is placed over the already difficult layer of race.  She addresses how one can tell–and whether one can tell–who, indeed, is “black” or “white.”  Scales-Trent also celebrates the richness of her bicultural heritage and shows how she has revised her teaching methods to provide her law students with a multicultural education.

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New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

Posted in Africa, Anthologies, Books, Brazil, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, South Africa, United States, Women on 2009-10-16 03:06Z by Steven

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

SAGE Publications, Inc.
Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
2001
432 pages

Edited by

Loretta I. Winters
California State University, Northridge

Herman L. DeBose
California State University, Northridge

How multiracial people identify themselves can have major consequences on their positions in their families, communities and society. Even the U.S. Census has recognized the rapidly increasing numbers of those who consider themselves multiracial, adding a new racial category to the 2000 Census form: two or more races.

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century examines the multiracial experience, its history and the political issues and consequences surrounding biracial and multiracial identity, bringing together top names in the field to give readers cutting edge views and insights gained from contemporary research.

This important new text follows the trail blazed by Maria Root, who contributes its opening chapter. An introduction places the issues of multiracial identity into context via a discussion of U.S. Census data and debates, providing an overview of the varied readings to come covering such topics as:

  • Race as a social, rather than biological, construction
  • The Multiracial Movement
  • Racial/Ethnic Groups in America and Beyond
  • Race, Gender & Hierarchy
  • Gang Affiliation and Self-Esteem
  • Black/White Interracial Couples and the Beliefs that Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide

The book concludes with “The Multiracial Movement: Harmony and Discord,” by co-editor Loretta Winters, an epilogue putting the readings into perspective according to three models in the multiracial identity literature: the Multiracial Movement model, the Counter Multiracial movements model and the Ethnic Movement model.

Timely and comprehensive in its range of topics, this is an important resource for many audiences: students in Ethnic Studies, Race Relations and related courses; human service professionals including psychologists, counselors, social workers and school personnel and, importantly, multiracial individuals themselves.

Forward  
Introduction Herman L. DeBose
Acknowledgments  
PART I: RACE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION  
1. Five Mixed Race Identities: From Relic to Revolution Maria P. P. Root
2. The New Multiracialism: An Affirmation or an End to Race as we Know It? Mary Thierry Texeira
PART II: THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT  
3. New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population (Click here to read.) Ann Morning
4. Multiracial Identity: From Personal Problem to Public Issue Kimberly McClain DaCosta
5. From Civil Rights to the Multiracial Movement Kim M. Williams
6. Census 2000: Assessments in Significance Rainier Spencer
7. Evolution of Multiracial Organizations: Where We Have Been & Where We Are Going Nancy G. Brown & Ramona E. Douglas
PART III: RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUPS IN AMERICA & BEYOND  
8. The Dilemma of Biracial People of African American Descent Herman L. DeBose & Loretta L. Winters
9. Check All That Apply: Trends & Perspectives Among Asian Descent Multiracials Teresa Williams-Leon
10. Beyond Mestizaje: The Future of Race in America Gregory Velazco y Trianosky
11. Colonization, Cultural Imperialism, and the Social Construction of American Indian Mixed Blood Identity Karren Baird-Olson
12. “Race,” “Ethnicity,” and “Culture” in Hawai’i: The Myth of the “Model Minority” State Laura Desfor Edles
13. Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa G. Reginald Daniel
PART IV: RACE, GENDER & HIERARCHY  
14. Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-too Ethnicity & the Whiteness Trap Paul Spickard
15. The Hazards of Visibility: “Biracial Women,” Media Images, and Narratives of Identity Caroline A. Streeter
16. Masculine Multiracial Comedians Darby Li Po Price
PART V: SPECIAL TOPICS  
17. Gang Affiliation & Self-Esteem: The Effects of a Mixed Heritage Identity Patricia O’Donnell Brummett & Loretta I. Winters
18. Black/White Interracial Couples & the Beliefs That Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide Kristyan M. Kouri
Epilogue: The Multiracial Movement: Harmony & Discord Loretta I. Winters
Index  
About the Editors  
About the Contributors
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Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

Posted in Articles, Arts, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Women on 2009-10-15 20:04Z by Steven

Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

Journal of American Studies
Volume 41, Issue 1 (April 2007)
pages 83-114
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806002763

Jo-Ann Morgan, Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
Western Illinois University

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.


Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea (1867)

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Raising Biracial Children

Posted in Books, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Women on 2009-10-13 21:00Z by Steven

Raising Biracial Children

AltaMira Press an Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
November 2005
208pp
Cloth: 0-7591-0900-1 / 978-0-7591-0900-1
Paper 0-7591-0901-X / 978-0-7591-0901-8

Kerry Ann Rockquemore
University of Illinois

Tracey A. Laszloffy  

As the multiracial population in the United States continues to rise, new models for our understanding of mixed-race children and how their conception of racial identity must be developed.  A wide divide between academics who research biracial identity, and the everyday world of parents and practitioners who raise and deal with mixed-race children exists. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive synthesis of the existing research in the field, as well as a model for better understanding the unique process of racial identity development for mixed-race children. Raising Biracial Children provides parents, educators, social workers, and anyone interested in multiracial issues with an accessible framework for understanding healthy mixed-race identity development and to translate those findings into practical care-giving strategies.

About the Authors
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
is associate professor of African-American studies and sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is co-author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. Her research focuses on racial socialization in inter-racial families and racial identity development. Tracey A. Laszloffy is a marriage and family therapist in private practice in Connecticut. Prior to this she served on the faculty at Seton Hall University where she directed the masters level Marriage and Family Therapy Program. Dr. Laszloffy has published extensively in the area of race, oppression, and family therapy.

Table of Contents

  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • Chapter One: Moving Beyond Tragedy: A Multidimensional Model of Mixed-Race Identity (Read the chapter here).
  • Chapter Two: Acceptance and Denial: Shifting Our Gaze from Labels to Pathways
  • Chapter Three: Racism in America: What Parents Need to Know
  • Chapter Four: Starting at Home: Families and Racial Socialization
  • Chapter Five: Beyond the Family: Community Influences on Racial Identity Development
  • Chapter Six: More than Skin Deep: Appearances and Mixed-Race Identity
  • Chapter Seven: Just between Sisters: The Intersection of Race and Gender in the Lives of Mixed-Race Girls
  • Chapter Eight: Multiracialism in America: Reflections and New Directions
  • Appendix A: Multiracial Organizations
  • Appendix B: Online Resources
  • Appendix C: Research and Reading for Interracial Families
  • Appendix D: Movies and Documentaries
  • References
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Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Women on 2009-10-12 23:29Z by Steven

Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era

Lynne Rienner Publishers
2006
405 pages
Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-58826-372-8
Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-58826-398-8

Edited by David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The experiences and voices of multiracial individuals are challenging current categories of race, profoundly altering the meaning of racial identity and in the process changing the cultural fabric of the nation. Exploring this new reality, the authors of Mixed Messages examine what we know about multiracial identities—and the implications of those identities for fundamental issues of justice and equality.

Read the entire introduction here.

Table of Contents

  • Mixed Messages: Doing Race in the Color-Blind Era—David L. Brunsma
  • SHIFTING COLOR LINES.
    • Defining Race: Comparative Perspectives—F. James Davis.
    • Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States?—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David G. Embrick.
    • Racial Justice in a Black/Nonblack Society—George Yancey.
    • Carving Out a Middle Ground: The Case of Hawai’i—Jeffrey Moniz and Paul Spickard.
    • New Racial Identities, Old Arguments: Continuing Biological Reification—Rainier Spencer.
    • Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?—Charles A. Gallagher.
    • Racism, Whitespace, and the Rise of the Neo-Mulattos—Hayward Derrick Horton.
  • MANIPULATING MULTIRACIAL IDENTITIES.
    • Race, Multiraciality, and the Neoconservative Agenda—G. Reginald Daniel and Josef Manuel Castañeda-Liles.
    • White Separatists in the Color-Blind Era: Redefining Multiracial and White Identities—Abby L. Ferber.
    • Defining Racism to Achieve Goals: The Multiracial and Black Reparations Movements—Johanna E. Foster.
    • Selling Mixedness: Marketing with Multiracial Identities—Kimberly McClain DaCosta.
  • SOCIALIZATION IN MULTIRACIAL FAMILIES.
  • DILEMMAS OF MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY.
    • Negotiating Racial Identity in Social Interactions—R. L’Heureux Lewis and Kanika Bell.
    • Black/White Friendships in a Color-Blind Society—Kathleen Korgen and Eileen O’Brien.
    • Black and Latino: Dominican Americans Negotiate Racial Worlds—Benjamin Bailey.
    • Finding a Home: Housing the Color Line—Heather Dalmage.
    • Confronting Racism in the Therapist’s Office—Kwame Owusu-Bempah.
    • Culture and Identity in Mixed-Race Women’s Lives—Debbie Storrs.
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