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How multiracial people identify themselves can have a big impact on their positions in family, community & society. This volume examines the multiracial experience in the US.
Narratives of mixed-race people bringing claims of racial discrimination in court, illuminating traditional understandings of civil rights law As the mixed-race population in the United States grows, public fascination with multiracial identity has promoted the belief that racial mixture will destroy racism. However, multiracial people still face discrimination. Many legal scholars hold that this is distinct from the discrimination faced by people of other races, and traditional civil rights laws built on a strict black/white binary need to be reformed to account for cases of discrimination against those identifying as mixed-race. In Multiracials and Civil Rights, Tanya Katerí Hernández de...
Featuring new critical essays by scholars from Europe, South America, and the United States, At Home and Abroad presents a wide-ranging look at how whiteness-defined in terms of race or ethnicity-forms a category toward which people strive in order to gain power and privilege. Collectively these pieces treat global spaces whose nation building and identity formation have turned on biological and genealogical exigencies to whiten themselves. Drawing upon racialized, national practices implemented prior to and during the twentieth century, each of the essays enlists literature or performance to reflect the sociopolitical imperatives that secured whiteness in the respective locations they study...
Elected in 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first African American president of the United States. Though recognized as the son of a white Kansas-born mother and a black Kenyan father, the media and public have nonetheless pigeonholed him as black, and he too self-identifies as such. Obama's experience as an American with black and white ancestry, though compelling because of his celebrity, is not unique and raises several questions about the growing number of black-white biracial Americans today: How are they perceived by others with regard to race? How do they tend to identify? And why? Taking a social psychological approach, Biracial in America identifies influencing factors and several underlying processes shaping multidimensional racial identities. This study also investigates the ways in which biracial Americans perform race in their day-to-day lives. One's race isn't simply something that others prescribe onto the individual but something that individuals "do." The strategies and motivations for performing black, white, and biracial identities are explored.
How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future - that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitmentto the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity - ...
The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive worksnovels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installationsas artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artis...
In Shades of Gray Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective struggles with multiracial identity. McKibbin weaves a rich sociohistorical tapestry around the critically acclaimed works of Danzy Senna, Caucasia (1998); Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001); Emily Raboteau, The Professor’s Daughter (2005); Rachel M. Ha...
An updated edition with new perspectives on racial identity and significant attention on intersectionality New Perspectives on Racial Identity Development brings together leaders in the field to deepen, broaden, and reassess our understandings of racial identity development. Contributors include the authors of some of the earliest theories in the field, such as William Cross, Bailey W. Jackson, Jean Kim, Rita Hardiman, and Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, who offer new analysis of the impact of emerging frameworks on how racial identity is viewed and understood. Other contributors present new paradigms and identify critical issues that must be considered as the field continues to evolve. This new ...
The past two decades have seen a growing influx of biracial discourse in fiction, memoir, and theory, and since the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency, debates over whether America has entered a “post-racial” phase have set the media abuzz. In this penetrating and provocative study, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both “blackness” and “whiteness” by invoking multiple racial identities. Focusing on several key novels—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)—as well as memo...
Colorism is defined as "discriminatory treatment of individuals falling within the same 'racial' group on the basis of skin color." In other words, some people, particularly women, are treated better or worse on account of the color of their skin relative to other people who share their same racial category. Colorism affects Asian Americans from many different backgrounds and who live in different parts of the United States. Is Lighter Better? discusses this often-overlooked topic. Joanne L. Rondilla and Paul Spickard ask important questions such as: What are the colorism issues that operate in Asian American communities? Are they the same issues for all Asian Americans—for women and for men, for immigrants and the American born, for Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, and other Asian Americans? Do they reflect a desire to look like White people, or is some other motive at work? Including numerous stories about and by people who have faced discrimination in their own lives, this book is an invaluable resource for people interested in colorism among Asian Americans.