Books With Flair

A collection for an undergraduate course, providing a theoretical framework and analytical tools and discussing the meaning of race and ethnicity as a social construction. The readings are designed to require students to negotiate between individual agency and the constraints of social structure, an

A collection for an undergraduate course, providing a theoretical framework and analytical tools and discussing the meaning of race and ethnicity as a social construction. The readings are designed to require students to negotiate between individual agency and the constraints of social structure, an

The essays in Christians and the Color Line complicate the research findings of Emerson and Smith's Divided by Faith (2000) and explore new areas of research that have opened in the years since its publication.

Through interviews with individuals from black-white multiracial families, together with sociological analysis, this study examines the challenges faced by people living in such families, and explores how their experiences demonstrate the need for rethinking race in America.

Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space. Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.

“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

This volume celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture. Over the last decade and more, American literary studies have tended, with only a few rare and recent exceptions, to look at separate strands of literary history and tradition--African American or white, male or female, lesbian or gay or straight. Every contributor to this collection, no matter how widely varied the point of view in other ways, examines the dynamic relationship between "mainstream" and African-American expressive traditions in American culture. Engaging the work of writers from Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass to William Styron and Ernest Gaines, they concur in treating the color line as a site of cultural mutation where American identities are produced, not diluted, through acts of cultural exchange. The book draws new research into the rich, contentious, yet thoroughly pluralistic cultural equation that is American literature. Toni Morrison's ground-breaking lecture, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" opens the book, which then moves on to provocative essays by scholars who have heeded her call for a rethinking of American literary tradition, black and white.

As part of a growing nationwide movement to bring Ethnic Studies into K-12 classrooms, Rethinking Ethnic Studies brings together many of the leading teachers, activists, and scholars in this movement to offer examples of Ethnic Studies frameworks, classroom practices, and organizing at the school, district, and statewide levels. Built around core themes of indigeneity, colonization, anti-racism, and activism, Rethinking Ethnic Studies offers vital resources for educators committed to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in our schools.

Is racial conflict determined by biology or society? So many conflicts appear to be caused by racial and ethnic differences; for example, the cities of Britain and America are regularly affected by race riots. It is argued by socio-biologists and some schools of psychoanalysis that our instincts are programmed to hate those different to us by evolutionary and developmental mechanisms. This book argues against this line, proposing an alternative drawing on insights from diverse disciplines including anthropology, social psychology and linguistics, to give power-relations a critical explanatory role in the generation of hatreds. Farhad Dalal argues that people differentiate between races in order to make a distinction between the 'haves' and 'must-not-haves', and that this process is cognitive, emotional and political rather than biological. Examining the subject over the past thousand years, Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialisation covers: * psychoanalytic and other theories of racism * a new theorisation of racism based on group analytic theory * a general theory of difference based on the works of Fanon, Elias, Matte-Blanco and Foulkes * application of this theory to race and racism. Farhad Dalal concludes that the structures of society are reflected in the structures of the psyche, and both of these are colour coded. This book will be invaluable to students, academics and practitioners in the areas of psychoanalysis, group analysis, psychotherapy and counselling.

Culling the Masses questions the view that democracy and racism cannot coexist. Based on records from 22 countries 1790-2010, it offers a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere, showing that democracies were first to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states first to outlaw discrimination.