Intermarriage across Race and Ethnicity among Immigrants: E Pluribus Unions

Posted in Books, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2009-11-21 04:10Z by Steven

Intermarriage across Race and Ethnicity among Immigrants: E Pluribus Unions

LFB Scholarly Publishing
November 2008
228 pages
5.5 X 8.5 / viii
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-59332-294-6

Charlie V. Morgan, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brigham Young University

Morgan examines the relationship between assimilation and intermarriage. In studying mixed relationships, he finds that ethnicity, in the form of language and religion, is more important than race. Males and females were more likely to find themselves in coethnic relationships as they imagined the role that extended family would play. They talked about parental prejudices, language, religion, and other cultural clashes as major factors. There were many females, however, who did not follow this pattern because of perceptions of patriarchy. They avoided coethnic relationships because they wanted a partner who would think of them as an equal.

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Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2009-11-21 03:28Z by Steven

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family

University of California Press
May 2001
Paperback ISBN: 9780520227309
321 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 25 b/w photographs, 2 line illustrations

Neil Henry, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley

Pearl’s Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family’s past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family’s rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California.

The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson‘s longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry’s great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book’s stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.

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