Mixed Race Studies

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical [Review by Alan Gomberg]

Talkin’ Broadway
2013-03-27

Alan Gomberg

Much of Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical should prove fascinating to readers who have a deep interest in the creation and performance history of this classic, much-revived and -revised musical. Many of those Show Boat devotees probably already have Miles Kreuger’s superb 1977 book, Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical, but Decker goes into more detail on many matters (while going into less detail on some others) so his book is far from being a rehash of Kreuger’s.

Also, the performance history of Show Boat since 1977 has been (to put it mildly) extensive and complex, giving Decker much new history to relate. Still, the most rewarding parts of the book are those that cover earlier productions and the 1936 film version. There is much information here on the major productions from 1927 through the late 1940s that is likely to be new even to those who already know a good deal about Show Boat.

One thing that separates Decker’s book from Kreuger’s is his focus on a sociological theme, as suggested by the book’s subtitle: Performing Race in an American Musical. He writes in his introduction, “My emphasis on race rests equally on definitions of whiteness and blackness. Magnolia and Ravenal perform their whiteness every bit as much as Joe performs his blackness and any actress playing Julie must perform that character’s mixed-race identity, whatever that has meant in particular times and places.” Part of the way in which Decker examines these matters is by discussing in detail the unique contributions of some of the performers in each major production. This extends beyond those who played the characters mentioned above…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review: Race in a Bottle

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African Americans. Ironically, race-based drug treatment emerged in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, a project that theoretically promised both to scientifically refute the notion of genetically distinct racial groups and to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Though hyped by researchers, the FDA, and the press as an important first step toward personalized medicine, BiDil is a drug administered to patients based on their membership in a group…

…Critical to Kahn’s argument regarding evidence is the fact that the clinical trials on which the company based its patent application for BiDil were never designed to compare racial difference in response to the drug. Using “care of the data” as an organizing theme, Kahn highlights one of the many troubling aspects of this controversy: the extraordinarily loose, if not sloppy, construction of what passed as evidence in the patent application and FDA hearings. From the use of misleading statistics on mortality from heart failure in African Americans, to the failure to define the central variable of race, to the design of a clinical trial (A-HeFT) that included only African Americans (and therefore could not determine differential efficacy) to the lack of any mechanistic understanding for a differential effect, Kahn shows that attention to the data was consistently problematic when it came to matters of race. The chapter on the FDA hearings is particularly illuminating…

Read the entire review here.

The Autobiography of an Ex-White Woman: Bliss Broyard’s One Drop

Mother Jones
2007-11-09

Debra J. Dickerson

Suddenly, white people are fascinated by race. Good for them. Good for all of us?

If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it. A complex book on a complex issue, it’s hard to know where to begin (good reviews here, here and here).

Here’s the easy part: One Drop is about having a semi-famous father who gave you all the insulated, WASPy pampering any white girl could want but who turns out, on his deathbed, to have in fact been black, then backtracking to figure out why and how he did so. And where that leaves you in a nation where boxes must be checked and sides must be taken. Only in America could a strained conversation in your dying father’s sickroom change your race. This just in: you’re black.

Pere Broyard, Anatole, was a New Orleans Creole, as it turned out, who helped create a post-war, bohemian-intellectual Manhattan where he and his friends “didn’t know where books stopped and they began.” But the world did. The only way for the cerebral, wavy-haired Negro to claim a place in that rarified atmosphere, seduce numberless white girls, or even get a decent job, was to stop being black. The price of doing so for two generations left Broyard a twisted soul, self-eliminated from family and culture, adrift in a world which existed mostly in the minds of the trendy Communist sympathizers and slumming trust-funders who fed on each other until it was time to marry and move to Connecticut. “Our tribe of four made us seem alternately special and forsaken,” Bliss writes, “the last survivors of a dying colony or the founding members of an exclusive club.”She and her brother had almost no interaction with either side of the family, so deeply ‘incognegro’ was Anatole. So were they black now? If they’re not, is it because it’s too late or because it’s too easy?…

…Still, these works do what America never will; participate in all the truth and reconciliation we’re ever going to have—piecemeal, caveated, hazy, statute of limitations-expired but more than blacks knew before. More than whites could bear to admit to before. Leave it to white narcissism to do for us what the urgings of conscience never will: put white perpetrators center stage. Now that it’s safe. Given that America won’t hold its breath until a black person goes digging for the ancestor who narc’d on Denmark Vesey, maybe blacks should cut whites some slack on their long overdue introspection. There’s no denying that blacks desperately want to know what the hell happened and how and only whites can tell us that…

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013
pages 113-121
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp.(paper).

In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer’s Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of “passing” for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. “He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.” Gates then added, “I feel sorry for him.”

This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the “bi-racial” and “mixed-race” movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories—and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph.

“Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women,” wrote Sharon Toomer, the author’s great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, “but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—€”not interpretation.” She continued: “In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white.” But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.

Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren’t entirely certain what to make of it.

Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinchback—€”the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—€”Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the publication of Cane, a questing soul in search of a racial identity outside of contemporary realities, hoping…

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism by John Hoberman [Matt Wood Review]

TriQuarterly: a journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry from Northwestern University
2013-02-04

Matt Wood, Book Review Editor

We’ve heard the statistics on black and white mortality rates in the United States. Black infants are up to three times as likely to die as babies of other races. Black patients have lower survival rates from cancer and are hospitalized twice as often as whites for preventable conditions such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

How does this happen in the twenty-first century, when a black man is the president of the United States and three of the last four surgeons general have been black? Why do whites receive more potentially lifesaving cardiac procedures than blacks? Why are black patients less likely to have cancer surgery recommended to them? Why are black patients with diabetes and circulatory problems more likely to have limbs amputated?

Racism, says John Hoberman. In his scathing book Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism, he documents how the racial prejudices of the larger American society have influenced the diagnosis and treatment of black patients over the past century, and how those practices continue today. The book is a relentless and thoroughly researched account of racial discrimination by the largely white medical establishment, composed of medical school faculty, editorial boards of scientific journals, and professional associations such as the American Medical Association that develop medical school curricula and influence decisions about research. While Hoberman offers an unsatisfying solution to these problems, the book is thorough enough to make anyone—physician, layperson, black, white—question his or her own racial prejudices and assumptions…

…Hoberman calls this “racialization,” or using pseudoscientific rationales to define racial differences in physiology. The idea that blacks are more primitive human beings than whites stemmed from the same historical racist ideas that European colonizers used to justify black African slavery. This later developed into subtler stereotyping. Conditions associated with the stresses of modern “civilized” life were labeled “white.” Whites supposedly suffered more from myopia and other vision problems caused by the strain of reading too much. White businessmen were prone to digestive problems and ulcers because they shouldered “the burdens and responsibilities of administration and management in business and politics.” Blacks, on the other hand, supposedly possessed an innate physical “hardiness” that made them less susceptible to these “white” diseases. Instead, they were allegedly prone to sexually transmitted infections, drug abuse, and alcoholism because of their “careless” and “primitive” lifestyles. Hoberman points out a classic example of endometriosis. As late as 1950, some doctors believed that it occurred only in white women, because they assumed sexually transmitted diseases were the source of any gynecological problems in black women…

Read the entire review here.

Canon Fodder: ‘The Girl Who Fell From the Sky’ and the Problem of Mixed-Race Identity

Specter Magazine: A Brooklyn-based Art Journal
Ghost+Blog
2011-08-18

Summer McDonald

Baseball. Apple pie. Buying items in bulk. Buffets. All help create Americana, that itchy, dry-clean only fabric that bonds even the most disparate of us. As fixated as Americans are with the aforementioned, perhaps no pastime has been more consistent than toeing, monitoring, and often crossing the color line. Heidi W. Durrow’s first novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010), a national bestseller and winner of the Bellwether Prize, explores the American obsession with racial categorization and identity through the (blue) eyes of Rachel Morse, a biracial girl forced to go live with her black grandmother in Portland, Oregon, after surviving a terrible tragedy.

With a black-identified biracial president in the White House, the timeliness of Durrow’s debut cannot be overstated. And perhaps Durrow owes a word of thanks to the POTUS for helping breathe new life into a conversation older than this hardly perfect Union we call home, for her work centers on bringing the mixed-race experience to the fore. With the tragic fall of Tiger Woods and Mariah Carey marrying Nick Cannon (still having a hard time grasping that), no other public figure but the POTUS–with help from blackcelebritykids.com–could help us keep our eye on the multiracial ball. Durrow does her best to keep us focused on the “beiging” of America through a Youtube channel, a film and literature festival, as well as a website. TGWFFTS is merely the fictional rendering of Durrow’s real life politics.

Or so it seems. Having no knowledge of Durrow’s other exploits might make gauging the larger theme of the novel slightly more difficult. Despite an interesting mystery at the core of the work, the narrative feels disjointed, incomplete, and contrived to the point of an awkward and unbelievable “happy” ending. In a very basic sense, Durrow tells way more often than she shows, rushing the stories of some of the more interesting, ancillary characters (Brick or Rachel’s father, Roger, for example), preventing the organic development of fuller, richer characters–and therefore a more compelling story– for readers to empathetically engage. What’s left, then, is Rachel’s underwhelming coming-of-age story slash devolution (the impression the novel leaves, not my opinion) into blackness…

…“I’m not black. I’m not white. I’m both.” Seems harmless and simple enough. And it’s a message Durrow, given her other work, might want her readers to have received by the end of TGWFFTS. But the idea of both, the idea of being a mixed- or multi-raced person, although a seemingly refreshing and timely one, especially since our country “came together” and elected a biracial president and everything, is inherently problematic, and for me, troubling. Mixed- or multi-racial identity in a United States context is hardly about racial harmony or progress, but instead reinforces racial hierarchies by relying upon the equality efforts spearheaded by blacks while reinforcing anxiety about (being affiliated with) blackness…

…Throughout the 1970s and 80s, interracial couples and (their) mixed-race children slowly became more visible on the landscape of an apparently racially stratified society. By the 1990s, mixed-race citizens, parents of multiracial children, and heads of interracial families were lobbying the federal government for a multiracial category on the United States Census, a move they thought would legitimize the interracial family and mixed-race children. Although the effort failed, arguing for a multiracial category on the US census form garnered the movement national attention.

Though the discourse on multiracialism addresses all the possible combinations and hues of God’s racial rainbow, blackness is uniquely affected by the idea of mixed-race identity. First, the significance of the Lovings to the formation of mixed-race identity placed particular significance to black-white pairings. Second, identifying as mixed-race relies on essentialist, de-politicized, nuclear-family-oriented notions of race: (mono)racial parent + (mono)racial parent = biracial child, thereby implicitly arguing for a kind of respectability predicated upon sexual practices and behaviors acceptable to larger (read: white) society–a space blacks have been perpetually excluded from. Such manuevers inevitably silence the fetishistic aspects of discourses concerning interracial relationships in exchange for language that could be summarized by the colloquial, Lov[ing] conquers all.

Third, mixed-race advocates will often argue that they are working against the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, a statute established precisely to monitor blacks and keep them for commingling with whites. Although the one-drop rule excluded blacks, it also worked as an umbrella identity, a force which was employed as a galvanizing mechanism to gain equal rights during the Jim Crow and civil rights periods. Blackness, then, became both an inherently multiracial and sociopolitical identity that people rallied around to fight oppression. Multiracial advocates make a similar claim about the breadth of mixed race identity, and further suggest that being bi- or multiracial is a new, post-1967 phenomenon that thusly allows one to appreciate more than one culture or racial heritage. Belief in this description of multiracial identity as a novelty requires a limited, monolithic understanding of blackness that denies the racial mixture inherent to it. This not only constricts the meaning of blackness and black identity, but also takes those varying tenets of blackness and recasts them as constitutive of multiracial identity. This process leads to misreading and ahistorical cherry-picking of black culture in order to create a multiracial history that otherwise would not exist…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Scarborough review)

Civil War History
Volume 49, Number 1, March 2003
pages 72-74
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2003.0026

William Kauffman Scarborough, Professor Emeritus of History
University of Southern Mississippi

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. By Victoria E. Bynum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 316. Cloth.)

For generations the so-called legend of the “Free State of Jones” has circulated throughout Mississippi and, to a lesser extent, beyond the borders of the state. Anti-Confederate elements within this piney-woods county in south Mississippi, so the story goes, actually seceded from the Confederacy and established a small independent republic. As previous historians have discovered, the story is entirely apocryphal. In actuality a band of Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight formed a company in the fall of 1863 that subsequently gained control over much of this predominately non-slaveholding county and engaged in a number of skirmishes with Confederate cavalry units over a period of more than a year. The Knight Company was pretty well decimated during what the author term’s an “infamous” Confederate raid into the county in April 1864 led by Col. Robert Lowery, later a two-term governor of Mississippi (115). By the time the skirmishing ended, ten of the Jones County deserters had  been hanged, and most of the remainder had either fled to the swamps, returned to the Confederate army, or joined the Union army in New Orleans.

Those expecting to read a detailed account of the Civil War activities of Newt Knight and his intrepid band of dissident warriors will be disappointed with this book. Only two of the eight chapters (thirty-four pages in all) are devoted to the war. Instead, the author concentrates primarily on the background of the families that settled in this rural piney-woods county and on the interracial liaisons that resulted in the so-called community of “white Negroes” after the war. Indeed, as the dust jacket proclaims, this is actually an account of the “origins and legacy” of the legendary Jones County rebels from the American Revolution to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. With a heavy emphasis upon the currently fashionable theme of race, class, and gender, Bynum traces the movement of such families as the Knights, Collinses, Welborns, Bynums (the author’s father was a native of Jones County), Sumralls, Welches, and Valentines from their antecedents in the Carolinas, where they were allegedly influenced by the Great Awakening and the Regulator Movement, to their settlement in south Mississippi during the first third of the nineteenth century. It was these independent-minded nonslaveholding yeomen who opposed secession in 1861 and ultimately took up arms against the Confederacy, aided in no small measure by the female members of their families.

One of those women was Rachel Knight, a mulatto slave who had supported the Knight Company during the war and who later had a long-term intimate relationship with Knight, apparently bearing him at least two sons. Whatever the true relationship between Newt and Rachel, it is clear that the older children of the two intermarried beginning about 1878, thereby giving rise to a mixed-race community in Jones County that endures to this day. The ambiguous racial identities in the county were illuminated in 1948 when Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Rachel Knight, was convicted of violating the anti-miscegenation laws then on the books in Mississippi because he had married a white woman two years before. Although his conviction was overturned by the state supreme court, the case illustrates the complexity of the family relationships that resulted from the interracial unions inaugurated by Knight and his black paramour.

Bynum, who clearly sympathizes with Knight and his company of anti-Confederates, contends that the Civil War dissident has been stigmatized unfairly by his postwar defiance of racial customs. If he was not quite the Robin Hood figure depicted by his son, Thomas J. Knight, in a 1935 biography, he was certainly not the villainous traitor described by his segregationist grandniece, Ethel Knight, in what…

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Review)

French History
Volume 27, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 135-137
DOI: 10.1093/fh/crs158

Emily Musil Church, Assistant Professor of History
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. By Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. 312 pp. ISBN: 978 0 8122 4172 3.

Rebecca Hartkopf Scholss’ investigation of the end of slavery in the French Caribbean island of Martinique is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of the Francophone Black Atlantic world. Schloss’ book builds on existing works by exploring the complex dynamics that existed amidst and between the various racial and economic groups in Martinique, as well as between the metropole and colony. The author’s writing style makes a long, complicated colonial history with a complex cast of characters both engaging and accessible. She uses a wide variety of sources—ranging from court proceedings to diaries to demographic statistics—to reconstruct how Martinique, and the French empire more broadly, defined and redefined racial categories and their meanings. Although she uses class and racial categories to describe the social framework, Schloss is careful to reinforce that the categories she describes—such elite Creoles, poor whites, free mixed-race persons, enslaved Africans, and so on—were fluid designations and not united, cohesive groups. The…

Read or purchase the article here.

Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe [Review]

H-net Reviews
H-SAfrica
April 2007

Elizabeth Schmidt, Professor of History
Loyola University Maryland

James Muzondidya. Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005. xviii + 323 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59221-246-0.

Based on a wide range of archival sources and more than two dozen interviews, James Muzondidya’s book provides a major historical reassessment of Zimbabwe’s colored community from the early twentieth century to 1980. This small community has largely been ignored in Southern African historiography. The few works focusing on the colored population generally have perpetuated a distorted view, arguing that the mixed-race community had no authentic identity. Rather, they posit that “colored” was a state-imposed category without roots in popular experience or consciousness. According to this view, coloreds were merely a product of the colonial state’s divide-and-rule tactics. While Africans viewed them as dupes, collaborators, and beneficiaries of the colonial system, Europeans dismissed them as a marginal population that was more African than European and, as such, unworthy of European rights and privileges.

In this important contribution to the historical literature, Muzondidya reassesses the construction of colored identity, rejecting the proposition that colored social and political identities were solely state-imposed. He argues instead that these complex and contested identities were the product of colored historical agency and the political, economic, and social structures in which the actors operated. He disaggregates the mixed-race category, too often viewed as homogeneous, in terms of gender, generation, class, culture, and historical background. In a particularly fascinating section, he explores the deep divisions between South African-born Cape Coloreds (or Cape Afrikanders) and the indigenous “EurAfrican” population. Cape Colored immigrants to colonial Zimbabwe were predominantly Muslim, Afrikaans-speaking descendants of African and Asian slaves, the Cape’s original Khoikhoi inhabitants, and Afrikaner settlers. Generations removed from their exclusively African or European past, they belonged to the Western-educated middle and professional classes…

Read the entire review here.

Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority [Andrews Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 918-919
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.758864

Matthew T. M. Andrews
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan

Andrew J. Jolivétte (ed), Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, Bristol: Policy Press. 2012. v+237 pp. (paper)

In Obama and the Biracial Factor, Andrew Jolivétte edits a collection of essays that critically explore the role of U.S. President Barack Obama’s biracial background not only in his 2008 election and first term in office but also in the context of an increasingly multiracial USA. This volume is part of a multidisciplinary body of scholarship on ‘mixed race’ or multiracialily that has grown exponentially in the USA and the UK over the past two decades. However, it also departs from this scholarship’s tendency to focus exclusively on the topics of identity formation and racial classification on government forms. Instead, utilizing the timely case of President Obama ‘the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas’ the book examines what Jolivétte terms ‘mixed race hegemony’, the assertion that ‘biracial and multiracial individuals and families will lead to the end of a race-conscious and racially-discriminatory society in the United States’ (p. 4). Through various disciplinary lenses, the volume’s authors more or less expound on this concept to imagine a ‘post-racist’ rather than ‘post-racial’ USA.

The book’s first section. ‘The Biracial factor in America’, explores how narratives of ‘mixed race’ have shaped the past and present US race relations. In his chapter. G. Reginald Daniel situates Obama’s 2008 election within Daniel’s body of influential work on multiracial identity and considers the egalitarian possibilities of a ‘critical multiraciality’, which emphasizes cross-racial, coalition building and shared ancestral and cultural connections. Next, in ‘A Patchwork Heritage’, Justin Ponder offers an insightful close reading of Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father and argues that its rhetorical appeal lies less in Obama’s “accurate* portrayal of himself as African American than in his indeterminate citation of others, especially his white mother, complicating easy representations of his racial identity. Finally. Darryl Barthé,  Jr. charts the historical origins of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in the USA to challenge the ‘racial revisionism’ in debates surrounding President Obama’s black identity.

The volume’s second section. “Beyond Black and While Identity Polities’, considers the gendered, global and cultural implications of President Obama’s biraciality beyond black white racial politics. Wei Ming Dairiotis and Grace Yoo draw on a nation-wide survey of ‘Obama Mamas’ or mothers who supported Obama’s 2008 campaign and show how many perceived him as a potential ‘bridge builder’ that could provide a more peaceful future for their children. In her perceptive chapter. ‘Is “No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama?”‘, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain contends that Ireland’s embrace of Obama’s Irish heritage illustrates an unprecedented decoupling of ancestry and phenotype in contemporary racial thinking. This section also includes an additional essay by Dariotis. in which she extends her notion of ‘mixed race kin aesthetic’ to explain Obama’s global appeal, and a chapter by Zebulon Vance Miletsky. who uses Obama’s ‘mutt like me’ comment as an entry point into a historically informed analysis of questions around his ‘racial authenticity’.

The book’s final section, ‘The Battle for the New American Majority’, addresses existing challenges for President Obama and Americans more generally in realizing a truly diverse American majority. In his essay, Robert Keith Collins employs person-centred ethnography to critique monolithic conceptions of ‘blackness’ that undergird debates around Obama’s…

Read or purchase the article here.