Mixed Race Studies

Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy

Cognella
2011
436 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-93555-160-7

Edited by:

Rashawn Ray, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Maryland, College Park

This book examines the major theoretical and empirical approaches regarding race/ethnicity. Its goal is to continue to place race and ethnic relations in a contemporary, intersectional, and cross-comparative context and progress the discipline to include groups past the Black/White dichotomy. Using various sociological theories, social psychological theories, and subcultural approaches, this book gives students a sociohistorical, theoretical, and institutional frame with which to view race and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

• Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century / Rashawn Ray
• The Embedded Nature of ‘Race’ Requires a Focused Effort to Remove the Obstacles to a Unified America / Dr. James M. Jones
• PART 1 THE SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT OF RACE
  • The Science, Social Construction, and Exploitation of Race / Rashawn Ray
  • Science of Race
    • The Evolution of Racial Classification / Tukufu Zuberi
  • Social Construction of Race
    • Racist America: Racist Ideology as a Social Force / Joe R. Feagin
  • Exploitation of Race
    • White Racism and the Black Experience / St. Clair Drake
• PART 2 THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES
  • Racial Attitudes Research: Debates, Major Advances, and Future Directions / Rashawn Ray
  • Individual and Structural Racism
    • Racial Formation: Understanding Race and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • From Bi-racial to Tri-racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the U.S.A. / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • The Social Psychology of Prejudice and Perceived Discrimination
    • Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position / Herbert Blumer
    • Reactions Toward the New Minorities of Western Europe / Thomas F. Pettigrew
  • Racial Attitudes and Public Discourses
    • Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century / Lawrence D. Bobo
  • Race, Gender, and Sexuality
    • Getting Off and Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches Toward Women / Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow
  • Colorism, Lookism, and Tokenism
    • “One-Drop” to Rule them All? Colorism and the Spectrum of Racial Stratifi cation in the Twenty-First Century / Victor Ray
  • Assimilation Perspectives: Group Threat Theory, Contact Theory, and Ethnic Conflict
    • The Ties that Bind and Those that Don’t: Toward Reconciling Group Threat and Contact Theories of Prejudice / Jeffrey C. Dixon
  • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights
    • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights / Shiri Noy
• PART 3 THE CUMULATIVE PIPELINE OF PERSISTENT INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
  • The Cumulative Pipeline of Persistent Institutional Racism / Rashawn Ray
  • Individual and Structural Racism
    • A Different Menu: Racial Residential Segregation and the Persistence of Racial Inequality / Abigail A. Sewell
  • Education
    • Cracking the Educational Achievement Gap(s) / R. L’Heureux Lewis and Evangeleen Pattison
  • The Labor Market, Socioeconomic Status, and Wealth
    • Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination / Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
    • Black Wealth/White Wealth: Wealth Inequality Trends / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
    • The Mark of a Criminal Record / Devah Pager
  • The Criminal Justice System
    • Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality / Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson
  • The Health Care System
    • Root and Structural Causes of Minority Health and Health Disparities / Keon L. Gilbert and Chikarlo R. Leak
• PART 4 CONFRONTING THE PIPELINE: SOCIAL POLICY ISSUES
  • Engaging Social Change by Embracing Diversity / Rashawn Ray
  • When Is Affirmative Action Fair? On Grievous Harms and Public Remedies / Ira Katznelson
  • Engaging Future Leaders: Peer Education at Work in Colleges and Universities / Alta Mauro and Jason Robertson
  • What Do We Think About Race? / Lawrence D. Bobo

Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?

Zócalo: Public Square
2011-09-07

Five Experts Comment on the Politics of Race

Richard Thompson Ford, George E. Osborne Professor of Law
Stanford University

Michael C. Dawson, John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science; Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
University of Chicago

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California, Berkeley

As the son of a black Kenyan and a white American, President Obama is biracial. As a symbol of our times, he’s also called post-racial. On his census form, he classifies himself as black. Whatever he is, the categories obsess many Americans. So in advance of Randall Kennedy’s visit to Zócalo, we put the question to some leading academics: Is Obama black, bi-racial, or post-racial?…

He’s Black…

…He’s Black, Unfortunately…

…He’s White, Unfortunately…

…He’s Race-neutral, Unfortunately…

…He’s All and None—But Let’s Give It a Rest…

Read the entire article here.

From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6 (November 2004)
pages 931-950
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268530

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University 

In this article I argue that the bi-racial order (white vs non-white) typical of the United States is undergoing a profound transformation. Because of drastic changes in the demography of the nation as well as changes in the racial structure of the world-system, the United States is developing a complex, Latin America-like racial order. Specifically, I suggest that the new order will have two central features: three loosely organized racial strata (white, honorary white, and the collective black) and a pigmentocratic logic. I examine some objective, subjective, and social interaction indicators to assess if the Latin Americanization thesis holds some water. Although more refined data are needed to conclusively make my case, the available indicators support my thesis. I conclude this article by outlining some of the potential implications of Latin Americanization for the future of race relations in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

Chapter in:

Race Struggles
University of Illinois Press
2009
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07648-0

Edited by:

Theodore Koditschek, Professor of History
University of Missouri, Columbia

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Helen A. Neville, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chapter Author:

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Since the early 1990s, there has emerged in the United States a push to racially reclassify persons with one black and one white parent as biracial. A central feature of what I am calling the biracial project is a cohort of scholars, themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for people of mixed parentage (PMP) than a black one. These scholars maintain that when PMP identify as biracial, they gain a more mentally healthy racial identity, have fewer experiences of alienation, and are able to express their racial and cultural distinction from African Americans. In addition to the presumed personal benefits of such an identity, these scholars suggest that a biracial identity is a positive step in moving society beyond race and toward a color-blind society. What remains troubling about this scholarship, though, is a tendency to conceptualize PMP as a distinct racial group, and the inattention to the potentially negative political impact such a reclassification would have on African Americans.

Historically and currently, white supremacy in the United States has hinged on the oppression of people of African descent. The position of African Americans in the political economy has served as the basis for developing a racialized social system, restructuring that system at different historical moments, and incorporating new social groups into the racial hierarchy as races. Asserting a new racial group premised on a claim to an inherent (biological) whiteness and a rejection of blackness taps into the intricacies, logics, and values of that very system. It is therefore important to remember that the push for a biracial racial category arose and made its greatest strides amid predictions that by the year 2050 whites will be a numerical minority. More than a question of self-identity, the push for a biracial identity concerns substantiating the existence of a new race to be positioned as an intermediary between blacks and whites in a reordered racialized social system. Indeed, in the United States there have always been multiple racial groups situated below whites in the racial hierarchy. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has recently argued that, increasingly, different groups are beginning to hold a position of “honorary whiteness” within that hierarchy. Taking into account the structures of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, I remain unconvinced that an honorary white racial status in the United States would include PMP, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, though I agree with his claim that various racialized groups that were previously denied the privileges of whiteness increasingly enjoy advantages, privileges, and access to centers of power that continue to be denied black people and those whom Bonilla-Silva calls the “collective black.” Far from helping to erase existing color lines or challenging the new racial formations described by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Bonilla-Silva, it would draw yet another color line. And unlike certain Asian and Latino groups, a new biracial race stakes its claim, quite literally, on possessing whiteness.

The biracial project approaches racial identity as racial identification, or the assertion of a racial category. Using identity as a synonym tor race has also entailed inadequate attention to the complexities of identity. Consequently, these works rarely engage the psychological scholarship on black identity formation, not to mention the historical, sociological, and cultural interrogations of blackness that have appeared in Black Studies over the past century. Most troubling is the inattention, if not utter aversion, to the history of PMP considering themselves black and struggling over the meanings of blackness.

It is hardly coincidental that these scholars presume certain antiracist attributes to inhere in a biracial identity. In asserting the subversive character of a biracial identity, Maria P. P. Root maintains that it “may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports.” Naomi Zack and G. Reginald Daniel more plainly argue that a biracial identity hastens the end of racial categories altogether by challenging popular notions of race. For Zack in particular, a biracial identity serves as the basis for “ultimately disabus(ing) Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race,” thus leading society away from racial classifications and hastening racisms demise. Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real, largely asserted with little research substantiating the claims of its proponents.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Situating the discussion of biracial identity in the context of race and racial oppression as structural relationships, I provide a detailed review of the theoretical and prescriptive literature advocating a biracial identity. Specifically, I am concerned with this racial projects theoretical basis for a biracial identity, how it conceptualizes race and racism, the place of the one-drop rule in this conceptualization, and the defense of biracial identity as an antiracist tool…

Read the chapter here.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Third Edition)

Rowman & Littlefield
November 2009
318 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4422-0218-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-0219-1

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

In the third edition of his highly acclaimed book, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking. He has now extended this challenge with a new chapter on Obama’s election addressing the apparent miracle of a black man elected as the 44th President of the nation despite the fact that racial progress has stagnated since the 1980s and, in some areas, even regressed. In contrast to those who believe the election of President Obama is a watershed moment that signifies the beginning of a post-racial era in America, he suggests this development embodies the racial trends of the last 40 years including two he has addressed in this book: the rise of color-blind racism as the dominant racial ideology and the emergence of an apparently more flexible racial stratification system he characterizes as Latin America-like.

Features

• Exposes racial nature of “post-racial” discourse
• Examines the future of racial stratification in the USA
• Explains why the election of Obama may not be a sign of racial progress

Table of Contents

• Preface for Third Edition of Racism without Racists
• 1. The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America
• 2. The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism
• 3. The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities without Sounding Racist
• 4. “I Didn’t Get That Job Because of a Black Man”: Color-Blind Racism’s Racial Stories
• 5. Peeking Inside the (White) House of Color Blindness: The Significance of Whites’ Segregation
• 6. Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives
• 7. Are Blacks Color Blind, Too?
• 8. E Pluribus Unum or the Same Old Perfume in a New Bottle? On the Future of Racial Stratification in the United States
• 9. Will Racism Disappear in Obamerica? The Sweet (but Deadly) Enchantment of Colorblindness in Black Face
• Conclusion

In Florida, a Death Foretold

The New York Times
2012-03-31

Isabel Wilkerson

IN the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Has ‘whiteness studies’ run its course at colleges?

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-30

Alex P. Kellogg, Special to CNN

Among university departments that study African-American history, Latin American or Chicano cultures and all varieties of ethnicities and nationalities, there’s a relatively obscure field of academic inquiry: whiteness studies.
 
While there are no standalone departments dedicated to the field, interdisciplinary courses on the subject quietly gained traction on college and university campuses nationwide in the 1990s. Today, there are dozens of colleges and universities, including American University in Washington, D.C., and University of Texas at Arlington, that have a smattering of courses on the interdisciplinary subject of whiteness studies.
 
The field argues that white privilege still exists, thanks largely to structural and institutional racism, and that the playing field isn’t level, and whites benefit from it. Using examples such as how white Americans tend not to be pulled over by the police as often as blacks and Latinos, or how lenders targeted blacks and Latinos for more expensive, subprime loans during the recent U.S. housing crisis, educators teach how people of different races and ethnicities often live very different lives.
 
Most of the instructors specialize in sociology, philosophy, political science and history, most of them are liberal or progressive, and most of them are, in fact, white. Books frequently used as textbooks in these courses include “How the Irish Became White” by Noel Ignatiev, an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of American history at Princeton; but the field has its roots in the writings of black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and author James Baldwin.
 
In the past, detractors have said the field itself demonizes people who identify as white.
 
But today, academics who teach the classes say they face a fresh hurdle, one that has its roots on the left instead of the right: the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president.
 
“Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind,” says Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania…

…These academics generally agree that the end of slavery, the dismantling of Jim Crow and the election of a black president are all clear signs that things are getting better.
 
But that progress has slanted the mainstream narrative too far into positive terrain, they argue, leaving many to think that racial equality has arrived. Even some young students of color are more skeptical than ever before.
 
That’s dangerous, they argue.
 
“The typical college student will always say ‘What racial inequality? Look at the White House,’” says Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology department at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “I have to first convince them that inequality exists.”…

…Charles Mills says he, too, has a fresh sense that many faculty and students are more skeptical of his work since Obama’s election. Mills is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His first book, “The Racial Contract,” is widely taught in courses on U.S. college campuses.
 
Mills, like other scholars who study whiteness, argues in his courses that whites in particular have a self-interest in seeing the world as post-racial. In that world, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. The advantage of this perspective, he says, is that it allows your success in life not to be determined by race, but by how hard you work.
 
“Obama’s election meant to many white Americans that we’re in a post-racial epoch,” says Mills, even if most indicators show that we’re not…

Read the entire article here.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States

Duke University Press
2010
584 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4558-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4572-5

Edited by:

Miriam Jiménez Román, Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
New York University

Juan Flores, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• I. Historical Background before 1900
  • The Earliest Africans in North America / Peter H. Wood
  • Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans of the Southwest / Jack D. Forbes
  • Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola / Virginia Meacham Gould
  • Afro-Cubans in Tampa / Susan D. Greenbaum
  • Excerpt from Pulling the Muse from the Drum / Adrian Castro
• II. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges / Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg / Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
  • Invoking Arturo Schomburg’s Legacy in Philadelphia / Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
• III. Afro-Latin@s on the Color Line
  • Black Cuban, Black American / Evelio Grillo
  • A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches / Jesus Colon
  • Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City / Nancy Raquel Mirabel
  • An Uneven Playing Field: Afro-Latinos in Major League Baseball / Adrian Burgos Jr.
  • Changing Identities: An Afro-Latino Family Portrait / Gabriel Haslip-Viera
  • Eso era tremendo!: An Afro-Cuban Musician Remembers / Graciela Perez Gutierrez
• IV. Roots of Salsa: Afro-Latin@ Popular Music
  • From “Indianola” to “Ño Colá”: The Strange Career of the Afro-Puerto Rican Musician / Ruth Glasser
  • Excerpt from cu/bop / Louis Reyes Rivera
  • Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean / Jairo Moreno
  • Contesting that Damned Mambo: Arsenio Rodriguez and the People of El Barrio and the Bronx in the 1950s / David F. Garcia
  • Boogaloo and Latin Soul / Juan Flores
  • Excerpt from the salsa of bethesda fountain / Tato Laviera
• V. Black Latin@ Sixties
  • Hair Conking: Buy Black / Carlos Cooks
  • Carlos A. Cooks: Dominican Garveyite in Harlem / Pedro R. Rivera
  • Down These Mean Streets / Piri Thomas
  • African Things / Victor Hernandez Cruz
  • Black Notes and “You Do Something to Me” / Sandra Maria Esteves
  • Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger / Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman
  • Excerpt from Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger / Felipe Luciano
  • The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City / Marta Moreno Vega
  • Reflections and Lived Experiences of Afro-Latin@ Religiosity / Luis Barrios
  • Discovering Myself / Un Testimonio / Josefina Baez
• VI. Afro-Latinas
  • The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society / Angela Jorge
  • Something Latino Was Up with Us / Spring Redd
  • Excerpt from Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises / Mariposa (María Teresa Fernandez)
  • Latinegras: Desired Women—Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives / Marta I. Cruz-Janzen
  • Letter to a Friend / Nilaja Sun
  • Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects / Ana M. Lara
  • The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo / Marianela Medrano
• VII. Public Images and (Mis)Representations
  • Notes on Eusebia Cosme and Juano Hernandez / Miriam Jimenez Roman
  • Desde el Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latino Community / Carlos Flores
  • Displaying Identity: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C. / Ginetta E. B. Candelario
  • Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and Lucecita Benítez / Yeidy M. Rivero
  • Can BET Make You Black? Remixing and Reshaping Latin@s on Black Entertainment Television / Ejima Baker
  • The Afro-Latino Connection: Can this group be the bridge to a broadbased Black-Hispanic alliance? / Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille
• VIII. Afro-Latin@s in the Hip Hop Zone
  • Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad / Raquel Z. Rivera
  • Chicano Rap Roots: Afro-Mexico and Black-Brown Cultural Exchange / Pancho McFarland
  • The Rise and Fall of Reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderon and Beyond / Wayne Marshall
  • Do Platanos Go wit’ Collard Greens? / David Lamb
  • Divas Don’t Yield / Sofia Quintero
• IX. Living Afro-Latinidads
  • An Afro-Latina’s Quest for Inclusion / Yvette Modestin
  • Retracing Migration: From Samana to New York and Back Again / Ryan Mann-Hamilton
  • Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States / Vielka Cecilia Hoy
  • We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduran Garifuna / Aida Lambert
  • Profile of an Afro-Latina: Black, Mexican, Both / Maria Rosario Jackson
  • Enrique Patterson: Black Cuban Intellectual in Cuban Miami / Antonio Lopez
  • Reflections about Race by a Negrito Acomplejao / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity / Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Nigger-Reecan Blues / Willie Perdomo
• X. Afro-Latin@s: Present and Future Tenses
  • How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans / John R. Logan
  • Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preferences for Whiteness / William A. Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton
  • Brown Like Me? / Ed Morales
  • Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico / Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project
  • Mexican Ways, African Roots / Lisa Hoppenjans and Ted Richardson
  • Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace / Tanya Kateri Hernandez
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions
  • Afro-Latinism in United States Society: A Commentary / James Jennings
• Sources and Permissions
• Contributors
• Index

Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

Zygon Center for Religion and Science
Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
2011-03-25
13 pages

Kevin Patrick Considine
Loyola University, Chicago

My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

Read the entire paper here.

Obama’s ascent to the (still) White House is part and parcel of forty years of transition from the Jim Crow order to a new racial regime. Obama represents the sedimentation of a higher stage of the “new racism,” one described by Dylan E. Rodríguez as a “multiracial white supremacy.” In the new phase of racial regulation, the old sins—imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and the racial order—work best in blackface.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/