Books & Links
Websites
The American Community Survey (ACS) is conducted every year to provide up-to-date information about the social and economic needs of your community. The ACS shows how people live--our education, housing, jobs and more. For example, results may be used to decide where new schools, hospitals, and emergency services are needed. The census is conducted once every 10 years to provide an official count of the entire U.S. population to Congress.
Racial justice through media, research, and activism. Check out their helpful Toolkits.
A web series addressing the subject of stereotypes in a spirit of irreverent inquiry.
CensusScope was designed, developed, and programmed by associates of rhe Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN). SSDAN is a university-based organization that creates demographic media, such as user guides, web sites, and hands-on classroom computer materials that make U.S. census data accessible to educators, policymakers, and citizens.
Examine state and county topics for individual census years drawn directly from historical volumes of the U.S. Census of Population and Housing.
A TEDx talk given at Hampshire College.
A report by the Pew Research Center
A clearinghouse of information and resources relevant to the lives of people who are multiracial, multiethnic, transracially adopted, or otherwise impacted by the intersections of race and culture.
A place to find thought-provoking news, conversation and support for those who care about diversity, equal opportunity and respect for differences in schools
The Hapa Project is a multiracial identity project created by artist Kip Fulbeck. The project embodies a range of mediums, including a published book, traveling photographic exhibition, satellite community presentations, and online communities.
Articles in this series explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans
Syllabi
Keren R. McGinity, Brandeis University
This course focuses on how religion, ethnicity, and race contributed to maintaining group separatism at some early points in American history and intersected to create a unified national identity at others. It will also explore the relationship between group continuity and individual identity development. Romantic relationships and marriage between people with different ethnoreligious backgrounds will be the main vehicle for examining religion, race, and ethnicity. Love and marriage between between people of different faith traditions, between whites and people of color, and between people with different ethnic backgrounds will be explored. The course incorporates popular culture by considering how interfaith, interethnic, and interracial relationshipswere were portrayed on television and in films during the rising ethos of individualism in America.
The course is designed to explain how large social issues such as antisemtisim, segregation, sexism and identity politics influence life on both national and personal levels. How contextual factors such as immigration trends, World Wars, and the civil rights, feminist, and fatherhood movements influenced the meaning of love across religious, ethnic, and racial lines will be considered.
Paul Spickard, UC Santa Barbara
Course Objectives:
- Introduce the student to an analytical understanding of racial and ethnic processes as they have operated in the 20th-century world, from the disciplinary perspectives of sociology, history, psychology, and anthropology.
- Acquaint the student with the patterns of social interaction and interpersonal dynamics involved in interracial romance and marriage.
- Provide the student with a detailed introduction to the particular situations of Americans of mixed ethnic ancestry in those larger patterns of social interaction.
- Challenge the student to examine the identity issues and other social phenomena that have framed the lives of multiethnic Americans.
- Add to the student's capacity to read and listen analytically and to think, write, and speak critically about matters of substantial personal, social, and political importance.
Organizations
Representing America's Multiracial, Multiethnic Community since November 12, 1988. Your authoritative source of information about AMEA and the multiracial/ethnic community.
Border Crossers utilizes creative tools to encourage educators in explorations of race and racism with young students. We believe that if educators are prepared to have meaningful conversations about equity, students will be better equipped to interrupt patterns of structural racism and injustice in their own lives and thrive in a multicultural society.
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?,” the biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 1-4, 2012.
The nation's leading organization that helps build healthier communities by raising awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families.
A national multi-ethnic organization that challenges society's notions of race through community building, education, and action
Books
Paul Spickard
Werner Sollors
Vivek Bald
"In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women."
Angela Davis Gardner
“Butterfly” refers to Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, whose mixed-race son Davis-Gardner follows back to America with his father, Pinkerton, and his American wife, after Butterfly’s suicide. Davis-Gardner’s historical research is effortlessly authoritative; her exploration of race in late 19th Century America is fascinating. But Butterfly’s Child is as much a study of gender as of race, and its portrait of the impact of Midwestern farm and family life on Kate, Pinkerton’s wife, is unforgettably poignant. (Jennifer Egan)
Lowell P. Beveridge, Jr.
Young Lowell Beveridge comes from an extended family of politically conservative, Ivy League educated teachers who summer altogether on the coast of Maine. In 1954, fresh out of Harvard, an athlete and a historian, and now a conscripted private in the US Army, Beveridge takes a bold step: he marries an African American woman from Harlem. It is the height of McCarthyism and he is already on the government's radar as a suspected Communist. This book is a revelation, a personal and family saga at the very center of what became a crucial and convulsive stage in the political and cultural development of the United States. Told simply, with clarity and grace, it's a moving story of a search for love and peace, of a family torn apart, and a country in the throes of change.
Alex Lubin
"In this absorbing transnational history, Alex Lubin reveals the vital connections between African American political thought and the people and nations of the Middle East."
Edited by Rebecca C. King-O'Riain, Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song, and Paul Spickard
"Patterns of migration and the forces of globalization have brought the issues of mixed race to the public in far more visible, far more dramatic ways than ever before. Global Mixed Race examines the contemporary experiences of people of mixed descent in nations around the world, moving beyond US borders to explore the dynamics of racial mixing and multiple descent in Zambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Okinawa, Australia, and New Zealand."
Baratunde Thurston
"Have you ever been called 'too black' or 'not black enough'? Have you ever befriended or worked with a black person? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you.
Werner Sollors (editor)
Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided our nation since its earliest history. This collection explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in our racial identity.
Ralph Richard Banks
Keren R. McGinity
"When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are "lost" to the Jewish religion. In this provocative book, Keren R. McGinity shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families. She finds that these husbands strive to bring up their children as Jewish without losing their heritage. Marrying Out argues that the "gendered ethnicity" of intermarried Jewish men, growing out of their religious and cultural background, enables them to raise Jewish children."
Imani Perry
Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor
Renee C. Romano
"Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public trials contribute to a public reckoning with America’s racist past? Racial Reckoning investigates that question, along with the political pressures and cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these decades-old crimes."
John A. Powell
"Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation."
Emily Raboteau
"At the age of twenty-three, award-winning writer Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of 'Zion' as a place Black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one... On her ten-year journey back in time and around the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau wanders to Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists... Uniting memoir with historical and cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus."
June Cross
"June Cross was born in 1954 to Norma Booth, a glamorous, aspiring white actress, and James 'Stump' Cross, a well-known black comedian. Sent by her mother to be raised by Black friends when she was four years old and could no longer pass as white, June was plunged into the pain and confusion of a family divided by race. Secret Daughter tells her story of survival. It traces June’s astonishing discoveries about her mother and about her own fierce determination to thrive. This is an inspiring testimony to the endurance of love between mother and daughter, a child and her adoptive parents, and the power of community."
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.
Michael J. Rosenfeld
Suleiman Osman
Daniel J. Sharfstein
A multigenerational saga of three families crossing the racial divide and an extraordinary new account of the American experience
David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken
"Nearly a decade ago, Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds introduced the concept of and has been the authority on the experiences of TCKs-children who grow up or spend a significant part of their childhood living abroad. Early on, TCKs were identified as the rototype citizen of the future. That future is now, as more and more children are growing up among worlds, creating a culturally rich and diverse world. Rich with real-life anecdotes, Third Culture Kids, Revised Edition examines the nature of the TCK experience and its effect on maturing, developing a sense of identity and adjusting to one's passport country upon return. For many third culture kids, this book will be their first opportunity to discover that they share a common heritage with countless others around the world. This expanded edition profiles the personal challenges that TCKs experience, from feelings of rootlessness and unresolved grief to struggles with maturity and identity. Highlighting dramatic changes brought about by instant communication and new mobility patterns, the new edition shows how the TCK experience is becoming increasingly common and valuable. The authors also expand the coverage to include cross-cultural kids, children of biracial or bicultural parents, immigrants and international adoptees-all of this bringing hidden diversity to our world and challengingour old notions of identity and home."
Pearl Fuyo Gaskins
"What Are You? is based on the interviews the author has made over the past two years [1997-1999] with mixed-race young people around the country. These fresh voices explore issues and topics such as dating, families, and the double prejudice and double insight that come from being mixed, but not mixed-up."
Touré
"In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Inspired by a president who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage, we are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness. In this provocative new book, iconic commentator and journalist Touré tackles what it means to be Black in America today."
Films
A comedy-drama about a Vietnamese brother and sister adopted and raised by an African American couple.
Matt and Christina Drayton are a couple whose attitudes are challenged when their daughter brings home a fiancé who is black. (from IMDB)
Friends and family of a married black architect react in different ways to his affair with an Italian secretary. (IMDB)
An Indian family is expelled from Uganda when Idi Amin takes power. They move to Mississippi and time passes. The Indian daughter falls in love with a black man, and the respective families have to come to terms with it.
A moving and uplifting drama about the effects of interracial marriage in the 1960s.
Vin Diesel's short film about the problems that accompany an actor as he auditions, due to his multi-ethnic appearance.
A white divorcée falls in love with and marries an African-American man. When her ex-husband sues for custody of her child, arguing that a mixed household is an improper place to raise the girl, the new husband fights for his parental rights in court, fighting against a judge who represents the prejudices of the era.
As a black child adopted by white parents in the 1970s and raised in a predominantly white suburb, Director Phil Bertelsen's adolescence was shaped by fond memories of a loving family as well as by difficult periods of self-examination and self-doubt.
Kenya McQueen, an accountant finds love in the most unexpected place when she agrees to go on a blind date with Brian Kelly, a sexy and free-spirited landscaper.
A documentary film tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving to examine the drama, the history, and the current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States.
This teaching guide for Grades 6-12 was created by the Southern Poverty Law Center to accompany "The Loving Story." The documentary film directed by Nancy Buirski tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court Case, Loving v. Virginia (1967) that changed history.