The subject of race (particularly as relates to interracial dating and marriage) has long been considered strongly controversial. I maintain that any lack of acceptance on the part of the races (where it still exists) is largely the result of a lack of familiarity—one to another. Knowledge, insight, and the dispelling of stereotypical rumor are each important elements necessary to bridge the racial gap that yet remains. The purpose of this book is to provide the material necessary to gain a greater understanding of just how truly connected we are as a people. While we will each possess our own individual dreams, hopes, fears, and insecurities, it is hopeful that (above all) we will recognize the presence and plan of God within each of our lives. The following material has been written in such a format that one can simply begin by opening the book on any given page (even starting in the middle if so desired). In your reading, it is my hope that you will glean valuable information along the way. The composition of material is likened to that of a family scrapbook or album whose contents are assorted snippets, sentimental tokens, and snapshots of life. You might also compare it to a recipe, where a “dash of this, and a sprig of that” enter into the mix. Subjects range from healthcare to cuisine and even manage to include encapsulated brief short story. The material is intended to educate, inform, and enlighten. Moreover, may it serve as a reminder of the obligation we all bear to show respect for all races and nationalities—looking beyond title, race, or ethnicity. In essence, seeking to know the true person, the heart, the genuine soul—the individual.

The subject of race (particularly as relates to interracial dating and marriage) has long been considered strongly controversial. I maintain that any lack of acceptance on the part of the races (where it still exists) is largely the result of a lack of familiarityone to another. Knowledge, insight, and the dispelling of stereotypical rumor are each important elements necessary to bridge the racial gap that yet remains. The purpose of this book is to provide the material necessary to gain a greater understanding of just how truly connected we are as a people. While we will each possess our own individual dreams, hopes, fears, and insecurities, it is hopeful that (above all) we will recognize the presence and plan of God within each of our lives. The following material has been written in such a format that one can simply begin by opening the book on any given page (even starting in the middle if so desired). In your reading, it is my hope that you will glean valuable information along the way. The composition of material is likened to that of a family scrapbook or album whose contents are assorted snippets, sentimental tokens, and snapshots of life. You might also compare it to a recipe, where a dash of this, and a sprig of that enter into the mix. Subjects range from healthcare to cuisine and even manage to include encapsulated brief short story. The material is intended to educate, inform, and enlighten. Moreover, may it serve as a reminder of the obligation we all bear to show respect for all races and nationalitieslooking beyond title, race, or ethnicity. In essence, seeking to know the true person, the heart, the genuine soulthe individual.

The subject of race (particularly as relates to interracial dating and marriage) has long been considered strongly controversial. I maintain that any lack of acceptance on the part of the races (where it still exists) is largely the result of a lack of familiarity—one to another. Knowledge, insight, and the dispelling of stereotypical rumor are each important elements necessary to bridge the racial gap that yet remains. The purpose of this book is to provide the material necessary to gain a greater understanding of just how truly connected we are as a people. While we will each possess our own individual dreams, hopes, fears, and insecurities, it is hopeful that (above all) we will recognize the presence and plan of God within each of our lives. The following material has been written in such a format that one can simply begin by opening the book on any given page (even starting in the middle if so desired). In your reading, it is my hope that you will glean valuable information along the way. The composition of material is likened to that of a family scrapbook or album; whose contents are assorted snippets, sentimental tokens, and snapshots of life. You might also compare it to a recipe; where a “dash of this, and a sprig of that” enter into the mix. Subjects range from healthcare to cuisine and even manage to include encapsulated, brief short story. The material is intended to educate, inform, and enlighten. Moreover, may it serve as a reminder of the obligation we all bear to show respect for all races and nationalities—looking beyond title, race, or ethnicity. In essence, seeking to know the true person, the heart, the genuine soul—the individual.

A story about the trials and triumphs of a Black chef from Queens, New York, and a White media entrepreneur from Staten Island who built a relationship and a restaurant in the Deep South, hoping to bridge biases and get people talking about race, gender, class, and culture. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY GARDEN & GUN • “Black, White, and The Grey blew me away.”—David Chang In this dual memoir, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano take turns telling how they went from tentative business partners to dear friends while turning a dilapidated formerly segregated Greyhound bus station into The Grey, now one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country. Recounting the trying process of building their restaurant business, they examine their most painful and joyous times, revealing how they came to understand their differences, recognize their biases, and continuously challenge themselves and each other to be better. Through it all, Bailey and Morisano display the uncommon vulnerability, humor, and humanity that anchor their relationship, showing how two citizens commit to playing their own small part in advancing equality against a backdrop of racism.

Weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis, Same Family, Different Colors explores the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States. Colorism and color bias—the preference for or presumed superiority of people based on the color of their skin—is a pervasive and damaging but rarely openly discussed phenomenon. In this unprecedented book, Lori L. Tharps explores the issue in African American, Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race families and communities by weaving together personal stories, history, and analysis. The result is a compelling portrait of the myriad ways skin-color politics affect family dynamics in the United States. Tharps, the mother of three mixed-race children with three distinct skin colors, uses her own family as a starting point to investigate how skin-color difference is dealt with. Her journey takes her across the country and into the lives of dozens of diverse individuals, all of whom have grappled with skin-color politics and speak candidly about experiences that sometimes scarred them. From a Latina woman who was told she couldn’t be in her best friend’s wedding photos because her dark skin would “spoil” the pictures, to a light-skinned African American man who spent his entire childhood “trying to be Black,” Tharps illuminates the complex and multifaceted ways that colorism affects our self-esteem and shapes our lives and relationships. Along with intimate and revealing stories, Tharps adds a historical overview and a contemporary cultural critique to contextualize how various communities and individuals navigate skin-color politics. Groundbreaking and urgent, Same Family, Different Colors is a solution-seeking journey to the heart of identity politics, so that this more subtle “cousin to racism,” in the author’s words, will be exposed and confronted.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country. A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “white space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America.

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.

Through in-depth interviews with individuals from black-white multiracial families, and insightful sociological analysis, Heather M. Dalmage examines the challenges faced by people living in such families and explores how their experiences demonstrate the need for rethinking race in America. She examines the lived reality of race in the ways multiracial family members construct and describe their own identities and sense of community and politics. Their lack of language to describe their multiracial existence, along with their experience of coping with racial ambiguity and with institutional demands to conform to a racially divided, racist system is the central theme of Tripping on the Color Line.