Upon arrival to the United States, Mexican immigrants are racialized as simultaneously non-White and "illegal." This racialization process complicates notions of race that they bring with them, as the "pigmentocracy" of Mexican society, in which their skin color may have afforded them more privileges within their home country, collides with the American racial system. Racial Baggage examines how immigration reconfigures U.S. race relations, illuminating how the immigration experience can transform understandings of race in home and host countries. Drawing on interviews with Mexicans in Los Angeles and Guadalajara, sociologist Sylvia Zamora illustrates how racialization is a transnational process that not only changes immigrants themselves, but also everyday understandings of race and racism within the United States and Mexico. Within their communities and networks that span an international border, Zamora argues, immigrants come to define "race" in a way distinct from both the color-conscious hierarchy of Mexican society and the Black-White binary prevalent within the United States. In the process, their stories demonstrate how race is not static, but rather an evolving social phenomenon forever altered by immigration.

Cosmopolitanism—the genuine appreciation of cultural and racial diversity—is often associated with adult worldliness and sophistication. Yet, as this innovative new book suggests, children growing up in multicultural environments might be the most cosmopolitan group of all. City Kids profiles fifth-graders in one of New York City’s most diverse public schools, detailing how they collectively developed a sophisticated understanding of race that challenged many of the stereotypes, myths, and commonplaces they had learned from mainstream American culture. Anthropologist Maria Kromidas spent over a year interviewing and observing these young people both inside and outside the classroom, and she vividly relates their sometimes awkward, often playful attempts to bridge cultural rifts and reimagine racial categories. Kromidas looks at how children learned race in their interactions with each other and with teachers in five different areas—navigating urban space, building friendships, carrying out schoolwork, dealing with the school’s disciplinary policies, and enacting sexualities. The children’s interactions in these areas contested and reframed race. Even as Kromidas highlights the lively and quirky individuals within this super-diverse group of kids, she presents their communal ethos as a model for convivial living in multiracial settings. By analyzing practices within the classroom, school, and larger community, City Kids offers advice on how to nurture kids’ cosmopolitan tendencies, making it a valuable resource for educators, parents, and anyone else who is concerned with America’s deep racial divides. Kromidas not only examines how we can teach children about antiracism, but also considers what they might have to teach us.

While Chicago has the second-largest Mexican population among U.S. cities, relatively little ethnographic attention has focused on its Mexican community. This much-needed ethnography of Mexicans living and working in Chicago examines processes of racialization, labor subordination, and class formation; the politics of nativism; and the structures of citizenship and immigration law. Nicholas De Genova develops a theory of “Mexican Chicago” as a transnational social and geographic space that joins Chicago to innumerable communities throughout Mexico. “Mexican Chicago” is a powerful analytical tool, a challenge to the way that social scientists have thought about immigration and pluralism in the United States, and the basis for a wide-ranging critique of U.S. notions of race, national identity, and citizenship. De Genova worked for two and a half years as a teacher of English in ten industrial workplaces (primarily metal-fabricating factories) throughout Chicago and its suburbs. In Working the Boundaries he draws on fieldwork conducted in these factories, in community centers, and in the homes and neighborhoods of Mexican migrants. He describes how the meaning of “Mexican” is refigured and racialized in relation to a U.S. social order dominated by a black-white binary. Delving into immigration law, he contends that immigration policies have worked over time to produce Mexicans as the U.S. nation-state’s iconic “illegal aliens.” He explains how the constant threat of deportation is used to keep Mexican workers in line. Working the Boundaries is a major contribution to theories of race and transnationalism and a scathing indictment of U.S. labor and citizenship policies.

Race on the Move takes readers on a journey from Brazil to the United States and back again to consider how migration between the two countries is changing Brazilians' understanding of race relations. Brazil once earned a global reputation as a racial paradise, and the United States is infamous for its overt social exclusion of nonwhites. Yet, given the growing Latino and multiracial populations in the United States, the use of quotas to address racial inequality in Brazil, and the flows of people between each country, contemporary race relations in each place are starting to resemble each other. Tiffany Joseph interviewed residents of Governador Valadares, Brazil's largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S., to ask how their immigrant experiences have transformed local racial understandings. Joseph identifies and examines a phenomenon—the transnational racial optic—through which migrants develop and ascribe social meaning to race in one country, incorporating conceptions of race from another. Analyzing the bi-directional exchange of racial ideals through the experiences of migrants, Race on the Move offers an innovative framework for understanding how race can be remade in immigrant-sending communities.

“Anyone who believes that the American racial structure is characterized by unmovable white/black boundaries should read this book.” —Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration In this groundbreaking study of Puerto Rican and Dominican migration to the United States, Wendy D. Roth explores the influence of migration on changing cultural conceptions of race—for the newcomers, for their host society, and for those who remain in the countries left behind. Just as migrants can gain new language proficiencies, they can pick up new understandings of race. But adopting an American idea about race does not mean abandoning earlier ideas. New racial schemas transfer across borders and cultures spread between sending and host countries. Behind many current debates on immigration is the question of how Latinos will integrate and where they fit into the US racial structure. Race Migrations shows that these migrants increasingly see themselves as a Latino racial group. Ultimately, Roth shows that several systems of racial classification and stratification co-exist in each place, in the minds of individuals and in their shared cultural understandings of “how race works.” “Superb . . . transcends the existing literature on migration and race.” —Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States “Provides important clarifications regarding the nature of racial orders in the United States and the Hispanic Caribbean.” —Mosi Adesina Ifatunji, Social Forces “Rich with insights.” —Richard Alba, The Graduate Center CUNY, author of Blurring the Color Line “Innovative ethnographic fieldwork . . . Recommended.” —E. Hu-DeHart, Choice “Insightful.” —Edward Telles, Princeton University, author of Race in Another America “A transformative book.” —Clara E. Rodriguez, Journal of American Studies

Not all racial incidents are racist incidents, Lawrence Blum says. "We need a more varied and nuanced moral vocabulary for talking about the arena of race. We should not be faced with a choice of 'racism' or nothing." Use of the word "racism" is pervasive: An article about the NAACP's criticism of television networks for casting too few "minority" actors in lead roles asks, "Is television a racist institution?" A white girl in Virginia says it is racist for her African-American teacher to wear African attire.Blum argues that a growing tendency to castigate as "racism" everything that goes wrong in the racial domain reduces the term's power to evoke moral outrage. In "I'm Not a Racist, But...", Blum develops a historically grounded account of racism as the deeply morally-charged notion it has become. He addresses the question whether people of color can be racist, defines types of racism, and identifies debased and inappropriate usages of the term. Though racial insensitivity, racial anxiety, racial ignorance and racial injustice are, in his view, not "racism," they are racial ills that should elicit moral concern.Blum argues that "race" itself, even when not serving distinct racial malfeasance, is a morally destructive idea, implying moral distance and unequal worth. History and genetic science reveal both the avoidability and the falsity of the idea of race. Blum argues that we can give up the idea of race, but must recognize that racial groups' historical and social experience has been shaped by having been treated as if they were races.

Classroom Voices on Education and Race presents core educational issues— with an emphasis on race and the racial achievement gap, school culture, and curriculum—through the unfiltered and poignant voices of high school students. Students from urban, rural, and suburban public schools express a strong desire for a more active role in their classrooms, as well as for a curriculum that is more responsive to their world. Current students speak out against an increasingly complex and demanding world in which standardized testing serves to detach students from their learning and from their peers. They bear witness to increasingly competitive, content-driven classrooms that minimize open communication and critical thinking, and instead foster a culture of and cheating. And, they expose a hidden curriculum that contradicts the learning expectations of formal education. In particular, they speak to the persistence of racial stereotypes and segregation. Burdened by ignorance and misunderstandings, students address the need for honest racial dialogue facilitated by adults in their desire to cross the racial divide. Educators must listen to the voices from their classrooms in order to better participate in the lives and education of their students.

In the parlance of social psychology, social work, and urban social scientists, African American fathers have often been described as "absent," "missing," "non-residential," "non-custodial," "unavailable," "non-married," "irresponsible," and "immature." It is wondered why it is/was so difficult to find literature, research, and comments regarding positive attributes of African American families in general and African American fathers in particular. This book fills a void in attempting to offer a broader picture regarding the status of African American males in a father role. The purpose is to get beyond the African American father "invisibility" syndrome and gloom and doom pathology oriented labels and tell another side of the story about the power of fathering in the African American experience. The book brings these "invisible" social and biological fathers to life by telling their stories and letting the reader hear and feel the vibrancy of their voices as they struggle to meet the challenges of being fathers and Black men in America. Black Fathers: An Invisible Presence in America is divided into four sections: *Part I offers some research and theory regarding the impact of fathers on the lives of their children. *In Part II, reactions and experiences from those men who had active, involved, and committed Black men in their lives as they were growing up are shared. *In Part III, stories are shared from African American men who had problematic relationships with their fathers, but who put forth the time, energy, and effort to work through the issues. *The primary focus of Part IV is on how to strengthen the role of Black fathers, father figures, and social fathers in family life and child rearing by discovering and internalizing psychological strengths anchored in African American psychological themes, African values, and spirituality. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in the fields of race/ethnic relations, family studies, and Black studies.

Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City. Racial history has always been the thorn in America’s side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white also had to struggle with their own racial identities. Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white. A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America’s history of immigration and race.