Race in Mind - by Paul Spickard (Paperback)

About the Book

Race in Mind presents fourteen critical essays on race and mixed race by one of America's most prolific and influential ethnic studies scholars.

Book Synopsis

These essays analyze how race affects people's lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawaiʻi to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard's trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

Review Quotes

"A pioneer in mixed race studies, Paul Spickard is one of the most innovative historians to study race and ethnicity in the past generation. Race in Mind captures the essence of his originality and its relevance for understanding today's increasingly multiracial America. This book is essential reading for the twenty-first century." --Lon Kurashige, University of Southern California

"Challenging what [Spickard] sees as the simple white/black binary of many ethnic and racial studies, the 14 essays here examine multiraciality. . . . Spickard reaches beyond African-Americans to consider the Asian and Latino/a communities in the United States and explore[s] how race is 'constructed in different ways in different times and places, ' among them England, Japan, Central America, South Africa, China, Pacific Islands, and Hawaii. . . . In his assessments of scholarship in the field of race and ethnic studies, Spickard writes with directness and verve, engaging and instructing the lay reader while flinging a gauntlet--'Race in America is not, and has never been, just about White and Black'--toward conventional academic theorists." --Publishers Weekly

"Paul Spickard is one of the most innovative, controversial, and powerful voices in the scholarship on race and racial multiplicity, both in the United States and on a global scale. This volume traces his unique scholarly contributions to the field from the 1980s to the present. Like no other scholar in American history, he writes American history as world history: the essays in this volume negotiate transnational perspectives, on the one hand, and, on the other, they combine the world history paradigm with thorough investigations into the specificity of time, particular people, locales, cultures, and social systems." --Maria I. Diedrich, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

"This is a collection of masterful writings by one of the nation's most cogent and sensitive race scholars. National and global as well as comparative historical in scope, these essays display Spickard's signature sharp wit combined with an incisive intellect in deliberations on wide-ranging topics in history and ethnic studies, particularly in terms of race and multiplicity. It is wonderful that we now have an opportunity to experience the full import of some of Spickard's most representative analyses compiled into one volume." --G. Reginald Daniel, author of Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

"Erudite, insightful, challenging, informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, Race in Mind: Critical Essays is an impressive body of impressively presented and reasoned scholarship on the subject of race that is very highly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as both community and academic library collections." --Midwest Book Review

"Over the years, Spickard found the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois to be hugely influential including the conclusion that 'racialized relationships exist in every part of the globe.' Many of the later essays in this collection deal with multiplicity--'people who are manifestly multiple in their racial ancestry'--and delve into the racial history, affiliations, and loyalties of Asian Americans, Hawaiians, and Pacific-Islander Americans." --Foreword Reviews

About the Author

Paul Spickard is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor/co-editor of a number of books, including Global Mixed Race.