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Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix

Rainier Spencer
Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix
ISBN: 978-1-58826-751-1
$68.50
ISBN: 978-1-58826-776-4
$27.50
2010/355 pages/LC: 2010026517
A related title: Challenging Multiracial Identity by Rainier Spencer
"Well-crafted and tightly written.... This is a challenging and thought-provoking book.... In teaching the sociology of race and ethnicity, such a text is likely to act as a useful stimulus. It has the potential to encourage critical engagement with competing perspectives on the significance of racial categories and racial mixing in the past, present and future contexts."—Vicki Harman, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"[An] insightful analysis and critique of ideologies surrounding 'multiracialism' in the 21st-century US.... An important, innovative study."—Choice

"Clear and direct.... Rainier Spencer brilliantly analyzes the complexities of multiracialism and multiracial studies."—Heather Dalmage, Roosevelt University

"With its historical sweep and cogent analysis, this important book will be hotly debated by race scholars and widely used and taught in the university classroom."—Kerry Ann Rockquemore, New Faculty Success

DESCRIPTION

Is postraciality just around the corner? How realistic are the often-heard pronouncements that mixed-race identity is leading the United States to its postracial future? In his provocative analysis, Rainier Spencer illuminates the assumptions that multiracial ideology in fact shares with concepts of both white supremacy and antiblackness.

Spencer links the mulatto past with the mulatto present in order to plumb the contours of the nation's mulatto future. He argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rainier Spencer is professor emeritus of Afro-American and mixed-race studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

CONTENTS

  • Introduction.
  • THE MULATTO PAST.
  • The Mixed-Race Background.
  • Of Tragic Mulattoes and Marginal Men.
  • Mulatto Writers on Marginality.
  • Imitations of Life.
  • Rejecting a Shared Past.
  • THE MULATTO PRESENT.
  • Postraciality, Multiraciality, and Antiblackness.
  • Resurrecting Old Myths of Mulatto Marginality.
  • The False Promise of Racial Bridging.
  • Assessing the New Millennium Marginal Man.
  • THE MULATTO FUTURE.
  • Whither Multiracial Militancy?
  • Conserving the Racial Order.
  • Mulatto (and White) Writers on Deconstructing Race.
  • Beyond Generation Mix.