The Philosophy of Multiracial Identity and Self Realization

The Philosophy of Multiracial Identity and Self Realization
Author: Charles Michael Byrd
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2024-09-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0761874631

A child of the Civil Rights Era born below the Mason-Dixon Line, Charles Byrd eloquently shares his awe-inspiring story of self-discovery and revelation through a lens of spirituality. This important book chronicles the tense family dynamics, powerful social experiences, and thought-provoking interracial philosophy of a man whose national advocacy helped persuade the federal government to allow the 10 percent of the population at that time to self- identify as more than one race on the 2000 U.S. Census. This literary retrospective includes references to nine of Byrd’s many essays published on the former Interracial Voice website he founded in the 1990s and other national publications. He ruminates on a variety of subjects from former President Barack Obama’s preferred racial identity to the Black community’s resistance to the multiracial identity. Byrd serves as a docent through his personal history of American interracial thought from the mid-century Civil Rights era in pre-Loving Abingdon, Va., to present-day New York City, pointing to the segregated schools and cemeteries along the way to his conclusion that he was unwilling to relinquish any part of his blended heritage. This book is a deeply intellectual look at rarely discussed points of view in the late 20th century movement to recognize mixed-race people as they chose to be seen.

Visible Identities

Visible Identities
Author: Linda Martín Alcoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2005-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0198031416

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

The Multiracial Experience

The Multiracial Experience
Author: Maria P. P. Root
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 516
Release: 1996
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780803970595

In this book Maria Root uses her multiracial experience to challenge current theoretical and political conceptualizations of race, and redefine the way race and social relations are defined.

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience
Author: Tina Fernandes Botts
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-01-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498509436

Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience is a collection of essays by philosophers about the mixed race experience. Each essay is meant to represent one of three possible things: (1) what the philosopher sees as the philosopher’s best work, (2) evidence of the possible impact of the philosopher’s mixed race experience on the philosopher’s work, or (3) the philosopher’s philosophical take on the mixed race experience. The book has two primary goals: (1) to collect together for the first time the work of professional, academic philosophers who have had the mixed race experience, and (2) to bring these essays together for the purpose of adding to the conversation on the question of the degree to which factical identity and philosophical work may be related. The book also examines the possible relationship between the mixed race experience and certain philosophical positions.

Loving Day

Loving Day
Author: Mat Johnson
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812983661

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “[Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor.”—Los Angeles Times “Razor-sharp . . . Loving Day is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Men’s Journal • The Miami Herald • The Denver Post • Slate • The Kansas City Star • San Antonio Express-News • Time Out New York Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white. Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers. A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love. Praise for Loving Day “Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison’s Invisible Man.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel’s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson’s comic timing is impeccable.”—Los Angeles Times “Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege.’”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity

The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity
Author: Veronica Benet-Martinez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0199796750

Multiculturalism is a prevalent worldwide societal phenomenon. Aspects of our modern life, such as migration, economic globalization, multicultural policies, and cross-border travel and communication have made intercultural contacts inevitable. High numbers of multicultural individuals (23-43% of the population by some estimates) can be found in many nations where migration has been strong (e.g., Australia, U.S., Western Europe, Singapore) or where there is a history of colonization (e.g., Hong Kong). Many multicultural individuals are also ethnic and cultural minorities who are descendants of immigrants, majority individuals with extensive multicultural experiences, or people with culturally mixed families; all people for whom identification and/or involvement with multiple cultures is the norm. Despite the prevalence of multicultural identity and experiences, until the publication of this volume, there has not yet been a comprehensive review of scholarly research on the psychological underpinning of multiculturalism. The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity fills this void. It reviews cutting-edge empirical and theoretical work on the psychology of multicultural identities and experiences. As a whole, the volume addresses some important basic issues, such as measurement of multicultural identity, links between multilingualism and multiculturalism, the social psychology of multiculturalism and globalization, as well as applied issues such as multiculturalism in counseling, education, policy, marketing and organizational science, to mention a few. This handbook will be useful for students, researchers, and teachers in cultural, social, personality, developmental, acculturation, and ethnic psychology. It can also be used as a source book in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on identity and multiculturalism, and a reference for applied psychologists and researchers in the domains of education, management, and marketing.

Philosophy for Girls

Philosophy for Girls
Author: Melissa Shew
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-09-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190072938

This revolutionary book empowers its readers by exploring enduring, challenging, and timely philosophical issues in new essays written by expert women philosophers. The book will inspire and entice these philosophers' younger counterparts, curious readers of all genders, and all who support equity in philosophy. If asked to envision a philosopher, people might imagine a bearded man, probably Greek, perhaps in a toga, pontificating about abstract ideas. Or they might think of that same man in the Enlightenment, gripping a quill pen and pouring universal truths onto a page. They may even call to mind a much more modern man, wearing a black sweater and smoking a cigarette in a Paris café, expressing existential angst in a new novel or essay. What people are unlikely to picture, though, is a woman. Women have historically been excluded from the discipline of philosophy and remain largely marginalized in contemporary textbooks and anthologies. The under-representation of women in secondary and post-secondary curricula makes it harder for young women to see themselves as future philosophers. In fact, it makes it harder for all people to engage the valuable contributions that women have made and continue to make to intellectual thought. While some progress has been made in building a more inclusive world of philosophy, especially in the last fifty years, important work remains to be done. Philosophy for Girls helps correct the pervasive and problematic omission of women from philosophy. Divided into four sections that connect to major, primary fields in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics), this anthology is unique: chapters are all written by women, and each chapter opens with an anecdote about a girl or woman from mythology, history, art, literature, or science to introduce chapter topics. Further, nearly all primary and secondary sources used in the chapters are written by women philosophers. The book is written in a rigorous, academic spirit but in lively and engaging prose, making serious philosophical insights accessible to readers who are new to philosophy. This book appeals to a wide audience. Individual readers will find value in these pages--especially girls and women ages 16-24, as well as university and high school educators and students who want a change from standard anthologies that include few or no women. The book's contributors both represent and map the diverse landscape of philosophy, highlighting its engagement with themes of gender and equity. In doing so, they encourage philosophers current and future philosophers to explore new territory and further develop the topography of the field. Philosophy for Girls is a rigorous yet accessible entry-point to philosophical contemplation designed to inspire a new generation of philosophers.

Beyond Black

Beyond Black
Author: Kerry Rockquemore
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2008
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780742560550

Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America is a groundbreaking study of the dynamic meaning of racial identity for multiracial people in post-civil rights America. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma document the wide range of racial identities that individuals with one black and one white parent develop, and they provide an incisive sociological explanation of the choices facing those who are multiracial. Stemming from the controversy of the 2000 census and whether an additional "multiracial" category should be added to the survey, this second edition of Beyond Black uses both survey data and interviews of multiracial young adults to explore the contemporary dynamics of racial identity formation. The authors raise social and political questions that are posed by expanding racial categorization on the U.S. census. Book jacket.

Counseling Across the Lifespan

Counseling Across the Lifespan
Author: Cindy L Juntunen
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1483389138

This practical book helps readers provide effective mental, emotional, and behavioral health services to clients across the continuum of care, from health promotion through long-term treatment and remediation. Anchoring each chapter within a life stage—from childhood through older adulthood—the text identifies the nature and origin of various psychological issues and emphasizes the importance of anticipating and responding early to concerns that arise for large portions of the population. The Second Edition features new chapters and expanded coverage of important topics, such as sociocultural contextual factors and interprofessional health perspectives.

Interracial Communication

Interracial Communication
Author: Mark P. Orbe
Publisher: Waveland Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2022-11-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1478650583

As the racial and ethnic landscape of the United States shifts, interracial communication plays an increasingly crucial role. The sociopolitical climate has impacted identities, relationships, media, and organizations—challenging the possibility of having transformative engagement about race. Power differences affected by race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and geography are sometimes invisible. Competent interracial communication is key to alleviating polarized interactions and addressing the unequal treatment of microcultures. Part I of the book provides essential background, including the history of race, the importance of communication, the development and intersectionality of racial and ethnic identities, and models and theories of interracial communication. Part II applies this information to communication practices in specific, everyday contexts: global racial hierarchies and colorism, friendships/ romantic relationships, communication in the workplace, interracial conflict, and race and ethnicity in the media. The concluding chapter outlines pathways to meaningful change and invites readers to become active participants in dialogue to facilitate working through differences. The authors offer comprehensive, readable, and insightful coverage of pressing issues. They focus on communication as vital to removing barriers to understanding. Becoming proactive in eliminating racism on a personal level is a step toward the macrolevel changes required to dismantle systemic racism. The fourth edition is a socially relevant resource for facilitating interracial dialogue to create a positive climate to work together to achieve social justice.