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Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap

Gilda L. Ochoa

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and ... More

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and pundits debate the sources of an achievement gap, Academic Profiling turns our attention to students, teachers, and parents to learn about the opportunity and social gaps within schools. In candid and at times heart-wrenching detail, students in a California public high school share stories of support and neglect on their paths to graduation. Separated by unequal middle schools and curriculum tracking, students are divided by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. While those in an International Baccalaureate Program boast about socratic classes and stress release-sessions, students outside of such programs bemoan unengaged teaching and inaccessible counselors. Labeled “the elite,” “regular,” “smart,” or “stupid,” students encounter differential policing and assumptions based on their abilities. These disparities are compounded by the growth in the private tutoring industry where wealthier families can afford to spend thousands of dollars to enhance their children’s opportunities, furthering an accumulation of privileges. However, in spite of the entrenchment of inequality in today’s schools, Academic Profiling uncovers multiple forms of resilience and the ways that students and teachers are affirming identities, creating alternative spaces, and fostering critical consciousness. As the story of this California high school unfolds, we also learn about the possibilities and limits of change when Gilda L. Ochoa shares the research findings with the high school.Less

The American Dream in Vietnamese

Nhi T. Lieu

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ... More

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. The text claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry. The book examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and websites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. It shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity. This text demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, the book finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.Less

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (ed.)

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in ... More

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is an eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party. For all its cultural and historical interest, this story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, the text tells of how Haywood grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers Union, supported protests in Chicago against Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985.Less

Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State

Kumarini Silva

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized ... More

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized hierarchies in contemporary culture, especially in the wake of September 11. Here, brown is seen as both a product of historical xenophobia and slavery in the United States, and as a newer form of ongoing racism tied to notions of security and securitization. In order to illustrate this process, each chapter maps various junctures where the ideological, political and mediated terrain intersect, resulting in both an appetite for all things ‘brown’ by U.S. consumers, while at the same time various political and nationalist discourses and legal structures conspire to control brown bodies (immigration, emigration, migration, outsourcing, incarceration) both within and outside the United States. The book explores this contradictory relationship between representation and reality, arguing that the representation acts as a way to mediate and manage the anxieties that come from contemporary global realties, where brown spaces, like India, Pakistan, and the amalgamated Middle East, pose significant economic, security, and political challenges to the United States.Less

Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity

John Hartigan Jr.

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists ... More

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.Less

The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California

Wendy Cheng

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At ... More

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At a moment in which Asian Americans and Latinas/os are becoming a significant presence in American suburbs, such dynamics illustrate the increasingly relevant role of middle-income, majority-nonwhite spaces to understanding racial formation in the twenty-first century. In particular, the development and assertion of an emergent multiracial, nonwhite identity points to the social, cultural, and political possibilities we might find in the rapidly increasing number of “majority-minority” suburbs in the United States to challenge the reproduction of white privilege and racially exclusive notions of belonging. In its conceptualization of regional racial formation, this is the first work to explicitly link the importance of place and place-making to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential concept of racial formation. The main audience for this book will be scholars and students in ethnic studies, American studies, urban and suburban studies, geography, sociology, California and Los Angeles studies.Less

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections ... More

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections between Coleman’s murder and an online war of words and music he was having with another Chicago rapper in a rival gang. This book points out how common this type of incident can be when rap groups form as extensions of gangs. Gangs and rap music, it argues, can be a deadly combination. Set in one of the largest underground music scenes in the nation, this book takes readers into the heart of gangsta rap culture in Chicago. From the electric buzz of nightclubs to the sights and sounds of bedroom recording studios, the book presents gripping accounts of the lives, beliefs, and ambitions of the gang members and rappers with whom the author spent six years. A music genre obsessed with authenticity, gangsta rap promised those from crime-infested neighborhoods a ticket out of poverty. But while firsthand experiences with gangs and crime gave rappers a leg up, it also meant carrying weapons and traveling collectively for protection. Street gangs serve as a fan base and provide protection to rappers who bring in income and help to recruit for the gang.Less

A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i

Hokulani K. Aikau

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their ... More

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. This book gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion. Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the Church. This book traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the Church as a “chosen people”—even at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the Church were being codified. The book shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.Less

Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout

Lynn Mie Itagaki

Racial Burnout: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and the Crisis of Civil Racism examines cultural responses to the riots through the aesthetics and politics of the post-civil rights era and argues that ... More

Racial Burnout: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and the Crisis of Civil Racism examines cultural responses to the riots through the aesthetics and politics of the post-civil rights era and argues that this historical event interrupts the rhetoric of civil racism: the maintenance of civility at the expense of racial equality. As a manifestation of structural racism, civil racism includes the active, though often unintentional, perpetuation of discrimination through one’s everyday engagement with the state and societyLess

Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks

Katharine Capshaw

Civil Rights Childhood shifts critical attention towards the qualities in black children's lives that received photographic attention during their day but that have faded from memory of the civil ... More

Civil Rights Childhood shifts critical attention towards the qualities in black children's lives that received photographic attention during their day but that have faded from memory of the civil rights movement, such as childhood joy, pleasure, and creativity. Drawing on photographic theory and black cultural studies, the project examines a variety of children's photographic books, including texts by prominent authors like Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and recovers books by lesser-known black writers and artists. The project studies texts emerging from the documentary tradition of the 1930s, lengthy historical narratives that include photographs, books that conjoin photographic images with other visual media, and photographic picture books for the very young. By considering books that represent the struggle for citizenship to black children, the project sheds new light on the ongoing attempts by photographers and writers to intervene in stories of civil rights that ignore child involvement or emphasize child passivity. This project enables new recognition of the role of representation to advancing social justice and determining progressive race relations. Recuperating this affirmative perspective on youth during the civil rights movement complicates and extends understanding of the role of photography to integration and civil rights efforts; it permits a more expansive awareness of black child social and political experience in the wake of Brown v. the Board of Education; and it reveals the pivotal role of civil rights representation to contemporary children's perspectives on race relations.Less