America Beyond Black and White
How Immigrants and Fusions Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide
-
- $26.99
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
“This book is both powerful and important. Powerful for the testimony it provides from Americans of many different (and even mixed races) about their experiences. And important because there is a racial revolution underway that will upend race as we know it during the twenty-first century.”
—John Kenneth White, Catholic University of America
America Beyond Black and White is a call for a new way of imagining race in America. For the first time in U.S. history, the black-white dichotomy that has historically defined race and ethnicity is being challenged, not by a small minority, but by the fastest-growing and arguably most vocal segment of the increasingly diverse American population—Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Arabs, and many more—who are breaking down and recreating the very definitions of race.
Drawing on interviews with hundreds of Americans who don’t fit conventional black/white categories, the author invites us to empathize with these “doubles” and to understand why they may represent our best chance to throw off the strictures of the black/white dichotomy.
The revolution is already underway, as newcomers and mixed-race “fusions” refuse to engage in the prevailing Anglo- Protestant culture. Americans face two choices: understand why these individuals think as they do, or face a future that continues to define us by what divides us rather than by what unites us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fernandez, a professor of sociology in the criminal justice department at Central Connecticut State, discusses the impact of immigration on America's economy and culture, proposing that rampant racial bigotry, rather than the unchecked influx of immigrants, is what threatens to tear society apart. After covering the history of U.S. immigration law, the economic role of immigrant labor in maintaining large-scale agriculture, and the cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean, Fernandez contends that as long as whites are the "designer originals," while the rest of the population are "knockoffs," immigrants will not be assimilated into U.S. culture. Dedicated to his grandson, "a fantastic fusion of Columbian, French, Irish, Japanese and Spanish heritages," Fernandez's book suggests that the prejudice that sustains the dominance of whites can be undone by racial mixing, ultimately making Americans "one race, united in peace and driven by our desire to celebrate a nation of all-American fusions." Utopian perhaps and confrontational certainly, but definitely thought provoking.
