Race in Mind

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 28, 2015

Spickard, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara and eminent scholar of race and ethnic studies, collects, introduces, and updates two decades of his work in this volume. Challenging what he sees as the simple white/black binary of many ethnic and racial studies, the 14 essays here examine multiraciality. While paying particular attention to black-identified Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Jean Toomer, Spickard reaches beyond African-Americans to consider the Asian and Latino/a communities in the United States and explore 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. He assesses whiteness studies and the current fascination with DNA-based ancestry tracing in American culture, finding some virtues in both but sounding an alert about their failings. Spickard's prodigious reading is a prime virtue of this collection; his strong positions, whether in opposition or support, do not muddle his scholarly attempt to report and clarify theoretical concepts. 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.