Race in Mind – Critical Essays

Race in Mind presents fourteen critical essays on race and mixed race by one of America's most prolific and influential ethnic studies scholars. Collected in one volume are all of Paul Spickard's theoretical writings over the past two decades. Ten of the articles have been revised and updated from previous publications. Four appear here for the first time. Spickard's work embraces three overarching themes: race as biology versus race as something constructed by social and political relationships; race as a phenomenon that exists not just in the United States, but in every part of the world, and even in the relationships between nations; and the question of racial multiplicity.

These essays analyze how race affects people's lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawai?i to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard's trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

"Paul Spickard is one of the most innovative, controversial, and powerful voices in the scholarship on race and racial multiplicity, both in the U.S. and on a global scale. This volume traces his unique scholarly contributions to the field from the 1980s to the present. Like no other scholar in American history, he writes American history as world history: the essays in this volume negotiate transnational perspectives, on the one hand, and, on the other, they combine the world history paradigm with thorough investigations into the specificity of time, particular people, locales, cultures, and social systems." —Maria I. Diedrich, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

"This is a collection of masterful writings by one of the nation’s most cogent and sensitive race scholars. National and global as well as comparative historical in scope, these essays display Spickard’s signature sharp wit combined with an incisive intellect in deliberations on wide-ranging topics in history and ethnic studies, particularly in terms of race and multiplicity. It is wonderful that we now have an opportunity to experience the full import of some of Spickard’s most representative analyses compiled into one volume." —G. Reginald Daniel, author of Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

"A pioneer in mixed race studies, Paul Spickard is one of the most innovative historians to study race and ethnicity in the past generation. Race in Mind captures the essence of his originality and its relevance for understanding today’s increasingly multiracial America. This book is essential reading for the twenty-first century." —Lon Kurashige, University of Southern California