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This book is about the fact that most of the proposed solutions to racial issues in the United States do not work. More importantly, it is about proposing an alternative way to think about addressing such issues, what it calls the mutual-obligations approach. Its one main goal is to work toward a solution to racial division, racial inequality, racial alienation, and the racialized society. To be white in America does come with privileges. Scholars who study what it means to be white describe that privilege in three dimensions: white structural advantage, white normativity, and white transparency. These three dimensions of whiteness work together to sustain white hegemony; that is, whites' position at the top. On the other hand, scholarship shows, repeatedly, that the negative effects of the racialized nature of the United States are experienced most forcefully by African Americans.

Multiculturalism is a philosophy emphasizing cultural maintenance and offers many valuable insights for the eradication of racial tensions. It also is a philosophy that can inhibit the development of value consensus because of the multiple sets of values that can emerge. And developing value consensus is a must if racial unity is to become a viable reality in the United States. This chapter draws on some preliminary research to explore what the Americans' core values might look like. In doing so, it takes the initial steps toward envisioning a set of values that can unify all Americans. It discusses the results of a study of multiracial organizations asking members of different races about their insights as to what can unify Americans. Their answers provide clues as to which values may transcend racial division within our society. The chapter first discusses the American identity, why a common core is needed, African Americans and their ideas about freedom, and what the core concept of freedom means.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. Poor working-class people in Greenpoint–Williamsburg were engaged in constant conflict with the New York City administration and the state and federal agencies which affected their environment and subsistence. When protest surfaced, it was a manifestation of anger and frustration built up in relation to poor employment conditions, government agencies that caused delay and humiliation, absentee landlords, and inadequate city services. The forms protest took and the demands for city services reflected the dependent position to which the workers of Greenpoint–Williamsburg had been reduced. The racial divisions within poor people's movements were clearly related to real estate trends precipitated by the same regional developments which had led to high levels of unemployment and a rising need for public assistance among black, white, and Hispanic workers.

This chapter shows that the final split between the English colonial rulers and settlers in British North America provided passports to freedom for runaway slaves, who during the white American War for independence deserted their passport masters. It provides a historical analysis of the formation of the binary racial division that arose out of the project of colony building on Manhattan Island during the early modern era and took shape in articulation with divisions of class, religion, birthplace, gender, sexuality, and language.

This chapter develops the significance of racial divisions and electoral politics as forces of political suppression. The pervasive political machine and the vituperance demonstrated by voluntary associations such as the American Legion show the dynamics which prevent local movements from growing beyond the community. It is here we find the forces that divide and cripple the community and turn one neighborhood against another.

September 23, 2001, marked an important event in the coexistence of different religious faiths as thousands of people of different race and religions gathered at Yankee Stadium in New York City to mourn and pray for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Among the members of the clergy that lead this multiracial event of prayer was a senior pastor from Riverside Church—which happens to be one of the most prominent multiracial congregations in the country. Multiracial congregations such as this church served as windows of opportunity for eliminating cultural misunderstandings and racial division since no racial group accounted for more than 80% of the congregation. This chapter looks into how four initially all-white churches have evolved into four of the most renowned multiracial congregations in the United States.

Eldin Villafañe, a theologian, associated the role of the church in today's racialized society with Latin Jazz as the latter fuses two different types of music to form a whole new genre, in a similar way to the idea that the church needs to fuse differences to make a whole. This last chapter looks back at the life and message of Jesus of Nazareth and how this represents his effort to find peace and a place of worship for all nations. The chapter briefly goes over the history of Christian congregations and observes that only few have served as venues for racial Shalom. Because of racial division, uniracial congregations have been established across the United States. Today, however, there is a worldview that would help initiate the establishment of multiracial congregations. Lastly, this book has tried to identify the possible outcomes and challenges that such endeavors may encounter, and how the need arises for innovative congregations for an improved Christian multiracial community.

Robert Willan’s 1809 On Cutaneous Diseases is a volume that consolidated writings on skin diseases into a single body of knowledge—a work that established Willan as the nominal founder of dermatology. The chapter makes the case, then, that Willan’s taxonomy of skin disease and the emergence of a modern, skin-centered model of racial difference are conceptually linked. This is not to say that Willan’s division of skin diseases and the racial division of humans is straightforwardly linked, but rather that Willan brought a certain level of awareness of the skin that renders it the immediately visible sign of racial distinction. Perhaps the genealogy of modern race might be found within a history of skin.

This chapter considers what the Jewish people are and how they have come to their own identity and history following the new historical consciousness. In the nineteenth century, race became vitally important, and an ethnocentric dogma based on a naturally determined biology became widespread in Europe. As a result, any ethnic elements that could be uncovered in the Jewish literary tradition were intensified. From a Western point of view, the antinomy between Jews and Europeans was also based on a racial division. This racial division became, in the course of the nineteenth century, a standard fixture of the intelligent and educated Jew. In this manner, nation was associated with race in the Jewish conceptual world. Race was perceived as being parallel to nation, or as endowing the nation with greater immanent historical depth.

“Urban Slaves and Freed Blacks” examines urban Blacks, slave and freed, who were part of a rather large population that worked in a substantial number but limited range of trades and lived in marginal neighborhoods throughout Cuban cities. Documentation of Black customs and, in particular, of representative character types, is the focus of the section entitled “Cuban Costumbristas’ Multifaceted Portraits of Black Women.” It presents an analysis of Black women as public figures, often depicted as essential components of a booming Creole Black urban culture. Negative characterization of certain Black female types demonstrates the subversive mechanisms that female slaves or freed Black women had at their disposal to confront the gender-based impositions of mainstream culture. Like Black males, Black women had to live and work in specific urban locales, and their whereabouts as street vendors or as medicine women became favorite themes for Costumbristas. Costumbrista writers followed similar trends observed in popular Cuban visual art, seeking to classify Black women in terms of their supposedly oversexualized behavior, of their acculturation into mainstream Cuban culture, or of the specific jobs they were allowed to engage. One common character is the mulata fina, a figure that acquired literary importance in unpublished abolitionist novels.

This introductory chapter proposes that African American poet Jean Toomer's 1923 masterwork (Cane) cannot be understood apart from the upsurge of postwar antiracist political radicalism and its aftermath. Toomer does not enthuse about America as the site of cultural pluralism or future racial amalgamation; rather, it is victory in the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism that will put an end to racial division. The violent class struggles that signaled 1919 as a possible revolutionary conjuncture, coupled with the compensatory ideological paradigms adopted by various political actors and cultural producers as insurgency devolved into quietism, supply not just the context, but the formative matrix, from which Toomer's text emerged. The expectations and desires that were aroused and then quashed in the wake of the Great War and the Russian Revolution constitute a spectre haunting the world of Cane.

This chapter focuses on novels of the 1860s that presented differing narratives about spiritual reunion in the years following the Civil War, with particular reference to works written by women. It begins by discussing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1868 novel The Gates Ajar, which offered hope that the fractured Union could be restored from the ruins of the war. It then examines the role of the novel in healing the nation’s wounds, its emphasis on intermarriage as a solution to racial division, and its exploration of the threat posed by white racism to a union of black and white citizens. The chapter concludes by citing examples of novels written during the 1860s, including Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864), Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood; or, Village Life in New England (1867),John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), Anna Elizabeth Dickinson’s What Answer? (1868), Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865), and William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853).

This chapter describes how, during the Second World War and immediately afterwards, many British, certainly government officials and senior police officers, maintained the belief that their police were superior to others. Attempts were made by the British and American allies to develop forms of liberal-democratic police in their defeated enemies, but these were not always particularly successfully. Initially, a mixed system of British and American police worked well in liberated Europe, but there were potential divisions. Racial divisions could be found among the police in many states, as the old European empires came to an end. In some instances, American police officers may have been critical of the European empires; but racial prejudice remained present among many American communities and their police. This was especially apparent among American cops in states of the Deep South, where the residue of black slavery remained. Ultimately, decolonization, the cold war, and a determination to shore up and assist some very dubious regimes ensured a difference between the use of police overseas and their use at home, while protest movements often linked with international concerns prompted similar police responses in different countries.

This chapter shows how most African Americans who moved to Birmingham thought they could improve their lives, materially and otherwise. Their experience hardly fulfilled all of their hopes. The town's rigid system of industrial segregation severely restricted their opportunities. The system was not so unyielding, however, that black workers could not achieve some control over their working lives. Whites' commitment to a racial division of work allowed blacks such complete domination of certain jobs that they gained a degree of leverage in some sectors of the labor market. Black workers could and did exploit this monopoly, especially during boom times, to secure better wages and to define for themselves the terms of their employment.