America Beyond Black and White: How Immigrants and Fusions Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide

By: Ronald Fernandez

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Synopsis: "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 Whiteis 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.