Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience

Tina Fernandes Botts is assistant professor of philosophy at California Statue University, Fresno.

• Foreword, by Linda Martín AlcoffEditor’s Introduction: Toward a Mixed Race Theory, by Tina Fernandes BottsPart 1: Mixed Race Political TheoryChapter 1: Responsible Multiracial Politics, with a new postscript, by Ronald Robles SundstromChapter 2: Mixed Race Identity in Britain: Finding Our Roots in the Post Racial Era, by Gabriella Beckles-RaymondPart 2: Mixed Race MetaphilosophyChapter 3: Through the Looking Glass: What Philosophy Looks Like from the Inside When You’re Not Quite There, by Marina OshanaChapter 4: Being and Not Being, Knowing and Not Knowing, by Jennifer Lisa VestChapter 5: A Mixed Race (Philosophical) Experience, by Tina Fernandes BottsPart 3: Mixed Race OntologyChapter 6: The Fluid Symbol of Mixed Race, by Naomi ZackChapter 7: On Being Mixed, by Linda Martín AlcoffChapter 8: Race and Ethnic Identity, by J.L.A. GarciaPart 4: Mixed Race and Major FiguresChapter 9: Through a Glass, Darkly: A Mixed-Race Du Bois, by Celena SimpsonChapter

In these essays, mixed-race philosophers address the impact of this phenomenological experience on their philosophical work—analyzing, critiquing, and reflecting on the mixed-race experience as viewed personally, historically, socially, politically, and philosophically. Rich insights into the nature of the 'lived experience' of being a 'mixed person' are on display, as are various troubling questions raised by the very existence of mixed-race persons. Is social categorization contradictory, and does it cause self-alienation by demanding monoracial identification of persons who have multiple experiences and multiple social and self ascriptions? Is race a matter of lineage, appearance, or culture? Who decides on race and for what purpose? Do mixed-race persons cause discomfort, threatening both the borders of white identity and black emancipatory projects and indigenous sovereignty? Do mixed-race persons symbolize traumatic conquest and the slavery experience? Is mixed-race experience a way to engage in interracial repair and open up different ways of knowing and being? Is it the way to a new universal humanism or virtue cosmopolitanism? This is a valuable and challenging resource. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.