Search results for ""Author Tara Betts""

ADVENTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE, a memoir-travelogue first published in 1960, is being reissued with a critical introduction, including minor edits and annotations of the original text by scholar Tara Betts. Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Philippa Duke Schuyler was heralded as America's first internationally-acclaimed mixed race celebrity. Her father, a conservative black journalist, and her mother, a white Texan heiress, dedicated Schuyler's development to the cause of integration with the claim that racial mixing could produce a superior hybrid human, a claim that Schuyler resisted, but would nonetheless hurl her into a destructive identity crisis that consumed her throughout her life. When the transition from child prodigy to concert pianist proved challenging in America, Schuyler, like many black performers before her, went abroad during the 1950s for larger audiences. Schuyler's witnessing first-hand the dissemblage of European colonies in Africa and the Middle East is the focus of ADVENTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE. This narrative connects the Harlem Renaissance to the prelude of the Civil Rights Movement at a time when the public conversation on interracial identity in America was just beginning. As Schuyler writes about Africa-"the homeland of her ancestors"-readers can begin to understand how the young musician would eventually find her way as an author and a journalist, and the books that followed.

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THE BEIGING OF AMERICA, BEING MIXED RACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, takes on "race matters" and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed-race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. THE BEIGING OF AMERICA was prompted by cultural critic/scholar Hua Hsu, who contemplated the changing face and race of U.S. demographics in his 2009 The Atlantic article provocatively titled "The End of White America." In it, Hsu acknowledged "steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage" that undergirded assertions about the "beiging of America." THE BEIGING OF AMERICA is an absorbing and thought-provoking collection of stories that explore racial identity, alienation, with people often forced to choose between races and cultures in their search for self-identity. While underscoring the complexity of the mixed-race experience, these unadorned voices offer a genuine, poignant, enlightening and empowering message to all readers.

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