An African American man describes life as the son of a white mother and Black father, reflecting on his mother's contributions to his life and his confusion over his own identity.

June Cross was born in 1954 to Norma Booth, a glamorous, aspiring white actress, and James "Stump" Cross, a well-known black comedian. Sent by her mother to be raised by black friends when she was four years old and could no longer pass as white, June was plunged into the pain and confusion of a family divided by race. Secret Daughter tells her story of survival. It traces June's astonishing discoveries about her mother and about her own fierce determination...

A collection of head-on portraits and quotes in which men and women whose mixed racial heritage includes Asian or Pacific Island descent discuss what their heritage means to them and how it defines them.

"A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a 'black' father from the segregated South and a 'white' mother from the West, spent his whole...

"Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called microaggressions, in addition to blunt-force insults, can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp...

"Twelve-year-old Ning doesn't know where she belongs. The daughter of a Chinese woman and American man, Ning doesn't fit in in 1870s Shanghai, where her American features and unbound feet make her stand out. When she receives news that her father will be visiting from America, Ning excitedly hopes that her parents will become a family. Instead, she learns that her father is taking her back with him to America. Ning wonders if being American will finally...

"The unique and beautifully written story of one multiracial woman's journey of acceptance and identity that tackles the fraught topic of race in America. Sil Lai Abrams always knew she was different, with darker skin and curlier hair than her siblings. But when the man who she thought was her dad told her the truth--that her father was actually black--her whole world was turned upside down. Raised primarily in the Caucasian community of Winter Park,...

"In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of "transgender" and "transracial" as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker...

The author concludes his "trilogy of American public life" by contemplating the many cultural associations of the color brown--toil, decay, impurity, and time--as he considers the meaning of Hispanics in American society