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

America Beyond Black and White is 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.