Overview

During an interview for a faculty position, a senior professor asked Kevin Johnson bluntly, \u0022How did you get to be a Mexican?\u0022 And, a young woman at a Harvard Law School dinner party inquired, \u0022Are you one of those people whose high school friends are all dead from gangs and stuff?\u0022 The son of a Mexican American mother and an Anglo father, Professor Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in the contemporary United States. Johnson also grew up in the borderlands between classes. He spent his childhood with his mother, first on welfare and then with a racist working-class stepfather. As an adolescent, he moved to his father's home in a predominantly upper-middle-class suburb. His educational experiences too extend from a racially mixed elementary school to an all-white high school, and from Berkeley to Harvard Law School. From this vantage point, he analyzes the intersection of race and class in the United States. This book looks not just at the question \u0022Who is a Latino?\u0022 but also at the question of where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. Professor Johnson's mother was an ardent assimilationist who classified herself as \u0022Spanish\u0022; her failure to become a part o f middle America led her into depression and eventually mental illness. Her son has woven not just her experiences and his own, but also those of friends and relatives, into a complex and moving story of one white/brown man's search for identity.

Full Product Details

9781566396509

Table of Contents

Reviews

Engaging and warmly inviting. Funny and tragic by turns, this book has a momentum that carries the reader along. Johnson's struggles reverberate beyond himself; the incidents he recounts, whether dramatic or small, apply to the lives of others who have had to deal with poverty, class origins, and racial stereotyping. --Richard Delgado, co-editor of Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror A compelling and thoughtful portrayal of the struggle for identity faced by a sensitive young man who did not fit neatly into the artificial racial and ethnic categories embedded in the political and cultural fabric of this nation. --Gregory H. Williams, Dean of Ohio State University College of Law

The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Johnson ponders life as a mixed-race man in the racially charged atmosphere of America. Johnson (Law/Univ. of Calif., Davis) grew up uneasily among ethnic contradictions. His mother preferred to describe herself as Spanish, rather than acknowledge her tree heritage; even so, his father, a blue-eyed blond, urged him to embrace his Mexican heritage. In an era of affirmative action, Johnson felt highly conflicted about checking the box on college and law school entrance and loan forms and thereby profiting from an ethnic heritage that he grew up freely embracing. He felt just as uncomfortable with Anglos who didn't know his ethnicity as he did with militant Chicano activists who might doubt his bona fides. But Johnson regarded the painful plight of his mother - she was stricken by clinical depression and getting by on welfare after her two marriages had foundered - as a negative example of what can happen to people who are forced by racism to deny who they really are. The bulk of the book is taken up with Johnson's intellectual autobiography, tracing his own uncertainties as questions of identity exacerbated the problems of adolescence and early adulthood, and then following his career as a lawyer and law professor more secure in his racial identity, though still not without self-doubt. Indeed, the most appealing aspect of the work is the author's candor about his insecurities and personal dilemmas. But bland writing fetters Johnson's intelligence. To put it bluntly, he writes like a lawyer. A thoughtful story, told somewhat indifferently. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Kevin R. Johnson is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of a number of law review articles on civil procedure, civil rights, race relations, immigration law, and refugee law.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available