P.O. Box 22748 Oakland CA 94609 510.601.0182 info@speakoutnow.org



DonateNow

 
Home   »  Speak Out  »  Speakers & Artists



Biography and Booking information

{Ronald Fernandez }
Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
Ronald Fernandez is an eloquent speaker on issues of race, ethnicity and legal and undocumented migration. His latest book is America Beyond Black and White: How Immigrants Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide (University of Michigan Press).

The book seeks a radical reconfiguration of the culture and it touches on a wide variety of hot button issues: legal and illegal immigration, race, ethnicity, and the very questionable value of assimilating into a culture that teaches newcomers to make skin color a key variable in self identification. America Beyond Black and White focuses on the 50 million people in the United States who do not fit into the much-used black/white dichotomy, and that these "outsiders" underscore the need to reevaluate the discourse on the issue of race in U.S. society.

Fernandez is currently the Director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at a Connecticut University. His also speaks on the Caribbean. The New York Review of Books rates his book, Cruising the Caribbean as one of the best in print and The Disenchanted Island is regarded as a seminal analysis of the century long relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.

Fernandez can offer first-hand insights on Vieques, Puerto Rican political prisoners and his travels in the Caribbean include Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Grenada, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Cuba. On the latter, he speaks on race in Cuba and the questions of eliminating prejudice and institutional discrimination in Cuban society.

Quote
PRAISE FOR AMERICA BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE
"In this visionary, necessary book, Ronald Fernandez invents a new language to address age-old dilemmas of race and ethnicity. He goes well beyond boxes and labels, easy answers and academic jargon. Fernandez celebrates the unacknowledged reality of multiracial identity, the experience of the people he calls "fusions," and offers eloquent proof that so-called "illegal immigrants" must be included in the national dialogue on race. This is sociology at its best, clear-eyed, compassionate, intelligent and useful. The book is ultimately a clarion call for the embrace of our common humanity."
— Martín Espada, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author and poet
"This book is both powerful and important. Powerful for the testimony it provides from Americans of many different (and even mixed races) about their experiences. And important because there is a racial revolution underway that will upend race as we know it during the twenty-first century."
— John Kenneth White, Catholic University of America
In Our Store
America Beyond Black and White: How Immigrants and Fusions Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide (Contemporary Political and Social Issues)America's Banquet of Cultures: Harnessing Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration in the Twenty-First CenturyPrisoners of Colonialism: The Struggle for Justice in Puerto Rico The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Second Edition