Available From UC Press

In these revealing histories spanning the globe and the centuries, discover people who reshaped their identities—and what it means to belong.

Society is accustomed to thinking of primary identities—racial, ethnic, national, religious—as if they were permanent, essential, unalterable features of individuals and groups. Paul Spickard gently upends this accepted notion in his new history of how individuals, families, and collectives have gone about the work of constructing their identities—and how they’ve transformed them, sometimes by choice and sometimes under compulsion.

Built on a lifetime of research, Race Changes tells the stories of over fifty people, families, and ethnic groups across time and place. It seeks to discover what kinds of circumstances produce identity change, what those changes reveal about society, and why they matter.

Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author, coauthor, or editor of over twenty books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity, Is Lighter Better?: Skin-Tone Discrimination Among Asian Americans, and Japanese Americans (2009).

“Race Changes is an important work that challenges the general public’s assumptions about the stability and essential nature of racial identity. Paul Spickard opens readers’ minds to the multiplicities, dynamics, and global dimensions of racial change across time and space and directly invites us on a quest of knowledge and understanding by way of being curious.”—Catherine Ceniza Choy, author of Asian American Histories of the United States

“Having read Spickard’s pioneering work on multiracial people and experiences for many years, I find Race Changes to be yet another inimitable work that combines his theoretical insights, great storytelling, and deep appreciation of the complexity of human beings.”—Miri Song, coauthor of Mixed Heritage in the Family: Racial Identity, Spousal Choice, and Child-Rearing

“Race Changes takes us on an epic journey across the globe and through time to explore how mixed-race people moved from one racial identity to another and, sometimes, back again. Painstakingly researched, the book is an intriguing page-turner and provides just the historical contextualization that the field of critical mixed-race studies needed. It is a fascinating sociohistorical analysis of racial choices, enabled and constrained by the social contexts in which its captivating subjects found themselves, and the book provides us with a solid basis to better understand mixed-race contemporary issues. Beautifully produced with amazing historical photographs and images, Race Changes is a must-read for everyone interested in race mixing across the centuries.”—Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, author of Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Beauty Pageants