These essays analyze how race affects people's lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawai¿i to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard's trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

Paul Spickard is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor/co-editor of a number of books, including Global Mixed Race.