Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation’s ‘dusky human consequences’

Postcolonial Studies
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2002
pages 297-307
DOI: 10.1080/1368879022000032801

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

In recent years there has been a surge in academic endeavours to claim hybridity as a site of transgression, subversion and liberation. In particular, hybridity has been deployed as a strategy for the negotiating of difference which, according to Homi Bhabha, is ‘neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between‘. Within this transformative ‘third space’, boundaries are remade and fixities destabilised. In the hands of less careful scholars, however, hybridity runs the risk of being idealised and dehistoricised as the only ‘enlightened’ response to oppression. Despite the evidence for reading the colonial process as one of mutual transculturation. affecting both coloniser and colonised cultures, the celebratory discourses of hybridity tend to foreground the destabilising of the latter. The danger of this notion of  ‘enlightened hybridity’ as Anne McClintock points out, is that it rehearses the myth of colonialism as the progress and liberation of humanity from a state of deprivation to enlightened reason. Other critics including Jean Fisher have argued that hybridity as a concept is too deeply embedded within a discourse of biology, and as such cannot extricate us from an original dualism of self and other.’ While this does not preclude the potential for the concept to be liberated from its origins and strategically transformed,  there is a need to be more attentive to the ways in which this transformation is mobilised.

Hybridity has its origins in nineteenth-century racial science; whether used to describe physiological 0r cultural difference, hybridity has served as the primary metaphor for the dangerous consequences of cross-racial contact. This essay focuses on the ambivalent figure of the Eurasian within the Australian national imaginary in order to elaborate on the thorny issue of hybridity as a source of both desire and anxiety. The term ‘race’ is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest in visible, phenotypical markers. The emphasis on somatic signifiers is important since the living product of cross-racial heterosexuality is primarily identified with and through the body. As my discussion goes on to demonstrate, the body of the racial hybrid is both the physical manifestation of cross-racial desire and the source of repulsion and fear. While race as a scientific category has long been disproven, it remains one of the most insidious aspects of our colonial heritage. The idea of race survives because the most consistent arguments about it have always been framed within cultural and aesthetic terms. Hence, in looking at the discourse of cross-racial desire. I am less interested in…

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Indian Voices Creates a Bureau of Black Indian Affairs

Indian Voices
July/August 2011

Rose Davis, Publisher
Indian Voices

At last a true Separate But Equal—For the Good of the People

The Dawes Rolls (a census, used by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] to determine identity of Tribal members and citizens) came into existence in the 1890’s. It was a time of “Separate but Equal” and this “flawed U.S. policy” became the basis for the Full-Blood/By-Blood vs. Freedman (no Indian Blood counted) rating system for Tribal Membership. US Dawes Rolls Enumerators using Separate but Equal techniques left the Freedman with an identity crisis which continues to this day.

The policy of using Separate but Equal data gathering techniques negated the U.S governments requirement in the 1866 treaties that Blacks be treated as equal citizens.

No one other than Phil Fixico has aggressively championed the cause of addressing and reversing this issue. As a Seminole Maroon descendant he has written, lectured, networked and labored exhaustively to bring this issue into the social consciousness. The resulting Bureau of Black Indian Affairs is his “brain child.” He has generously offered the project to the collective consciousness of the Indigenous community and has stated that he will take no part in it’s operation or management. As a networking partner Indian Voices humbly takes on the task of launching the first Bureau of Black Indian Affairs in this July/August 2011 issue…

Read the entire article here.

South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?

International Business Times
2011-07-27

Palash R. Ghosh

The recent death of Magnus Malan, the feared former general and defense minister of South Africa, might have ended an era in a country once defined by strict racial separation.

Malan, who ferociously fought to maintain racial apartheid until the very end, was removed from his post by then-President F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s under pressure from recently freed political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
 
Malan was part of the White Afrikaner community, the people most associated with establishing and rigidly maintaining the apartheid system for many decades.
 
The Afrikaners are the descendants of mostly Dutch (as well as German and French Huguenots) who arrived in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century (English speakers from Britain came in the following century).

Indeed, the Afrikaners have lived in South Africa so long that they regard themselves as “Africans” or “the white tribe of Africa.”
 
However, today, Afrikaners find themselves in a brand new, and perhaps for them, perilous, South Africa.
 
For one thing, their numbers are shrinking….

…One of the bittersweet ironies of Afrikaner culture and history is that—despite being intimately associated with the philosophy of white supremacy and white ‘purity’—they are themselves of mixed race.
 
This has to do with the fact that when the original Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa almost four-hundred years ago, they brought almost no women. Consequently, they had to marry and mate with local women, or with Malays and East Indians.
 
Thus, some the oldest and most revered Afrikaner families, including the Krugers, Van Riebeecks, Bruyns, Van Rensburgs, and Zaimans are likely the descendants of mixed-race couples.
 
[Professor A.M.] Grundlingh [of the History Department at Stellenbosch University] said according to estimates, about 6 percent of so-called “white” Afrikaners are actually of mixed blood.
 
Allegedly, one of the greatest of Afrikaner heroes, Andries Pretorius, the leader of the Great Voortrek, was himself descended from East Indian slave women on both his maternal and paternal sides.
 
This also helps to explains why many of the current “Coloured” of South Africa speak Afrikaans as their first language…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2010)
pages 273-299
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2010.513829

Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on blackness in the western Caribbean cities of Port of Veracruz and Boca del Río, which lie in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Specifically, it looks at the racial-based and color-based identification of individuals of African descent, societal construction of the ‘black’ category, and the relationship between national and racial identities. This article relies on data from participant observation conducted over the course of one year and 112 semi-structured interviews.

…Blackness in Mexico

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico and Peru were the largest importers of African slaves in Spanish America (Palmer, 1976). Most scholars estimate that approximately 200,000 African slaves reached Mexico’s shores, although the number may be higher since many slaves were imported illegally (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944). When the slave system collapsed in the early 1700s, the biological integration of the population increased as the African-origin population increasingly mixed with the Indian and Spanish groups (Cope, 1994). After 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, legal distinctions pertaining to race were terminated (González Navarro, 1970). By this time it was generally assumed that the black population had ‘disappeared’ through biological integration with the broader population.

Mexico’s early-20th-century post-revolutionary ideology further solidified the narrative of the disappearance of Mexico’s black population. This ideology promoted the mixed-race individual (mestizo) as the quintessential Mexican (Knight, 1990; Vasconcelos, 1925). In doing so, however, it not only glorified the mestizo, but sought to assimilate the Indigenous (Knight, 1990) and African (Hernández Cuevas, 2004, 2005) components of Mexico’s population through integration. The erasure of the African element in Mexico continued in the following decades through the Eurocentric re-interpretation of particular aspects of Mexican culture (Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005).

The supposed disappearance of the African-origin population was first questioned in the 1940s when Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946, 1958) studied what he defined as a ‘black’ population in the Costa Chica region of Mexico’s southern coast. Aguirre Beltrán’s pioneering study set the stage for the re-emergence of the issue of blackness in Mexico. In the past few decades, there has been a surge of scholarly work on the topic, much of which has focused on the historical experience of Africans and their descendants (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944; Alcántara López, 2002; Bennett, 2003; Carroll, 2001; Chávez Carbajal, 1997; García Bustamante, 1987; Gil Maronã, 1992; Herrera Casasús, 1991; Martínez Montiel & Reyes, 1993; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Motta Sánchez, 2001; Naveda Chávez-Hita, 1987, 2001; Palmer, 1976; Rout, 1976; Vincent, 1994; Vinson III, 2001; Winfield Capitaine, 1988) and the African contribution to Mexican culture (Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hall, 2008; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005; Malcomson, forthcoming; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Ochoa Serrano, 1997; Pérez Montfort, 2007; for more general overviews and/or discussions of Afro-Mexicans, see Hoffman, 2006a, 2008; Martinez Montiel, 1997; Muhammad, 1995; Vinson III & Vaughn 2004); less attention has been paid to the contemporary experience of Mexicans of African descent. When the contemporary experience is addressed, most scholars focus on the Costa Chica region (Aguirre Beltrán, 1946, 1958; Althoff, 1994; Campos, 2005; Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Flanet, 1977; Gutiérrez Ávila, 1988; Hoffman, 2007a; Lewis, 2000, 2001, 2004; Moedano Navarro, 1988; Tibón, 1961; Vaughn, 2001a). However, Hoffman (2007a, 2007b) argues that the Costa Chica represents an exceptional case in Mexico, and that identity formation in this region is not based on negotiation with state-sponsored institutions due to their limited presence in the area…

Read or purchase the article here.

Debate: Are the Americas ‘sick with racism’ or is it a problem at the poles? A reply to Christina A. Sue

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 32, Issue 6 (July 2009)
Special Issue: Making Latino/a Identities in Contemporary America
pages 1071-1082
DOI: 10.1080/01419870902883536

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Christina A. Sue commented on my 2004 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies on the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA. Almost all her observations hinge on the assumption that racial stratification in Latin American countries is fundamentally structured around ‘two racial poles’. I disagree with her and in my reply do three things. First, I address three major claims or issues in her comment. Second, I point out some methodological limitations of Americancentred race analysis in Latin America. Third, I conclude by discussing briefly the Obama phenomenon and suggest this event fits in many ways my Latin Americanization thesis.

The Americas are sick with racism, blind in both eyes from North to South.
(Eduardo Galeano 2000, p. 56)

Since I unveiled my Latin Americanization thesis in 2001, I have received plenty of critical feedback
some negative, but mostly positive. Accordingly, I welcome Christina Sue’s comment. Although we see race matters in both Americas quite differently
I believe the Americas are ‘sick with racism’ and Sue seems to believe racism is a problem at the ‘racial poles’
our exchange may stimulate further debate about the racial question in Latin America and the USA.

In this rejoinder I do three things. First, I address some of Sue’s criticisms. Second, I advance several methodological observations orthogonally related to Sue’s comments. Third, I briefly tackle the big elephant in the contemporary American racial room (the election of a black man as president) and suggest it fits my Latin Americanization thesis…

…First, Obama, like most politicians in the Americas, worked hard during the campaign at making a nationalist, post-racial appeal. Second, like some racially mixed leaders in the Americas, Obama was keen to signify the peculiar character of his ‘blackness’ (his half-white, half-black background) and the provenance of his blackness (his father hailed from Kenya and in the USA African blackness is perceived as less threatening). Obama has cultivated an outlook where his ‘blackness’ is more about style than political substance; Obama is the ‘cool’, exceptional black man not likely to rock the American racial boat. Third, Obama has exhibited an accommodationist stand on race (Street 2009). In a speech in Selma, Alabama, he stated the USA was ‘90% on the road to racial equality’ (Obama 2007) and continued this path in his so-called ‘race speech’ (Obama 2008). Fourth, whites see Obama as a ‘safe black’ who, unlike traditional black politicians, will not advocate race-based social policy. Fifth, Obama will formulate ‘universal’ (class-based) policies that are unlikely to remedy racial inequality (Obama 2004). Sixth, his election, in conjunction with other developments in the last decades, evinces the ascendance to political power (with a small ‘p’) of ‘neo-mulattos’ (Horton and Sykes 2004), will exacerbate the existing colour-class divide within the black community, and reinforce ‘multiculturalist white supremacy’ (Rodríguez 2008)…

Read the entire article here.

Half-white is an insult

The Guardian
2008-11-13

Michael Paulin

The debate over how black Obama is obscures the racial reconciliation his election represents

Barack Hussein Obama’s stunning victory against what was a thoroughly cynical Clinton campaign and a confused and morally bankrupt conservative Republican opposition is as historically significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. His victory has revealed that a radical new form of political discourse and dialogue is possible, and that the tired dichotomies the political class have sustained for so long can be challenged by the people.

We now have our first black president. The most powerful man in the world is a black man. A man partly raised by his white grandparents. We have the first black president of the United States and, simultaneously, our first mixed-race president.

In Britain, Obama’s victory has exposed a predominantly white minority’s inherent suspicion and mistrust of black people. Christopher Hitchens, appearing on Newsnight last week, declared: “We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white. He is not full black.” Rod Liddle, writing in the current edition of the Spectator under the headline “Is Barack Obama really black?”, suggested that “coloured“—a term of reference used in apartheid South Africa—would be more appropriate…

…These commentators are ignorant of the realities of the black experience and of the possibility of being of mixed heritage. Hitchens’s reliance on the concept of being “full black”, which harks back to the age of eugenics, exposes just how reactionary he has become. At this great moment in the global struggle for genuine democracy and racial unity, such commentators wriggle in discomfort, clinging to Obama’s “whiteness” in order to appease their own anxieties about the fact that we now have a black president. Even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an atrocious piece in the Evening Standard suggesting it was an insult to Obama’s mother to call him black…

…It is unfortunate that this needs to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt: Barack Hussein Obama is black. Yet he is also mixed-race. Perhaps more important, he is a black, mixed-race intellectual…

Read the entire article here.

A Multiracial Movement and a Multiracial Box Won’t Solve the Racism Problem

Rachel’s Tavern: Race, Gender, and Sexuality from a Sociological Perspective
2007-04-02

Rachel Sullivan, Associate Professor of Sociology
Montgomery College, Germantown, Maryland

In a comment on the last thread on Rachel’s Tavern about how biracial children affect family approval of black/white relationships Dave of mulatto.org, made the following comment:

Professor Rachel Sullivan here gives a good textbook example of propaganda that facilitates white/black biracial subordination, by making the case that white/black biracials shouldn’t be considered a population with challenges distinct from blacks except for being more privileged.

The problem is that this is not what I said, but I do think this is an opportunity to talk about some of the politics of multiracial identity. For the record, my dissertation was not on how people of mixed race identify. It was about family approval of black/white relationships, and the reason children (biracial or not) were important was because the most common reason given for opposing an interracial relationship was the idea that the children would suffer. That belief was premised on the “tragic mulatto myth.” In this study, all of the people I interviewed were couples in Black/White interracial relationships. Only one of those people self identified as biracial. I did not interview the children of these couples, so I did not get their opinions.

However, for the record I do not agree with Dave’s position, which to me reads that “people who have one black parent and one white parent are a distinct racial group and should identify as biracial, mixed race, or mulatto, not as black.” (I’m not sure how he feels about people of mixed parentage identifying as white.) Here’s a quote from his comment:

It’s logically inconsistent to say (1) white/black biracials should be identified as black because most white people will only see and treat them as black, and (2) whites treat white/black biracials better than black people because they see them as different than dark-skinned black people. Although I don’t think this makes logical sense, I think it’s crafted to be anti-white/black biracial propaganda. The first part implies that white/black biracials shouldn’t have a distinct affinity identity to organize and advocate for ourselves, because we aren’t treated differently, and the second part implies that white/black biracials are less deserving of telescopic philanthropy (definition on Wikipedia) than black people.

Dave’s belief is that mixed race people mixed ancestry should organize their own groups, and they should see themselves as distinction from African Americans. I have no objection to organizing some multiracial groups, but I also thinking that many of the needs, concerns, and issues overlap with those of other people of color. Personally, I do not think it would be beneficial to try to create a new racial group akin to the “colored” population in South Africa.

I am tired of multiracial activists who say people should have an option to choose their race, and then these same people get mad if people do not choose “biracial” or “multiracial.” People should have the choice, regardless of their color of phenotype, to define themselves racially. I also feel that these choices may change over time or circumstances; making racial identities fluid in some cases. I feel that both the one drop rule, and the assertion that people must choose biracial are racist because they encourage essentialist definitions of race and because they do not allow the freedom of self definition…

Read the entire entry here.

Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Speech

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture
Volume 10, Number 1 (2011)
18 pages

Bridget Byrne, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences
University of Manchester

This article takes the speech that Barack Obama made in his campaign for democratic nomination in 2008 as a moment in the performativity of race. It argues that Obama was unable to sustain an attempt to be ‘post race’, but is also asks the extent to which Obama was able to re-write the way in which race is positioned within the US, particularly with reference to the place of African-Americans within the national narrative.

Introduction

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it usually is a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustment they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some tell-tale sign. They no longer know who I am.
(Obama, Dreams from my Father xv).

It’s not likely that there are too many people left who do not know who Barack Obama is, or that he is the product of a ‘brief union’ as he puts it, between ‘a black man and a white woman, an African and an American’ (Obama, Dreams from my Father xv). Nonetheless, Obama’s racial identity remains a source of fascination. The website democraticunderground.com hosted a discussion thread in March 2008 prompted by the question ‘What ethnicity is Obama’. The original questioner was interested in exploring ‘his white half’s ethnicity’. One of the respondents to this thread provides links to a website publishing Obama’s family tree and writes ‘it is amazing to see just how ‘white’ his mother and grandparents are’. The same respondent also provides a picture from Obama’s mother’s high school yearbook to demonstrate her ‘amazing’ whiteness as well as one of Obama with his white grandparents. The thread continues with a string of photos of different members of his family (including his half-Indonesian sister’s ‘Oriental husband who came from Canada’). This is just one example of the fascination that Obama’s racial positioning prompts in supporters and detractors alike and suggests that for many, it takes more than a ‘split-second’ adjustment to reconcile themselves to complex ideas of family, heritage and racialized identities.

This paper will explore a particular moment in the racialized positioning of Obama and his own self-positioning as an example of the performativity of race or possibly of ‘post-race’. The paper will take a key instance when Obama put his own racial positioning on the stage, in response to a particular set of political events. Through an examination of his ‘A more perfect union’ speech in Philadelphia during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination (18th March 2008), I want to consider the extent to which we can ‘trouble race’ in the same way that Judith Butler has argued for the troubling of gender. The campaign election of Barack Obama has inserted the concept of ‘post-race’ into popular discourse in a forceful way. This article will question what the theoretical literature, which might regard race to be ‘under-erasure’ rather than ‘overcome,’ can offer to an analysis of the positioning of Obama. This is important because, despite longstanding academic and activist insistence that ‘race’ is a social construction devoid of any inherent or essential meaning, the ontological status of ‘race’ remains in question. As the reaction to Barack Obama shows, race is something that we still appear to need to ‘know’ about each other (and perhaps particularly about those who are not ‘white’). Yet, as I will argue, the racialized performativity offered by Obama is far from clear-cut and suggests that a more complex analysis is required. This paper will first explore the ideas of being ‘beyond’ or ‘post’ race and then consider how the notion of gender performativity might be productively extended to race peformativity. Then it will return to the speech given by Barack Obama in the course of his nomination campaign to explore both the impossibility for some figures to step outside of race, but also the potential scope to re-fashion concepts of race and inheritance, and particularly their relation to the nation…

Read the entire article here.

Does Gates DNA Data Make Black Indians an Urban Legend? Or Does Eating Out of the Same Pot Still Matter?

Indian Voices
July/August 2011
page 7

Phil Wilkes Fixico

I am Phil Wilkes Fixico a Seminole Maroon Descendant who was featured in the Smithsonian Institution’s book and exhibit entitled “IndiVisible” African-Native American Lives. My personal and family’s genealogy was researched by Kevin Mulroy, Ph.D. of UCLA. Dr. Mulroy is recognized as the worlds’s leading authority on Seminole Maroons. I am pleased that Bruce Twyman, Ph.D. and author of “The Black Seminole Legacy and North American Politics’ has done a survey targeting the general public’s views about African- Native Americans and Dr. Henry Louis Gates DNA studies.

The problem that I have with Dr. Gates’ attempts to end the myth that there is a goodly some of African-Americans with Native American ancestry is that he bases his findings totally on DNA results. He then “quotes a quote” by advising African Americans to Seek the White Man as their correct blood ancestor…

Read the entire article here.

Identity Politics: The Ambiguity of Race and the “End of Racism”

The Atlanta Post
2011-07-11

Ezinne Adibe

Professor and author Kwasi Konadu discusses identity politics and what it means to be African

One hundred years from now what weight will race and/or ethnicity have on our understanding of identity?  Are we moving towards a society where race will become so ambiguous that notions tied into race will become a thing of the past? The concept of a post-racial society seemed to gain further traction during the election of President Barack Obama, but as author Dr. Kwasi Konadu notes, there hasn’t been much of a post-racial anything in the years since President Obama’s election. Dr. Konadu recently shared his thoughts on identity, post-racialism, and what it means to be African.

Ezinne Adibe: How has your identity shaped your work?

Dr. Kwasi Konadu: My work been very personal in that a lot of my research has been shaped by my ancestry. For instance, it was after a number of years of doing my family history through family elders that a dream about my great-great-grandmother led me back to Ghana to find out more. That led to my dissertation in Ghana, which led to a decade of research and partnership in Ghana, another home of mine in the African world. So, indeed, identity shaped by ancestry has been critical to how I choose what I am interested in, how I approach those matters with a kind of passion, and always the quest for getting the story right.

Ezinne Adibe: I come across many conversations about identity, especially with regards to national identity. There are some that feel national identity is more important than racial or ethnic affiliation. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Konadu: If we make the matter of identity an either or question, whether it is the clan or the nation, in terms of how we define nations and nationalism, or it is some other kind of affiliation, I think we miss a very subtle but important point about how Africans, and other humans, have historically identified themselves. Humans tend to have concentric circles of a composite identity. So, at the same time I can be a father, a husband, a professor, a brother to my own biological kin or a brother in a communal sense. And there can be no conflict with either of those circles, because these identities are not in conflict but are expressions of a composite, whole identity. I think they become conflictual because of the historical experiences that brought Africans to whatever side of whatever ocean/sea they now find themselves. Whatever means by which Africans were exported from their homelands, they have endured a certain kind of transformation where blackness became the demonic inverse, that is, it became the opposite of Judeo-Christian whiteness, and blackness also became a synonym for Africaness. And so, it’s not surprising to find that many of our peoples worldwide, but certainly in North America, are offended if called African, because African, in their mind, is shorthand for this package of barbarism, backwardness, idol worshippers, lacking beauty and intelligence. All this is packaged into being African. So, who wants to be African?…

…Ezinne Adibe: There is another interesting conversation related to identity, which is this idea that we will all be mixed sometime in the future. There are a lot of people who say that it will be great once we can move to that point where race is so ambiguous, because then people won’t be racist. What are your thoughts on this post-racial idealism?

Dr. Konadu: Well, I’m sorry to disappoint the people that feel that way or have come to that conclusion. You can have racism without race…I’ll give you a historical note. In the 15th century Spain and Portugal, there were dominant and pejorative ideas about African peoples as savages, barbarians, non-Christians, and therefore heathens, and under Papal or Catholic doctrine these Africans could be enslaved. The concept of race wasn’t truly refined as we know it today, but there was racism. Take for instance, the first group of Africans taken from the Senegambia region, what is now Senegal and the Gambia, and transported to Portugal. They were stripped naked and paraded through the streets of the capital city, Lisbon. It was a spectacle. You can imagine, from the Africans’ perspective, the sheer terror of having all these white folks stare at you as kind of a voyeur, and especially with the belief these white folks were cannibals. That was the introduction of Africans into this and perhaps other early European societies. So, there were ideas about race and racism; however, race wasn’t fully refined, whereby it was linked to the institutional terror and injustices as we find today. But there was racism without race. So, racism need not race as an appendage in order to be real. You can have the end of race as the New York Times announced when Barack Obama was elected, “a post-racial society” (laughs). Since his election, whatever people think about him and his administration, African folks in Africa and in North America have suffered greatly. There is greater racial violence, whether it is the unleashing of these white supremacist groups and even allied Chicano Mexican groups terrorizing black folks. There is another kind of violence – economic violence. In this so-called recession, black folks have felt it the hardest, in housing, jobs, prisons, hospital and educational program closings, the poorest quality foods, criminalization, and so. The point is the quality of black folks lives has exponentially declined since his inauguration and since the New York Times announced a post-racial society. So, if that’s any cue that this is what post-racialism looks like, I don’t think African folks want anything to do with it….

Read the entire interview here.