Mixed Race Studies

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Pennsylvania State University Press
2006
384 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-271-02883-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-271-03288-7

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Although both Brazil and the United States inherited European norms that accorded whites privileged status relative to all other racial groups, the development of their societies followed different trajectories in defining white/black relations. In Brazil pervasive miscegenation and the lack of formal legal barriers to racial equality gave the appearance of its being a “racial democracy,” with a ternary system of classifying people into whites (brancos), multiracial individuals (pardos), and blacks (pretos) supporting the idea that social inequality was primarily associated with differences in class and culture rather than race. In the United States, by contrast, a binary system distinguishing blacks from whites by reference to the “one-drop rule” of African descent produced a more rigid racial hierarchy in which both legal and informal barriers operated to create socioeconomic disadvantages for blacks.

But in recent decades, Reginald Daniel argues in this comparative study, changes have taken place in both countries that have put them on “converging paths.” Brazil’s black consciousness movement stresses the binary division between brancos and negros to heighten awareness of and mobilize opposition to the real racial discrimination that exists in Brazil, while the multiracial identity movement in the U.S. works to help develop a more fluid sense of racial dynamics that was long felt to be the achievement of Brazil’s ternary system.

Against the historical background of race relationsin Brazil and the U.S. that he traces in Part I of the book, including a review of earlier challenges to their respective racial orders, Daniel focuses in Part II on analyzing the new racial project on which each country has embarked, with attention to all the political possibilities and dangers they involve.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Historical Foundation
  • 1. Eurocentrism: Racial Formation and the Master Racial Project
  • 2. The Brazilian Path: The Ternary Racial Project
  • 3. The Brazilian Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Ternary Racial Project
  • 4. The U.S. Path: The Binary Racial Project
  • 5. The U.S. Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Binary Racial Project
• Part II. Converging Paths
  • 6. A New U.S. Racial Order: The Demise of Jim Crow Segregation
  • 7. A New Brazilian Racial Order: A Decline in the Racial Democracy Ideology
  • 8. The U.S. Convergence: Toward the Brazilian Path
  • 9. The Brazilian Convergence: Toward the U.S. Path
• Epilogue: The U.S. and Brazilian Racial Orders: Changing Points of Reference
• Notes
• References
• Index

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves

The Guardian
2010-08-25

Tom Phillip

Interviewers plan to reach 190m people, including the long-ignored Kalunga, by motorbike, plane, canoe and donkey

When Jorge Moreira de Oliveira’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather arrived in Brazil in the 18th century he was counted off the slave-ship, branded and dispatched to a goldmine deep in the country’s arid mid-west. After years of scrambling for gold that was shipped to Europe, he fled and became one of the founding fathers of the Kalunga quilombo, a remote mountain-top community of runaway slaves.

On Wednesday last week, more than 200 years later, it was Moreira’s turn to be counted—this time not by slavemasters but by Cleber, a chubby census taker who appeared at his home clutching a blue personal digital assistant (PDA).

“I’m Kalunga. A Brazilian Kalunga,” Moreira told his visitor from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, who diligently noted down details about the interviewee’s eight children, monthly income and toilet arrangements.

Such is Brazil’s 2010 census—a gigantic logistical operation that aims to count and analyse the lives of more than 190 million people in one of the most geographically and racially diverse nations on earth…

…Identity

“It is a question of identity,” said Ivonete Carvalho, the government’s programme director for traditional communities. “When you assert your identity you are saying you want [government] action and access to public policies. [The census] is a fantastic x-ray.”

The Kalungas’ fight for recognition is part of a wider movement for racial equality in Brazil, a country with deep roots in Africa but where Afro-Brazilian politicians and business leaders remain few and far between. According to Carvalho, only one of Brazil’s 81 senators is black, despite the fact that Afro-Brazilians represent at least 53% of the population. The last census found that fewer than 40% of Afro-Brazilians had access to sanitation compared with nearly 63% of whites.

Just as descendents of Brazil’s runaway slaves are finding their voice—and telling the census takers about it—so too are Brazil’s officially black and indigenous communities swelling as a growing number of Brazilians label themselves “black” or “indigenous” rather than “mulatto” when the census takers come knocking.

“People are no longer scared of identifying themselves or insecure about saying: ‘I’m black, and black is beautiful,’ ” Brazil’s minister for racial equality, Elio Ferreira de Araujo, told the Guardian…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Johnson]

American Anthropologist
Volume 110, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pp. 79–80
ISSN 0002-7294; online ISSN 1548-1433
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00013.x

Amanda Walker Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? G. Reginald Daniel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 365 pp.

Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 407 pp.

These two books discuss the racial formations of blackness from the foundations of early capitalism and modernist nation-state formation through contemporary transformations. Both caution against the silencing of race, particularly the dangers of “colorblindness” in political engagement and in theorizations of globalization, but both books also forge critiques of race essentialism. Whereas Globalization and Race explores geopolitics and notions of “diaspora,” Race and Multiraciality explores lineage and multiraciality. The methodological and theoretical approaches are what most separate these texts, as Globalization and Race centers on ethnographies and anthropological theories whereas Race and Multiraciality combines analysis of secondary historical and demographic data and sociological theories…

…Race and Multiraciality compares racial formations in the United States and Brazil, particularly the dimensions of blackness and multiraciality. Daniel argues that the ending of legal segregation in the United States—coupled with challenges to the “binary racial project” or white–black paradigm by multiracial movements—and the disruption of the notion of “racial democracy” and the “ternary racial project” (or white–multiracial–black paradigm) in Brazil by the movements for African Brazilian recognition and racial equality have sent the United States and Brazil on converging paths. Daniel juxtaposes the “Latin Americanization” (p. 259) of U.S. racial politics in the context of emerging recognition of multiraciality and desires for colorblind “racial democracy” with the “Anglo Americanization” (p. 285) of Brazilian racial politics. This is done in the context of increasing dichotomization of negro–branco (black–white) and the interpellation of multiracial people into a unified and “race-d”—versus “colored” as in the colonial and census terms pretos and pardo—African Brazilian identity. Daniel seeks to disrupt the notion that multiraciality is inherently problematic as well as to expose the untenability of colorblindness, particularly in its neoliberal form.

Daniel’s historicization of trajectories of Eurocentrism that underline both “whitening” in Brazil and antimiscegenation in the United States—including the “paranoia about invisible blackness” (p. 37) and the granting of privilege in terms of behavioral and phenotypic proximity to Europeanness that pervaded both nation’s racial projects—seems to suggest that the processes of racial formation in the two nations have converged, or at least intersected, at prior historical moments to the contemporary era. Although he explores the complexity of “Latin” American colonization models in Louisiana and the Southwest as they confront the “Anglo” models of the “North and Upper South,” he overlooks the mythification of the U.S. post–Civil War “North” as itself a variant of a “racial democracy.” In my view, the linearity of his model or metaphor of “converging paths” undermines his attempts to problematize U.S. and Brazilian racial projects. Additionally, although Daniel critiques the “binary racial project” in the United States, he also tends to reify it, at times conflating multiraciality with black and white biraciality (see pp. 173, 295). The racialization of Asian Americans in the United States and Brazil disappears in both his theorization of the “binary” and “ternary” models of race and also his discussions of multiracial movements…

Read or purchase the review here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Bailey]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 36, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 535-536
DOI: 10.1177/009430610703600609

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?, by G. Reginald Daniel. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 360pp. cloth. ISBN: 0271028835.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s adoption of the mark “one or more races” format in 2000 is viewed by some scholars as a racial revolution of sorts. It may signal a changing tide from monoracial understandings of population diversity (i.e., recognizing only single racial heritages) to the interpellation of a more complex phenomenon of multiraciality. Framing this shift as from a binary (black vs. white) to a ternary racial project (white, multiracial, black), sociologist G. Reginald Daniel contributes significantly to our understanding of the contentious issues surrounding this development. Importantly, he does so as an insider, having been active in social movements promoting the recent Census recognition of multiracial identities (p. 5).

In his latest book, Daniel juxtaposes the shifting U.S. dynamic with changes underway in Brazil. Interestingly, that context appears to be moving in the opposite direction, from ternary (white, brown/multiracial, black) to binary (white vs. negro) racial understandings. Hence, he subtitles his book “Converging Paths,” situating it as a must-read for students of comparative racial dynamics. There has yet to be a census adoption of the binary project in Brazil, but it may only be a matter of time.

Framed, then, as a push and pull between binary and ternary racial projects, Daniel’s goal is to understand similarities and differences in these countries’ racial formations and their consequences for both the production of inequality and for the possibility of overcoming it. To do so, he offers an extensive exploration of the existing literature on to media (print, television, and internet) and census bureau/governmental sources, social movement activists, and observations of public behavior in Brazil and the United States. Although the exposition of this extensive material in this comparative fashion constitutes the contribution of this book, much of the material is drawn from his previously published work, as the author points out (pp. 5–6)…

Read or purchase the review here.

Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese

Portuguese Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2011-03-01)
pages 56-69

Francisco Bethencourt, Professor of History
King’s College, London

In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre’s praise of mixed-race people in Brazil challenged the idea of white supremacy, contributing to the building of a new Brazilian identity. In the 1950s, Freyre projected the idea of openness and racial mixture onto the Portuguese empire, fuelling Salazar’s colonial propaganda. The idea of Lusotropicalism was contested by Marvin Harris and Charles Boxer, who demonstrated that there were very few mixed-race people in Angola and Mozambique, and exposed the long history of racism in the Portuguese colonies. However, the fashionable notions of hybridism and creolization have been putting Freyre back on the map. The article exposes the limits of Freyre’s approach of inter-ethnic relations, structured around the flexibility (or otherwise) of white colonists. It engages with the much more interesting but problematic approach suggested by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who shifted to Kongo and African agency the creolization of the Atlantic. It suggests a reassessment of the real Christianization of Kongo and its complex chronology, drawing attention to the royal interests of conversion, the limits of conversion among the population, and the conditions for erosion of Christianity in the long run.

Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico

The Americas
Volume 67, Number 4 (April 2011)
E-ISSN: 1533-6247; Print ISSN: 0003-1615

Jake Federick, Assistant Professor of History
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy’s parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church’s book of baptisms. He noted the boy’s age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather’s wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

Two years later, on July 4, 1775, Captain Padres once again stood at the baptismal font in the Teziutlán church. The priest presiding over the rite this time was Pedro Francisco Gómez, and the child was five-day-old Mariana Paula. She too was legitimate, the child of Manuel Castillo and Antonia Vásquez. According to the book of baptisms, Manuel and Antonia were de razón (an abbreviation of gente de razón), which meant literally that they had the power of reason but in the eighteenth century the term was used to describe non-natives. Padres was described only as being from the local parish; no racial information was recorded. On this occasion, for some reason, the priest did not feel that it was necessary to note a casta (racial category) for young Mariana or her parents…

Read or purchase the article here.

Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

Time Magazine
2009-09-15

Alexis Okeowo

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it—and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Blood: An analytical look at methods of classifying race

Psyhcology Today
1995-11-01

Jefferson M. Fish, Professor Emeritus of Psychology
St. John’s University, New York, New York

An analytical look at methods of classifying race.

Race is an immutable biological given, right? So how come the author’s daughter can change her race just by getting on a plane? Because race is a social classification, not a biological one. We might just have categorized people according to body type rather tha skin color. As for all those behavioral differences attributed to race, like I.Q.—don’t even ask.

Last year my daughter, who had been living in Rio de Janeiro, and her Brazilian boyfriend paid a visit to my cross-cultural psychology class. They had agreed to be interviewed about Brazilian culture. At one point in the interview I asked her, “Are you black?” She said, “Yes.” I then asked him the question, and he said “No.”

“How can that be?” I asked. “He’s darker than she is.”…

…The short answer to the question “What is race?” is: There is no such thing. Race is a myth. And our racial classification scheme is loaded with pure fantasy…

…Since the human species has spent most of its existence in Africa, different populations in Africa have been separated from each other longer than East Asians or Northern Europeans have been separated from each other or from Africans. As a result, there is remarkable physical variation among the peoples of Africa, which goes unrecognized by Americans who view them all as belonging to the same race.

In contrast to the very tall Masai, the diminutive stature of the very short Pygmies may have evolved as an advantage in moving rapidly through tangled forest vegetation. The Bushmen of the Kalahari desert have very large (“steatopygous“) buttocks, presumably to store body fat in one place for times of food scarcity, while leaving the rest of the body uninsulated to radiate heat. They also have “peppercorn” hair. Hair in separated tufts, like tight curly hair, leaves space to radiate the heat that rises through the body to the scalp; straight hair lies fiat and holds in body heat, like a cap. By viewing Africans as constituting a single race, Americans ignore their greater physical variability, while assigning racial significance to lesser differences between them.

Although it is true that most inhabitants of northern Europe, east Asia, and central Africa look like Americans’ conceptions of one or another of the three purported races, most inhabitants of south Asia, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Pacific islands do not. Thus, the 19th century view of the human species as comprised of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races, still held by many Americans, is based on a partial and unrepresentative view of human variability. In other words, what is now known about human physical variation does not correspond to what Americans think of as race…

…Americans believe that race is an immutable biological given, but people (like my daughter and her boyfriend) can change their race by getting on a plane and going from the United States to Brazil—just as, if they take an avocado with them, it changes from a vegetable into a fruit. In both cases, what changes is not the physical appearance of the person or avocado, but the way they are classified.

I have focused on the Brazilian system to make clear how profoundly folk taxonomies of race vary from one place to another. But the Brazilian system is just one of many. Haiti’s folk taxonomy, for example, includes elements of both ancestry and physical appearance, and even includes the amazing term (for foreigners of African appearance) un blanc noir—literally, “a black white.” In the classic study Patterns of Race in the Americas, anthropologist Marvin Harris gives a good introduction to the ways in which the conquests by differing European powers of differing New World peoples and ecologies combined with differing patterns of slavery to produce a variety of folk taxonomies. Folk taxonomies of race can be found in many—though by no means all—cultures in other parts of the world as well…

Read the entire article here.

“Mulata, Hija de Negro y India”: Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early Colonial Mexico

Journal of Social History
Volume 44, Number 3 (Spring 2011)
pages 889-914
E-ISSN: 1527-1897; Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2011.0007

Robert C. Schwaller, Lecturer of History
University of North Carolinia, Charlotte

Since the fifteenth century, the term “mulato” has been used to describe individuals of mixed African and European ancestry. Through an examination of mulatos from sixteenth century New Spain this piece complicates our understanding of the usage and implication of this socio-racial ascription. Both demographic and anecdotal evidence suggests that in the early colonial period mulato frequently described individuals of mixed African-indigenous ancestry. Moreover, these individuals may have represented the majority of individuals so named. Additionally this piece uses several case studies to demonstrate that Afro-indigenous mulatos formed frequent and long-term connections to indigenous society and culture. Through acculturation and familial ties, early mulatos helped to encourage interethnic unions and may have played a key role in the growth of a highly varied, multi-ethnic colonial population in Mexico. By highlighting these important trends, this study challenges our traditional assumptions concerning the category of mulato and suggests that we must avoid the homogenizing tendency inherent in such terminology.

Read or purchase the article here.