Mixed Race Studies

Privileging Kinship: Family and Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume 14, Number 4, Fall 2016
pages 688-711
DOI: 10.1353/eam.2016.0025

Daniel Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California

During the long eighteenth century, elite free people of color in Jamaica petitioned the government for exemptions to some of the island’s laws against those with African ancestry. In making these appeals, they highlighted advanced social and financial positions that put them above the average Jamaican of color. But perhaps most important, these petitions noted familial relations to white men on the island. These kinship connections were central in determining if a free person of color was deserving enough to receive “privileged” rights. In bestowing these privileges, Jamaican officials demonstrated that one’s racial status on the island was determined, in part, by familial linkages to white colonists. Although only a fraction of mixed-race Jamaicans gained these legal exemptions, the practice nevertheless reveals how important family relation was in constructing racial identities, even in a place built on racialized oppression and slavery.

What Does Identifying as Afro-Latina Really Mean?

Hip Latina
2017-05-04

Johanna Ferreira
Brooklyn, New York

Pic of author. Photo Credit: Karina Munoz

Racial identity for a lot of U.S. born Latinos, is a very complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-faceted thing. As a Dominican-American woman born and raised in Queens, New York, I can attest to that. All I have to do is take a good look in the mirror to know that aside from being a Latina, I am also mixed race. I see it in my tan complexion, my light hazel eyes, my dark curly hair (that’s neither tight nor loose), my plump lips, my small nose, and my bottom-heavy figure I inherited from my Dominican mother. I am a beautiful blend of European and African ancestry and yet there still seems to be so much confusion around me identifying as Afro-Latina. Why is that?

The term Afro-Latino is a term some Latinos use as a way to identify their racial background but it’s one that still triggers a lot of confusion, pain, and shame for many. This is due in large to the complex and varied nature of racial identity in the Latino community.

According to a 2016 Pew Research study, one quarter of all U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean or of African descent with roots in Latin America. Mind you, this is only taking into consideration the amount of Afro-Latinos who actually identify that way. The study shows that a lot of Afro-Latinos in the states don’t identify as Afro-Latino.

So much of our Latin American culture and history involves strong African influence. We see it in our varied skin tones, facial features, and hair textures and we experience it in our food and music. According to Pew Research, in Brazil, half of the population is of African descent (Black or mixed-race Black). In Cuba, Blacks and mixed-race Blacks make up more than a third of the country’s population. And according to the Central Intelligence Agency, 11 percent of the population in the Dominican Republic is Black while 73 percent of the population is mixed-race Black. That’s huge!

So why are there still so many Latinos out there hesitant to call themselves Afro-Latinos? Well for starters, not everyone understands the actual definition of Afro-Latino…

Read the entire article here.

Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos

Oxford University Press
2017-05-01
280 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0190633691

Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor of Government and African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

• The first book to simultaneously analyze U.S. African-American and Latin American political thinkers and their ideas about race.
• Transforms understandings of prominent U.S. African-American and Latin American intellectuals through a hemispheric analysis.
• Challenges political theory’s preoccupation with East/West comparisons by foregrounding the Americas.
• Brings African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation and shows how each discipline was developed through transnational intellectual exchanges.
• Maps a genealogy of racial thought in the Americas.

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass’ position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. This may be because their ideas about race differed dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism, while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory’s preoccupation with and assumptions about East/West comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy.

By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers – Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos – her book will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the ‘other’ America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Theory and Hemispheric Juxtaposition
• Part I : Ambas Américas
  • 1. “A Black Sister to Massachusetts”: Latin America and the Fugitive Democratic Ethos of Frederick Douglass
  • 2. “Mi Patria de Pensamiento”: Sarmiento, the United States, and the Pitfalls of Comparison
• Part II: Mestizo Futurologies
  • 3. “To See, Foresee, and Prophesy”: Du Bois’ Mulatto Fictions and Afro-Futurism
  • 4. “A Doctrine that Nourished the Hopes of the Non-White Races”: Vasconcelos, Mestizaje’s Travels, and U.S. Latino Politics
  • Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America

Duke University Press
2017-05-05
328 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6358-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6373-6
12 illustrations

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race mixture, or mestizaje, has played a critical role in the history, culture, and politics of Latin America. In Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom, Peter Wade draws on a multidisciplinary research study in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He shows how Latin American elites and outside observers have emphasized mixture’s democratizing potential, depicting it as a useful resource for addressing problems of racism (claiming that race mixture undoes racial difference and hierarchy), while Latin American scientists participate in this narrative with claims that genetic studies of mestizos can help isolate genetic contributors to diabetes and obesity and improve health for all. Wade argues that, in the process, genomics produces biologized versions of racialized difference within the nation and the region, but a comparative approach nuances the simple idea that highly racialized societies give rise to highly racialized genomics. Wade examines the tensions between mixture and purity, and between equality and hierarchy in liberal political orders, exploring how ideas and scientific data about genetic mixture are produced and circulate through complex networks.

Interview with Shirley Tate

Times Higher Education
2017-04-27

John Elmes, Reporter

Source: Kiran Mehta

We discuss realising what it means to be black in the UK, dealing with insomnia, and institutional racism in the academy, with the renowned race and black identity scholar

Shirley Tate is a cultural sociologist and researcher in the areas of institutional racism and black identity. Previously an associate professor in race and culture at the University of Leeds, she took up a new role as professor of race and education – the first of its kind in the UK – at Leeds Beckett University in April.

Where and when were you born?
In Spanish Town, Saint Catherine, Jamaica, in March 1956.

How has this shaped you?
I was brought up in Sligoville, which was the first free village in Jamaica set up after the enslaved population were granted full freedom in 1838. Being a black African-descent Jamaican is still pivotal to me in terms of how I identify as a person. I was very fortunate to be brought up there at a time of independence, Black Power, a resurgence of Rastafarianism and, with it, Garveyism. It was during this time that my cousin gave me a copy of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. I always look back at this as a really important moment in my coming to awareness as black and Caribbean because it helped me to understand how colonialism continued to work in the Western hemisphere for black people, people of colour and white people. Jamaica became independent from the British Empire in 1962, so I was British for five and a half years, then became Jamaican and then became a naturalised British citizen in the 1980s. I left Jamaica in 1975 for the UK, which was a very difficult transition. For the first time, I really realised what it meant to be a black person in a white country. I was really taken aback the first time that I was asked, by a seven-year-old mixed-race girl, whether I was “half or full”, meaning was I mixed race or not. For her, that was an important way to judge whether she had a connection with me. I was also asked by my boss, in the first job I had in the UK, where I had learned to speak and write such good English and was “complimented” by being told that I didn’t sound at all Jamaican. I cling to my Jamaican accent with a vengeance, so I didn’t feel the compliment…

Read the entire interview here.

Exploring Mexico’s African Heritage with Dr. Marco Polo Hernández

Los Afro-Latinos: A Blog Following the Afro-Latino Experience
2012-12-09

Nicolle Morales Kern

“We need to look deeper into our Africanness to understand ourselves,” says Dr. Marco Polo Hernández, a professor of Spanish and Afro-Hispanic studies at North Carolina Central University, in a recent phone interview. Mexico’s African heritage is not normally discussed or highlighted in conversation, or even education. But, Dr. Hernández, who holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Italian Studies from the University of British Columbia, a M.A. in Spanish Language and Peninsular and Latin American literatures, and a B.A. in General Studies & Spanish language and literatures from Portland State University, says that is slowly starting to change.

Growing up in Mexico City, Dr. Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas was not raised in a household or a society that highlighted the African influence on Mexico. While Father José María Morelos, who led the Independence movement from 1811 to 1815, is talked about, his African heritage is not. In school, everyone was told that they were mestizos (racially mixed), as most Latinos believe they are because the country’s African roots are rarely discussed…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latin America and the Black Pacific: An Interview with Sherwin K. Bryant

Black Perspectives
2017-04-22

Yesenia Barragan, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

This month I interviewed Sherwin K. Bryant about his work on the Black Pacific and Afro-Andes. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University and serves as the Director of the Center for African American History. As an historian of colonial Afro-Latin America and the Atlantic/Pacific Worlds, Bryant works at the intersections of cultural, legal, social history and political economy, with an emphasis upon Black life in the Kingdoms of New Granada and Quito (what is now modern Colombia and Ecuador). Dr. Bryant’s book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito offers the first serious treatment in English of slavery and slave life in colonial Quito and challenges the narrower conceptualization of slavery as primarily an economic demand. He is currently working on two new book-length projects. The first charts the history of Black subjectivities along Colombia and Ecuador’s Pacific littoral while the second develops a history of slave life within the contraband slave routes that ran through Panama and New Granada before the era of free trade. Follow him on Twitter @sherwinkbryant.

Yesenia Barragan: As you explain in Rivers of Gold, the Kingdom of Quito had a relatively small enslaved population in comparison to the more familiar cases in the Atlantic world and has thus been overlooked in the historiography of slavery in the Americas. What insights can we gain by examining the history of colonial Afro-Quito?

Sherwin K. Bryant: Until the last two decades, the African diaspora to Spanish America received scant attention compared to the US, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean. This was due in part to a scholarly reading of slavery through labor, the plantation complex, and an emphasis on numbers. These approaches caused previous scholars to underestimate the socio-political impact of slavery and Black life throughout much of Latin America.

Another enduring challenge to the study of Blackness in Latin America is found in the national myths and master narratives that diminish the importance of Black life, and those that deny and devalue the scale of Black populations and the extent of their on-going persecution. Rather than account for the full scope of Black life, these nations have preferred narratives of mestizaje, or race mixture, marginalizing Blacks and their contributions to the nation. To some degree and for some time now, scholars colluded in this elision, privileging studies of slavery as an institution, or race mixture and social climbing. Consequently, the writing of Spanish America’s Black history was fraught, episodic, and belated relative to the flourishing studies on Indigenous populations and women since the advent of social history in the 1970s and 80s. Finally, a US-centric approach to African American history and the prominence of the Atlantic basin in diaspora studies contributed to these omissions…

Read the entire interview here.

The Strange Career of William Ellis

C-SPAN
2017-04-08

Karl Jacoby talked about his book, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire. He spoke at the 5th annual San Antonio Book Festival.

Watch the video (00:45:45) here.

Early Afro-Brazilian Soccer Stars and the Myth of Racial Democracy

Sport In American History
2017-03-23

Zachary R. Bigalke
Department of History
University of Oregon

Carlos Molinari, “Time do Bangu em 1905,” Bangu.net, via Ludopédio, Francisco Carregal is pictured seated front row and center in the photo.

The ideology of racial democracy cast a long shadow over twentieth-century race relations in Brazil. First popularized by influential Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre, this theory presumed a level racial playing field that was paradoxically dependent on the whitening of the populace. Rather than helping to drive the country toward a multiracial future, racial democracy shrouded the structural issues that remained as a legacy of Brazilian slavery.

Throughout his corpus of writings, Freyre portrayed Afro-Brazilians as sexualized Dionysian figures with a florid talent for bodily movement, expressed not only through capoeira and samba but also on the soccer pitch. Freyre used soccer as a foil for his theories of racial democracy throughout the course of his career, assigning certain attributes such as surprise, skill, cleverness, speed, and spontaneity on a racialized basis even as he tried to claim racial syncretism both in soccer and in broader society. Journalist Mario Filho furthered this discourse in his 1947 book O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro, for which Freyre wrote the introduction. Freyre and later Filho lionized certain players while glossing over others to create the myth that soccer exemplified multiracial harmony within Brazil’s racial democracy.

The career arcs of two key soccer players—Francisco Carregal in Rio de Janeiro and Arthur Friedenreich in São Paulo—offer a lens to evaluate the extent of Afro-Brazilian agency during the early decades of soccer’s growth in Brazil. The stories of their respective careers and historical representations illustrate the extent to which the myth of racial democracy was contingent on the process of whitening, in soccer’s case less through manipulation of behavioral traits and physical appearance.

To better understand these individuals and their status in Brazilian soccer as vanguards for future generations of Afro-Brazilian players, let’s look at both men through the context of their careers as well as their portrayals by Filho in his landmark text…

Read the entire article here.

The Black/White Color Spectrum

Small Axe
Volume 21, Number 1, March 2017 (No. 52)
pages 143-152

Sandra Stephens

The artist reflects on her place within the black/white color spectrum in Jamaica and the United States and looks at how she addresses both whiteness and blackness within her work. Using her piece Face of the Enemy, on the Japanese Internment, from her solo show Rationalize and Perpetuate, and her video installations Snow White Remixed and Purity, Sanctity, and Corporeality, she reflects on how race and gender are much more open in the lives of children; the questioning of the idea of “purity” and its relationship to whiteness; and visual culture and its effects on identity. She also looks at her interest in video installations and how this visual space and language challenges the audience to connect in a deeper sense to the other.