Mixed Race Studies

Boa Aparência (Good Appearance): How Colorism Plays Out in Latin America

50shadesofblack.com | Fueling Conversation
2012-10-08

Dash Harris
In.a.Dash.Media

“Go to the banks and you’ll see how racist, this country is.” This was a sentiment expressed ad nauseam in my interviews about how colorism drives societal treatment. Interviewees in every country I visited for the docu-series always cited airports, banks and TV shows as representations of the aesthetic their particular country strives for:
 
Whitewashed.
 
It was true, I only saw one tanned bank teller throughout my travels, in Honduras. For any of the others jobs that were pointed out, the standard was homogenous, light skin and straight hair. This preference is blatant even within advertisements and postings for jobs…

…White supremacy and the aspiration to be the closest you possibly can is rooted in the idea of ‘mejorando la raza’ or improving or bettering the race by marrying white, if not white then light. Almost all of my interviewees have heard this phrase from a family member or friend as advice in the dating and marrying game. One Honduran, whom her friends call her ‘negra’ because she is dark skinned said her family said she hit the jackpot when she started dating her current boyfriend, a redhead very pale skinned Honduran. On the other hand when someone who is light or pale chooses to date ‘dark,’ families insist they are ruining or damaging the race. To preserve the privilege of being light, some have even resorted to marrying within their own family, like actress Michelle Rodriguez found out about her kissing cousins. Many of my interviewees came from mixed family backgrounds where their parents different colors caused a lot of fighting, drama, discontent, and familial problems that still persist to present day. The most common, was a dark skinned father and light skinned mother…

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Hue & Phenotype: Colorism… Even More Complex

50shadesofblack.com | Fueling Conversation
2012-09-21

Dash Harris
In.a.Dash.Media

I have interviewed over 100 people for this docu-series and recently I’ve come across more and more interviewees who ask me about my background. I’ve had a handful of Caribbeans ask me if I were ‘dougla,’ a person of Indian or indigenous and African ancestry and when I was in Honduras I was called a mulatta, which means the same. Usually someone who identifies as a mulatto is of european and african ancestry but that’s not how it was used in Honduras among the people who described me as such. I asked the reasons for these assumptions and people pointed out that my skin wasn’t “very dark” and my hair was curly and my eyes were “different.” I found that interesting because I consider myself a chocolate brown, my hair has gone days without a comb being ran through it because of the wrangling that it calls for and I see my eyes as any other person’s eyes can be. One Garifuna young man said I wasn’t ‘black enough’ and I could remedy that by getting a ‘super black boyfriend,’ he graciously volunteered himself. All courting aside, I thought he and many others were just pointing out the phenotypes that guide perception and categorization of ancestry in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is important to note that the U.S. is the only country that followed the one drop rule of hypo-descent, where you were considered ‘Black’ no matter what other ancestry you had. This did not exist in Latin America so it gave way to many ways to describe someone based on skin tone, hair color, hair texture, size of nose, lips, eyes. These all decide what category you’ll fit into. Your desciptors may also vary just based on individual perception. In Brazil there are 134 color descriptors. In the Dominican Republic ‘javao’ describes someone who is of pale of light complexion with “African features,” the list below shows more…

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Bolivia’s Census Omits ‘Mestizo’ as Category

The New York Times
2012-11-21

The Associated Press

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia is under a virtual curfew as census-takers count and classify the landlocked Andean nation’s population in its first census in 11 years.

Stirring controversy was the government decision not to include “mestizo” as a category of ethnicity.

People have the option of declaring themselves members of one of 40 ethnic groups, including Afro-Bolivians. But “mestizo,” or mixed-race, is not an option. Critics of President Evo Morales say he is afraid people won’t identify themselves with a particular indigenous group, thus delegitimizing the government…

Read the entire article here.

Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 105: North American Conference on British Studies
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom III (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

Papers

• “‘We Are an Indian People’: Mixed-Race Peoples on Virginia’s Eastern Shore” / Royce Gildersleeve, George Mason University
• “Global Citizens: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in the Caribbean, Britain, and India” / Daniel Livesay, Drury University
• “George Washington’s Anglo-Indian Relatives” / Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

Comment: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

This session will examine the fate of mixed-race individuals in selected places in the English-speaking world from approximately 1775 through 1820. Royce Gildersleeve’s paper focuses on the Virginia government’s efforts to dispossess a group of Gingaskin Indians from their traditional lands on the Eastern Shore. Over time, intermarriage between free black people and the native population had altered the appearance of tribal members. By 1812, the Virginia government maintained that the community was no longer inhabited by Indians but by African Americans who did not deserve title to the land. Daniel Livesay investigates the stories of mixed-race individuals from Jamaica who moved first to Britain and then to British India in an effort to improve their social and economic status. Focusing on the story of three families of color, Livesay explores how British imperialism allowed mixed-race individuals to forge new identities in a new place, but also shows how the hardening of racial ideologies ultimately foreclosed some of the most promising avenues of advancement. Rosemarie Zagarri explores the effects of a migration that proceeded in the opposite direction. Thomas Law, a high-ranking British East India Company official, brought his three illegitimate children, born of an Indian concubine, first to England and then to the young United States. Law hoped that this move would allow his Eurasian children to escape India’s increasingly hostile environment for mixed-race children and secure his sons’ future in what he believed to be a land of unbounded opportunity. Kathleen Wilson, an eminent scholar of the “new” imperial history of Britain, is an ideal commentator for the session.

By focusing on a small group of individuals from a wide geographic expanse, scholars on this panel will directly address the 2013 convention theme, “Lives, Places, Stories.” By concentrating on mixed-race peoples, the panel will complicate our understanding of racial regimes that have been seen in terms of binary oppositions, such black and white, native American and white, Anglo and Indian. The panel will also provide an opportunity for the study of comparative imperialisms. Despite their common British origins, British India, the Caribbean, and the early American republic are seldom examined with reference to one another. Given the relatively flexible character of racial ideology in the mid-eighteenth century, mixed-race individuals from these places could often exploit the ambiguities of their descent to their own advantage. Yet in both British India and the early American republic, the rise of scientific forms of racial ideology in the early nineteenth century diminished their room to maneuver. White Europeans and Americans came to define “race” less in terms of a society’s degree of civilization and economic affluence and more in terms of its members’ skin color and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, the application of these ideas was highly contextual and differed from place to place. By juxtaposing the fate of individuals of mixed-race origins in a variety of English-speaking contexts, this panel will provide new insights into the development of racial identity and the ways in which different imperial regimes imposed shared racial ideologies.

For more information, click here.

Curious Studies of Mixed Bloods in the West Indies

Timaru Herald
Timaru, New Zealand
Volume XXXVI, Issue 2366
1882-04-22
page 3
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

The following is contributed by the Paris correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune—There has been an interesting diicussion on the negro question m the French West Indies, carried on in two of our newspapers. An argument in one of them presents views which are so new to me that I have thought they may be novel to you, and so I translate the rejoinder. It was made to an article written to break down the prejudice of color, which keeps wide apart in Martinique white men and negroes. It ways “Unfortunately, the separation of whites and blacks is not caused by a mere prejudice. It is not a vain, stupid pride which leads whites to exclude negroes from their society. Our opponent imagines that ’emancipation, taking their privilege from whites, led the latter to make more of point of pride than ever to keep from confounding with people whom the law had as their equals.’ We must tell our opponent that pride had nothing to do with the separation of color. If the whites kept aloof from the negroes it was because equality made marriages possible socially, alliances which, unfortunately, considered anthropologically, would lead to the most disastrous consequences. There is a physiological law which must be deplored, for negros often deserve great sympathy; but this law must be brought to the knowledge of France, because Frenchmen are ignorant of it, and because this law explains the greater part of these differences which are wrongly attributed to politics. A great many observations have demonstrated that it is, so to say, impossible for a negro family, even after an infinite series of marriages with whites, to change completely the nature of their blood, while if a white family do but once marry with a negro, they lose for ever the purity of their race. In France we call mulatto all persons who are neither black nor white. In the colonies mulatto is applied only to tho offspring of a white man and a negress. After the first cross the children are classed by a scale whose degrees are very numerous, and depends whether the mulattress allies herself to blacks or whites. The first, second, third, or fourth degrees especially have distinct names; two mark the preponderance of white blood, two of negro. If the mulattress ally herself to a negro, the child is called a cafres; if the cafresse ally herself also to a negro, the child is called a griffe. On the contrary, if the mulattress ally herself to a white, the child is called mestif: if the mestive, too, ally herself to a white the child is called quadroon. The terrible consequences of the physiological law mentioned is this:—If the woman be of a more swarthy color than the man to whom she allies herself, the child’s color is like the mother’s color. If the father’s color be the blackest, the child’s color is like the father’s color. When two portons of tho same color are allied, their children are blacker than their parents, and curiously enough the second child is blacker than the first, the third blacker than the second, and so on. In fine, it is beyond doubt that a mixed population, left to themselves, are fatally destined to become negroes in a very few generations. We must add another and still more deplorable fact. It will explain the causes which have compelled the separation between whites and negroes, which cannot possibly be removed. On a plantation in one of the Lesser Antilles une mestive was born of a mulattress mother and a white father. This mestive became the mother of a quadroon. All the daughters of the successive alliances were for six generations allied to white men. Only boys issued from the seventh alliance. At the same time similar phenomena were observed on a neighboring plantation, but here only girls issued from the seventh alliance. The two last children of these seven alliances were married to whites. They were of remarkable beauty; their hair was of the lighter blond nothing about them retained anything of the African race; their skin was so white that they would easily hive been taken, not only for children of northern climes, but even for Albinos, had they not been so graceful and vigorous, so intellectual, nay, so brilliant. Well, their children were more than swarthy, and their grandchildren very dark mulattos. After these indisputable facts, we may well ask how many successive alliances with whites would be necessary to make all trace of black blood disappear? Could the result ever be attained? It may. From these facts, easily be seen why Creole females of pure while blood are averse to ever allying themselves with persons whose veins contain the least drop of negro blood. After a first marriage with this tainted blood, a second fault of that same sort would transform that white family that is to say, this European family, able at any time to return to Europe, to France, and reassume the social position it had before immigration—a second fault would transform it into a family of mulattos, and from mulatto to negro the road is short. We would be of the opinion of our opponent, and would hold with him, that we should lift up completely negroes to the level of whites, to make of them real Frenchmen, to subject them to the military draft, and make them serve in the garrisons of France as well aa of the colonies. Alas! a serious objection to this scheme exists—an objection whose importance Napoleon I saw, eager as he was to aeek soldiers everywhere. He said: “French blood would be soon tainted, and France would be menaced with possessing in a few years a great many persons of mixed blood.”

Brazil’s Affirmative-Action Quotas: Progress?

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2012-11-05

Ibram H. Rogers, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
State University of New York, Albany

Brazil recently passed what was probably the most sweeping affirmative-action law in the modern history of higher education. While the livelihood of affirmative action in the United States is in the hands of the Supreme Court, Brazil now requires its public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for its low-income students and compels its institutions to diversify significantly.
 
Yes, Brazil instituted what was firmly resisted by liberals and conservatives in the post-civil-rights-American push for affirmative action—quotas. The law comes after Brazil’s Supreme Court in April unanimously upheld the racial quota at the University of Brasilia, enacted in 2004, reserving 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race  students. The Law of Social Quotas will most likely face a challenge in the courts but, based on this earlier decision, it seems likely to stand.
 
The law forces the nation’s superior and largely free public universities to assign spots according to the racial makeup of each of the 26 states and the capital. Lawmakers and educators know that will lead to a surge in diversity in states with large black or mixed-race populations (well, surge may be putting it mildly). Officials expect the number of black students to jump nearly sevenfold, from 8,700 to 56,000.
 
The law gives public universities just four years to ensure that half of their entering classes come from public schools, which low-income students disproportionately attend. (Middle- and upper-class students, who are more likely to be white, typically attend private elementary and seconday schools.)
 
The law is nearly universally popular among Brazilian lawmakers. Only one out of 81 senators voted against it last month. President Dilma Rousseff signed it into law on August 29. Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told The New York Times he is “completely in favor” of quotas.
 
“Try finding a black doctor, a black dentist, a black bank manager, and you will encounter great difficulty,” Da Silva said. “It’s important, at least for a span of time, to guarantee that the blacks in Brazilian society can make up for lost time.”…

…For scholars of race, Brazil and the United States present a fascinating contrast, despite some similarities. The United States and Brazil have the two largest populations of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. A slight majority of Brazil’s 196 million people identify as black or mixed-race. Like in the United States, many of these black and mixed-race people are subjected to forms of racism that prevent access to higher education. Unlike in the United States, however, denial of this reality is not a problem. There is a vibrant national mainstream discussion of racism, and new dynamic legislators and laws to undo its effects…

Read the entire article here.

Quilombismo and the Afro-Brazilian Quest for Citizenship

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 43, Number 8 (November 2012)
pages 847-871
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712461794

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Between the radicalism of Black Brazilian movements of the 1980s, an aftermath of the negation and rejection of the myth of “racial democracy” that denies Brazilian subtle racism, the rise of re- Africanization sensibilities among Afro-Carnival groups, and the current ambivalent co-optation that has been packaged as “affirmative action” in the new millennium, a missing link to the many quests for Afro-Brazilianness lies in the (dis)locations that permeate the issues of identity, consciousness, and Africa-rootedness. Recent studies have remained invested in the polarity between the rigidity of “race” (one-drop rule) from the North American perspective and the fluidity of identity as professed by the South American miscegenation thesis. Regardless of the given schools of thought, or discourses, that have not resolved the oppressive sociopolitical realities on the ground, one must face the many levels of (dis)locations that define Afro-Brazilian identities. This essay draws upon the cultural productions of five Afro-Brazilian poets from various regions of Brazil, namely, Oliveira Silveira, Lepê Correia, Jamu Minka, Abelardo Rodrigues, and Carlos de Assumpção. Beyond exposing the marginalized poets to a wider readership in English, the essay also engages the current debate in the shift from racial democracy to affirmative action in Brazil and the implications for continued racial tensions and contradictions in the Brazilian state.

Read or purchase the article here.

Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy

University of Rochester Press (an imprint of Boydell & Brewer)
2009-04-01
443 pages
9 x 6
Hardback ISBN: 9781580462624
eBook ISBN: 9781580467100

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power.

In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time.

Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts.

Contents

1. Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
2. Two Faces of Racial Democracy
3. Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
4. Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
5. (Un)Broken Linkages
6. The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
7. Afro-Brazilian Carnival
8. Film and Fragmentation
9. Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
10. The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
11. (Un)Transgressed Tradition
12. Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
13. Quilombo without Frontiers
14. Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandao
15. The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production

Figuring Abjection: The Slave Mother in the Early Creole Novel

French Studies
Volume 67, Issue 1, January 2013
pages 61-75
DOI: 10.1093/fs/kns232

Maeve McCusker
School of Modern Languages
Queen’s University Belfast

While twentieth-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Créoles by Jules Levilloux. The few studies that exist of these texts tend to contrast their portrayal of the (male) mulatto; Levilloux has generally been considered the more progressive writer in this regard. However, both writers are in striking harmony in their depiction of the black mother, a figure (in both senses, as her physiognomy is central in her portrayal) who has until now been overlooked. In Outre-mer, as in Les Créoles, the elderly black mother is an abject and wretched creature, a source of phobic disgust. She has necessarily to be shown to be repulsive, filthy, and morally hideous in old age in order to counteract the fascination she provokes, and to embody a phantasized repellent to the desires of the white male.

Read or purchase the article here.

Beyond Confronting the Myth of Racial Democracy: The Role of Afro-Brazilian Women Scholars and Activists

Gettysburg College Faculty Publications
Paper 1 (November 2007)
55 pages

Nathalie Lebon, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

This paper offers a synopsis of the current scholarship mapping the social and economic exclusion of women of African descent in Brazil. It highlights the work of and role played by Afro-Brazilian women scholars and activists in redressing the paucity, until recently, of basic data and research on the life conditions of women of African descent. Finally, it provides some initial thoughts on the national and transnational dynamics of knowledge production underlying this state of affairs.

Despite its rank as the ninth largest economy in the world, Brazil holds the unsavory distinction of being a showcase for the socio-economic inequalities that characterize much of Latin America. The divide cuts many ways, European versus African or Native American descent, male versus female, urban versus rural, as well as along class of origin and region of residence. Forty-five percent of Brazilians are of African descent (or, according to census categories 5.39% “preto” (black) and 39.9% “pardo” (brown)). This places Brazil second only to Nigeria in the world in terms of the size of its black population. Women of African descent thus represent nearly a quarter of all Brazilians (Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras (Brazilian Women’s Articulation, hereafter AMB), 2001: 10). Despite this incontrovertible fact, until recently, very little research has been conducted about this segment of the Brazilian population. This paper offers a synopsis of the emerging scholarship mapping the social and economic exclusion of women of African descent in Brazil. The race and gender disaggregated statistics that pioneering scholars and activists, in many cases Afro-Brazilian women, have been painstakingly gathering and/or compiling, are beginning to reveal in concrete ways the depth of the inequalities that shape the lives of women of African descent in the birthplace of the now embattled myth of racial democracy…

…INTERLOCKING RACE AND GENDER HIERARCHIES AND THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Understanding the paucity of data on the lived experiences of women of African descent, especially in some areas, demands that we consider both racial and gender ideology and related structural features in the social, political and academic realms. For most of the 20th century, the notion that Brazil was a racial democracy was an essential component of the Brazilian racial formation. Later denounced as myth, this founding narrative of the modern Brazilian nation focused on mestiçagem (racial mixing), claiming since the 1930s, that there is no racism in Brazil due to the fact that most Brazilians are of mixed descent. It is interesting to note that it was equally adopted by elites as by pre-64 black movements as an ideal to be reached. While there is much debate as to what extent this myth truly prevailed in the past and to what extent it still is -as sociologist Antonio Guimarães (2001) argues-, the first roadblock to the dismantling of racial inequalities in Brazil, most would agree that we now need to move beyond simply denouncing it. Yet there is no doubt that some form of denial of racial inequalities has contributed to the erasure of race as a fundamental structuring axis of Brazilian institutions, including the academy, and daily life. In academia, throughout most of the 20th century and until the late 1990s, the majority of scholars of racial difference steered clear of discussions of contemporary racial inequalities to focus on studies of African culture and religions, synchretisms, and regional variation in and resistance to slavery (Reichmann, 1999: 24). Reichman rightly surmises that this was in part a result of the difficulties of facing white privilege for the majority of academics, and of the insecure position within academia of the first academics of African descent (ibid: 24). One could argue it was even more difficult in a cultural and political context, which extolled racial harmony.

More pointedly, at the hands of the authoritarian State, the myth of racial democracy was used to justify the complete elimination of the gathering of racially disaggregated data from the 1970 census, leading to almost twenty years without information (Berquó, 2001). As late as the 1990s, Brazilian scholars still faced an indifferent census bureau administration, unable “to disseminate timely statistical data on race and to disaggregate socioeconomic indicators by race (or gender)” (Reichmann 1999:26). Due to scarce resources many were unable to pay for the much needed “special tabulations”(ibid: 26) as well as suffered from having to work in isolation…

Read the entire article here.