Mixed Race Studies

Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
January 2013
304 pages
Illustrations: 8 colour plates, 12 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846318474

Edited by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of ‘transnational practice’ that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction / Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken
• I. Enacting Identity: Individuals, Families and Communities
  • 2. Prince Dido of Didotown and ‘Human Zoos’ in Wilhelmine Germany: Strategies for Self-Representation under the Othering Gaze / Albert Gouaffo
  • 3. Schwarze Schmach and métissages contemporains: The Politics and Poetics of Mixed Marriage in a Refugee Family / Eve Rosenhaft
  • 4. ‘Among them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919–1939 / Jennifer Anne Boittin
  • 5. ‘In this Metropolis of the World We Must Have a Building Worthy of Our Great People’: Race, Empire and Hospitality in Imperial London, 1931–1948 / Daniel Whittall
• II. Authenticity and Influence: Contexts for Black Cultural Production
  • 6. Féral Benga’s Body / James Smalls
  • 7. ‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow / S. Ani Mukherji
  • 8. ‘Coulibaly’ Cosmopolitanism in Moscow: Mamadou Somé Coulibaly and the Surikov Academy Paintings, 1960s–1970s / Paul R. Davis
  • 9. Afro-Italian Literature: From Productive Collaborations to Individual Affirmations / Christopher Hogarth
• III. Post-colonial Belonging
  • 10. Of Homecomings and Homesickness: The Question of White Angolans in Post-Colonial Portugal / Cecilie Øien
  • 11. Blackness over Europe: Meditations on Culture and Belonging / Donald Martin Carter
• IV. Narratives/Histories
  • 12. Middle Passage Blackness and its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War Epistemology / Michelle M. Wright
  • 13. Black and German: Filming Black History and Experience / John Sealey
  • 14. Excavating Diaspora: An Interview Discussing Elleke Boehmer’s Novel Nile Baby / John Masterson with Elleke Boehmer
  • 15. Afterword / Susan Dabney Pennybacker
• Bibliography
• Index

Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States

Duke Bar Journal (Duke Law Journal)
Volume 1, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 26-41

James R. Browning (1918-2012)

The word “miscegenation” is not included in the everyday vocabulary of a large part of our citizenry, but there are nonetheless laws in twenty-nine states prohibiting miscegenation. Etymologically, the term means intermarriage of persons of different races; when used in this paper, however, the word has reference to marriage between whites and non-whites.

Without suggesting an opinion on the desirability of anti-miscegenation laws, the writer proposes to sketch the provisions and effects of the present statutes on the subject. Various questions then arise: what is the purpose of such statutes and how effectively are they accomplishing that purpose? Also, what are the legal problems created in applying these laws?…

I. Provisions and Effects of Present Laws

The preceding chart presents a panorama of the statutory law of the twenty-nine states that have taken steps to prevent miscegenation. As one will note, the laws are about as varied as they are numerous; they disclose differing definitions of those in the prohibited class, the emphasis as to persons in this class significantly shifting with the geographical location of the states. All these states prohibit Negro-white marriages. Fourteen states, chiefly west of the Mississippi, forbid intermarriage of white and Mongoloid persons. Three states, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma prohibit Negro-Indian intermarriage. Four states forbid Indian-white marriages. Six states consider racial intermarriage with such abhorrence that its prohibition is provided for in their Constitutions.

In contrast to the common law rule that issue of a void marriage are illegitimate, many states have statutes legitimating such issue. However, some legitimation statutes have been interpreted not to apply to children of miscegenous marriages; others, as indicated on the chart, have not been construed as to this point. Although the status of the issue is uncertain in many states, the marriages themselves seem generally to be void ab initio and not merely voidable…

The passing of the frontier, which provided one method of escape for the minority groups, and the ever increasing occasion for social contact in our present mobile society, serve as catalysts to the inter-group reaction and increase the awareness of the fact that some groups have not assimilated in certain areas. The opportunity of assimilation, which in the ultimate sense must include amalgamation, has been extended to Jewish, Italian and other white minorities; but colored groups-Black, Brown, Yellow and to a lesser extent Red-are considered unassimilable, and are denied intermarriage with whites.

The underlying animosity to colored minorities can be partially attributed to a desire in white groups to maintain economic and social advantages. Independent of this desire is a wish to avoid the physical consequences which are thought to flow from racial inter-marriage. Thus, as one court put it in upholding the constitutionality of an antimiscegenation statute:

“The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural but is always productive of deplorable results.”

…The intimate relationship between the marital institution and the basic welfare of the States has been relied upon to justify close supervision by it of the matrimonial ventures of its domiciliaries. Without speculating as to the physical consequences of racial intermarriage, the writer suggests that the sociological effects upon the offspring must be considered. It may well be argued that the state, as parens patriae, has a privilege to bar marriage which would produce problem progeny. To apply this principle one can consider the situation of the child, of a mixed marriage.

If white and Negro intermarry, any children will normally be shunned by other whites if the child’s parentage is known; and the white parent may not be fully accepted by his child’s colored companions. Thus, a gap may develop in the home. More important, under the state segregation laws in many states the white parent will be barred by law from associating with his child in restaurants, theaters, and other public places. Will not the deprivation of the parent’s full companionship react adversely upon the child? This suggestion emphasizes that regulation of the family must take account of conditions of society with a view to producing normal children…

Read the entire article here.

John C. Minkins on Race Purity

The Indianapolis Recorder: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted the to Best Interest of the Negroes
Saturday, 1910-05-07
page 1, columns 4-5
Source: Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis: University Library: Program of Digital Scholarship

No Objection to Prohibitive Laws Against Miscegenation.

EDUCATION IS THE REMEDY.

Mixed Bloods Praised For Their Loyalty to tho Race—Eighty-one Percent of All the Mixed Blood Negroes In the Country Are In the South. Where There Is No Intermarriage.

A large and representative audience was present at the recent meeting of the Boston Literary and Historical association to hear an address by John C. Minkins, editor of the Providence (R. I.) Evening News, on miscegenation and the fight for race purity.  His address was enthusiastically received. William Monroe Trotter, the president, introduced the speaker. A piano solo was contributed by Miss Ester Francis, a contralto solo by Miss Mae Smith and a tenor solo by Mr. Robert M. Johnson, each being encored. A resultion was unanimously adopted against the report of the Brownsville board, thanking Senator Foraker, Attorney Dagget and N. B. Marshal for their good work in behalf of the discharged soldiers. The resolution calls for a bill in congress to reinstate the discharged soldiers.

Mr. Minkins discussed “Miscegenation and the fight for Race Purity,” treating the subject broadly and answering especially magazine articles that have appeared recently on the subject. He declared whtat the American Negro was the victim, not the enemy of the white man. He declared that the “Negro problem,” the problem of miscegenation, was the white man’s problem, the Negro being the clay and the nation the potter; that as the hybridization process began under slaver and continued for 240 years it was not difficult to place the blame for the original attacks upon racial purity, as in 1790 there were hardly any mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, white in 1890, 100 years later, the black had increased but 400 per cent and the mixed Negroes so much so that is was impossible to approximate it mathematically. After pointing out that hardly two southern states prohibit white intermarriage with a person who has some Negro blood, he said: “Few indeed of the states flatly prohibit intermarriage of the races, as they would do were their legislators genuinely in earnest in their abhorrence of Negro blood. If they had the courage of their convictions they would bar one drop of Negro blood. They leave us instead to infer that they believe there is a point at which intermixture of Negro and white blood is beneficial or they have other, to them, good an sufficient reasons for compromising and deciding to lower the legal bar sinister, such, for instance, as South Carolina had when she desired to protect some of the leading white families who were known to be ‘tainted.'”

He said the Negro need have no objection to absolutely prohibitive laws against miscegenation, as they would give him a far wider range of matrimonial choice than any other race on earth, since he could have all the thirty-second degree Negroes and more than 1,100,000 others, ranging from half white to thirty-one thirty-seconds white, from which to choose, adding, “The range is wide enough and attractive enough to satisfy the most adventurous and exacting among us.” He was not disposed to be disturbed by legitimate miscegenation and its ultimate effects, as they would take care of themselves as they had done ever since the present European Caucasian races sprang from the Negro’s ancestors, the Euro-Africans.

He asserted emphatically that the mulatto had increased faster than either white or black from 1850 to 1890. the increase being 92 per cent, the black increase 65 per cent and the white Increase, excluding about 13,000,000 immigrants, only 52 per cent. He accounted for the larger proportionate number of mulattoes In the north by immigration of mulattoes from the south, by intermarriage and by the counting of many octoroons at the south as white and asserted that more than 81 per cent of all the mixed Negroes in the country are in the south, where there is no intermarriage, the proportion to the whites in South Carolina. Louisiana and Mississippi being larger than it bears to the Negro population of those states. He praised the bulk of the mixed bloods for showing unalterable loyalty to their race and emphatically denied that the Negro was responsible for the “great black plague,” asserting that it was and always had been “a concomitant of the white man’s civilization” while he charged the white man also with responsibility for the “white slave” traffic.

Referring more particularly to Louisiana, where the anti-miscegenation crusade is under way, he said the intelligent Negroes of that state heartily endorsed the movement and accounted for the prevalence of the practice by so much ignorance among both white and black, asserting that Louisiana Negroes and Louisiana whites were the most illiterate In the country, Louisiana having twenty-one out of the thirty counties in the country in which more than two-thirds of all the Negroes were illiterate. He added that education decreases the desire for amalgamation. He deplored the fact that white men, who make the laws, had erected every conceivable defense around the white woman, but up to the time of the Louisiana crusade had interposed no barrier at all around the black woman, simply stipulating that there should be no intermarriage. Thousands of Negroes had been lynched for crimes, attempted and alleged, against white women, but no white man had ever been lynched for a like crime against a Negro woman.

In conclusion he denied that the Negro woman was immoral and insisted that the concurrent testimony of unprejudiced investigators proved “the most marvelous advancement in history” had been made by the Negro “along every conceivable line.” He advocated better protection through education and the unwritten law by both Negroes and whites for the Negro woman and the Negro home as the most effective means of making the Negro safer and the white woman also, as “the well being of the white race in this country is inseparably bound up with that of its fellow citizens in black,” adding that “the sooner this is realized tbe better it will be for both races, even though they are destined to live, as some people believe, as united as the hand, as separate as the fingers.”

Colorism and School-to-Work and School-to-College Transitions of African American Adolescents

Race and Social Problems
Volume 5, Issue 1 (March 2013)
pages 15-27
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-012-9081-7

Igor Ryabov, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas

Using multinomial logistic modeling, the current study estimated the impact of skin tone on school-to-work and school-to-college transitions of African American youths. The findings suggest that African American males with the lightest skin tone were more likely to find a job and to be in college than their co-racial peers with darker skin tones. The odds of finding a full-time job were also significantly higher for African American females with the lightest skin tone. Generally, the multivariate results reveal that among the effects examined in this study, the family background factors, marital status, prior achievement, and average school socioeconomic status matter the most.

Introduction

Colorism, the favoring of light complexion over dark complexion, has traditionally been important to our acceptance of racialized identities of Black folks in the United States. Complexion, along with other features of Eurocentric phenotypc—blue. gray, or green eyes; straight hair; thinlips: and a narrow nose—has always been considered valuable both within and outside the African American community. Eurocentric phenotype plays a central role in defining standards of beauty and governs both status and treatment. On the other hand, dark skin tone and Afrocentric features—broad nose, curly hair, and thick lips—have been devalued. The hierarchy of these phenotypic trails has implied that people of predominantly African ancestry with more European features are viewed as being more attractive and intelligent than those with few of none of these features.

An abundant literature has shown the many ways in which colorism affects the African American community (Bodenhorn 2006; Bodenhorn and Ruebeck 2007). One of the major streams of research has been the advantages of light skin complexion for upward social mobility. Much emphasis has been placed on the intergenerational mobility of light- versus darker-complected African Americans, while very little research has directly examined the intragenerational social mobility and. specifically, the influence of colorism on school-to-work and school-to-collegc transitions of African American adolescents. Although studies of adolescent transitions are abundant, one issue with these studies is that they usually treat African Americans as homogeneous group and do not account for the effects of colorism. This paper attempted to address this shortcoming in the literature and to explore the paths taken by black youths in the period immediately following their high school years. In addition to investigating cursory characteristics such as skin tone, the present study estimated the effect of a set of explanatory variables (school contextual factors, family effects, marital status, etc.) on the path that youths look in the period following their high school years. Of the three trajectories—college, work, and unemployment—the first two were considered as successful since both typically lead to the accumulation of skills either through formal study or learning on-the-job. Multinomial logistic regression was chosen as an appropriate statistical technique because the dependent variable was a set of more than two outcomes that could not he ordered in a meaningful way. With the purpose of investigating the aforementioned predictors of African American school-to-work and school-to-college transitions, we used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (henceforth, the Add Health). The cogent rationale of using the Add Health was that it had collected information not only from adolescent respondents, but also from their parents or members of their peer network. Furthermore, this information was incorporated in the way to provide a complete account of all possible social interactions among adolescents and their parents. These data allowed the examination of the relative influences of school contextual factors and family influences on school-to-work transitions. Additionally, the Add Health is a longitudinal survey which implies that an insight can be gained about the causal order of the relationship between school-to-work transitions and school contextual factors.

Conceptual Framework

Complexion Advantage and Social Mobility

Historical accounts point to a consistent pattern of preference given by individuals, regardless of their race, and institutions to light-complected individuals (Bodenhorn 2003. 2006; Cole 2005; Edwards 1959; Frazier 1957; Myrdal et al. 1944; Keuter 1917). The advantages of a light complexion date back to slavery when blackness was defined as barbaric, savage, and ugly, whereas whiteness was associated with culture, virtue, and beauty. According to Reuter (1917) and Frazier (1957), a complexion advantage appeared early in the slavery era when the majority of slaveholders resented at sending light-complected slaves to field work, while letting them to participate in craft training and apprenticeship. Slaves of mixed ancestry were more likely to be granted domestic positions, better food and clothing, and manumission and educational opportunities (Cole 2005). Myrdal et al. (1944) wrote that slaves, more European in appearance, commanded higher prices in the slave market and were preferred as personal servants to white masters because they were considered to be more esthetically appealing and intellectually superior to slaves with pure African ancestry. Frazier (1957) claimed a fair complexion improved slaves’ chances of survival by significantly reducing their toil and chores, by improving their access to food and shelter, and by exposure to the culture of whites, including their manners, dress, and linguistic conventions. Moreover, visible white ancestry became the basis of differential access to privilege not only among slaves, but also among free persons of color. Light-complected, mixed-race free mulattos were also more likely to be literate, and their superiority over dark-complecled free blacks was widely accepted in the free black population as a whole as a result of the status advantages and similarities between whites and mulattos in physical appearance, speech, dress, and behavior (Edwards 1959).

Differences in socioeconomic characteristics by skin tone lingered long after slavery. In the antebellum South, free light-complected blacks became the social and economic elite of black communities. Although their jobs as small businessmen and service workers with white patrons were not prestigious in the modem sense, these were privileged positions compared with the opportunities available to their darker contemporaries. Socially, elite groups of light-complected blacks erected walls between themselves and the dark-complected masses by avoiding intermarriage with darker blacks, continuing their associations with whiles, and passing their advantages on to their children. This is how the original mulatto elite maintained its in-group privileged status until the beginning of the twentieth century. Even now for many people of African descent, black is not black: Lightness begets access to in-group privileges, rather than whiteness alone. Evidence from some analysts implies that skin tone effects on socioeconomic status are as potent now as in the past (Bowman et al. 2004; Goldsmith et al. 2006; Thompson and Keith 2001).

Colorism: How it Works

Although the exact mechanism is not known, understanding how this process works is largely limited to social psychology, Sumner (1906) was among the first to notice the general tendency of human beings to rank themselves according to group membership. He coined the distinction between in-group and out-group and suggested that preference for in-groups over out-groups is a universal characteristic of social existence. According to theories of implicit social cognition, we universally share positive feelings about the in-groups while simultaneously prefer to distance ourselves from out-group members in a diverse social environment (Banaji 2001; Banaji and Dasgupla 1998; Dovidio et al. 2002;  Greenwald et al. 2002; Uhlmann et al. 2002). It is important to stress, however, that privileges may be granted to those in the in-group by both members of the in-group and out-group. For example, teachers and potential employers make attributions regarding who is and who is not smart, competent, etc., based on the implicit biases learned from the environment and related to the ways society relates lighter skin with attractiveness, intelligence, competence, and likeability (Lovejoy 2001: Maddox and Gray 2002).

Several studies have found that dark-complected African Americans are more likely to report racial discrimination at work than light-complected African Americans (e.g.. Hill 2002; Keith and Herring 1991; Seltzer and Smith 1991)…

Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd Edition

Polity Press
February 2013
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7456-4965-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7456-4966-5

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Second Edition, Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. As in the first edition, the book blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience. In this thoroughly updated and revised volume, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant. The result is a comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. The second edition’s new concluding chapter explores the racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice, and interrogates the thought that Barack Obama has ushered in a post-racial age. This volume is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Features

• Fully updated and revised edition of this comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory.
• Blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience and engages the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant.
• Taylor examines key topics such as mixed-race identity and white supremacy as well as timely examinations of racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice.
• This compelling volume will appeal to students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Part I: Theory:.
  • 1. What Race-Thinking Is:.
    • The Language Of Race.
    • What We Mean By ‘Race’: What Do You Mean, ‘We’?.
    • Modern Racialism: Prehistory And Background.
    • Power, Racial Formation, And Method.
    • Conclusion.
  • 2. Three Challenges To Race-Thinking:.
    • Introduction.
    • The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 1: Isn’t Race-Thinking Unethical?.
    • What Racism Is.
    • Classical Racialism: History And Background.
    • Early Modern Racialism.
    • High Modern, Or Classical, Racialism.
    • The Concept Of Classical Racialism.
    • The Challenge Of Human Variation: Isn’t Racial Biology False?.
    • What’s Wrong With Race.
    • The Challenge Of Social Differentiation: Isn’t The Race Concept Just In The Way?.
    • Ethnicity.
    • Nation.
    • Class.
    • Caste.
    • Intersecting Principles: Gender.
    • Conclusion.
  • 3. What Races Are:.
    • Introduction.
    • After Classical Racialism.
    • The U.S. Racial Terrain Today.
    • Varieties Of Racialism: Four Accounts And Ten Questions.
    • What Races Are – A Radical Constructionist’s Story.
    • Ten Questions.
    • Conclusion.
• Part II: Practice:.
  • 4. Existence, Experience, Elisions:.
    • Introduction.
    • Ethical Eliminativism, For And Against; Or, The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 2.
    • The Slippery Slope And The Argument From Political Realism.
    • The Argument From Self-Realization.
    • Existence, Identity, And Despair.
    • The Basics.
    • Despair And Terror.
    • Double-Consciousness.
    • Micro-Diversity, Part I.
    • Microdiversity, Part II.
    • In-Between: Illusions Of Purity And Interstitial Peoples.
    • Experience, Invisibility, And Embodiment.
    • The Basics.
    • Invisibility And The Other Mind-Body Problem.
    • From The Ontic To The Ontological.
    • Conclusion.
  • 5. The Color Question:.
    • Introduction.
    • Color And ‘Courting’: The Ethics Of Miscegenation.
    • Colorblindness And Affirmative Action.
    • Conclusion.
• A Note On Further Reading.
• Endnotes

Five times more ‘G.I. babies’ than previously thought

The Phillipine Star
Manila, Philippines
2012-12-17

Jarius Bondoc

There are five times more American “G.I. babies” in the Philippines than previously thought — and they continue to multiply. This is according to a recent study by a visiting American social researcher and professor in Angeles City, Pampanga. Such finding categorizes military-origin Filipino Amerasians as a social diaspora. For, they forcibly are stripped of their citizenship, dispersed in slums, and suffer discrimination.
 
The number of abandoned offspring of US military servicemen could be 250,000 or more, analysis by P.C. Kutschera, PhD, shows. Their ranks are “expanding slowly but exponentially,” he says. He considers Filipino Amerasians born not only during the Vietnam War. Counted as well are those sired since American Occupation and Commonwealth years, to the present joint US-Philippine military exercises. Meaning, Filipino Amerasians are not only in their thirties or forties, but can also be geriatrics and newborns.
 
Previously the Filipino Amerasians were estimated to run to about 52,000. Most studies considered only the height of the Vietnam War in 1968-1975. At the time the US used the sprawling Clark Air Base in Pampanga and Subic Naval Base in Zambales as launch pads for military operations across the South China Sea. Close to 100,000 US military personnel were stationed in those largest air and naval bases outside mainland America, and in 19 smaller facilities throughout the Philippines. The Philippine Senate evicted the bases in 1992…

…Kutschera presented his research last October to the 9th International Conference on the Philippines, held at the Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University in East Lansing. (Full text at http://www.amerasianresearch.org; coauthored by Marie A. Caputi, PhD, a professor at Walden University, Minnesota.) The paper, “The Case for Categorization of Military Filipino Amerasians as Diaspora,” amplifies Kutschera’s 2010 doctoral dissertation. That earlier work is on psychosocial risk and mental disorder due to stigmatization and discrimination of Amerasians in Angeles City outside Clark Air Base…

Read the entire article here.

Colorism: The War at Home

Ebony Magazine
News & Views
2013-02-20

Chris Williams

Dr. Yaba Blay discusses the history of ‘the color complex’ and how we can work to destroy it

The “color complex” has remains a source of great controversy and pain in the African American community and across much of the African Diaspora. As one of the leading voices and scholars on Black racial identity, Drexel University assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies Yaba Blay continues her arduous, groundbreaking work on the topic. Her (1)ne Drop Project has been featured on CNN’s Black in America series and expanded the discussion around how Blackness is defined in today’s society.

EBONY recently sat down with Dr. Blay to delve into the history behind colorism and how it has helped to shape Black racial identity in the United States.

EBONY: In the Black community, we seem to continue the tradition of lighter skin and straighter hair being ‘better.’ Why is the train of thought still prevalent in our collective mindset?

Yaba Blay: I definitely think it’s something we’ve internalized. Historically, just through observation we’ve seen that people with more European aesthetics and phenotypes were getting more privileges in this society. And again, for me, it’s really about us thinking about the framework from which we’re operating, like where are these ideas coming from and being able to acknowledge that they operate from outside of our community. These are conceptualizations that have been projected onto us and we see those things being affirmed in our society. It’s been called “the White ideal.” So—it constructs a spectrum of sorts where if I look at you and I can see that you potentially have European blood, I can assume that in comparison to someone who has darker skin, kinkier hair, and a more African phenotype that you’re better than them. It’s the idea that European genetics are your saving grace…

Read the entire interview here.

Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy

Lexington Books
March 2012
136 pages
Size: 6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-6964-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-6965-0

Samantha Nogueira Joyce, Assistant Professor in Communication Studies
Indiana University, South Bend

Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, by Samantha Nogueira Joyce, examines what happens when a telenovela directly addresses matters of race and racism in contemporary Brazil. This investigation provides a traditional textual analysis of Duas Caras (2007-2008), a watershed telenovela for two main reasons: It was the first of its kind to present audiences with an Afro-Brazilian as the main hero, openly addressing race matters through plot and dialogue. Additionally, for the first time in the history of Brazilian television, the author of Duas Caras kept a web blog where he discussed the public’s reactions to the storylines, media discussions pertaining to the characters and plot, and directly engaged with fans and critics of the program.

Joyce combines her investigation of Duas Caras with a study of related media in order to demonstrate how the program introduced novel ideas about race and also offered a forum where varying perspectives on race, class, and racial relations in Brazil could be discussed. Brazilian Telenovelas is not a reception study in the traditional sense, it is not a story of entertainment-education in the strict sense, and it is not solely a textual analysis. Instead, Joyce’s text is a study of the social milieu that the telenovela (and especially Duas Caras) navigates, one that is a component of a contemporary progressive social movement in Brazil, and one that views the text as being located in social interactions. As such, this book reveals how telenovelas contribute to social change in a way that has not been fully explored in previous scholarship.

Table of Contents

• Chapter I – Episode 1: And Let There be White
• Chapter II – Black Flows: Duas Caras / The Legacy of Whitening and Racial Democracy
• Chapter III – “My Little Whitey” / “My Big, Delicious Negro:” Telenovelas, Duas Caras, and the Representation of Race
• Chapter IV – Deu no Blogão! (“It was in the Big Blog!”): Writing a Telenovela, a Blog, and a Metadiscourse
• Chapter V – Duas Caras as a New Approach to Social Merchandising
• Chapter VI – Conclusions
• References
• About the Author
• Index

Mixed feelings

NOW.
2012-06-30

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“The people photographed are so beautiful they make you feel like having mixed race babies,” said Kevork Baboyan, one of many attendees at Wednesday’s opening of the photography exhibition, Mixed Feelings.

Over the years, racism has slowly but steadily started to raise eyebrows in Lebanon, a country that is infamous for abusing migrant domestic workers and discriminating against refugees and other groups of society. Rarely, however, has anyone addressed racism between Lebanese until Lebanese-Nigerian activist Nisreen Kaj sought – in collaboration with Beirut-based Polish photographer Marta Bogdanska — to explore the concepts of race and identity.

“Living in Beirut as a black Lebanese has [clearly highlighted] the hierarchy of skin color and ethnicity in the country,” Kaj told NOW Extra. “This reality has gotten under my skin, which is only a figure of speech, for it is in fact about the surface, about the skin, about the way we perceive identity, race, and ethnicity.”

Opening at Hamra’s Dar al-Musawwir, the launch combined images and interviews of some 30 Lebanese from African and Asian descent and was produced in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office…

…When asked whether racism was more prevalent in Lebanon as compared to other Arab nations, Khoury said it was “particularly [widespread] here, but this is exhibit is a start.”

“They see my car keys and can’t believe I own a car… so [people at the supermarket] follow me to see whether or not it’s actually possible,” said Khoury’s mother laughingly, recounting the incident with equal humor and frustration…

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Possibilities Abound in a Nation That Is Diverse, CNN Journalist Says

Yale News
2009-11-20

Susan Gonzalez

When CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien was growing up, her mother in­structed her never to let anyone tell her that she wasn’t black or Hispanic because of her mixed ethnic and racial heritage.

So, when she was asked to identify her race on official forms, O’Brien — the daughter of a black Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father — refused to check just one box, even when making a single selection was required, she told a packed auditorium in the Law School’s Levinson Auditorium during her Poynter Fellowship Lecture on Nov. 10.

America’s value lies in its diversity, O’Brien said, and that mixture of races and ethnicities should never be viewed as a “problem.”…

…Likewise, when O’Brien — also a Harvard graduate — was first applying for jobs as a journalist, one news director told her that there was only one spot open for a black person but that she wasn’t dark enough to qualify. Another news director asked if she would consider changing her name because it was too difficult to pronounce. On both occasions, her mother pointed out that these were jobs her daughter wouldn’t want anyway.

O’Brien said that her parents served as examples of perseverance who encouraged their children to look beyond challenges and focus on possibilities, instilling in them this message: “Dream and do what you want; push and achieve what you want; go and get what you want.”

Her own children, the journalist said, have become so used to diversity in their lives that they were shocked to discover that Barack Obama is America’s first black president.

“Diversity to me is an opportunity to think differently and to see differently,” she told her audience…

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