Mixed Race Studies

Artspeak: Macys misses the boat on celebration of Brazil

InsightNews.com
2012-06-12

Irma McClaurin, Ph.D., Culture and Education Editor

What a delightful surprise to open my mailbox and see Macys touting a celebration of Brazil.  The merchandise colors are vibrant oranges, yellows, and shocking turquoise.  However, as I looked at the models chosen to represent Brazil, it was clear that Macys had missed the boat. Brazil is a multi-racial country. Everyone knows that its people represent a human rainbow, and in fact, after World War II, American scholars often pointed to Brazil as the racial ideal.  Thus was born what anthropologist Dr. France Winddance Twine has critiqued as the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Democracy and Intermarriage in Brazil and the United States

The Latin Americanist
Volume 55, Issue 3 (September 2011)
pages 45–66
DOI: 10.1111/j.1557-203X.2011.01063.x

Jack A. Draper III, Associate Professor of Portuguese
University of Missouri

“We see a blurring of the old lines.”
—Michael Rosenfeld, Regional-Americanist sociologist

“The maintenance of interracial barriers and the reproduction of inequalities are assured […]”
—José Luis Petruccelli, Brazilianist sociologist

Introduction: A Tripartite Scholarly Geography of U.S. and Brazilian Race Relations

Various scholars have emphasized that exogamy is a key indicator of the assimilation of racial and ethnic minorities in a given society (Silva and Hasenbalg 1992,17-18). Increased marriage across racial/ethnic lines is generally understood to indicate a higher degree of intimacy between members of the respective racial/ethnic groups, since marriage is traditionally considered to represent the “maximum degree of material and affective intimacy” to which individuals can aspire (Pinto 1998 [1953], 176). In keeping with this insight, this article traces developments in conceptions of race relations through an analysis of contemporary academic discourses on interracial marriage in Brazil and the United States. I categorize these discourses into three major geographical-ideological groups, namely, regional-Americanist, cosmopolitan-Americanist and Brazilianist studies of race relations. The regional-Americanist strand of scholarship on interracial marriage is implicitly isolationist, virtually devoid of any international comparative perspective with which to contextualize the conclusions made about exogamy rates in the United States in recent decades. Cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship, on the other hand, is far more cognizant of racial discourses outside of the U.S. national context, and therefore, with its comparative perspective on race relations, is able to provide a more measured assessment of perceived progress in US racial assimilation in relation to that achieved in other countries. Finally, Brazilianist scholarship on interracial marriage inherits the international, comparative tradition firmly established by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre since his earliest writings (Freyre 1922). While this category of scholarship thus has much in common with cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship on race relations, it has also inherited a post-Freyrean critical tradition since the 1950s (Pinto 1998 [1953]; Bastide and Fernandes 1959) that has established relatively strict criteria for determining the real extent of racial discrimination…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mix-d: Museum: Timeline

Mix-d: Museum
Mix-d:
2012-06-30

This work-in-progress Timeline draws on material from a British Academy project conducted by Dr. Chamion Caballero (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University) and Dr. Peter Aspinall (University of Kent) which explored the presence of mixed race people, couples and families in the early 20th century, particularly in the period 1920-1950, a time when racial mixing and mixedness tended to be viewed very negatively by British authorities.

The project sourced a range of archival material from national and local archives. It included official documents, autobiographical recordings and photo and film material to understand how social perceptions of racial mixing and mixedness emerged and the effect they had on the lives of mixed race people, couples and families themselves, as well as their place in shaping contemporary ideas and experiences.

The project’s findings indicated that while mixed race people, couples and families certainly experienced prejudice and hostility in this ‘era of moral condemnation’, they were not inherently ‘tragic’, ‘marginal’ or ‘doomed’, but simply another part of the longstanding diversity and difference that is a feature of British life.

The findings from the research formed the foundation of the three part BBC2 series ‘Mixed Britannia’ presented by George Alagiah and was also the subject of an article in The Guardian.

View the Timeline here.

Passing For What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility

Callaloo
Volume 21, Number 2, Spring 1998
pages 381-397
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1998.0108

Phillip Brian Harper, Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, English
New York University

Ends and Means: The Social-Critical Significance of Racial Passing in the U.S. Context

The preposition “for” in the main title of my essay carries a deliberate dual significance, simultaneously constituting a synonym for “as” and indicating the (provisionally indeterminate) end of the activity I plan to interrogate here. For it has come to my attention over the last few years that racial passing—and the narratives that conventionally bring it to light—serves a function that escapes many students of the practice, by which I mean many of the students I teach. These readers of the racial passing narrative—chiefly enrollees in my African-American literature courses—tend to see it in psychic-orientational terms, as signifying only the protagonist’s disavowal of an identity that proper race pride and healthy self-regard would lead him or her enthusiastically to embrace. It is generally only after a fair amount of cajoling that they can acknowledge the material gain potentially enjoyed by anyone who, while legally designated as black, lives successfully as white for a significant time—that particular masquerade being the one generically conjured by the term “racial passing” in the U.S. context.

And yet there are other modes of racial masquerade than the one in which a light-skinned black “passes for” white; and there are other functions typically served by racial passing per se than the accomplishment of a merely individualist objective. Limited though these general functions may be, their critical utility is not insignificant; which is why, before I consider as what one might pass (the possibilities for which are much more numerous than we might expect, even within the limited field described by the oversimplifying white/black binary that governs U.S. racial culture), I should elaborate clearly to what purpose passing ordinarily works. It is against this generalized societal function that the meanings of some particular instances of racial passing—which I interrogate below—take shape.

I am at a great advantage in undertaking this task of elaboration, in that a substantial part of the work has already been done for me. Indeed, the last several years have brought numerous insightful analyses of the social-expository function typically served by racial passing, which, in the summary offered by Amy Robinson, is to reveal “‘race’ . . . as a construct, an arbitrary principle of classification that produces the ‘racial’ subject in the very act of social categorization.” The possibility of passing’s functioning in this way derives from the specifically visual means by which racial identity is registered in U.S. culture, where, as Robinson puts it, “appearance is assumed to bear a mimetic relation to identity, but in fact does not and can not.” These conditions make it “easy to bypass the rules of representation and claim an identity by virtue of a ‘misleading’ appearance” (250). Thus, Robinson suggests, passing “jeopardizes the very notion of race as a biological essence, foregrounding the social contexts of vision by calling into question the ‘truth’ of the object in question” (241), and thereby “emerges as a challenge to the very notion of the visual as an epistemological guarantee” (250).

While racial passing does do this, however, it is important to remember that this is effectively all that it does, and that it generally does even this relatively little only under certain self-defeating conditions. This latter constraint inheres in the fact that, for an instance of passing to register as a challenge to the logic of racial identification, it must disclose itself as an instance of passing in the first place, which disclosure typically would also constitute the failure of the act. For, as Robinson notes, “the mark of . . . success” for any instance of passing ordinarily consists “precisely in its inconspicuousness” (243)—its inability to be perceived at all, let alone as a threat…

The overlapping concepts of race and colour in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 7, (July 2012)
pages 1163-1168
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.657209

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

I thank Ethnic and Racial Studies for the opportunity to participate in this symposium and I am honoured to be in conversation with Michael Banton. an esteemed contributor to the Sociology of Race (and Colour), with whom I respectfully differ.

Banton argues that ‘U.S. scholars followed the ordinary language trend of using race instead of color’, as W. E. B. DuBois originally had, and that my use of the term ‘race’ erringly uses the experience of North American ‘black white relations as a paradigm case to offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of relations in Brazil.’ Banton objects to my use of race and colour as rough equivalents. For him, colour refers to a ‘first order abstraction’, which describes physical differences that are used in society as markers of social distinction, while race is a ‘second order abstraction’ that is neither visible nor measurable and that varies from place to place, ‘making it more difficult to identify what has to be explained’ (p. 4). Banton (p. 6) seems to find it odd that my book. Race in Another America, should bear the subtitle ”The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil’. But the title of my book simply reflects one of its central findings: that, in Brazil, conceptions of ‘race’ and conceptions of ‘color’ overlap.

Banton is right to separate folk and analytical concepts, but I think he goes about it in the wrong way. Race is clearly a folk concept, and it lacks analytical validity, but his race/colour distinction begs more questions than it resolves. Race and colour are both folk concepts but race and many references to colour are based on the social process of racialization, which classifies people according to race, privileging some while excluding others. Racial and colour inequality and discrimination in Brazil and the USA are rooted in a common western racial ideology, although one that has been interpreted in different ways in both countries. Whereas colour might be seen as merely descriptive, it also elicits a racial ideology where Brazilians are keenly aware of human colour variation, which they often place on a naturalized hierarchy of worth…

Read or purchase the article here.

Slavery, Race, and Reunion: The NY Times White Washes the Rape of Michelle Obama’s Ancestors (Again)

We Are Respectable Negroes
2012-06-18

Chauncey DeVega

Why would any person honor rapist’s blood?

In an effort to write the Obamas, who are de facto American royalty, back into a larger post-racial narrative that ostensibly makes some white folks feel more comfortable about having a black President, such a move seems par for the course.

In 2009, the NY Times featured a very problematic story about how genealogical researchers had reconstructed Michelle Obama’s family tree. There, the NY Times offered up a story about one of the First Lady’s ancestors who was a child slave and in all likelihood repeatedly raped by her white master. Just as was done in Saturday’s Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden by Rachel Swarns, the realities of power and exploitation under the chattel regime were conveniently overlooked and (quite literally) white washed away.

Family tree DNA research is in vogue: networks such as PBS and ABC have found it a compelling means to craft a narrative about a shared “American experience.” Given the country’s demographic shifts, and the election of its first black President, there is a coincidence of interests who are deeply invested in furthering a narrative of multicultural America, one where it is imagined that we are all in one way or another related.

In this racial project, the color line is broken in some deeply dishonest ways which do nothing to challenge power, illuminate deeper truths about racial inequality in the United States, overturn white privilege, or challenge the Racial State. For example, Henry Louis Gates Jr. can discover his Irish roots. Tina Turner can find out she is not significantly related to the Cherokees. Latino stars and starlets can find out about their “exciting” Anglo-African-Indigenous roots. Asian Americans can find out about their long history of respect for education, family, and the arts…

..Because the President and First Lady are the symbolic leaders of a country in which black people were historically considered anti-citizens, less than human, property, and not fit for inclusion in the polity, the DNA citizenship project’s goals are robust. The discovery of Michelle Obama’s white ancestors—while no surprise to her family—is a way for white folks to find kinship with her…to “own” her. Ironically, this will do nothing to soothe the anxieties of Michelle Obama’s among reactionary white conservatives—to them she is a black woman who has no business being in the White House except as a chambermaid.

Likewise, President Obama may be “half-white.” Nevertheless, he is the blackest man alive (despite all efforts to distance himself from policies that would uniquely assist African-Americans) for the Tea Party GOP and the racially resentful, reactionary white public. Race is a double bind for the President. Obama’s whiteness is a means to excuse-make for their racism; Obama’s blackness is a means for white bigots to overtly disrespect and diminish him…

In response to the Times’ first foray into these ugly, ahistorical waters, I offered a commentary and rewrite. I would like to pivot off of that intervention again.

Let’s work through a few particularly rich passages in Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden and offer some correctives and commentary…

…The politics of language are rich here as they advance a multicultural, conservative, colorblind racial agenda that imposes contemporary standards onto the past in an effort to remove the grounds of historical grievance in the present. Melvinia did not give birth to a “biracial” child. She was raped and had a black child who would be considered human property unless freed by his “father.”

The Slaveocracy and America’s racial order was based on the “one-drop rule” where a child’s racial status and freedom was determined by that of the mother. Thus, a white man (and slave owner) could rape, exploit, and do as he wished with black women (and men). The children would be born slaves. The logic of hypodescent was also operative as well. Race is not about the reality of genetic makeup and admixture. Racial identity is about perceptions by the in-group regarding who belongs and who does not.

Despite all of the efforts by the multiracial movement in contemporary America to create a “mixed race” census category—what is really a desire to access white privilege through the creation of a buffer race or colored class—being perceived as “black” or as having “African” ancestry, marks a person as having a connection to that group.

The NY Times is working to frame the story of Michelle’s ancestors, and the child rapist, slave owning white Tribble family, as a human story and drama, one about “ordinary” people…

…The racial project of reading America as a multiracial project historically, in the service of a post-racial fiction about the Age of Obama in the present, is operative throughout the above passage. Rachel Swarns’ allusion to a “multiracial” stew ignores the role of law, practice, social norms, and the State in carefully policing the colorline.

These Americans of “mixed ancestry” were not celebrated. White authorities saw them as a problem to be corrected, “cured,” eliminated, and as a threat to American society. For example, white race scientists labored over what to do about the Whind tribe who were of mixed black, native American, and white ancestry. Strict laws about miscegenation, segregation, schooling, and other areas of racialized civil society, were enforced through violence in order to protect the purity of America’s “white racial stock.”

These racially ambiguous people knew that to “pass” into whiteness was to move up the class and racial hierarchy. This was a common story in the black community, but also extended to Melungeons, the Mississippi Chinese, and others who in acts of racial realpolitik ran away from blackness in order to secure some share of whiteness as a type of property.

Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden‘s last paragraph is a potpourri of historical flattening and misrepresentation.

Why I Remain A Negro

The Saturday Review of Literature
1947-10-11
pages 13-

Walter White, National Secretary
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

THE SCENE was a New York duplex apartment. The people were liberals, economically as well as intellectually well off. They were discussing the race question. I had been invited to speak. One of the women, listening, seemed agitated by something I had said. She scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to another woman, a woman whose skin was reddish brown,, a woman who was probably colored. “Is Mr. White white or colored?” the message inquired. The other scribbled an answer and passed it back. “I am Mrs. White,” the reply said. The white woman, reading it, became excited. Hastily she penciled a comment: “What a wonderful talk! This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to hear him.”

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. Not long ago I stood one morning on a subway platform in Harlem. As the train came in I stepped back for safety. My heel came down upon the toe of the man behind me. I turned to apologize to him. He was a Negro, and his face as he stared at me was hard and full of the piled-up bitterness of a thousand lynchings and a million nights in shacks and tenements and “nigger towns.” “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” he said sullenly. “You white folks are always trampling on colored people.” Just then one of my friends came up and asked how the fight had gone in Washington—there was a filibuster against legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. The Negro on whose toes I had stepped listened, then spoke to me penitently.

“Are you Walter White of the NAACP? I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I thought you were white.” I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race—the appearance of whiteness—is mine. White is the rejection of all color; black is the absorption of  every shade.  There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin. Why then do I insist that I am a Negro, when nothing compels me to do so but myself?…

Read the entire article here.

Performance Studies: Interracialism: Performing Mixed Race (H42.2090)

New York University
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis: American Studies

This course will survey the emergent field of  ‘critical mixed race studies’ with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like ‘the mulatto‘ and ‘the one-drop rule‘? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of ‘passing‘ helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us ‘beyond passing’? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.

Black and white student ruling in a land of rainbows

University World News
Issue 224, 2012-06-03

Chrissie Long

While there appears to be little question that Brazil’s black community has been at a disadvantage regarding degree attainment, a ruling by the country’s top court upholding affirmative action in universities has sparked debate over whether the initiative will have positive outcomes for race relations.

Some say the impasse lies in socio-economics – not in skin colour – and affirmative action will create a dichotomy in a country where none existed previously. Others believe race quotas in universities are essential for equity.

“It is true that darker-coloured Brazilians are underrepresented in the most prestigious universities and courses. Yet people are excluded from excellent schools in Brazil by their poverty, not their race,” said Peter Fry, a British-born anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro…

…Race definitions are alien

Brazil has the largest number of African descendents of all countries outside the continent.

Approximately 45% of Brazil’s 191 million people consider themselves African Brazilian. Most arrived on slave ships between the 16th and 19th centuries and, over the course of the past 500 years, gradually became part of Brazilian society and the Brazilian identity.

The standard definition of ‘black’ and ‘white’ never existed in Brazil like it has in North American or European cultures, says Brazilian historian at Colorado College Professor Peter Blasenheim.

Due to generations of mixed-race marriages, Brazilians have always considered themselves more of a rainbow, where racial distinctions blur, making skin colour a complicated issue…

Race quotas in universities

Reginald Daniel, a professor of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara, reports that this variation in skin colour has already complicated the quota system in Brazil’s universities.

According to a January article in The Economist, two identical twins applied to the Universidade de Brasilia (UnB): one was classified as black, the other as white.

Daniel said UnB began requiring that photographs be reviewed by a commission after situations in which students who appeared white claimed African descent. When this became controversial, UnB began using interviews instead of photographs.

Rio de Janeiro State University, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to adopt a quota system, relied on self-classification but removed ‘pardo’, or brown, from the options so that students either had to select white ‘branco’ or black, ‘negro’…

Read the entire article here.

SO 3300: ‘Race’and ‘Mixed Race’

Forham University
Spring 2010

The origins of ‘race,’its historic role and social construction are examined. Ancient and modern-day ideas are explored. Contrasts between the United States and Latin American concepts of ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ are analyzed. Future implications are discussed.