Mixed Race Studies

Out writer Andrew Jolivétte on Obama and race

Windy City Times
Chicago, Illinois
2012-02-21

David-Elijah Nahmod

History was made a few short years ago, when Barack Obama became the first African American president in U.S. history. Though it’s been mentioned, the fact that the president is actually half white hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention.

There’s no question that American demographics are changing rapidly. The Leave It To Beaver/Father Knows Best nuclear family is disappearing, and is being replaced by families that encompass all the colors of the rainbow.

In his new book, Obama and the Biracial Factor (The Policy Press), professor Andrew J. Jolivétte of San Francisco State University offers a series of essays in which a variety of writers discuss the changing colors of the American landscape. The writers are all university academics, representing a variety of schools and ethnicities. Jolivette talked with Windy City Times about why he felt the book was needed, as well as his own status as a multicultural gay man.

Windy City Times: Can you tell us about the classes you teach at San Francisco State University?

Andrew J. Jolivette: I started teaching almost 12 years ago at the University of San Francisco. It was a people of mixed-descent class that focused on people who are multiracial. I was born and raised in San Francisco and moved to Oakland about eight years ago. For the past two years I’ve been chair of the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

I’ve taught a lot of different classes over the years: Mixed Race Studies, People of Color and AIDS, American Indian Education, American Indian Religion and Philosophy, and Black Indians in the Americas. I suppose because of my training in sociology I am interested in many different social and behavior explanations for societal inequalities, especially for Native Americans, LGBT and communities of color…

…WCT: Why do you think there’s a need for this book?

Andrew J. Jolivette: My own background as a Louisiana Creole (French, American Indian–Opelousa and Atakpa, African and Spanish ) has always hadan impact on my identity. Growing up I wasn’t sure where I fit in exactly in terms of race. My father is a Creole from the Southwest and my mother is African American and American Indian from Alabama and Indianapolis. People always tried to guess what my background was and I’ve heard just about everything from Egyptian and Cuban to East Indian. People from mixed backgrounds are often forced to move between different identities. In the case of Mr. Obama, I argue he knows how to navigate through many different communities. He can relate to white Americans, Black Americans and many other groups because he’s lived in so many different cultures. He has found a way to relate to people that helped him get elected…

…WCT: When he was first elected, much was made of Obama being the first Black president. Do you have any insight as to why his biracial status hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention?

Andrew J. Jolivette: Most of the country still argues that if you have any African or Black ancestry you will be seen and treated as Black. This is true only to a certain extent. In the book, I argue that being half white, being biracial, also shapes who he is as a person…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Americans Ready To Claim Their Own Identity

The New York Times
1996-07-20

Michel Marriott

For Alison Perry, being multiracial has meant moving through life as if she had a giant question mark drawn on her forehead. Strangers frequently approach and begin a vexing guessing game: “Are you Israeli?” “Are you a Latina?” “Where are you from?”

Yet for this slender, almond-colored woman with delicate features drawn from both her black-American father and her Italian-American mother, race is not what defines her.

“I definitely say that I’m interracial,” Ms. Perry said. “I do not identify myself as a black woman. I definitely don’t identify myself as a white woman, either.”

The very existence of multiracial people like Ms. Perry challenges this nation’s traditionally rigid notions of race…

…”People of mixed race in this country haven’t belonged anywhere,” said Charles Byrd, editor and publisher of Interracial Voice, an Internet news journal based in Queens that has backed the march. “The march will, in effect, allow people to come out and be themselves—not just be black, not just be white, but just be a human being.”…

…Forced Choices And No Choices

Increasingly, multiracial people are arguing—and many scientists agree—that race is a social construct, not a biological absolute. Many historians and social scientists, said Steven Gregory, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies at New York University, believe that the notion of race was largely invented as a way to assign social status and privilege.

Unlike sex, which is determined by the X or Y chromosome, there is no genetic marker for race. Indeed, a 1972 study by a Harvard University geneticist, Richard Lewontin, found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. He could trace only 6 percent of such differences to race.

Yet in the closing years of the 20th century, race remains a stubbornly resistant feature of this nation’s culture. Other societies, like those of some islands of the Caribbean and some South American countries, have a more fluid sense of racial identity. In Jamaica, for example, when people speak of color, they are referring to skin tone, not inalterable racial categories, said Cecile Ann Lawrence, a lawyer who was a government administrator in Jamaica.

But in the United States, race even divides multiracial people themselves. While some proudly claim their multiracial identity, others believe it is a sham, an effort to identify with the dominant, and privileged, white culture at the expense of a stigmatized minority.

“There is a tremendous amount of denial,” said Scott Minerbrook, whose father is black and whose mother white, but who considers himself black. Mr. Minerbrook, who is on the staff of Time magazine and lives in Islip, N.Y., says that many people “fall into the trap that they don’t want to be identified with failure; they think blackness equals failure.” But there is no escape, he argues; that is how the rest of the world labels multiracial children.

Some multiracial Americans believe, as Anthony Robert Hale, a graduate student in American literature at the University of California at Berkeley, said, that “in most cases, ‘mixed race’ means no race.”…

…Some Are Forging A Different Path

Regardless of society’s labels, many multiracial people are determined to set their own courses. Ms. Perry, who was an anthropology major at Wesleyan University, has learned to regard the American obsession with race with a degree of detachment, even tolerance. But she herself still defies categorization.

At Wesleyan, she was drawn to other interracial students, a well-organized and relatively large group on campus. She said she never felt part of the black community there.

Nonetheless, she joined a West African dance troupe at Wesleyan and traveled with it to Ghana. In Africa, she recalled with a chuckle, she was considered white. She also began dating one of the dance troupe’s drummers, who is white and Jewish….

Read the entire article here.

A Medical Humanities Perspective On Racial Borderlands

Literature, Arts and Medicine Blog
2008-06-30

Felice Aull, Ph.D., M.A., Associate Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience; Editor in Chief, Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database
New York University School of Medicine

I have long been interested in the metaphor of borderlands as a tool for exploring areas of ambiguity in medicine and in society. Courses that I teach (to medical students) consider ambiguous boundaries between student and professional, patient and physician, personal life and professional life, disease and health, and the cultural confusion that derives from migration and dislocation. I address those issues using theory from the social sciences and humanities in addition to fiction, memoir, poetry, and art. One of the topics that we consider is the ambiguity inherent in concepts of race. This has become a topic of recent interest (and controversy) because race, medical research and practice, and health policy are being linked with the genomics revolution. And since all of these endeavors take place in a sociopolitical context, recent events and discussions in the national political scene cannot help but play a role in our thinking about these topics. With this as background, I offer some thoughts triggered by a recent confluence of events.

The events

1. The presumptive nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s choice for president.
2. The March, 2008, announcement that the National Institutes of Health established the Intramural Center for Genomics and Health Disparities, whose priority is to “understand how we can use the tools of genomics to address some of the issues we see with health disparities.”
3. Publication in the journal, Literature and Medicine, of “How Culture and Science Make Race ‘Genetic’: Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous,” by Celeste Condit. (26/1, Spring 2007 pp.240-268).

What is race?

Because Barack Obama was chosen to be the presidential candidate of a major political party, much has been made of the advances this country has made in racial tolerance and acceptance. Yet the fact that so much attention is being given to the racial component of the upcoming election emphasizes that race and color are still important in the national narrative. Obama personifies the contradictions and fallacies of the way we traditionally think about race. Born in Hawaii to a “white” American woman and a “black” man from the African country of Kenya, Obama is identified by virtually everyone as “African American” and black, although he is culturally atypical in that he is not descended from US slaves. He himself for the most part accepts that designation but he has consistently sought to move beyond race and has even been described as “post-racial.” In this country Obama is virtually forced to identify as African American because he is so identified by almost anyone who notices the color of his skin. Mr. Obama could not identify himself publicly as a white American or as “Caucasian,” even though his ancestry is as much white as it is black. He could not “pass” as white, simply because we tend to equate skin color and other physical characteristics with something that many call “race.”…

…Race-based medicine…

In my teaching I used the recent penetrating article by Celeste Condit in Literature and Medicine (event #3 above) to consider concepts of race and race-based medicine. Condit lays out the background for the current interest in race-based medicine and then proceeds systematically to demonstrate that the complexity of human genetic variation can not be fit into discrete categories like race or what is more often now discussed as continent of origin and gene clusters. She marshals the evidence that “there are no discrete boundaries among groups; instead there are slowly changing [gene] flows” (p. 253). And here is why this essay appeared in a journal of literature and medicine: Condit asserts that language “is always predisposed toward discreteness and binarity” and that we cannot wrap our minds around “any single word or visual map that could capture the 3 million different patterns of difference [in the 3 million base pairs in the human genome that vary]” (250). In addition, Condit argues that the notion that “human genetic variation partitions people into ‘races’ ” is a two-step [probably unconscious] rhetorical strategy that claims (1) gene clustering coincides with continental boundaries and (2) continents coincide with five historically designated racial categories(254). She shows how verbal manipulation is involved in mapping genetic clusters with five continental groupings and then enumerates the many ways that racial designations fluctuate and do not consistently correspond with the five groupings or with genetic clusters…

Read the entire essay here.

‘Non-racialism’ in the struggle against apartheid

South African Review of Sociology (originally Society in Transition)
Volume 34, Issue 1 (2003)
pages 13-37
DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2003.10419082

Gerhard Maré, Professor of Sociology
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important opportunity, arising out of the transitional conjuncture, seriously to come to grips with the racist and racialised categories of apartheid, is rapidly being lost. Racism and a racially-ordered system is founded on the soft bed(rock) of race-thinking, and continues to draw on the banal perpetuation of notions of race in everyday life, as well as in political practice in a democratic South Africa. The author proposes that the undoubted commitment of the African National Congress to ‘non-racialism’ has remained unrealisable because there was no serious theoretical investigation of the status of race categories, either how they operated within apartheid South Africa or within the struggle for democracy itself. For this reason, it seems clear that the ANC’s ‘non-racialism’ more appropriately should be read as ‘non-racism’, as the notion of the existence of ‘races’ as socially meaningful categories have remained pivotal political categories and continue to operate as everyday common sense.

…In this paper I focus on the commitment to ‘non-racialism’ by the ANC, a commitment called the ‘unbreakable thread’ of decades of struggle against white domination (Frederikse 1990), and note some other positions and organisations. I will, in effect, take issue with the application of the term ‘non-racialism’ to describe the position of the ANC, which is much more accurately termed multi-racialism, despite Tambo’s rejection of such an interpretation. In conclusion I will suggest some of the implications of such misuse, most importantly that it cannot be the basis for ‘the primary goal [of] a completely restructured society’ (Frederikse, 1990:3-4).

Race thinking is embedded in our everyday thinking. It is located in racialised social identities, lived through what has been variously referred to as ‘stories of everyday life’(Wright, 1985:15; Heller, 1982), the ‘minutiae of everyday existence’ (Comaroff, 1996:166), the ‘banality’ of living within the ‘assumptions and common-sense habits’ (Billig, 1995:37) of a society permeated with race thinking. Such racialism will have to be disembedded from there, through deliberate social practice, institutional and legal change, and finding ways of subverting, rather than corroborating, daily experience and racialised ways of making sense. We continue to operate with race as a collective identity, and as the articulating and organising principle for other identities and/or moments when we draw on an array of alternate identities. Non-racialism remains without content if it continues to be a largely unexamined rhetorical commitment to an ideal.

At the same time, however, it is necessary immediately to note that my argument does not deny, in any way, the extreme dehumanisation and domination suffered under the system of apartheid, or under any racist system. Nor does it deny, as should be clear, that race thinking is located in real social conditions, and effectively makes sense of the way in which people have experienced, and continue to experience, that social reality, within a changing pattern of domination. It does not explore, here, the various ways in which race thinking serves, at times justificatory, exploitative, and other purposes. On the contrary, my argument depends on recognising the strength of pervasive racialisms, and demands and forms the basis for investigating racism. I will return to this point…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Loving Blackness in the UK

University of Birmingham
March 2010
336 pages

Lisa Amanda Palmer

A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Department of American and Canadian Studies)

Can ‘loving blackness’ become a new discourse for anti-racism in the UK and the broader black diaspora? This thesis will critically assess the concept of ‘loving blackness as political resistance’ as outlined by the African American feminist bell hooks (1992). The thesis will show the ways in which blackness has been both negated and denigrated in western cultures and thus constructed in opposition to notions of love and humanness. Conversely, love and blackness are also rehabilitated in different ways by Black diasporic populations in Britain through the transnational space. The transnational space can provide opportunities for constructing, networks of care, love and anti racist strategies that affirm the value of blackness and Black life. However, the transnational space can also be fraught with risks, dangers and exclusions providing Black and migrant populations with uneven forms of citizenship and belonging to western neo-liberal states. Loving blackness within a transnational context can help to create a dynamic space to affirm blackness against racial exclusions and dominations whilst providing a lens to suggest alternative ways of being human.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Politics of Loving Blackness in the UK
  • Background
  • Black feminist methodologies and personal narratives
  • The transnational space and personal narrative as a methodological reflection
  • Love and Black feminism
  • Love as a means for social change
  • Thesis outline
• Chapter one: Racism and the denigration of blackness
  • Introduction
  • Loving dialogue and the affirmation of Black humanity
  • The politics of love and blackness
  • Is loving blackness possible in a white supremacist context?
  • Blackness as a discursive location
  • ‘Race,’ racism and pseudo science
  • Whiteness lost – the ‘origins’ of blackness in sixteenth century England
  • Plantocracy racism and slavery
  • Early black presence in England
  • Pathological configurations of blackness in the Western environment
  • Internalised narratives of racism
  • Blackness falling out of love with Britishness
  • Conclusion
• Chapter two: A love that binds the nation: race memory and the politics of Forgetting
  • Introduction
  • Navigating race and blackness in Obama’s ‘post-racial’ America
  • Forgetting racial horrors and imperial terror
  • ‘The white, white West’ – white hegemony and social amnesia
  • ‘The forgetting machine’
  • De-colonial fantasies within liberal democracies
  • Conclusion
• Chapter three: ‘We don’t want the hate mongers’: Multicultural love and anti-colonial politics in the making of Black Britain
  • Introduction
  • Are we all British now? Love and the multicultural nation
  • ‘Tea drinking, hokey cokey’ and other projections of monocultural Britain
  • Multicultural blackness in Britain
  • Post-colonial paradigm of blackness in Britain
  • The dialogic paradigm of blackness in Britain
  • Symbols and memory in the making of ‘Black Britain’
  • Windrush
  • Why Manchester 1945?
  • Before ‘Black Britain’
  • Conclusion
• Chapter four: Diminishing Blackness: Transnational Blackness Beyond the ‘Black British’ paradigm
  • Introduction
  • Mixed futures/mixed histories
  • ‘Absorbing’ blackness
  • Invasion and the Black presence in Britain
  • The ‘mongrel nation’
  • Keeping racism in the mix
  • Disappearing blackness
  • Blanqueamianto – ‘The gradual whitening of blackness’
  • Troubling terms of race
  • Reframing Black Liverpool and that moment of optimism
  • Transnational blackness and Liverpool
  • Conclusion
• Chapter five: Slipping and Shifting: The changing parameters of Blackness in Britain
  • Introduction
  • ‘It’s Grimey’ – Black Popular Culture in Britain
  • Black Boys and Eski Beats
  • New migration and new racisms
  • No more saris, no more steel bands, no more samosas
  • ‘The deportation machine’
  • ‘Ethnic’ hierarchies and the new blackness in Britain
  • Racial excesses of white privilege
  • Constant Contestation
  • Conclusion – Loving blackness within a transnational context
• Chapter six: The Cultural Politics of Loving Blackness
  • Introduction
  • ‘Loving Justice’ – Malcolm and Martin
  • Cornel West and the nihilistic threat to Black America
  • Neoliberal nihilism, Katrina and the (in)visible Black American underclass
  • Nihilism and the Katrina catastrophe
  • hooks and ‘loving blackness’
  • Loving Native Indianess
  • Love and philosophy
  • Spirituality and politics
  • Caribbean transnational bonds of kinship and loving blackness
  • Conclusion
• Chapter seven: ‘Ladies a you’re time now’ Erotic Politics, Lovers’ rock And Resistance in Britain
  • Introduction
  • Black sexuality and erotic corruptions
  • Historical legacies
  • Lovers’ rock and its transnational emergence in Britain
  • A femminised sanctuary
  • Blocking Jah vibes
  • Conscious lovers’
  • Love as a discourse for liberation
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
  • Conclusion
  • Future research – ‘Black Europe’
• Bibliography

…Chapter 4: DIMINISHING BLACKNESS: Transnational Blackness beyond the ‘Black British’ paradigm

Introduction

There are a number of reasons why the nomenclature ‘Black British’ has remained a tenuous and contested political location for Black populations in Britain. In this chapter I will explore why our contemporary transnational situation destabilises this notion further. I am suggesting that the continuing disavowal of blackness and racism specifically in media discourses and amongst wider political and social fields in Britain continues to undermine what I will call the ‘optimistic moment of Black Britishness.’ That moment occurred between the mid 1980s and early 1990s where a ‘veritable renaissance’ of ‘Black British’ cultural representation had created a new form of Black visibility in Britain and beyond (Mercer 1994). This new visibility came into existence through the representation and cultural production of Black British film, visual arts, poetry, literature, music and television as well as through the academic writing of Black British scholars during this period such as Kobena Mercer (1994), Paul Gilroy (1987;1993) and Stuart Hall (Dent 1992; Owusu 2000). At the height of this moment, Stuart Hall (1992) suggested that ‘blacks in the British diaspora must, at this historical moment, refuse the binary of Black or British’ (Hall 1992, p.29). For Hall the ‘or’ represented a site of ‘constant contestation.’ In his view the aim of the struggle was for ‘a new kind of cultural positionality, a different logic of difference’ which he argues was encapsulated by the cultural historian Paul Gilroy. According to Hall, Black people in Britain should replace the ‘or’ with ‘and’, thus refusing the essentialising binary of Black or British. Instead the preferred ‘and’ could help us to realise the potentiality or possibility of this hybrid location (Hall 1992). For Hall the logic of coupling rather than binary opposition meant that,

You can be Black and British, not only because that is a necessary position to take in 1992, but because even those two terms, joined now by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do not exhaust all of our identities. Only some of our identities are sometimes caught in that particular struggle (Hall 1992, p.29).

However, after nearly two decades since Hall’s discourse on being both Black and British, has the optimism of this moment gone? Has the expectant ‘and’ deployed by Hall to heal this ‘constant contestation’ delivered the desired end to the entangled struggle of being Black British? I will attempt to answer these questions more specifically in this chapter in relation to the predicted ‘mixed race’ future and ‘mixed race’ histories of Britain and the changing transnational formation of blackness in contemporary British life. I will approach this analysis through the lens of a less than remarkable documentary text, The Great British Black Invasion which charts the changing face of Black Britain in the 21st centaury. I will explain that this documentary works as a micro representational text to the larger continuing omission of specific forms of regional blackness found in Britain in cities such as Liverpool, a city with one of the longest settled Black populations in the UK (Brown 2006). I will further discuss the political implication of Invasion’s discourse on racialised absorption blackness and ‘diminishing blackness’ as well the configuration of blackness as a transnational cultural and political framework. ‘Mixing’ and ‘absorption’ are terms that describe the faux embrace of racial intermixture. And at the same time these terms actually, and somewhat paradoxically, also work to reinforce deeply racist ideas about British racial ‘purity.’ I will conclude by suggesting that the transnational space for Black communities in Britain defined as ‘mixed race’ or otherwise remains a critical yet complex location to build alternative concepts of blackness. Through the dynamic utilisation of diasporic resources, transnational notions of blackness can act as revolutionary interventions ‘that undermine the practice of domination’ (hooks 1992, p.20) helping marginalised human beings to recover their human worth.

Mixed futures/mixed histories

Within the UK, the ‘racial’ forecast for African Caribbean populations suggests that this particular ethnic group will eventually decline as a distinct ethnic category from Britain’s multicultural map (Platt 2008). According to the report, Ethnicity and Family- Relationships within and between ethnic groups: An analysis using the Labour Force Survey (Platt 2008), Britain is facing a ‘mixed race’ future:

At the other end of the spectrum, Black Caribbean men and women were the most likely of any group to be in an inter-ethnic partnership (48 per cent of men and 34 percent of women in couples were in an inter-ethnic partnership); and this increased between first and second (or subsequent) generations and between older and younger men and women. Rates were also higher among couples with children. For 55 per cent of Caribbean men living with a partner and children under 16, and 40 per cent of Caribbean women, that partner was from a different ethnic group. It therefore appears a trend that is set to continue and that will result in an increasing number of people with diverse identities of which Caribbean heritage forms a part. It also means that those who define themselves as singularly Caribbean are likely to decline over time, as increasingly complex heritages emerge among those with some element of Caribbean descent (Platt 2008, p.7).

For many yeas now, it has been suggested that the fastest growing population in the UK will be of ‘mixed origins.’ For example, in the early 1990s, it was reported that around 53 per cent of African Caribbean men age 16-24 and 36 percent of Caribbean women of the same age were married or cohabiting with white partners (Modood et al., 1997). In our increasingly globalised societies, where diverse mobile populations move around the globe for temporary or permanent settlement, patterns of sexual interaction across racialised, national, religious and linguistic borders are set to continue (Bhattacharyya, et al. 2002). However, it is worth pointing out that the practice of ‘race mixture’ is not new to British soil. The long historical presence of Black populations in Britain, in particular African, Caribbean and Asian populations has been documented in the social histories that trace the Black presence in Britain back to the Roman era (Fryer 1984, Walvin 1994, Christian 1998, Ramdin 1987). Since the rise of the British Empire, the continuity of this presence has been directly linked to transatlantic slavery and the expansion of British imperial and colonial endeavours (Fryer 1984, Ramdin 1987). Metropolitan cities such as London, Cardiff, Liverpool and Bristol were some of the major British seaports involved in the transatlantic slave trade. It was at these ports that many Africans enslaved and in servitude first glimpsed British soil and began to make an impact upon local white populations (Christian 1998). During the nineteenth century, amongst the Black settler communities and visitors that emerged within the major British slaving ports, the practice of interracial marriage became widespread between Black males and white females (Fryer 1984, Christian 1998). The most common explanation for intermarriage suggests that on the whole the Black population during this period (numbering approximately 10,000 in total) had largely consisted of young African males who heavily out numbered the presence of African women (Fryer 1984, p.235). The practice of interracial marriages and the integration of African men into to larger white populations became a common practice amongst earlier noted individual Black settlers to Britain such as Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and others who came before them (Fryer 1984). Early Black radical figures to emerge onto the British scene were of ‘mixed origins.’ Personalities such as William Davidson one of the infamous Cato Street conspirators who attempted to blow up the entire Cabinet of the British Government in 1820 alongside Robert Wedderburn a working class hero who advocated press freedom in Britain whilst proclaiming that slaves had the right to kill their masters, both had fathers from Scotland and Black mothers from Jamaica (Fryer 1984). The Jamaican nurse and healer Mary Seacole the celebrated heroine of the Crimean War (1853-1856) who risked her life to nurse wounded and dying soldiers in the British Army also shared a ‘mixed’ Jamaican and Scottish ancestry (Fryer 1984). In the early twentieth century, in port cities such as Liverpool, Black male settlers to the city whether as students, seamen or factory workers inevitably formed intimate interracial relationships and families with local white women (Christian 1998). What I am referencing here is that the idea of a ‘mixed race’ future in Britain is neither novel nor without historical continuity. Indeed we cannot consider the possibility and implications of mixed futures without considering the living contextual legacy of mixed heritage communities in Britain. Thus as Peter Fryer (1984) had noted in response to the question as to what actually happened to Britain’s earlier nineteenth century Black populations, it would appear that the decedents of ‘interracial’ couplings no longer thought of themselves as constituting a distinct Black community and over time became part of the British poor (Fryer 1984, p.235). As such it would be reasonable to suggest that a significant number of ‘white’ families in Britain share a hidden history of Black ancestry. As Fryer explains,

The records of their lives are obscure and scattered, and they have for the most part been forgotten by their descendents. But there must be many thousands of British families who, if they traced their roots back to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, would find among their ancestors an African or person of African descent (Fryer 1984, p.235).

Increased awareness of the historical continuity of early Black settlers would enable twenty first century Black populations in Britain to form more complex discursive engagements with the notion of blackness and its emergence within the British Isles. Furthermore, a more complex rendering of the pre-twentieth century Black experience in Britain would further contribute to debunking the implausible myth of a racially sealed pure white Anglo Saxon race as synonymous with being British…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos

Palgrave Macmillan
April 2005
352 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6567-7, ISBN10: 1-4039-6567-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4039-6568-4, ISBN10: 1-4039-6568-4

Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Brown University

Suzanne Oboler, Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

In this collection, leading scholars focus on the contemporary meanings and diverse experiences of blackness in specific countries of the hemisphere, including the United States. The anthology introduces new perspectives on comparative forms of racialization in the Americas and presents its implications both for Latin American societies, and for Latinos’ relations with African Americans in the U.S. Contributors address issues such as: Who are the Afro-Latin Americans? What historical contributions do they bring to their respective national polities? What happens to their national and socio-racial identities as a result of migration to the United States? What is the impact of the growing presence of Afro-Latin Americans within U.S. Latino populations, particularly with respect to the continuing dynamics of racialization in the United States today? And, more generally, what are the prospects and obstacles for rethinking alliances and coalition-building between and among racial(ized) minorities and other groups in contemporary U.S. society?

Table of Contents

• Part I: Comparative Racialization in the Americas
  • Flows and Counterflows: Latinas/os, Blackness, and Racialization in Hemispheric Perspective—Suzanne Oboler and Anani Dzidzienyo
• Part II: The Politics of Racialization in Latin America
  • A Region in Denial: Racial Discrimination and Racism in Latin America—Ariel E. Dulitzky
  • Afro-Ecuadorian Responses to Racism: Between Citizenship and Corporatism—Carlos de la Torre
  • The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Peru’s Limeños in the 1990s—Suzanne Oboler
  • Bad Boys and Peaceful Garifuna: Transnational Encounters Between Racial Stereotypes of Honduras and the United States (and Their Implications for the Study of Race in the Americas)—Mark Anderson
  • Afro-Mexico: Blacks, Indígenas, Politics, and the Greater Diaspora—Bobby Vaughn
  • The Changing World of Brazilian Race Relations?—Anani Dzidzienyo
• Part III: The Politics of Racialization in the United States
  • Framing the Discussion of African American–Latino Relations: A Review and Analysis—John J. Betancur
  • Neither White nor Black: The Representation of Racial Identity Among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland—Jorge Duany
  • Scripting Race, Finding Place: African Americans, Afro-Cubans, and the Diasporic Imaginary in the United States—Nancy Raquel Mirabal
  • Identity, Power, and Socioracial Hierarchies Among Haitian Immigrants in Florida—Louis Herns Marcelin
  • Interminority Relations in Legislative Settings: The Case of African Americans and Latinos—José E. Cruz
  • African American and Latina/o Cooperation in Challenging Racial Profiling—Kevin R. Johnson
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions—Mark Sawyer
  • Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar—Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Witnessing History: An Octogenarian Reflects on Fifty Years of African American–Latino Relations—Nelson Peery

Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction

Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 4, Number 4 (2011)
pages 4-46
23 illustrations

Yaba Amgborale Blay, Assistant Teaching Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The cosmetic use of chemical agents to lighten the complexion of one’s skin, also referred to as skin whitening, skin lightening, and/or skin bleaching, is currently a widespread global phenomenon. While the history of skin bleaching can be traced to the Elizabethan age of powder and paint, in its current manifestations, skin bleaching is practiced disproportionately within communities “of color” and exceedingly among people of African descent. While it is true that skin bleaching represents a multifaceted phenomenon, with a complexity of historical, cultural, sociopolitical, and psychological forces motivating the practice, the large majority of scholars who examine skin bleaching at the very least acknowledge the institutions of colonialism and enslavement historically, and global White supremacy contemporarily, as dominant and culpable instigators of the penchant for skin bleaching. As an introduction to this Special Issue of The Journal of Pan African Studies focusing on skin bleaching and global White supremacy, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine the symbolic significance of whiteness, particularly for and among African people, by outlining the history of global White supremacy, both politically and ideologically, discussing its subsequent promulgation, and further investigating its relationship to the historical and contemporary skin bleaching phenomenon.

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Race Matters: Race, Telenovela Representation, and Discourse in Contemporary Brazil

University of Iowa
May 2010
193 pages

Samantha Nogueira Joyce

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

In Race Matters: Race, Telenovela Representation, and Discourse in Contemporary Brazil, I investigate the primetime telenovela Duas Caras (2008), examining how different factors such as narrative, audience reaction, as well as media criticism and commentary played a dynamic role in creating a meta-discourse about race in contemporary Brazil. In a larger sense, I examine how the social discourse about contemporary race relations and racism in that country were circulated, constructed and reconstructed during the time the program aired. Additionally, I explore the role of the media, particularly the telenovela, in debunking the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy. Secondly, the research incorporates the Brazilian notion that telenovelas are “open texts”, meaning they are co-authored by a variety of industrial, creative, cultural and social actors, into a methodological approach that expands the traditional idea of textual analysis. In addition to reading the telenovela text itself, this study investigates the production process, audience responses and broader media coverage. Thus, the public discourse about the telenovelas is a key part of the text itself.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. RACE MATTERS: RACE, TELENOVELA REPRESENTATION, AND DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • “Data” (Textual) Analysis
  • Cultural Value
  • Literature Review
  • Brazilian Television History
  • Soap Operas Vs Telenovelas: ‘Distant Relatives’
  • The Centrality of Telenovelas
  • Audience, Democratic Participation and Publis Spheres
  • Entertainment-Education
  • Ethical Dilemas
  • Conclusions: Current Reality, Future Possibilities
  • Outline of Chapters
• II. BLACK FLOWS: DUAS CARAS, THE LEGACY OF WHITENING AND RACIAL DEMOCRACY IDEOLOGY IN BRAZIL
  • Race and Raça. The United States and Brazil: Similar History, Disparate Outcomes
  • The Culteral Role of Narratives of Cross-Racial Love
  • The Black Movement in Brazil
  • Affirmative Action Policies, Quotas and Racial Identity In Brazil
  • Conclusions
• III. “MY LITTLE WHITEY”. “MY BIG, DELICIOUS NEGRO”. TELENOVELAS, DUAS CARAS, AND THE REPRESENTATION OF RACE
  • Brazilian Blacks and TV
  • Historical Uses of Racial Stereotypes. American and Brazilian TV
  • Representing Contradicions: Evilásio’s Case
  • From a Traditionally “White Priviledged” Space to “Multicolored Duas Caras”
  • Duas Caras, Ratings, Racism and Public Pressure
  • My Little Whitey and My Big Delicious Negro
• IV. DEU NO BLOGÃO! (“IT WAS IN THE BIG BLOG!”). WRITING A TELENOVELA, A BLOG, AND A METADISCOURSE
  • Mãe Setembrina
  • The Barretos
  • The Role of Ratings: IBOPE
  • Conclusions
• V. DUAS CARAS AS A NEW APPROACH TO SOCIAL MERCHANDIZING
  • The Social Merchandising Approach
  • E-E and SM: Similarities and Disparities
  • Emotional Involvement and Personal Agendas
  • Duas Caras as the “Future of E-E”
  • Racial Matters as a “Social Good”
  • E-E, SM and the Importance of Celebrity
  • Conclusions
• VI. CONCLUSIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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The Land of Miscegenation: Is the Racial Democracy Theory in Brazil a Myth?

Morgan State University
May 2005
86 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1430902
ISBN: 9780542025518

Makini Ramisi Chaka

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

This research is designed to show that Brazil’s racial democracy theory, founded in the early-20 th century by sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, is a myth. The theory states that miscegenation, acculturation and assimilation created a cultural mélange that made all races equal. However, severe social, economic, and political oppression of non-whites, specifically African descendants in Brazil have forced the country to reevaluate its national endorsement as a racial democracy.

The author explores three of the fundamental factors of the racial democracy theory, (1) miscegenation, (2) race vs. class, and (3) social and legal discrimination. In addition the author uses comparative analysis methodology from a cultural studies disciplinary approach to evaluate the arguments of proponents and opponents of the racial democracy theory. The opponents led by Florestan Fernandes in the 1960’s reveal white supremacy as the dominating form of race relations between blacks and whites in Brazil by examining racial mixing, race and class disparities, and forms of discrimination. This research focuses on the effects of those factors upon the Afro-Brazilian population, which distinctly occupy a subordinate place in society.

The conclusion reached by this author is that the racial democracy theory is a myth of the powerful white elite. The myth not only denies racial identification and a shared ethnic identity of African descendants in Brazil, but it also suppresses racial mobilization and denies them a right to legal defense.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1
  • Introduction
  • Statement of the Problem
  • Background of the Problem
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Importance of the Study
• Chapter 2: Literature Review
• Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 4: Miscegenation
• Chapter 5: Race vs. Class
• Chapter 6: Social and Legal Discrimination
• Chapter 7: Conclusion

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Challenging Certain Aspects of Intergroup Relations in “The Shaping of South African Society, 1652 – 1840”: A Review Article

Kronos
Number 17 (1990)
pages 71-76

Hans Heese, University Archivist
Stellenbosch University

When the first edition of “The Shaping of South African Society 1652-1820”, dealing with the integration of southern Africa into a world economy and the domination of whites over blacks, was published in 1979, it filled a need which was increasingly being felt in South African historiography. In its introduction the authors stated that they wanted to “redress” the imbalance created by previous, Eurocentric historiography which has given “inadequate attention to non-Europeans: in this case the slaves, Khoikhoi, Khoisan hunter-gatherers, Bantu-speakers, free blacks and persons of mixed descent”

The volume consisted of four parts: the first part covered the major population groups, the second the rulers and the ruled, the third the expansion of the colony and its frontiers, and in the last part Elphick and Giliomee reviewed the development of social stratification over the whole period.

The other contributors were Armstrong, Freund, Guelke, Legassick, Schutte and Shell who had all done prolonged research in the various archives of South Africa, the Netherlands and Great Britain. With the exception of Legassick, all of them represent the “liberal” school — as opposed to the “radical” school.

In 1982 an Afrikaans translation, ’n Samelewing in Wording: Suid-Afrika 1652-1820, was published. Both versions were used as textbooks at undergraduate and postgraduate level at South African universities.

In 1989 a second edition was published under the title The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1849. The new edition contained two new chapters—one on the Cape economy and the other on the Cape under the British, 1814-1834. The chapters on the Khoisan and Slaves had been extensively revised and extended to cover the period up to the 1830’s, both with the help of Malherbe and Worden as co-authors respectively. The authors of these two additional chapters—the one on the Cape economy and the other on the British at the Cape—were Robert Ross and Jeff Peires. Giliomee incorporated his earlier chapter on the burgher rebellions (1795-1815) from the 1979 edition in his contribution on the Eastern Frontier in the second edition…