Mixed Race Studies

Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Auditorium of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York
Monday, 2011-09-12, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

Discussant: Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU

Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. She teaches extensively on these topics. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group) and Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación (INAH, UNAM, CEMCA and IRD), and has two forthcoming chapters in Contesting Recognition (Palgrave) and Cultures of Colour (Berghahn Books).

Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this paper presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. Mestiza is a racial category that emerges as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. Mestiza refers to those who represent Mexicaness and, therefore, those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism. Mestiza is then seen as term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implies possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. Such setting has given way to a process of racial and racist normalization that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the commonly spread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because we are all ‘mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status.

The title for the CLACS Fall 2011 Colloquium Series is Contemporary Racisms in the Americas. This colloquium will explore emergent racisms in the Americas as integral to the multicultural and what some have called “post racial” present defined within larger processes of economic and cultural globalization and transnational migration. It will also deepen the understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racism as major obstacles to the construction of intercultural relations, racial and economic justice, and democracy. In this way, it will complement the themes covered by the seminar on Racisms and anti-racist strategies in the Americas. It will become an opportunity for students to benefit from latest contributions to the analysis of racism in the hemisphere and develop a thematic and methodological comparative perspective. It will also become an opportunity for a larger audience to benefit from the information and analysis of cutting-edge scholarship which is also preoccupied with the construction of anti-racist strategies.

For more information, click here.

Getting Back to Basics: Re-Reading NYT’s “Race Remixed”

Nuñez Daughter
2011-02-15

Kismet Nuñez

A few weeks ago, @TrickAmaka sent me a New York Times piece by Susan Saulny on the high numbers of adults who identify as mixed-race as of the 2010 census.  In what was apparently the first in a series titled “Race Remixed,” the article focuses on a group of students at the University of Maryland as part of “the crop of students moving through college right now” who make up “the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”  Apparently, inquiring minds expect to latest census to reflect the changing dynamics of race in America:

One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.

I’m glad I waited until after V-Day to even click the link.  Turns out the second article basically redacted the first (it is, *gasp* a “complex” matter, quantifying and analyzing the mixed-race population), and the third (well, what do you, our ever so intelligent and enraged readers, think?) threw the topic to the wolves of the blogosphere for further discussion…

The piece is mostly NYT playing Columbus and re-discovering race (mixture) in this country.  Again.  After all, what do you with bleached out phrases like these:

“Some proportion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans.”

 A bit of rape with your legacy of colonialism?  A dollop of indentured servitude and forced labor on the side?  How Disney of you…

…And I affirm Ms. Wood, Ms. López-Mullins, and all of the other students who were brave enough to talk to a reporter about what is going on in their hearts and in their heads.  Figuring out who you are is no easy feat, regardless of your race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc., etc., etc.
 
But there is a legacy of violence that underlies all of these identity claims and we need to make that central to the discussion.   Once upon a time a black man boy was lynched for whistling at a white woman.  Once upon a time a black woman was raped for walking down the wrong road.  Once upon a time a white woman was enslaved for not being white enough (or was she?).
 
And because we should never speak of these relations as though they were simply a matter of romance, a rainbow conflagration of resistance that just happened to occur between the legs of women of color, I will also never advocate for “mixed-race” as a corporate identity…

Read the entire article here.

Race Card: The New York Times Realizes Mixed People Exist

Bitch Media
2011-01-31

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Breaking news: the New York Times has discovered mixed people. Did you know that the number of racially mixed families in the US is growing? Or how about that some mixed kids feel pressured to choose one race? And get this—multiracial people find it annoying to be asked, “What are you?”
 
Yeah, that’s about as deep as the Times Jan. 29 piece on multiracial youth got. The paper evidently rolled out the article because the Census Bureau will soon unveil data about racial groups in the U.S., including how many people identified as more than one race—a move the government first allowed on the 2000 census.

…As required by law after Election Day 2008, all articles about multiracial people must make note of President Obama. And this piece follows suit. Why did Obama just check black on his census form? Isn’t he white, too? Should we call him the first black president or the first multiracial president?…

Read the entire article here.

Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Paper presented at XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gothenburg, Sweden
July 2010
21 pages

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo

Two paradigmatic cases of the building process of post-slavery societies in the Americas were, without a doubt, Brazil and the United States. While the United States had an exceptional and singular development, the Brazilian case can be generalised, with certain caveats, to other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean in terms of the incorporation of Afro-descendent and Amerindian populations into the free work regime, the formation of a class society, as well as the development of racial and national ideologies. Whereas in Brazil racial democracy was cultivated, segregation still presents a problem in the United States; whilst the former perpetuates pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and precarious employment, the latter provided for the formation of a modern black society, albeit separate from the rest of the nation; if in Brazil we have turned colour into the basic unit of a complicated symbolic system of status attribution, in the U.S. race was built into a descent status group.

In this article I aim to clarify the way in which Brazil has, since abolition, been developing a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendents. Not only do I intend to show how this system has developed through time, but how it is also shaped by the mobilization of the black population around the notion of race—as a group of solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. My strategy is to trace the terms “colour” and “race” and their meanings through time, as used or systemised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. Certainly, this is a preliminary and incomplete study, but I hope that it can serve as a guide to future and more systematic investigations about specific periods, places and social agents…

Read the entire paper here.

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

Duke University Press
2003
312 pages, 41 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3070-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3058-5

Jerry Dávila, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health.

Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Building the “Brazilian Man”
• 2. Educating Brazil
• 3. What Happened to Rio’s Teachers of Color?
• 4. Elementary Education
• 5. Escola Nova no Estado Novo: The New School in the New State
• 6. Behaving White: Rio’s Secondary Schools
• Epilogue: The Enduring Brazilian Fascination with Race
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Number 21 (November 1979)
pages 20-22

Joan R. Dassin

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos Milagres), says its director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a clear direct film that confronts a human question—that of racial discrimination—with great frankness and humor.

Completed in December 1975 and first shown in Brazil in October 1977, Tent of Miracles, based on Jorge Amada’s novel, is indeed a richly-peopled, plain-speaking, and even light-hearted picture about the persecution and survival of black African culture in Brazil. With this focus, Nelson Pereira—the patriarch of nationally-minded filmmakers in Brazil for nearly 25 years—has challenged the most widely-held false belief in his society: the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

…This visual parable of “whitening” reveals the ideology implicit in the film’s defense of racial crossbreeding. It also undercuts the energetic and upbeat presentation of an autonomous Afro-Brazilian culture. Unwittingly, perhaps, Nelson Pereira repeats the error of both his literary source (Bahian novelist Jorge Amado’s 1969 novel, Tent of Miracles) and an earlier classic of Brazilian social history (Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves of 1933). Both works uncritically advocate miscegenation.

Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character. In contrast, the recognition that in siring the Brazilian race the Portuguese colonizers brutally imposed their will on black female slaves—after largely exterminating or subjugating recalcitrant Indian laborers—has spread very slowly. Indeed, historical truth has only recently made inroads into the national myth that Brazilians are the harmonious products of these three races, and live in an untroubled racial democracy.

As Brazilian culture critic Sergio Augusto has pointed out, miscegenation—both as a practice and as a widely espoused doctrine—has had two pernicious effects. Rather than fostering egalitarianism, miscegenation has promoted “whitening.” Most seriously, it has denied to blacks (Indians being long out of the picture) the opportunity to develop their cultural identity as an independent group. Another Brazilian commentator, Muniz Sodré, seconds this view. Miscegenation’s hidden value of “whitening,” he asserts, is in fact a rejection of black culture in Brazil, a relegation of the Afro-Brazilian inheritance to a “source of sensationalism, a plethora of genital tricks, and an eternal supplier of recipes.”

Lamentably, Tent of Miracles does not explore these negative consequences of miscegenation for black cultural survival in Brazil. On the contrary, the philosophy of “whitening” that lies behind supposedly egalitarian racial crossbreeding is visually and emotionally reinforced by the “success story” of Tadeu Canhoto. The U.S. viewer will probably miss the subtle racist implications of lauding miscegenation, because here the “mixed” population is considered black, and as such, is clearly subject to the will of the white majority. But in Brazil, the color line is not drawn so sharply. Indeed, the “democratic” mixing of races is the cornerstone of the dominant national ideology of race, ironically described by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes as “the prejudice of having no prejudice.”

Defenders of the doctrine of miscegenation and the myth of racial democracy come from all quarters in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, who with Jorge Amado is the greatest popularizer of Brazil for North Americans, has proudly noted that Brazil is growing ever “browner.” Freyre sees this trend as “proof” that the Brazilian “meta-race,” supposedly formed in equal parts by blacks, Indians and whites, is at last emerging.  Even some Brazilian blacks have themselves proposed miscegenation so that “the negro will disappear and we will not have racial conflict like they do in the United States.” As the young black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento recently reflected, the 18th century dictum that “Brazil is a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattos” is still the accepted national vision. The vision has only one catch: it is predicated on the “total disappearance” of those who live in “hell.”…

Read the entire article here.

ASEM 2535: The Multiracial Individual

The Womens College, University of Denver
Fall Quarter, 2011

Arthur C. Jones, Clinical Professor and Chair of Culture and Psychology

From the beginning of its history, the United States has always been a place where bi-ethnic and bi-racial romantic alliances have been common, producing children with multi-ethnic and multi-racial roots. This was inevitable in a country that evolved as an international “melting pot,” including Native American peoples, enslaved Africans, and successive waves of immigrants and refugees from around the world. Yet, it was not until the year 2000 that the U.S. Census included a category that allowed respondents to indicate a bi-racial or multi-racial heritage/identity. This course will explore the historical racial tensions in the U.S. that have made it difficult to acknowledge the reality of multi-racial peoples in its midst, and will trace the trends in culture and national consciousness that made it possible for a change to occur in the 2000 Census. We will survey the varying ways in which multiracial people have been regarded by the larger society in different social contexts, as well as the ways in which the sociological, psychological, and political dynamics of multiracial identity have changed over time, and have impacted the experience of multiracial people themselves. Finally, we will examine the contemporary social and psychological dynamics of race and ethnicity in the U.S., including the continuing controversy surrounding the very idea of a multiracial identity.

For more information, click here.

Emerging Voices in Academia: Critical Mixed Race Theory

Little Theater, Building 1200
Nappa Vally College
Napa, California
2011-09-22, 16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Dr. Andrew Jolivétte is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and social/cultural critic. His work spans many different social and political arenas – from education reform and LGBT/Queer community of color identity issues to mixed-race identity, critical whiteness studies, gay marriage, and AIDS disparities among people of color. Jolivétte is currently an assistant professor in the American Indian Studies Department and also teaches in the Ethnic Studies Program at San Francisco State University. He recently completed a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship through the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Jolivétte is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, Creole studies, Black-Indians, critical mixed-race movement building, and mixed-race health disparities. He is the author of, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, February 2012), Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, July 2006) which is a part of the Contemporary Native American Communities Series and Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, January 2007).

For more information, click here.

Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

Ruth Williams, Seretse Khama and family

This one-off documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing.

Throughout modern history, interracial sex has been one of society’s great taboos, and across many parts of the world, mixed race relationships have been subjected to a range of deterrents. Mixed couples have endured shame, stigma and persecution and many have risked the threat of ostracism from their friends and families.

In several parts of the world, including South Africa during the apartheid era, governments introduced legislation to prohibit race mixing. Laws against race mixing were still in force in 16 American states until they were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Loving v Virginia case of 1967.

Yet despite the social and legal constraints–and the even more violent extra-judicial attempts to discourage race mixing organised by extreme nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan–interracial relationships have been an ever-present feature of societies throughout modern times.

Through the stories of interracial relationships which created scandals in their own time–including the liaisons between the East India Company’s James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair un-Nissa at the beginning of the 19th Century, and the romance of the Botswanan royal Seretse Khama and the middle-class British girl Ruth Williams in the years after the Second World War–the film examines the complex history of interracial relationships and chronicles the shifts in attitudes that for centuries have created controversy and anxiety all around the world.

Contributors to this film include the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn; who founded the Seretse Khama Defence Council; and the esteemed moral philosopher Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose mother Peggy Cripps–the daughter of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps married his father, the Ghanaian political activist Joe Appiah in 1953.

Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country’s fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.

The first film (1910-1939) [Air Date: 2011-10-06, 20:00Z] discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.

The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.

In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.

Notes from Steven F. Riley.

For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4).
• Mark Christian. “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (2008): 213-241.
• Lucy Bland. “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender & History, Volume 17, Issue 1 (2005): 29-61.
• Rachel M. Fleming.“Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4 (1930): 257-263.
• Carina E. Ray. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender & History, Volume 21, Number 3 (2009): 628-646.
• Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. (London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3).
• Alison Blunt. “Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain,” International Journal of Population Geography (Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora) Volume 9, Issue 4 (2003): 281-294.
• Sydney F. Collins. “The Social Position of White and “Half-Caste” Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review, Volume 16, Number 6 (1951): 796-802.