Mixed Race Studies

Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-22

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV…

…“I started noticing more the popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explained when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society, I would like to see more attention to literature, performance and art that is using the debates about mixed race to think more carefully about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”…

…Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting that she feels so different from everyone else, even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it.”

Elam said the strip sparked anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character so flatly dismissed Jazmine’s desire to be biracial.  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including Baby Halfie, the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The plaything was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. “The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves

The Guardian
2010-08-25

Tom Phillip

Interviewers plan to reach 190m people, including the long-ignored Kalunga, by motorbike, plane, canoe and donkey

When Jorge Moreira de Oliveira’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather arrived in Brazil in the 18th century he was counted off the slave-ship, branded and dispatched to a goldmine deep in the country’s arid mid-west. After years of scrambling for gold that was shipped to Europe, he fled and became one of the founding fathers of the Kalunga quilombo, a remote mountain-top community of runaway slaves.

On Wednesday last week, more than 200 years later, it was Moreira’s turn to be counted—this time not by slavemasters but by Cleber, a chubby census taker who appeared at his home clutching a blue personal digital assistant (PDA).

“I’m Kalunga. A Brazilian Kalunga,” Moreira told his visitor from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, who diligently noted down details about the interviewee’s eight children, monthly income and toilet arrangements.

Such is Brazil’s 2010 census—a gigantic logistical operation that aims to count and analyse the lives of more than 190 million people in one of the most geographically and racially diverse nations on earth…

…Identity

“It is a question of identity,” said Ivonete Carvalho, the government’s programme director for traditional communities. “When you assert your identity you are saying you want [government] action and access to public policies. [The census] is a fantastic x-ray.”

The Kalungas’ fight for recognition is part of a wider movement for racial equality in Brazil, a country with deep roots in Africa but where Afro-Brazilian politicians and business leaders remain few and far between. According to Carvalho, only one of Brazil’s 81 senators is black, despite the fact that Afro-Brazilians represent at least 53% of the population. The last census found that fewer than 40% of Afro-Brazilians had access to sanitation compared with nearly 63% of whites.

Just as descendents of Brazil’s runaway slaves are finding their voice—and telling the census takers about it—so too are Brazil’s officially black and indigenous communities swelling as a growing number of Brazilians label themselves “black” or “indigenous” rather than “mulatto” when the census takers come knocking.

“People are no longer scared of identifying themselves or insecure about saying: ‘I’m black, and black is beautiful,’ ” Brazil’s minister for racial equality, Elio Ferreira de Araujo, told the Guardian…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Johnson]

American Anthropologist
Volume 110, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pp. 79–80
ISSN 0002-7294; online ISSN 1548-1433
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00013.x

Amanda Walker Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? G. Reginald Daniel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 365 pp.

Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 407 pp.

These two books discuss the racial formations of blackness from the foundations of early capitalism and modernist nation-state formation through contemporary transformations. Both caution against the silencing of race, particularly the dangers of “colorblindness” in political engagement and in theorizations of globalization, but both books also forge critiques of race essentialism. Whereas Globalization and Race explores geopolitics and notions of “diaspora,” Race and Multiraciality explores lineage and multiraciality. The methodological and theoretical approaches are what most separate these texts, as Globalization and Race centers on ethnographies and anthropological theories whereas Race and Multiraciality combines analysis of secondary historical and demographic data and sociological theories…

…Race and Multiraciality compares racial formations in the United States and Brazil, particularly the dimensions of blackness and multiraciality. Daniel argues that the ending of legal segregation in the United States—coupled with challenges to the “binary racial project” or white–black paradigm by multiracial movements—and the disruption of the notion of “racial democracy” and the “ternary racial project” (or white–multiracial–black paradigm) in Brazil by the movements for African Brazilian recognition and racial equality have sent the United States and Brazil on converging paths. Daniel juxtaposes the “Latin Americanization” (p. 259) of U.S. racial politics in the context of emerging recognition of multiraciality and desires for colorblind “racial democracy” with the “Anglo Americanization” (p. 285) of Brazilian racial politics. This is done in the context of increasing dichotomization of negro–branco (black–white) and the interpellation of multiracial people into a unified and “race-d”—versus “colored” as in the colonial and census terms pretos and pardo—African Brazilian identity. Daniel seeks to disrupt the notion that multiraciality is inherently problematic as well as to expose the untenability of colorblindness, particularly in its neoliberal form.

Daniel’s historicization of trajectories of Eurocentrism that underline both “whitening” in Brazil and antimiscegenation in the United States—including the “paranoia about invisible blackness” (p. 37) and the granting of privilege in terms of behavioral and phenotypic proximity to Europeanness that pervaded both nation’s racial projects—seems to suggest that the processes of racial formation in the two nations have converged, or at least intersected, at prior historical moments to the contemporary era. Although he explores the complexity of “Latin” American colonization models in Louisiana and the Southwest as they confront the “Anglo” models of the “North and Upper South,” he overlooks the mythification of the U.S. post–Civil War “North” as itself a variant of a “racial democracy.” In my view, the linearity of his model or metaphor of “converging paths” undermines his attempts to problematize U.S. and Brazilian racial projects. Additionally, although Daniel critiques the “binary racial project” in the United States, he also tends to reify it, at times conflating multiraciality with black and white biraciality (see pp. 173, 295). The racialization of Asian Americans in the United States and Brazil disappears in both his theorization of the “binary” and “ternary” models of race and also his discussions of multiracial movements…

Read or purchase the review here.

Truthdig Radio with Marcia Dawkins

Truthdig Radio
KPFK 90.7 FM (Los Angeles); 98.7 FM (Santa Barbara); 99.5 FM (China Lake); 93.7 North San Diego
Wednesday, 2011-04-20, 21:00Z (14:00 PDT, 17:00 EDT)

Kasia Anderson, Host and Associate Editor

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dr. Dawkins discusses mixed race identities, press (including the 2011-04-18 CNN article, “Neither black nor white: Three multiracial generations, one family” by Thom Patterson) and the census.

List to the interview here (Ends at 00:10:57).

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Bailey]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 36, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 535-536
DOI: 10.1177/009430610703600609

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?, by G. Reginald Daniel. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 360pp. cloth. ISBN: 0271028835.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s adoption of the mark “one or more races” format in 2000 is viewed by some scholars as a racial revolution of sorts. It may signal a changing tide from monoracial understandings of population diversity (i.e., recognizing only single racial heritages) to the interpellation of a more complex phenomenon of multiraciality. Framing this shift as from a binary (black vs. white) to a ternary racial project (white, multiracial, black), sociologist G. Reginald Daniel contributes significantly to our understanding of the contentious issues surrounding this development. Importantly, he does so as an insider, having been active in social movements promoting the recent Census recognition of multiracial identities (p. 5).

In his latest book, Daniel juxtaposes the shifting U.S. dynamic with changes underway in Brazil. Interestingly, that context appears to be moving in the opposite direction, from ternary (white, brown/multiracial, black) to binary (white vs. negro) racial understandings. Hence, he subtitles his book “Converging Paths,” situating it as a must-read for students of comparative racial dynamics. There has yet to be a census adoption of the binary project in Brazil, but it may only be a matter of time.

Framed, then, as a push and pull between binary and ternary racial projects, Daniel’s goal is to understand similarities and differences in these countries’ racial formations and their consequences for both the production of inequality and for the possibility of overcoming it. To do so, he offers an extensive exploration of the existing literature on to media (print, television, and internet) and census bureau/governmental sources, social movement activists, and observations of public behavior in Brazil and the United States. Although the exposition of this extensive material in this comparative fashion constitutes the contribution of this book, much of the material is drawn from his previously published work, as the author points out (pp. 5–6)…

Read or purchase the review here.

More Minnesotans say they’re multiracial in 2010 Census

TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press
2011-04-17

Richard Chin and MaryJo Webster

Maybe it’s hip to be mixed.

That could be one explanation for Minnesota’s 51 percent increase over the past decade in the number of people who say they are multiracial, substantially higher than the national increase.

According to the recent U.S. census, about 125,000 people in Minnesota identified themselves as being of two or more races, up from about 83,000 in the previous census.

Almost all of that increase took place in the metro-area suburbs and outstate, where the number of multiracial people jumped more than 75 percent.

About 2.4 percent of Minnesota’s population is multiracial, about the same as the nation as a whole.

But multiracial people represent a larger part of the state’s minority population than of the U.S. population. Almost one of six nonwhite people in the state are multiracial, compared with about one in 10 nationwide.

University of Minnesota sociologist Carolyn Liebler, an expert in racial identity, said she thinks three things are driving the increase:

• More children are from interracial marriages, with parents in those marriages increasingly likely to identify their offspring as multiracial.
• Immigration has increased, with people born in another country who have a mixed background more likely to say they come from two or more races.
• More people are deciding to label themselves multiracial because they face increasing acceptance and opportunity to make that choice.

Mixed-race people are nothing new. Most American blacks, for example, have some white ancestry.

But throughout much of American history, mixed-race people were forced legally and socially to identify with just one race…

Read the entire article here.

When Social Inequality Maps to Demographic Diversity, What Then for Liberal Democracies?

Social Research: An International Quarterly
Volume 77, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
pages 1-20
ISBN: 978-1-933481-20-3

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University in the City of New York

If social inequality results from discriminatory behaviors or policies based on membership in a race and ethnicity, as it certainly has in the U. S., should policy in a liberal society offer group-based benefits? The civil rights era answered positively. Identity politics, diversity rationales, and pressures for color-blind policy are challenging that answer. What and how we measure is in the middle of the argument.

Framing the Issue

Nations vary in the diversity of their population—here using “diversity” to reference some or all of the following: ethnicity, religion, language, race, ancestry, tribe, and caste. The U.S., Canada and Australia are generally cited as more “diverse” than other OECD countries. There is a large literature indicating that governing demographically diverse populations challenges statecraft in ways not experienced in nations with more homogeneous populations. Diverse populations, for example, are generally assumed to be more prone to internal conflict than more homogenous societies, giving rise to research on how to manage conflict rooted in cultural differences. The conflict may pit group against group. Under some conditions, the conflict expresses itself as a demand for more autonomy, even separation, by the aggrieved group—especially where political power is monopolized by a religion or ethnicity that does not adequately serve or protect the aggrieved group. Where separation is impractical or fiercely resisted—apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland are examples—armed uprising can occur.

Nations vary in the magnitude and patterns of their social inequality—which does bring us nearer to our topic. The U.S. and Europe are, of course, often contrasted in how much inequality they tolerate—more in the U.S., less in Europe.

Here I start with the observation that demographic diversity and social inequalities have to be jointly examined. What policy responses are appropriate in liberal democracies when social inequalities map to demographic diversity? More specifically—how far should the liberal state go in remediation of inequality by providing group rights or group-targeted benefits? My comments offer the U.S. as a case in point…

…Racial Classification in the United States

In the U.S., more than three centuries of racist doctrine planted racially inscribed inequalities deep into the society, polity, and economy. The civil rights movement in the 1960s attempted to end this history through a policy regime that used race to undo racism. Making policy distinctions based on race came to be accepted as the only way to overcome the legacies of a racist history.

Now, nearly a half-century into that policy regime, strong reservations are being voiced. Political arguments echo the “dilemma of recognition”—do race-based policies not defeat their own purpose?…

…More than a century and a half of discriminatory social policy designed to protect the numerical and political supremacy of Americans of European ancestry needed a classification system that assigned everyone to a discrete racial group. Census categories provided this classification, as did vital statistics and, eventually, all administrative records. This measurement system is the basis for presuming that separate and distinct races constitute the true condition of the American population, and can thereby provide the basis for law and public policy. Because there are measurable groups, there are traits that are differently distributed across these groups–including, of course, traits such as intelligence, social worth, moral habits. On this foundation was constructed a race-based legal code and social and economic practices that haunts American history. Ironically, the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s gave fresh momentum to racial measurement. Laws and policies were still to be based on racial classification, but in a 180-degree policy reversal the task became to ensure civil rights that prior uses of racial classification had denied…

…The classification adopted in 1977 and used in the 1980 and 1990 censuses seemed secure and capable of discharging its civil rights purposes in policy arenas. But by the middle of the 1990s, the political landscape was transformed by demographic changes, by the rise of multiculturalism and by the multiracial movement. New political demands called into question the existing racial and ethnic categories–and also the public purposes they were thought to serve.

The OMB again took up the task of reviewing the nation’s official racial classification system, and adopted two changes. The most commented upon change was to allow census respondents to mark one or more to the race question, finally putting to rest the one-drop rule that had worked so hard to preserve the myth of racial purity. This multirace option expresses the obvious—laws against miscegenation notwithstanding, reproduction across racial lines has been a constant in American history for four centuries.

There was a second change. The prior OMB standard had placed Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders within the more general Asian race. Advocates argued that the census should recognize Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders as a separate racial category. The OMB held public hearings and examined research showing that Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders did differ from Asians more generally; it agreed to the separate category. In the mid-1990s the official primary race groups of the United States went from four to five, unwittingly reproducing the Blumenbachian pentagon from two centuries earlier…

…Classification as the Site of Identity Politics: Multiracial rhetoric came to the fore in the 1990s, when advocates insisted on explicit recognition of multiracialism in federal statistics. What was striking about the debate that erupted is what the advocates wanted—not civil rights, but demands for recognition, choice, and identity. In congressional testimony, the Association of MultiEthnic Americans, though recognizing that the multiple-race option would make it harder to enforce civil rights law, nevertheless insisted on “choice in the matter of who we are, just like any other community.” This testimony found it ironic that “our people are being asked to correct by virtue of how we define ourselves all of the past injustices of other groups of people.”

Of course, correcting past injustices was what the traditional civil rights organizations were all about. Their cause was thus threatened by talk of choice and identity. Self expression, they insisted, was not a good reason to revise the government’s scheme of racial and ethnic categories. In its testimony, the NAACP pointed out that the current racial classification was fashioned “to enhance the enforcement of anti-discrimination and civil rights law,” and warned that “the creation of a multiracial classification might disaggregate the apparent numbers of members of discrete minority groups, diluting benefits to which they are entitled as a protected class under civil rights laws and under the Constitution itself.”…

Read the entire article here.

Transcending Blackness in the 21st Century, or How Can I Be Like Barack Obama?

Global Studies: A Member of the International Instutute
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Multiracial Tales and Multicultural Discourses
494 Van Hise Hall
2011-04-18, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

As “postrace” is the buzzword of the new century, and Barack Obama has quickly become a poster child of the postrace, the question arises: must multiracial African Americans metaphorically transcend blackness in order to achieve success? This talk will critique the notion that mixed-race black subjects function as bridges offering safe passage to a third, interstitial, or hybridized space. I argue that a two-sided stereotype, comprised in the “new millennium mulatta” and the “exceptional multiracial,” has arisen instead through a variety of mediated discourses.

Ralina Joseph is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. Her forthcoming book from Duke University Press entitled Transcending Blackness: Anti-Black Racism and African American Multiraciality from the New Milennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial investigates 1998-2008 era pop culture representations of multiracial African Americans.

For more information, click here.
View the poster in color or black-and-white.

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339

Michele René Ruiters

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science

This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.

The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.

My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.

Table of Contents

• II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
• III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
  • Who is ‘Coloured’?
  • Why Identity?
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Insider Re-vision of History
  • A National Identity
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Synopses
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
  • Political identities
  • Marginal Identities
  • Censuses and control
  • Passing
  • ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
  • The Public Sphere
  • Elites, Institutions and Ideology
  • Citizenship and Belonging
  • ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
  • Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
  • Arrival of the Colonists
  • Race at the Cape
  • Social life and gender
  • Slavery at the Cape
  • Impositions and Adoptions
  • Miscegenation and Misfits
  • Imagined Communities
  • ‘I am Coloured’
  • Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
  • Apartheid Apparatus
  • Definitions of ‘Coloured’
  • Social spaces and Political issues
  • Imagined Community Realized
  • Black Politics and State Repression
  • Challenging Identities
  • Language
  • Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
  • The End of Apartheid
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
  • The National Question
  • Elites Change Identities
  • New Coloured Identities
  • Brown Identities
  • The December First Movement and Slave Identities
  • KhoiSan Identities
  • Creoles and Africans
  • Way Forward
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
  • What is the African Renaissance?
  • Who is an African?
  • Marginal voices on African identities
  • The State’s Options
  • Existing Options
  • New Identities?
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
• Curriculum Vitae

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.

During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.

Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.

Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:

Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).

Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

Time Magazine
2009-09-15

Alexis Okeowo

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it—and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration.

Read the entire article here.