Mixed Race Studies

A Mystery of  a People

WUNC 91.5, Chapel Hill
The State of Things
North Carolina Public Radio
2011-07-28

Isaac-davy Aronson, Host

Questions of racial identity and cultural heritage have long surrounded a group of Appalachians called the Melungeons. In recent years, curiosities have been piqued about this loosely connected group of people, spawning DNA testing, numerous books, Web sites and a documentary film. Guest host Isaac-Davy Aronson talks with K. Paul Johnson, corresponding secretary for the Melungeon Heritage Association; and Julie Williams Dixon, a Raleigh-based writer and director of the film “Melungeon Voices.”

Listen to the interview (00:19:10) here.

The Fear of Colonial Miscegenation in the British Colonies of Southeast Asia

The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 8 (2009)
pages 54-64

Katrina Chludzinski, Co-Editor

Between 1820 and 1923, European and American travelogue writers in the Southeast Asian British Colonies looked down upon Europeans participating in miscegenation with local women. They felt that it was a “barbaric” institution, and if Europeans participated in miscegenation, they were destroying the racial hierarchy that had been established during colonialism. They feared miscegenation would blur the racial lines that had been used as the basis for control over the colonies. Miscegenation also produced children of mixed races, called Eurasians. Eurasians became a separate class, however, the British and Southeast Asians did not know how to classify and treat them. Eurasians were not accepted by Europeans or Southeast Asians, they were a group of people not even recognized as a class. Why did the European and American travelogue writers fear miscegenation between Europeans and Southeast Asians? By examining European and American travelogues, I will argue that in the Southeast Asian British Colonies between the years 1820-1923, British and American travelogue writers feared miscegenation between Europeans and Southeast Asians because it challenged the existing racial structures.

For this paper I will rely exclusively on the Travelogues of Europeans and Americans. They provide a window into the culture of Southeast Asia which Southeast Asians themselves did not write about. Southeast Asian culture was new and different to European and American travelogue writers, however. As such, they documented extensively what which was foreign or strange to them. Though relying exclusively on travelogues limits this paper by excluding the Southeast Asian perspective, my purpose is to analyze the European and American perspective on Southeast Asian culture. Travelogues proved the best source for such analysis.

For the history of miscegenation in Southeast Asia, I will mainly rely on John G. Butler’s The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History 0f a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia. According to Butler, colonial miscegenation came about due to the necessity for female companionship. He goes on to speculate that concubinage occurred mainly in rural settings, and that these woman not only provided companionship, but they also helped acclimate European men to their new Southeast Asian settings. Later in his book, Butler describes how concubinage began to decline in the early twentieth century as Europeans in Southeast Asia began to make more money and were able to afford to bring European wives over…

…The British saw miscegenation as dangerous to the colonial structure because it contradicted the belief that Southeast Asians were inferior to Europeans. In one American travelogue from the Philippines, the writer compared the way that the British and the Spanish treated the natives. He commented that the British ridiculed the Portuguese and the Spanish for allowing interracial marriage. The British felt that miscegenation would result in the decline of the colonial government and even the decline of home government of the colonizing power, even though they did not explain how.  The conclusion that interracial marriage would lead to the decline of the colonial structure could only result from the fear that interracial marriage blurred the lines of the racial hierarchy that the British had established. According to the same American travelogue writer, the British believed that interracial marriage produced “mongrel,” “inferior” and “renegade” Eurasian children. The British did not know how to classify Eurasians and did not want to recognize their European descent. In order to maintain their racial hierarchy, the British needed to establish the inferiority of Eurasians in any way possible, including the use of derogatory words to describe them. Ann Stoler explains that miscegenation presented questions that Europeans were not ready to answer. One 0f those questions was how to maintain white supremacy when their racial purity was threatened by miscegenation. The British response to this question was to classify Eurasians as inferior and employed derogatory language to make them social outcasts and discourage others from participating in miscegenation.

European travelogue writers dismissed concubinage between Europeans and Southeast Asians because they did not want to admit that European men were part of the problem to the degradation of their racial structures. A British travelogue writer in Burma made excuses for British men falling into concubinage. He claimed that Burmese women had sweeter and more affectionate personalities, therefore British men could not help themselves. Ann Stoler remarks that Europeans also felt by keeping the race pure and abstaining from promiscuity, they were establishing their superiority over Southeast Asians. But concubinage would make the established racial structures harder to define, thereby making it harder to maintain their racial superiority. An interracial couple threatened the Caucasian racial purity. But they feared that if they admitted that British men were willing participants in miscegenation it would encourage other British men to do it as well. In an attempt to deter other British men from it, travelogue writers refused to admit that British men were consciously able to consent to concubinage.

To establish that British were not at fault for participating in miscegenation, other excuses were made by travelogue writers. For example, one writer claimed that Europeans could not help themselves. The climate of Southeast Asia weakened their strength to stand by their British morals. These outrageous claims were only used to remove all blame from Europeans and place it on the natives, or the climate of the colony itself…

…Miscegenation produced Eurasian children that were not European or Asian; they were a people without an identity that had the ability to change the European established racial hierarchy. Christina Firpo mentions that in Vietnam, Eurasians were clearly recognizable as being of French descent. But the French viewed this as a threat to their racial purity and superiority. A British travelogue writer noticed that Eurasians were divided amongst themselves based on how closely they resembled Europeans. The Eurasians with the skin tones and facial features that more closely resembled those of Europeans had higher social statuses than those that had features that more closely resembled Southeast Asians. ‘This made it seem like there were several racial categories within the Eurasian community. This confusion over racial hierarchies within the Eurasian community created confusion among the British. The British were confused as to how to categorize Eurasians racially. The British had established a strict racial hierarchy. They were also convinced that they would be able to maintain a racial purity amongst the Europeans. So they were not prepared when British men began to participate in miscegenation and producing another race. As Ann Stoler put it, Eurasians “straddled the divide” between colonizers and colonized. This “divide” blurred some of the racial lines between Europeans and Southeast Asians, which terrified the British.

Travelogue writers also noticed that Eurasians were disliked by both Europeans and Asians. Not only were they despised by the Europeans, but since they despised their Southeast Asian heritage, they alienated themselves even further by rejecting the Southeast Asian community. This left Eurasians isolated and alone. The British feared Eurasians because they did not know what Eurasians would do, since they were not accepted by either community. Eurasians were also alienated in their own families. One travelogue writer wrote that in Eurasian families, the lighter skinned children had more privileges than the darker skinned ones. The British feared that unrest in the Eurasian community for not having a place in the previously established racial structure might lead to political unrest. Eurasians did not belong to European or Asian societies and they suffer disadvantages for it.  They were rejected from some jobs and events because they were Eurasian. The British would not allow them access to all European events or to high ranking European jobs. Furthermore, Southeast Asians would not accept them into the Southeast Asian community. In most cases, the European father left and the family was financially cut off and without a father. Having their European fathers leave lead to feelings of abandonment and alienation as well. In some cases, when the European father left, the family became poor. So not only were the Eurasian children alienated from most communities, they were left with no means to support themselves….

Read the entire article here.

Transcultural Transformation: African American and Native American Relations

University of Nebraska
November 2009
139 pages

Barbara S. Tracy

A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by denying one or the other something is lost. Claiming the relationship turns transcultural transformation into a powerful response. Working from Henry Gates’ explanation of signifying combined with Houston Baker’s description of blues literature, I examine signifying, call and response, and blues/jazz elements in the work of three writers to discover the collective lives of African Americans, Native Americans, and Black Indians. In the writing of Black-Cherokee Alice Walker, I look for the call and response of both African and Native American story-ways. I find these same elements in the writing of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie, in his blues writings and his revision of Robert Johnson’s and other stories. In the work of Creek/Cherokee Craig Womack, I examine a Creek/Cherokee perspective of Black Creeks and Freemen. In all of these works, I find that the shared African American and Native American experience plainly takes place in these works in a variety of ways in which the authors call upon oral and written story, song, and dance, and create a response that clearly signifies the combined power of these shared experiences. This is a fusion of shared traditions with differences that demonstrate the blending of voices and culture between two peoples who have been improvising together for a long time.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Speaking of Things Yet Unspoken: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians
• 1. The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian: Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility
• 2. Crossroads: The African American and Native American Blues Matrix in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues
• 3. “Red is Red”: Transcultural Convergence and Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire
• Conclusion: Common Ground: Let the Music Start
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875-1935

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 23, Number 3 (2002)
pages 29-54
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2003.0009

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

At a lavish wedding and reception in New York City in 1891 Elaine Goodale, daughter of a prominent New England family, married Charles Eastman, a member of the Wahpeton band of the Santee Sioux (Dakotas). Writing in her memoirs Elaine declared, “I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” Charles, a medical doctor, described himself a few months before their marriage by writing, “I was soon to realize my long dream—to become a complete man! I thought of little else than the good we two could do together.” Both Charles and Elaine were members of a group of reformers who sought to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation, and they portrayed their marriage as a natural means to overcome Indian “backwardness” and poverty. The white woman would further uplift her already civilized Dakota husband, and the couple would work diligently to serve his people.

Fifty years later New York socialite Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her Russian émigré husband, the painter Maurice Sterne. Mabel soon became entranced with Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Describing her feelings, Mabel wrote in her memoirs:

I had a strange sense of dislocation, as though I were swinging like a pendulum over the gulf of the canyon, between the two poles of mankind, between Maurice and Tony; and Maurice seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body, with his power unbroken and hard like the carved granite rock, yet older than the Germanic Russian whom the modern world had destroyed.

Mabel and Tony eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1923. In this case Mabel saw herself as a bridge between Tony’s people and her own; she envisioned her marriage not as a vehicle by which to uplift and “serve her husband’s people,” but as a means to save her own race from the destruction wrought by the modern world.

The stories of the Eastmans’ and Luhans’ marriages contain all the necessary ingredients for two “racy” novels but they also provide more than voyeuristic romances. As Peggy Pascoe has written, “For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage.” Both the Eastmans and the Luhans operated at the outer boundaries of American racial norms. Yet, through writing and speaking about their marriages, both couples worked to transform the racial ideologies of their times. Similarly both couples were bound by the gender norms of their respective eras but they also actively reshaped gender and sexual conventions…

…As Pascoe argues, a study of interracial marriage can also yield a greater understanding of the construction of gender norms as well. Just as with the study of race, women’s historians and other feminist theorists have for decades documented the fleeting nature of gender norms and argued that gender is not a fixed set of notions that directly correlates with biological differences between the male and female sex. Many scholars of intermarriage have ignored gender; they have made little distinction between attitudes toward and laws aimed at relationships between white men and nonwhite women and those directed toward unions between white women and nonwhite men.10 But, as a growing number of other historians have shown, American society has had markedly different attitudes toward interracial marriage depending on the gender of the white person involved. In general, interracial relationships between white men of the colonizing, dominant group and nonwhite women of colonized, conquered, and/or enslaved groups have been tolerated. Although laws in many colonies and states forbid interracial marriage between white men and black women, for example, many white slave owners commonly engaged in forced sex, concubinage, and informal relationships with their female slaves without social opprobrium. As we shall see, relationships between white men and Indian women were similarly tolerated within American society. Liaisons between white men and nonwhite women did not violate the hierarchical order that developed between European Americans, African Americans, and American Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism, conquest, and domination.

As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out, however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage. When white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married, they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order, white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law, white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men, therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Bloods, Mestizas, and Pintos: Race, Gender, and Claims to Whiteness in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?

Western American Literature
Volume 36, Number 3 (Fall 2001)
pages 212-231

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Since the 1980s, a growing number of scholars in widely different fields have discredited race as a self-evident category of human social relations. Alongside the work of scientists who have found no genetic or biological basis for racial categorization, critical race theorists have looked to changes in legal definitions of race and citizenship to conclude that race is socially and culturally constructed. Historians have contributed to the field by analyzing the history of Whiteness and the so-called White race. Many groups considered “White” today were once deemed non-White; it was only through renouncing common cause with other stigmatized “races” that certain Americans such as Irish and Jewish immigrants were able to attain White status and privilege. Of course, “choosing” to become White has not been an option for some Americans whose skin color is not light enough to allow them to pass for White. But as George Fredcrickson argues, it is not from color alone that race is constructed. He asserts that “theessential element [in notions of race and racism] is that belief, however justified or rationalized, in the critical importance of differing lines of descent and the use of that belief to establish or validate social inequality”.

The social construction of race played out in myriad spaces: in brightly lit courtrooms and dark bedrooms, in factories and fields, in movie theaters and swimming pools, in classrooms and offices, in fast-moving trains and plodding city buses. The realm of literature as well became a space in which various American sought to envision and enforce their notions of race. The literature of the American West offers a particularly rich bounty of competing constructions of race. Until recently it has been all too common in the fields of both western American literature and western history to study Anglo-Americans’ views of the West and its peoples. A growing number of scholars, however, have challenged the ethnocentrism and cultural hegemony of this approach.

Significantly, though, we are not the first to engage in such a critique of Anglo-Americans’ portrayals of the West. Even as Easterners flooded bookstores and literary journals with their accounts of the West in the nineteenth century, an elite and well-educated Californians, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, penned her own challenge to such representations. In 1872, countering Anglo notions that Californians were a “half barbaric” race who were unfit to govern themselves, to hold property, or to occupy professional positions, Ruiz de Burton published Who Would Have Thought It?, a political satire dressed up as a romance novel. Although written twelve years before one of the most famous Anglo novels about nineteenth-century California, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Ruiz de Burton’s novel nevertheless reads like a sharp retort and a satire of Jackson’s view of California and the West…

Read the entire article here.

In search of the power of whiteness: A genealogical exploration of negotiated racial identities in America’s ethnic past

Communication Quarterly
Volume 50, Issue 3-4 (2002)
pages 391-409
DOI: 10.1080/01463370209385674

Roberto Avant‐Mier, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Texas, El Paso

Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah

In this essay, the authors explore some of the relational, intersectional, and contextual dimensions of negotiated racial identities. By employing a genealogical method of analysis that looks at three key cases (Anastasie Desarzant, Homer Plessy, and Suzie Phipps), they investigate how various historically‐situated communities in Louisiana have dealt with some of the contradictions, multiplicities and tensions of racial and ethnic identity formation. They then apply these insights in an analysis of issues relating to colorblindness versus color consciousness and commentaries on contemporary examples of how negotiated identities might affect various present‐day publics, debates, and politics.

Americans have always had ambivalent feelings regarding the question of what to do about the nation’s racial identities, and this was especially true when citizens had to deal with the ambiguities of the Enlightenment ideals. During the time of the Founders, civic leaders talked about the importance of the notion that “all men [sic] are created equal,” but when these ideals were put into practice, they had to compete with the economic and social hierarchies that were considered to be mirrors of natural inequalities. Given these normative expectations, it should come as no surprise that in 1790, the first Congress voted that a person must be “white” in order to be a citizen (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Omi & Winant, 1994; Roediger, 1994). Since that time, the very notion of what it means to have either a “racial” or an “ethnic” identity has gotten even more complicated, as layers of legal, political, and cultural meanings have pulled us in the competing directions of defending either color con-…

Read or purchase the article here.

Is the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas in Brazil an example of Brazil’s racial democracy or, in fact, an instance of its profound racism?

IDEATE The Undergraduate Journal of Sociology
University of Essex
Volume 6, Summer 2011
8 pages

Bethan Rafferty
SC386 Anthropology of Latin America: Race, Gender and Identity

The role of mulatas in Brazilian society is one filled with social, political and historical significance. Mulatas are not seen as ordinary women, but as a living biological embodiment of the Brazilian nation. Indeed the Brazilian tourist board uses Brazilian miscegenation to sell Brazil as a potential holiday destination to tourists:

‘The mixture of races has made Brazil a culturally rich and at the same time unique country. This miscegenation began with the Indian, the African and the Portuguese, but soon after, immigrants from around the world began to arrive: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs. The result is a happy people, open to everything new, a people one can only find in Brazil. Because of this massive diversity, Brazil is one of the last places on Earth where no one is a foreigner, where one can change one’s destiny without losing one’s identity and where each and every Brazilian has a little of the entire world in his or her blood. This may be the reason why Brazilians welcome people from another land so openly.’ (Brazil Ministério do Turismo. http://www.braziltour.com/. Accessed: 22/6/2011.)

Although the strong connection between Brazil and the African continent is acknowledged by some Brazilians, and embraced in some cultural practices such as Capoeira, Black Brazilians continue to be one of the poorest social groups in the country: ‘Although 32 percent of whites are poor, more than 62 percent of African Brazilians are impoverished’ (Daniel, 2006: 190.). While some claim that the high admiration for the mulatas’ physical beauty is proof of a racial democracy (See Freyre, 1946 and the theme of erotic democracy in Goldstein, 2003.), the persistence of negative connotations regarding blackness points to a more painful reality, in which the traces of slavery and discrimination are still alive and active.

In this paper I will argue that although the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas at a micro-level may not be an indicator of personally racist views, at the macro-level it demonstrates Brazilian prejudice against blackness and is an example of racism due to the racebased sexualisation of mulatas.

In the first section of the essay I will talk about the idea of ‘whitening’ Brazilian traditions and people, in the second section I will explore the power balance in relationships between White men and women of colour, thirdly I will consider the sexualisation of mulatas, the fourth part of the essay will examine mulata beauty and interracial sexual relations at a personal or microlevel and the fifth section will analyse the sexism inherent in the objectification of mulatas…

Read the entire article here.

The tan from Ipanema: Freyre, Morenidade, and the cult of the body in Rio De Janeiro

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
October 2009

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Art
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

She says she has brown skin, and a feverish body
And inside the chest, love of Brazil
“I am Brazilian, my body reveals
That my flag is green and yellow”

—Carmen Miranda

In a felicitous turn of phrase, Barbara Babcock once asserted that “what is socially marginal is often symbolically central” (1978, 38). There is no better way to describe the figure of the mulata (a light-skinned black woman) in Rio de Janeiro. As evidenced in popular culture, artistic productions, tourist brochures and TV programs, the mulata is an idealized icon in the contemporary Brazilian imagination. A polysemic category, “mulata” in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes the voluptuosity and sensuality characteristic of women who dance the samba onstage. I use the local term mulata in order to make reference to these multiple meanings. The fascination with this local figure is inscribed within the discourse of mesticagem, a dominant narrative emphasizing the process of cultural and biological fusion of the “races,” white and black in particular, as symbol of Brazilianness. I take racial and colour categories such as “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mestico” to be ideological products with material effects vis-a-vis the structuring of power relations across society. These categories acquire different symbolic value within the context of Brazilian “pigmentocracy,” where instead of a colour line, shadism permeates race relations: The lighter the skin, the greater the social value. To a point, that is.

In this article I argue that the most valued bodies in Rio de Janeiro are those of white Brazilians that are able to embody the qualities of mulattoes. In particular, I focus on the characteristics associated with mulatto women in the context of carnival, and look at how in recent years white women have progressively come to occupy the spotlight in this setting. The article explores the Brazilian fascination with the mulata in terms of stereotypes that organize images of social difference and convey specific longings and desire. It situates the emergence of this fascination within the context of colonial gender and race relations and later, the development of a national ideology focused on the value of whitening through “mixing.” I examine the discourse on mesticagem in the work of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, the most influential thinker in the history of Brazil (Schwartzman 2000). Exploring Freyre’s glorification of the mulata, I look at how women’s bodies have become surfaces upon which masculinist and nationalist desires are deployed. I then move on to argue that morenidade (brownness), while commonly thought of as interchangeable with mulatice (mulatto-ness) as a central value and self-concept in Brazilian society, is in fact the preferred social type. I explore how morenidade is one aspect of the idealized “perfect body” in Rio’s society, and look at how local people invest their physiques with numerous techniques in order to obtain such an ideal for themselves. Woven through the article is an exploration of how these issues are expressed in the narratives of my research participants. In resonance with Malysse (2002), I conclude that Rio’s culture has become obsessed with the image bodies project as expressions of personhood, and bring to bear my reflections on morenidade upon the Carioca (from Rio) perfect body.

National Identity and the “Whitening” Strategy

Why has the mulata become the central object of desire in the Brazilian imagination? How did she become a symbol of national identity, given the generalized denigration of mulattoes in colonial times, and the debased sexual role that women of colour were subjected to? Brazilian intellectual debates over race have become central to understandings of nationhood at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Contemporary gender stereotypes are deeply imbricated with larger narratives on the role of biracial peoples in the formation of Brazil as a modern nation.

The debate over national identity and the future of the nation in Brazil was not a product of independence from Portugal. It actually began to take place at the onset of the abolition of slavery and the institution of the republic in 1889. Racism took a very particular shape in Brazilian intellectual production. It was recast under the native category of branqueamento (whitening). Late-19th and early-20th-century sociological writings in Brazil reflect the ideological supremacy of the white world. Brazilian intellectuals, however, were faced with the following theoretical problem: How to treat national identity vis-a-vis racial inequalities. The solution was to emphasize the mestico element (Ortiz 1985, 20). For the 19th-century intelligentsia the mestico was—more than a concrete reality—a category through which a sociological need was expressed: the elaboration of a national identity. According to these writers, moral and ethnic miscegenation allowed for the environmental adaptation of the European civilization to the tropics. Moreover, the result of this experience permitted the characterization of Brazilian culture as different from the European. In the local appropriation of theories of hybridization, Brazilian intellectuals posited that miscegenation would ultimately derive in a process of branqueamento, through which the gradual predominance of white traits over black ones could be ensured, in both the body and the spirit of mulattoes (see Araujo 1994, 29; Skidmore 1993). As Ortiz states, the social sciences of the time reproduced, at the level of discourse, the contradictions of Brazilian society. Whilst the notion of “racial inferiority” was used to explain Brazilian “backwardness,” the notion of mesticagem also pointed toward a possible national unity. The identity thus produced was ambiguous, integrating both the negative and the positive elements of the races in question (Ortiz 1985, 34). The emphasis placed on the ideology of whitening of the Brazilian population was articulated with the particular interests of the coffee bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo state, which achieved its political hegemony with the rise of the First Republic. State immigration policies in the last quarter of the 19th century initiated programs that attracted millions of Europeans (see Skidmore and Smith 1992). These policies tackled the scarcity of labour power (defined strictly as unavailability of slaves) and established a clear association between mesticagem, whitening, and social progress. Massive immigration programs were seen not only as a solution to the lack of labourers, “but also as part of a long-term modernizing project, in which the whitening of the national population was seen as one of the most desired consequences” (Hasenbalg 1979, 128-129).

With the emphasis on whitening as a Brazilian solution for the “problem” of the races, Brazilian intellectuals such as Joao Batista de Lacerda and Oliveira Vianna shifted away from negative views of hybridity. From thinking of miscegenation as the production of a mongrel group making up a “raceless chaos,” a degraded corruption of the originals, Brazilian intellectuals reconceptualized ideas of amalgamation using elements already present in racist theories, such as the claim that all humans can interbreed prolifically and in an unlimited way, sometimes accompanied by the melting-pot notion that the mixing of people produces a new mixed race, with merged but distinct new physical and moral characteristics (see Da Matta 1981; Skidmore 1993; Stepan 1991; Young 1995). The ideal of whitening was consistently appropriated by Brazilian intellectuals from 1880 to 1920 and became consolidated, albeit transformed, with Gilberto Freyre’s culturalism in the 1930s. Nancy Leys Stepan calls this a shift to “constructive miscegenation” that overtly challenged the notion of mulatto degeneracy and reminded the country that “we are all mestizos” (Stepan 1991, 161). This particular ideology began to play a more “positive” part in Brazilian understandings of the nation…

Read the entire article here or here.

Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. About Black Experience in Latin America

Black in Latin America
Public Broadcasting Service
April 2011

Gates discusses his new project in this interview from the PBS site.

First, could you talk a little bit about this project?

I conceived of this as a trilogy of documentary series that would mimic the patterns of the triangle trade. There would be a series on Africa which was called Wonders of the African World in 1999. And then there would be a series on black America called America Behind the Color Line in 2004. And then the third part of the triangle trade was, of course, South America and the Caribbean. The triangle trade was Africa, South America, and the continental United States and Europe. That’s how I conceived of it. I’ve been thinking about it since before 1999. But the first two were easier to get funding for. Everyone knows about black people from Africa, everyone knows about the black American community. But surprisingly, and this is why the series is so important, not many people realize how “black” South America is. So of all the things I’ve done it was the most difficult to get funded and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive, it’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it…

The series reveals how huge a role history can play in forming a nation’s concept of race. Although each of the countries you visited has its own distinct history, did you find any commonalities between the six countries with regard to race?

Yes, each country except for Haiti went through a period of whitening, when they wanted to obliterate or bury or blend in their black roots. Each then, had a period when they celebrated their cultural heritage but as part of a multi-cultural mix and in that multi-cultural mix, somehow the blackness got diluted, blended. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be “blackish” — really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. In other words, the poverty in each of these countries has been socially constructed as black. The upper class in Brazil is virtually all white, a tiny group of black people in the upper-middle class. And that’s true in Peru, that’s true in the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s obviously an exception because it’s a country of mulatto and black people but there’s been a long tension between mulatto and black people in Haiti. So even Haiti has its racial problems…

…How do you feel the race experience differs between Latin American nations and the United States?

Whereas we have black and white or perhaps black, white, and mulatto as the three categories of race traditionally in America, Brazil has 136 kinds of blackness. Mexico, 16. Haiti, 98. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. But these are very real categories. In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. Color and race are defined in strikingly different ways in each of these countries, more akin to each other than in the United States. We’re the only country to have the one-drop rule. The only one. And that’s because of the percentage of rape and sexual harassment of black women by white males during slavery and the white owners wanted to guarantee that the children of these liaisons were maintained as property…

Read the entire interview here.

Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought

Duke University Press
1974
334 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1320-5

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

Published to wide acclaim in 1974, Thomas E. Skidmore’s intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology has become a classic in the field. Available for the first time in paperback, this edition has been updated to include a new preface and bibliography that surveys recent scholarship in the field. Black into White is a broad-ranging study of what the leading Brazilian intellectuals thought and propounded about race relations between 1870 and 1930. In an effort to reconcile social realities with the doctrines of scientific racism, the Brazilian ideal of “whitening”—the theory that the Brazilian population was becoming whiter as race mixing continued—was used to justify the recruiting of European immigrants and to falsely claim that Brazil had harmoniously combined a multiracial society of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.