Mixed Race Studies

Brazilian ethnoracial classification and affirmative action policies: Where are we and where do we go?

Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Should we count, how should we count and why?
2007-12-06 through 2007-12-08
Montreal, Quebec Canada

September 2007
12 pages

José Luis Petruccelli, Senior Researcher
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Brésil

Brazilian society is characterized by persistent racial fragmentation, which constitutes a significant variable structuring social outcomes and is evident in the socioeconomic inequalities constantly observed in field research. A variety of information converges to demonstrate ethnoracial criterion as a decisive parameter of exclusion and of social subordination. Particularly salient among the reasons for this reality is the permanence of several discriminatory practices in public and private institutions against the populations of African and indigenous descent.

Although statistics of race have been incorporated in a continuous way in surveys only since the 1980’s, the country has a reasonable tradition of statistical experience of racial classification. In this sense, two aspects must be outlined: first, the majority of Brazilians identify according to a relatively restricted group of color representations; second, open-ended responses to racial self-classification, as well as pre-codified classic categories, demonstrate a fair amount of stability.

But an important ambiguity persists with respect to the category applied to the miscegenated groups, at the national level and particularly in some areas of the country that have been, historically, less influenced in their population composition by the Atlantic slave traffic. As a matter of fact, the pardo (brown) term designates a residual category in the racial classification system, inside which at least three types of ethnic groups can be distinguished: firstly, the group that identifies in this way due to phenotype that is perceived to be of African origin, which is, without any doubt, the most numerous in this category; secondly, a group that can be identified as predominantly of Indian descent, characteristic of the areas mentioned above; finally, a group that expresses an adhesion to a specific historical-geographical condition and does not actually constitutes a proper ethnic identification in the sense of physical appearance, since, in terms of social relationships, they don’t suffer racial discrimination.

In this way, it does have methodological pertinence to continue investigating the best possible means of identifying the mentioned racial categories, which present temporal persistence and sociological consistence. As a result, more finely tuned information would be available, indispensable for an appropriate elaboration of targeted affirmative action policies, understanding that the purposes of the ethnoracial classification range from allowing free expression of identities to the facilitation of formulating laws and nondiscrimination policies.

The reflections in this work aim to begin answering the following questions: Is the current system of racial classification in use, reasonably correct? Furthermore, is it possible to elaborate a classification system essentially “correct” ? What would the most appropriate number of ethnoracial categories be then? Or even, what would be the best means of accounting for the mentioned specific characteristics, granting the necessary recognition to the expression of socially relevant identities and of regional differences?

…The question of racial classification raises diverse arguments, from orthodox Marxism up to ideological right-wing positions, trying to depict the difficulties of identifying who the beneficiaries of the proposed actions would be. The ghost of the miscegenation ideology rises again to contest the justice of the compensatory policies. If Brazilians are all miscegenated, runs the argument, they would be all “equal” and it could not be a means of differentiating blacks from non-blacks, since all would have something to do with African origins. To this “ideological” position a “scientific” point of view recently emerged: the geneticists discourse about the genealogical mixture of the ancestries of Brazilian whites, shuffling genomic characteristics with social representation of ethnoracial identity, in spite of the well known differences between origin (and DNA) and colour (or mark). Yet, whatever the extent of racial mixture in the country “the majority have lacked the basic rights associated with citizenship for most of the twentieth century and for all of the country’s earlier history” (Nobles, 2000)…

Read the entire paper here.

Coming Into their Own? The Afro-Latin Struggle for Equality and Recognition

Grassroots Development Journal
Inter-American Foundation
African Descendants and Development (2007)

Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology
George Washington University

Most Americans have at least a passing familiarity with the history of Afro-Americans in the United States. The epic story of slavery, the Civil War and Emancipation, Jim Crow, the civil rights struggle, and the Black Power movement has become part of our common heritage. This wasn’t always the case. A few short decades ago, the history of Americans of African descent was largely unknown even by black Americans. It was the province of a small number of specialists, not part of our general education or popular culture. The civil rights movement and the demand for a more inclusive history helped change that, bringing about a greater awareness of the role of Afro-Americans in the history of the United States.
 
Still few Americans know that the Afro-American experience in the United States is but a small part of a much larger hemispheric history. Only about 6 percent of Africans brought to the Americas came to what is now the United States. Today probably less than a third of the hemisphere’s Afro-Americans are in the United States. Latin American slavery lasted longer and was more intense than its U.S. counterpart. The Portuguese and Spaniards began enslaving Africans early in the 15th century, before Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. Slavery would finally end in the hemisphere when Cuba and Brazil abolished it in the late 1880s.
 
Latin American historians have long studied slavery in the colonial era. But far less is known about Latin Americans of African descent after independence. There are significant Afro-American populations throughout the region, although some have been reluctant to acknowledge them. Throughout the 20th century, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile have insisted that they were white nations with few or no citizens of African descent. In the last decade, largely due to the insistence of local Afro-American activists, there has been an increased recognition that African descendants are not just a part of these countries’ history but very much a part of the present, even if in small numbers. Peru and Mexico have tended to emphasize their Spanish and indigenous lineage, ignoring the substantial African heritage. In the Dominican Republic, people visibly of African descent constitute a majority, but because African ancestry is stigmatized it is commonly denied even when it is obvious. In all of these countries, Afro-Latin activists are changing the national dialogue by insisting that the African and Afro-American contribution to the national culture be recognized…

…Afro-Latin activists face daunting challenges, perhaps most importantly a lack of basic information on Afro-American populations. Often it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain from census and other official records an accurate picture of the social and economic circumstances of different racial groups. Despite substantial populations of African descent throughout the Americas, their history is often not well-known, even by regional specialists. Racial classifications further complicate the task. Who should or should not be categorized as Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Colombian or Afro-Mexican can be unclear and, frequently, a matter of dispute. Students of race in the United States study a society whose culture and law have traditionally dictated that all persons with any traceable African ancestry belong to a single group—variously called colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African American—but a unified group nonetheless. There has been occasional recognition that some individuals are of mixed ancestry and stand apart; terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were used in the past and there are contemporary debates about proposed census categories like biracial or multiracial. But recognition of mixture has not disturbed the consensus placing people with traceable African ancestry into a single group.

No such consensus exists in Latin America. If race is a social construct, it is often an elusive one for Latin Americans as well as outsiders. Spanish and Portuguese have meticulous vocabularies detailing every conceivable combination, real and imagined. Latin American lexicons include terms like negro, preto, pardo, moreno, mulato, trigueño, zambo and others detailing presumed degrees of African, European and indigenous admixtures. Traditionally individuals of partial African descent have rejected identification as negro, or black, a rejection supported by the prevailing culture. Some individuals with known African ancestry are accepted as white. In Latin America racial identity often is a complex negotiation involving ancestry, phenotype, social status and family connections. Classification is contextual. A hierarchy exists to be sure and it prizes European descent and appearance more than African ones. Yet at times whites will allow Afro-Latins to proclaim a whiter status than phenotype and ancestry might dictate, partly as a courtesy, partly because it confirms the view of many whites that they live in essentially white societies. Despite this, the individual of visible African descent who claims to be white will often be the victim of race- or color-based exclusion. The picture becomes even cloudier when individuals who look white or nearly white identify with Afro-Americans for familial or cultural reasons.

This notion of racial fluidity has created difficulties both for scholars researching Afro-Latins and for Afro-Latin activists seeking to mobilize a constituency. In many important ways, legal discrimination in the United States helped to forge a unified group. In Latin America, the multiplicity of racial/color categories coupled with the ideologies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento that read Afro-Americans out of the history and culture also served to blunt the development of Afro-American group consciousness and identity. This was true even in areas where people of visible African ancestry faced considerable racial discrimination. And yet if group consciousness and concerted action have been difficult, Latin America does have a history of Afro-American political and social activism that has challenged class and color barriers. This theme has been explored by, among others, George Reid Andrews in his book Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. The Afro-Latin struggle against racial subordination began in slavery. Colonial Latin America was dotted with cimarrón settlements of runaway slaves defying recapture. Their descendants are still to be found in Brazilian quilombos and similar enclaves throughout the hemisphere…

…Racism prevailed throughout the hemisphere. New ideologies at the start of the 20th century were helping to move the Afro-American and indigenous peoples of Latin America further to the margins of their nations’ societies and cultures. For students of U.S. history, the role of scientific racism and social Darwinism in providing the intellectual underpinnings for Jim Crow and disenfranchisement are well known. These forces influenced thinking in Latin America, but in different ways. Latin American elites saw the problem less as in terms of protecting their privilege and status than in attaining the white majority they believed required for progress and modernity. To this end large-scale European immigration was encouraged, often by generous land bounties. It would transform Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. Other nations would receive far fewer Europeans, but their strong desire for blanqueamiento further marginalized Afro-Latins. Cultural dynamics from the slave era had long dictated that the individual should strive for racial mobility via lighter racial classification. If the national ethos dictated that the nation was white, it was all the more prudent, particularly for those of mixed ancestry, not to declare an African heritage. Thus mestizaje and blanqueamiento both contributed to the pronounced unwillingness of many Afro-Latins to identify as such, even when phenotype made such identification and the resulting discrimination inescapable…

Read the entire article here.

Artspeak: Macys misses the boat on celebration of Brazil

InsightNews.com
2012-06-12

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

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

Read the entire article here.

Malaga Island: A century of shame

Maine Sunday Telegram
2012-05-20

Colin Woodard, Staff Writer

A new exhibit at the Maine State Museum tells the story of the eviction of Malaga Island’s residents, one of the state’s most disgraceful official acts ever.

AUGUSTA — A century ago this spring, Maine Gov. Frederick Plaisted oversaw the destruction of a year-around fishing hamlet on Malaga Island, a 42-acre island in the New Meadows River, just off the Phippsburg shore. The island’s 40 residents—white, black and mixed race—were ordered to leave the island, and to take their homes with them, else they would be burned. A fifth of the population was incarcerated on questionable grounds at the Maine School for the Feebleminded in New Gloucester, where most spent the rest of their lives. The island schoolhouse was dismantled and relocated to Louds Island in Muscongus Bay.

Leaving no stone unturned, state officials dug up the 17 bodies in the island cemetery, distributed them into five caskets and buried them at the School of the Feebleminded—now Pineland Farms—where they remain today.

Several islanders spent the rest of their lives in this state-run mental institution. One couple, Robert and Laura Darling Tripp, floated from place to place in a makeshift houseboat, but, unwelcomed, wound up moored to another scrap of an island. Malnourished, Laura fell sick during a gale; when her husband returned with help, he found the couple’s two children clinging to her lifeless body. Many others suffered from the stigma of being associated with the island.

“After the island was cleared, people did not really want to talk about this incident, especially the descendants, because to raise your hand and say you were from Malaga supposedly meant you were feebleminded or had black blood in you or both,” said Rob Rosenthal, whose 2009 radio documentary “Malaga: A Story Better Left Untold” helped draw attention to what is one of the most disgraceful official acts in our state’s history. “Nobody wanted to declare that.”…

Read the entire article here.

Gay male pornography and the re/de/construction of postcolonial queer identity in Mexico

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
ISSN: 14742756
Volume 8 Issue 2 (November 2010)

Gustavo Subero, Independent Researcher

Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men’s perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

In Praise of Michelle Cliff’s Creolite

North Carolina State University
2002-11-13
62 pages

Quincey Michelle Hyatt

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts—English

Focusing on feminism, language, and history, this thesis explores the ways in which the theories of creolization set forth in Michelle Cliff’s novels, Abeng (1984), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1990), explain existence in an increasingly cross-cultural world.

Read the entire thesis here.

Discovering the life of Afro-Germans

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2012-06-06

Edward Colimore, Inquirer Staff Writer

When she was growing up in Willingboro as the only child of Walter and Perrie Haymon, she felt like “a little princess.” She was the center of her parents’ lives, attended private school, and took piano and ballet lessons.

But Wanda Lynn Haymon “always had something gnawing” at her, she said. Relatives whispered about her at family gatherings and cousins told her that she was not really part of the family.

She had recurrent nightmares, too, of being an infant abandoned on a snowy doorstep with uniformed men – possibly soldiers – standing around her.

“I really had doubts,” she said. “I’d go to my parents and ask if I was adopted and they’d say, ‘Do you feel adopted?’ I would say ‘No’ because I was treated so well.”

She found out—through documentation in 1994—that “I wasn’t who I thought I was.”

Wanda Lynn Haymon was actually Rosemarie Larey, a native of Germany who had been adopted. Her biological father was black, possibly an African American soldier, and her mother was white and a German national.

She was born in 1956, only 11 years after the Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps, where many were subjected to medical experiments and sterilization.

Even after the war, the stigma of having a biracial child caused many mothers – including Rosemarie’s – to give up their children for possible placement with African American families.

Now, as Rosemarie Peña, she heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey ( http://blackgermans.us/), an organization whose name belies its reach: It connects Afro-Germans internationally and seeks to document their experience.

About 200 people attended the group’s convention last year in Washington and a greater number is expected for the second convention, Aug. 10-11 at Barnard College in New York City…

Read the entire article here.

What I’ve learned from living with HIV

The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog
2012-07-01

Macalester College

Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow us to share it in this space.

My name is Chris, and I live with HIV.

I know some were here last year [on my Twitter timeline], so I’ll try not to bore you. I just want to remind us that we are here among you, living, thriving, sometimes barely surviving w HIV/AIDS. I’d like to tell my story: why I made choices I did and what I’ve learned-because I have learned a great deal about myself from this disease.

To start: I have been positive for 15 years. March 10, 2010 was  my anniversary. I am 41 years old. In fact, I was born exactly 1 week before Stonewall rebellion in NYC. I was born and raised in a working-class Boston neighborhood. I grew up in uber-dysfunctional family: brother diagnosed as sociopath in teens, dad an alcoholic, mom mentally ill. It was hell in that family, I was a little “sissy” who knew at early age he was gay. I was OK with it but knew others wouldn’t be. I was terrorized as kid-ass kicked a lot. My city didn’t like “femme” boys. Also, I am mixed: dad was white, mom Latina…long before mixed folks were cool. We just were odd. So I grew up alone, and lonely…

Read the entire essay here.

Racial Democracy and Intermarriage in Brazil and the United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read or purchase the article here.

“You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 38, Number 2 (April 2003)
pages 125-145
DOI: 10.1177/00219894030382008

Loretta Mijares

The term “Anglo-Indian”, emerging as early as 1806, originally referred to the British in India. In India today, however, the term is universally understood to refer to the mixed-race descendants of British-Indian liaisons. In between these two historical markers lies a complex history of changing notions of racial mixture and affiliations with colonial power. At the same time, the “half-caste” has been a perennial figure in colonial fiction, and continues to appear regularly in contemporary Indian writing in English. Discussion of the literary figure of the half-caste, however, has taken place (if at all) by and large in the absence of any acknowledgement of the history of this community. A literary analysis of the “half-caste” attentive to this history offers valuable lessons about the usefulness and limitations of such theoretical notions as “hybridity” by calling attention to the shifting historical valences of literal experiences of hybridity. As a case-study in such an approach, this essay examines the role of racial mixture in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with due attention to the Anglo-Indian community in India. This reveals how racial mixture in the literary imagination often becomes a metaphor for something else, and in this process of metaphorization is alienated from the history from which it originates. This process has parallels in literary theory: theoretical abstractions such as hybridity have become rarefied and need to be reconnected to their geographical and historical contexts if they are to retain any efficacy in explaining the processes of identity construction they claim to describe.

In India, the mixed-race population was known as “Eurasian”, with “half-caste” as a derogatory term. By the late nineteenth century, however. “Eurasian” had likewise accumulated a pejorative connotation…

Read the entire article here.