Mixed Race Studies

The Equality of the Human Races

University of Illinois Press
2002 (First published in 1885)
536 pages
5.5 x 8 in.
6 black & white photographs, 12 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07102-7

Anténor Firmin (1850-1911)

Translated from the French by:

Asselin Charles

Introduction by:

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Rhode Island College

Positivist Anthropology

This is the first paperback edition of the only English-language translation of the Haitian scholar Anténor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races (De l’Égalité des Races Humaines), a foundational text in critical anthropology first published in 1885 when anthropology was just emerging as a specialized field of study.

Marginalized for its “radical” position that the human races were equal, Firmin’s lucid and persuasive treatise was decades ahead of its time. Arguing that the equality of the races could be demonstrated through a positivist scientific approach, Firmin challenged racist writings and the dominant views of the day.

Translated by Asselin Charles and framed by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban’s substantial introduction, this rediscovered text is an important contribution to contemporary scholarship in anthropology, pan-African studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio and Magoffin County, Kentucky

Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 50, Number 6 (November 1950)
pages 281-290

Edward T. Price, Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Oregon

A number of population groups of dark-skinned peoples, recognized as socially distinct in rural localities of eastern United States, are commonly assumed to be tri-racial, mixed from white, Negro, and Indian ancestors. A small example of such a group is mentioned by The Ohio Guide (1) as living in the vicinity of Carmel in Highland County. Aside from another small mixed-blood settlement of very different circumstances in Darke County, this group near Carmel is probably the only one to be found rooted in Ohio.

Carmel is a cross-roads hamlet based on a school, a church, and a country store. Its location on the margin of the Till Plains, half surrounded by the wooded hills which mark the western edge of the Appalachian Plateau, is probably significant for the phenomenon which brings it this notice (figs. 1 and 2).

The “half-breeds” or “Carmel Indians,” as they are locally identified, are well known to the farmers of the vicinity, who, on the surface at least, accept good-naturedly the claim of the former to Indian ancestry. Privately the question of Negro blood also may be raised. Most of the older residents think that both are present and can name families or individuals who they think illustrated each type in the days before the mixing was so thorough. The group look mixed; a few of them are nearly white, but most are identifiable by their brown or tan skin; many of them have curly black hair, and many have straight black hair. Few, if any, really look like Indians, but identifying negroid features are not usual. I consider it likely that Indian and Negro mixtures are both present on the basis that the degree of pigmentation in most of the people otherwise seems inconsistent with their general lack of negroid features (figs. 3, 4, and 5).

The surnames of the members of this group are, with few exceptions, Gibson (Gipson), Nichols, and Perkins. One or two other names have recently been added to the group by marriage. Some of the Gipsons aver that the Gibsons have a trace of Negro blood. In the summer of 1947 their number was determined to be at least 150; the population is said to have been somewhat larger in times past…

Read the entire article here.

A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans

Miami Herald
2007-06-10 through 2007-06-24

In this series, the black experience is unveiled through a journey: to Nicaragua, where a quiet but powerful civil and cultural rights movement flickers while in neighboring Honduras, the black Garffuna community fights for cultural survival; to the Dominican Republic where African lineage is not always embraced; to Brazil, home to the world’s second largest population of African descent; to Cuba, where a revolution that promised equality has failed on its commitment to erase racism; and to Colombia, where the first black general serves as an example of Afro-Latin American achievements.

Part 1: Nicaragua and Honduras: Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice
Audra D.S. Burch
A close-up look at a simmering civil rights movement in a tiny port settlement along Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

…To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.

This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.

The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.

Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, “passing” for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.

“It’s hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black,” says [Juliet] Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman…

Part 2: Dominican Republic: Black denial
Frances Robles
An examination on the sensitive nature of racial definition in a nation with inextricable ties to Africa.

SANTO DOMINGO—Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.

Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo—bad hair.

But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. “If you’re working in a bank, you don’t want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant,” the bank teller said. “It’s not that as a person of color I want to look white.   I want to look pretty.”

And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket.  The richer, the “whiter.” And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black…

Part 3: Brazil: A Great Divide
Jack Chang
Black Brazilians speak out and push for affirmative action laws in the hemisphere’s most Africanized nation.

…And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.

“The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you’ll see exclusion is endemic,” he said. “We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve…

…”I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there’s widespread racism in Brazil,” said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil…

…Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the “racial democracy” vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.

Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races…

Part 4: Cuba: A barrier for Cuba’s blacks
Miami Herald Staff Report
Economic and political apartheid are alive in Cuba, despite a revolution launched in 1959 that promised equality.

..DISPARITY IN NUMBERS

Cuba’s official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island’s 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.

The disparity between the census’ 11 percent and UM’s 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.

“You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba,” said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso…

Part 5: Achievers: Racism takes many hues
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
An overview on the achievement of black leaders in the region. And a personal essay by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

…Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?

A COMPLEX MATTER

The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but “afrodescendente” (Africa-descended) or negro (black)…

..Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that’s a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation’s most controversial journalists in the process.

When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she’s crazy. “I don’t know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,” she says

Multimedia

Read the entire series here.

“La Negrita,” Queen of the Ticos: The Black Roots of Costa Rica’s Patron Saint

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 3, January 2013
pages 323-355
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0025

Russell Lohse, Assistant Professor of History
Pennsylvania State University

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica’s relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation’s supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica’s tradition of “rural democracy.”

Many writers have traced Costa Rica’s democratic tradition to the colonial period. In the mid-twentieth century, Carlos Monge Alfaro advanced the classic articulation of the myth of “rural democracy,” an enduring staple of conventional Costa Rican historiography. In his Historia de Costa Rica, read as a textbook by generations of Costa Rican students, Monge Alfaro argued that colonial Costa Rica developed as an egalitarian society of small landholders, unique in Latin America. According to this widely accepted version of national history, colonial Costa Rica remained for centuries an impoverished backwater, neglected by the Spanish Empire. Deep class divisions never emerged because all members of society toiled equally for their meager subsistence. The province’s isolation and chronic poverty forced all of its residents to work with their own hands, for each to make of the situation what he would.

Monge Alfaro and others further contended that colonial Costa Rica was a racially homogeneous society. The racial component of the myth is based on the notion that the few Indians living in Costa Rica at the time of the conquest were peacefully absorbed into Hispanic society, obviating the bloody racial conflicts that plagued other Central American regions. Similarly, the marginalizing character of the subsistence economy precluded the entrenchment of African slavery and the sistema de castas. Spanish peasant immigration accounted for the overwhelming preponderance of the country’s racial stock. Racially homogeneous, Costa Rica was therefore free of racial prejudice and discrimination. The lighter complexion of the population and the absence of racial tension made Costa Rica resemble a tranquil European country more than its Central American neighbors. Racial homogeneity predisposed the region to the harmonious coexistence (convivencia) accepted as a national characteristic. More overtly racist ideologues envisioned Costa Rica’s relative political stability, high literacy rate, economic prosperity, and “European” standards of civilization as results of the absence of indigenous and African populations.

But the popular legend of the apparition of the Virgen de los Angeles openly challenges key tenets of the myths of rural democracy and racial homogeneity. The central theme of the legend of the Virgin’s apparition demands recognition not only of Costa Rica’s racial diversity, but of the reality of racial prejudice and discrimination in the nation’s past.

Legend of the Apparition

As the legend has been recounted in the twentieth century, on August 2, 1635, a woman was gathering firewood near her home in Puebla de los Pardos, the segregated district where people of African descent lived on the outskirts of Cartago, the capital of the Spanish province of Costa Rica. On that day she was surprised to find a black stone image of the Virgin Mary and Child perched on a large rock. Elated, she put the small statue in a basket and carried it home. The next day, she returned to the woods for more firewood and there she found an identical image on the same rock. Thinking she had found a secaond statue, she returned home to find, to her surprise, that the image of the day before was gone….

The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism

Indiana University Press
2007-05-22
320 pages
22 b&w photos
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-21927-5; Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-34902-6

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz exposes and challenges the common assumptions about whom and what Jews are, by presenting in their own voices, Jews of color from the Iberian Peninsula, Asia, Africa, and India. Drawing from her earlier work on Jews and whiteness, Kaye/Kantrowitz delves into the largely uncharted territory of Jews of color and argues that Jews are an increasingly multiracial people—a fact that, if acknowledged and embraced, could foster cross-race solidarity to help combat racism. This engaging and eye-opening book examines the historical and contemporary views on Jews and whiteness as well as the complexities of African/Jewish relations, the racial mix and disparate voices of the Jewish community, contemporary Jewish anti-racist and multicultural models, and the diasporic state of Jewish life in the United States.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• A Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Are Jews White?
  • What’s White
  • The People of Contradictions
  • Apartheid/American Style
  • Jews: Race or Religion?
  • Christian Centricity
• 2. Black/Jewish Imaginary and Real
  • Real 1: The Black/Jewish Tangle
  • Real 2: Am I Possible?
  • Imaginary 1: Exodus
  • Imaginary 2: Media Coverage
  • Imaginary 3: Media Hype
  • Real 3: Solidarity
  • Real 4: Nationalism and Feminism
• 3. Who Is This Stranger?
  • The Cultures of Jews
  • Mizrahim
  • Sephardim
  • Post-Colonial Jews
  • Feminist Ritual
  • Ashkenazim
  • De-Ashkenization
  • U.S. Jews
• 4. Praying with Our Legs
  • Fighting Slumlords, Building Coalitions: Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (Chicago)
  • Confronting Power in the Jewish Community: Jews United for Justice (St. Louis)
  • Trying to Change Congregational Life: Jewish Community Action (Minneapolis)
  • Bringing Our Bodies to the Picket Line: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (New York)
  • The Place to Go for a Progressive Jewish Voice
• 5. Judaism Is the Color of This Room
  • The Temple of My Familiar: Ayecha (National)
  • Crossing Many Borders: Ivri-NASAWI/Levantine Center (International)
  • A Mixed Multitude: Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation (Chicago)
  • Respect and Knowledge: Beta Israel of North America (International)
  • Hospitality Is the First Principle: Congregation Naharat Shalom (Albuquerque)
  • Jews Were All People of Color: Center for Afro-Jewish Studies (Philadelphia)
  • I Promised Them It Wasn’t Going to Happen Again: Central Reform Synagogue (St. Louis)
  • Jews of Color Speak Out
  • Transformation in Partnership
• 6. Toward a New Diasporism
  • If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem
  • If I Forget Thee O Doikayt, O Haviva Ottomania
  • Home
  • Diasporism and the Holocaust
  • Israel and Diasporism
  • Anti-Semitism and Diasporism
  • A Jewish Tradition: Radical Justice-Seeking
  • To Change the Way Racism Is Fought: Shifting the Center
  • Diasporism and the Colors of Jews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

‘Visible & Invisible’ Exhibition to Explore History of Hapa JA Experience

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-03-31

The Japanese American National Museum, in collaboration with the USC Hapa Japan Database Project, will present its next exhibition, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” from Sunday, April 7, through Sunday, Aug. 25.

Through photos, historical artifacts, multimedia images, and interactive components, “Visible & Invisible” explores the diverse and complex history of the mixed-roots and mixed-race Japanese American experience.

At a free opening night party planned for Saturday, April 6, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., visitors can preview this unique perspective on mixed race within the Japanese American community.

“Visible & Invisible” is preceded by the five-day Hapa Japan Festival, a free event featuring Hapa musicians and artists, a comedy night, readings by award-winning authors, film screenings of leading documentaries, and a two-day academic conference at USC. The festival runs from April 2 to 6. For more information on the schedule and featured programs, visit http://www.hapajapan.com/…

Read the entire article here.

Concepts and Terminology in Representations of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Journal of Museum Ethnography
No. 6, MEG Conference “Museum Ethnography and Communities” (October 1994)
pages 7-21

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Introduction

Many scholars concur on how Black people were differentiated from white people during slavery in the United Stales. In brief, the United States operated a system of “racial caste” in which “a single drop of black blood” led to a man or woman being defined as Black (Williamson 1984). Dunn tells us that “In North America black blood was like original sin and stained a man and his heirs for ever” (Dunn 1972:254), while Foner argues that “almost everywhere in the United States even the smallest amount of Negro blood was enough to make a man a Negro and therefore a member of the subordinate caste” (Foner 1970:407). Yet, in the courts of South Carolina in 1835 Judge William Harper, faced with the case of a “white” man accused of having a Black ancestor, and thus simply “passing for white” made the following ruling:

We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a coloured person. The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man … it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It is hardly necessary to say that a slave cannot be a white man (cited in Williamson 1984:18).

On a different matter, and in the genre of Reggae, the phenomenal musical form of the 1970s and 80s, one artist comments on the need to relate the facts of Atlantic slavery:

Me have fe remind you, about the rowing of the boat and the bodies that float, as they took we ‘cross the see, and put we in slavery; about the missionary dem, dem said dem a we friend, but dem rob we of we gold and wealth untold, and [told us about] the pie in ihe sky. after we die. Me say, me have fe remind you! (Mutabaruka 1987)

These two examples illustrate the kinds of problems that underlie attempts by museum ethnographers to represent their exhibits; the former illustrates the problem of identifying language which is both an accurate and correct reflection of the historical record, while not offensive; the latter, the sensitivity and emotions of Black people as they confront the atrocities committed against them historically…

…Liverpool, “miscegenation” and the notion of “half-caste“

Some of these problems have a particular resonance in Liverpool, the city with the nation’s longest-standing Black community, the vast majority of whom are indigenous and of mixed African and European origins (Fryer 1984; Small 1991b). This is a context in which, unlike anywhere in the Americas, most children of mixed African and European ancestry were born of a white mother and a Black father, each belonging to a group that lacks power (6). Moreover, this community has been the victim of insidious misrepresentations, both scholarly and popular, over the course of the century (Fletcher 1930; Liverpool Black Caucus 1986:42). So when the problems outlined above are reflected in discussions of the collective Black experience in the use of terms like “mixed-race”, “mulatto”, “mixed-breed”, “mixed-blood” and “half-caste”, there is bound to be a strong response. Again such phrases tend to be used uncritically, though they were introduced with specifically negative intentions.

Though these phrases share common meaning, the term “half-caste” has been most used in Liverpool (Law & Henfrey 1981; Rich 1984; Rich 1986). The phrase was common currency in the city and some whites still use it, even though Black people have made it clear that they consider it derogatory and degrading. The most offensive public use of the phrase occurred in the 1970s and 80s when Kenneth Oxford, Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, insisted on using the term publicly when numerous Black organisations had formally insisted that it was both “racist and degrading” (Liverpool Black Caucus 1986:42). “Half-caste” is a scurrilous term introduced by Europeans to demean and degrade the children of mixed African and European origins (Jordan 1962; Rich 1984). It originated with the idea that there are pure “races” and that the white “race” is superior; people of mixed origins were portrayed as biologically, psychologically and socially inferior (Reuter 1918). When we examine the historical record and scrutinize scientific knowledge of these assertions, we find conclusions which are remarkably different. As one scholar has recently pointed out:

“Mixed-race” is meaningless as a category, since all humans are of mixed ancestry: biologically speaking, one may only say that such children are the offspring of a union between two people located at widely divergent points on a scale of somatic “racial” characteristics (hair type, skin colour, etc.) (Wilson 1984:43).

The historical background to this confusion, and the contradictions that persist should we accept this language uncritically, are reflected in a record by the American Hip Hop group Public Enemy, which describes the “logic” of “racialised” classification during slavery in the Americas:

White mother, white father, white baby; Black mother. Black father, Black baby; white mother, Black father. Black baby; Black mother, white father. Black baby. (Public Enemy 1990).

A more detailed historical analysis is provided in the literature (Jordan 1962; Cohen & Green 1972; Berlin 1974; Root 1992). But of course, underlying the notion of “mixed-race” is the idea of “miscegenation” or “race-mixing”. This is a concept which continues to be used uncritically even in scholarship produced in the 1980s and 90s, as if it is a value-free descriptive term. An appreciation of its origins indicates its more dubious nature…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Look at Her Hair”: The Body Politics of Black Womanhood in Brazil

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 11, Issue 2 (July 2003)
pages 18–29
DOI: 10.1525/tran.2003.11.2.18

Kia Lilly Caldwell, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This article examines Brazilian ideals of female beauty and explores their impact on Black women’s subjective experiences. The analysis focuses on hair as a key site for investigating how Black women’s bodies and identities are marked by Brazilian discourses on race and gender. Despite Brazil’s image as a “racial democracy,” derogatory images of Black women in Brazilian popular culture highlight the prevalence of anti-Black aesthetic standards in the country. Through analysis of Black women’s personal narratives, this article examines how individual women attempt to reconstruct their subjectivities by contesting dominant aesthetic norms. The analysis provides insight into the gendered dimensions of Brazilian racism by demonstrating the ways in which Black women’s views of, and experiences with, their hair highlight the complex relationship among race, gender, sexuality, and beauty.

“Otherness” is constructed on bodies. Racism uses the physicality of bodies to punish, to expunge and isolate certain bodies and construct them as outsiders.
—Zillah Eisenstein

INTRODUCTION

This article examines Brazilian ideals of female beauty and explores their impact on Black women’s processes of identity construction. Given Brazil’s longstanding image as a “racial democracy,” examining the racialized and gendered significance of hair provides key insights into the ways in which Black women’s bodies are marked by larger political and social forces. My analysis focuses on hair as a key site for investigating how Black women’s identities are circumscribed by dominant discourses on race and gender. I examine the pervasiveness of anti-Black aesthetic standards in Brazilian popular culture and explore Black women’s attempts to reinvest their bodies with positive significance.

The racial implications of hair and beauty have received scant attention in most research on race in Brazil (Burdick 1998). This tendency is largely due to the lack of research on the intersection of race and gender and the near invisibility of Afro-Brazilian women as a focus of scholarly inquiry (Caldwell 2000). Nonetheless, examining the social construction of beauty provides crucial insights into the intersection of race, gender, and power in contemporary Brazil. As a key marker of racial difference, hair assumes a central role in the racial politics of everyday life in Brazil. Most Brazilians are keenly aware of the social and racial significance of gradations in hair texture and use this knowledge as a standard for categorizing individuals into racial and color groups. The racial implications of hair texture take on added significance for Black women, given the central role accorded to hair in racialized constructions of femininity and female beauty.

This article forms part of a larger study that explores Afro-Brazilian women’s struggles for cultural citizenship through analysis of women’s life histories and practices of social activism. Field research was conducted in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, in 1997. The research participants included activists in the Black movement, women’s movement, and Black women’s movement, as well as non-activists. My field research and ethnographic analysis examine how women who self-identify as negra (Black) develop critical consciousness about issues of race and gender, and how this consciousness translates into social and political activism. Excerpts from my interview data are used in this article to explore Afro-Brazilian women’s views of hair and beauty. My analysis places dominant constructions of female beauty in dialogue with Black women’s critical reflections on the psycho-subjective dimensions of beauty and their role in processes of identity formation…

…Brazil’s now widely disputed image as a “racial democracy” also played a central role in constructing official and popular understandings of gender during most of the twentieth century (Caldwell 1999). In an attempt to reinterpret Brazil’s national past of colonial slavery, nationalist ideologues, such as Gilberto Freyre (1986[1946]), promoted constructions of Black womanhood that legitimized colonial gender norms. These gender norms continue to buttress and perpetuate colonial hierarchies of gender, race, and class by constructing the social identities of White women as the standard of womanhood and female beauty, and the social terms of sexual and manual labor. In contemporary Brazil, the social identities of Black, Mulata and White women demonstrate how physical differences are linked to gendered notions of racial superiority. While Black and Mulata women have long been regarded as being more sexually desirable, White women have traditionally been considered to be more beautiful. In many ways, the distinctions made between White, Mulata and Black women draw upon a virgin/whore dichotomy that classifies women into different categories based on their presumed suitability for sex or marriage. These forms of differentiation are succinctly expressed in the Brazilian adage: “A white woman to marry, a mulata to fornicate, a black woman to cook.”

In Brazil, racialized gender hierarchies also classify women by dissecting their bodies and attributing certain physical features either to the category of sex or beauty. This dissection process assigns features such as skin color, hair texture, and the shape and size of the nose and lips to the category of beauty, while features such as the breasts, hips, and buttocks are assigned to the sexual category. Given the Eurocentric aesthetic standards that prevail in Brazilian society, Black women have traditionally been defined as being sexual, rather than beautiful. Ironically, however, Black and Mulata women’s association with sensuality and sexuality has been lauded as evidence of racial democracy in Brazil (Caldwell 1999; Gilliam 1998).

Representations of mixed-race or Mulata women in Brazilian popular culture reveal the complexities of Brazilian discourses on race, gender and beauty. A carnival song from 1932, “Teu Cabelo Nao Nega” (Your Hair Gives You Away), highlights the ambivalent portrayal of Mulata women in Brazilian popular culture. As the song states:

In these lands of Brazil
Here
You don’t even have to cultivate it
The land gives
Black beans, many learned men, and giribita
A lot of beautiful mulatas

The hair gives you away.
Mulata.
You are mulata in color
But since color doesn’t rub off, mulata,
Mulata, I want your love. (Davis 1999:155)

“Your Hair Gives You Away” was the carnival success of 1932 and became one of the most successful carnival songs of all time (Davis 1999). The portrayal of Mulata women in the song reinforces Brazil’s nationalist image as a racial democracy and racial-sexual paradise. The lyrics portray Mulata women as being quintessentially Brazilian. Like black beans, they seem to spring from the land in large quantities. However, on closer observation, the lyrics also reveal racist beliefs premised on anti-Black aesthetic values. Both the title of the song and the lyrics contain the phrase, “hair gives you away.” When analyzed in the context of Brazilian racial beliefs, this phrase can be seen as an expression of racial “outing.” By referring to the Mulata’s hair, the narrator of the song states his belief that this desirable woman has African ancestry. Her hair texture is the marker that reveals this ancestry. The narrator then goes on to describe the Mulata as being Mulata in color. This statement reinforces the Mulata’s phenotypic characteristics and the fact that she is not negra or black in color. The narrator further states that the Mulata’s color is inconsequential since it will not “stick” to him. His desire to have the mulata’s love, or more accurately her sexual favors (Carvalho 1999), is unchanged and he continues to sing her praises, albeit with a double-voiced message of attraction and revulsion.

The process of racial outing performed in “Your Hair Gives Away” demonstrates how Afro-Brazilian women’s bodies are marked and categorized by Brazilian practices of racialization. Despite the prevalence of official and popular discourses, which emphasize the importance of racial miscegenation, practices of racial differentiation and categorization are pervasive in Brazil. As recent work by Antonio Guimaraes (1995) and Robin Sheriff (2001) has shown, the much acclaimed Brazilian color continuum coexists with practices of racialization that center on categorizing individuals into bipolar categories of Whiteness and Blackness. These practices of racialization reflect a decidedly anti-Black bias, which privileges Whiteness as an unmarked and universal identity. Lewis R. Gordon’s (1997) work on anti-Blackness provides significant insights into these processes. As Gordon provocatively argues,

in an antiblack world, race is only designated by those who signify racial identification. A clue to that identification is the notion of being “colored.” Not being colored signifies being white, and, as a consequence, being raceless, whereas being colored signifies being a race. Thus, although the human race is normatively white, racialized human beings, in other words, a subspecies of humanity, are nonwhite…. In effect, then, in the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black. Thus to be racialized is to be pushed “down” toward blackness, and to be deracialized is to be pushed “up” toward whiteness. (1997:76)

“Your Hair Gives You Away” demonstrates how a national preference for Whiteness and a concomitant devaluation of Blackness circumscribe the social identities of Afro-Brazilian women. The anti-Black aesthetic values articulated in “The Hair Gives You Away” describe the Mulata’s hair texture and skin color as being unappealing. These physical attributes were considered to be undesirable largely because they were associated with the Mulata’s African ancestry. Furthermore, while not explicitly stated, Brazilian notions of “good” and “bad” hair are present in the narrator’s evaluation of the woman described in the song. By stating, “the hair gives you away,” the narrator indicates that she does not have “good” hair and thus has not completely escaped the “stain” of Blackness…

Read the entire article here.

Challenging Multiracial Identity

Lynne Rienner Publishers
2006
135 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58826-424-4

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

What is multiracialism—and what are the theoretical consequences and practical costs of asserting a multiracial identity? Arguing that the multiracial movement bolsters, rather than subverts, traditional categories of race, Rainier Spencer critically assesses current scholarship in support of multiracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Expecting Excellence in the Field of Multiracial Identity Studies
• Projection as Reality: Three Authors, Three Studies, One Problem
• Psychobabble, Socioblather, and the Reinscription of the Pathology Paradigm
• White Mothers, the Loving Legend, and Manufacturing a Biracial Baby Boom
• Distinction Without Difference: The Insidious Argument for First-Generation Black/White Multiracial Identity
• The Road Forward

Focus on Research: Emma J. Teng F’06 on the Hidden Histories of Mixed Race Families

American Council of Learned Societies
ACLS News
2012-10-01

ACLS asked its fellows to describe their research: the knowledge it creates and how this knowledge benefits our understanding of the world. We are pleased to present this response from Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In June 1914, a young American woman with a small baby boarded a ship bound for China. Although she was white, she traveled in accommodations meant “for Asiatic passengers only.” Why? Mae Watkins Franking, a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was traveling to China to reunite with her Chinese husband, whom she had met as a student at the University of Michigan. Due to the Marital Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped U.S. citizenship from all American women who married foreign nationals, Mae had taken Chinese nationality, and thus, in an age of segregated travel, she journeyed to Shanghai under this status. Mae might have felt apprehensive moving to China, for although racial intermarriage was legal in Michigan at the time of the Frankings’ wedding, the Chinese government prohibited the intermarriage of overseas students with foreign women. (Merchants and laborers were allowed to intermarry.) The Frankings had three children: Nelson, born in the U.S., was an American citizen by right of birth; while Alason and Cecile, born in China, were considered by the U.S. government to be “aliens ineligible for naturalization.” Although the family returned to the United States in 1918, Alason and Cecile would have to wait until 1943 to gain the right of naturalization—despite the fact that their ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. These are just a few examples of the legal injustices faced by mixed (and in this case transnational) families up through the first half of the twentieth century.

Supported by a grant from the ACLS, in 2007 I set out to write a book that would bridge China studies and Asian American studies by comparing ideas concerning Euro-Chinese intermixing, or hybridity, in the U.S. and China between 1842, when China was opened to Western trade, and WW II. As the writing took shape, I realized that this was a story not only about the history of ideas, but also about mixed families and individuals whose lives were shaped by these ideas, and the laws and social proscriptions they informed. I thus went back and did more research: a rare luxury in the academic world. As a result, the manuscript that subsequently evolved also takes up the subject of how mixed families, who faced discrimination from both sides, negotiated their own identities within the constraints and opportunities of their social environments. In keeping with the comparative spirit that first inspired my project, I decided to juxtapose the lived experiences of Eurasians in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, three sites where the “Eurasian problem” became a topic of public discourse…

…Why does it matter for us to gain a more nuanced, less monolithic understanding of the intellectual genealogy of ideas concerning mixed race? The subject of mixed race is particularly germane today with increasing rates of intermarriage in our society. These intermarriages suggest that the old taboos against intermarriage and the barriers between races have diminished in the years since 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down the last of the anti-miscegenation laws. Yet, some of the old presumptions remain. First of all, the very notion of “mixed race,” so frequently celebrated in the contemporary media, entertainment, and advertising industries, relies on the presumption that there are “pure races” to begin with. My research aims to debunk this presumption by adding to the growing scholarship showing intermarriage and intermixing as age-old phenomena, challenging the commonplace certainty by which many feel they can identify those who are “pure Chinese” or “pure white.” Understanding histories of migration, cross-cultural contact, and interracial mixing allows us to see that, in fact, no such groups exist, other than as social and legal constructions, which may vary from country to country, time period to time period…

Read the entire article here.