Mixed Race Studies

Does Race Matter in Latin America?

Foreign Affairs
Volume 94, Number 2 (March/April 2015)

Deborah J. Yashar, Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Princeton University

In 1992, the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the daughter of poor Guatemalan peasants, for her work promoting indigenous rights. Her prize, momentous in its own right, highlighted a sea change in Latin American politics. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, prominent indigenous movements had emerged in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. As a result, Latin American countries undertook unprecedented reforms to address ethnic diversity: politicians amended national constitutions to recognize indigenous people, passed laws supporting bicultural education and affirmative action, and added questions about race and ethnicity to official censuses. Today, indigenous people not only are actively involved in politics but also have risen to leadership positions. Evo Morales, an indigenous Bolivian, has served as his country’s president since 2006. Ollanta Humala, an indigenous Peruvian, became Peru’s president in 2011.

Such a shift would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. Although Latin America boasts a rich and diverse citizenry—a legacy of powerful indigenous empires, colonialism, the African slave trade, and contemporary immigration-questions about ethnic difference were long suppressed. As part of the nation-building projects they undertook after winning independence, Latin American governments constructed twin myths of national unity and ethnic homogeneity, actively promoting racial mixing and erasing ethnic distinctions from official documents and from the national discourse. Meanwhile, the blurring of ethnic lines, sanctioned by governments, contributed to fluid understandings of race and identity. Whereas in the United States, anyone with mixed black and white heritage was historically considered black, Latin American societies developed various categories of racial identity based on skin color and cultural practices. A person might even identify as more than one ethnicity over the course of a single day-indigenous at home and mixed race at school, for example.

In stark contrast to the promise of ethnic inclusion, however, indigenous groups and people of African descent remained economically disadvantaged and politically marginalized well into the twentieth century. (Even today, black and indigenous populations lag behind their white counterparts by a variety of indicators, including rates of poverty and maternal and child mortality.) But partly because race and ethnicity had become so fluid, there was little tradition of identity politics in Latin American countries, and black and indigenous communities found it difficult to mobilize as a group in order to demand reforms. In addition, by midcentury, governments were papering over ethnic diversity by focusing instead on class divisions, shoring up support among the working class and the peasantry. Leaders and officials even began to replace the term “Indian” (used to refer to indigenous people) with the word “peasant.” Yet economic programs designed to assist the lower classes unintentionally strengthened many rural indigenous communities. And when these populist programs ultimately gave way to the free market, cutting off state support to those communities, indigenous groups mobilized for change…

Read the entire article here.

Black Man, White House: An Oral History of the Obama Administration

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2016-06-07
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062399793
Ebook ISBN: 9780062399816
6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 1.09 in (d)

D. L. Hughley

From legendary comedian D.L. Hughley comes a bitingly funny send-up of the Obama years, as “told” by the key political players on both sides of the aisle.

What do the Clintons, Republicans, fellow Democrats, and Obama’s own family really think of President Barack Obama? Finally, the truth is revealed in this raucously funny “oral history” parody.

There is no more astute—and hilarious—critic of politics, entertainment, and race in America than D. L. Hughley, famed comedian, radio star, and original member of the “Kings of Comedy.” In the vein of Jon Stewart’s America: The Book, Black Man, White House is an acerbic and witty take on Obama’s two terms, looking at the president’s accomplishments and foibles through the imagined eyes of those who saw history unfold.

Hughley draws upon satirical interviews with the most notorious public figures of our day: Mitt Romney (“What’s ‘poverty’? Is that some sort of rap jargon?”); Nancy Pelosi (“I play F**k/Marry/Kill, and there’s a lot more kills than fu**ks in Congress, believe me.”); Rod Blagojevich (“You can’t sell political offices on eBay; I discovered that personally.”); Joe Biden (“I like wrestling.”); and other politicians, media pundits, and buffoons. It is sure to be the most irreverent—and perhaps the most honest—look at American politics today.

Impeachment, culture wars and the politics of identity in Brazil

The Conversation
2016-05-26

Marshall Eakin, Professor of History
Vanderbilt University

Brazil is in the midst of its worst political crisis since the 1960s and possibly its most severe economic downturn in the last 100 years.

The economy will not – and cannot – improve until the country emerges from the political chaos of the moment and puts into place strong and legitimate leadership.

Most of the commentary on Brazil’s current crisis has focused on politics and economics. I believe that a more profound threat generated by this crisis will be to Brazilians’ sense of self – to their very identity as Brazilians.

In my 40 years studying Brazilian history and culture, I have never seen the country more polarized. Over the past decade, I have spent extended periods in Brazil researching and writing “Becoming Brazilians: Race and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil,” which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. More so than many countries, Brazil has had a powerful and dominant narrative of national identity for decades…

…Race and national identity

For much of the 20th century Brazilians of all social groups collectively forged a rich and vibrant cultural nationalism around the notion of mestiçagem — racial and cultural mixing.

The iconic intellectual Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) produced the most influential version of this narrative. According to Freyre,

Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries with him in his soul, when not in body and soul … the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the Indian or the Negro.

Many diverse political regimes from the 1930s to the 1980s placed an official seal of government approval on this narrative of mestiçagem. They hoped to publicize Brazil’s supposed “racial democracy” to the world. As I argue in my book, the lived realities of the great masses of Brazilians seemed to provide abundant evidence of the creative power of mestiçagem. Carnaval and Brazilian music like samba and bossa nova arose out of this dynamic mixing. The jazz on the playing pitch of Pelé and other great players produced the world’s most beautiful soccer…

Read the entire article here.

In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

University of North Carolina Press
May 2016
Approx. 432 pages
6.125 x 9.25, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3520-3

Stephen M. Ward, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

James Boggs (1919-1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) were two largely unsung but critically important figures in the black freedom struggle. James Boggs was the son of an Alabama sharecropper who came to Detroit during the Great Migration, becoming an automobile worker and a union leader. Grace Lee was a Chinese American scholar who studied Hegel, worked with Caribbean political theorist C. L. R. James, and moved to Detroit to work toward a new American revolution. As husband and wife, the couple was influential in the early stages of what would become the Black Power movement, laying the intellectual foundation for labor and urban struggles during one of the most active social movement periods in modern U.S. history.

Stephen Ward details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses’ lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward’s book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.

Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era

University of Chicago Press
April 2016
272 pages
3 halftones, 55 line drawings, 11 tables
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780226353012
Cloth ISBN: 9780226352961
E-book ISBN: 9780226353159

Michael Tesler, Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine

When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn’t lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans’ political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama’s presidency—in spite of his administration’s considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.

Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.

One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama’s presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Obama as Most-Racial
• Chapter 1. Racial Attitudes and American Politics in the Age of Obama
• Chapter 2. The Spillover of Racialization Hypothesis
• Chapter 3. The Obama Presidency, Racial Attitudes, and the 2012 Election
• Chapter 4. Racial Attitudes and Evaluations of Public Figures in the Obama Era
• Chapter 5. The Spillover of Racialization into Public Policy Preferences
• Chapter 6. Racial Attitudes and Voting for Congress in the Obama Era
• Chapter 7. The Growing Racialization of Partisan Attachments
• Chapter 8. The Expanding Political Divide between White and Nonwhite Americans
• Chapter 9. Conclusion: Racial Politics in the Obama and Post-Obama Eras
• Notes
• References
• Index

Pete Souza: photographing the real Barack Obama

The Guardian
2016-05-29

Jonathan Jones

President Barack Obama fist-bumps custodian Lawrence Lipscomb in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House

Over two historic terms, official White House photographer Pete Souza has chronicled the most intimate, candid and comical moments of Barack Obama’s presidency

It was a tale of two Americas. In Las Vegas the casinos were humming with a hell-yes tide that was about to sweep the manic Donald Trump to his most pumped-up victory yet. In Washington DC, civilisation still existed. In the week Trump’s xenophobic bid to be the Republican presidential candidate began to look unstoppable, the man whose Americanness he has questioned was meeting 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin. In Pete Souza’s official White House photograph of their get-together, President Barack Obama cracks a delicious smile as the first lady dances with McLaurin, who was invited to visit the White House in recognition of community work she has done for decades in the US capital. The meeting was also a celebration of Black History Month – and Souza’s picture manages to be both intimate and historic. Here are three African Americans in the White House. The room they are in – the Blue Room – is opulently decorated with gold stars, Empire-style furniture, and a portrait of some grand national father who holds a white handkerchief in his white hand…

Nov 2009 – Obama jokes with staff before the Summit of the Americas in Singapore Photograph: Pete Sousa/The White House

…What made Souza such an ideal day-to-day chronicler of Obama’s presidency? The answer is surprising. Before he recorded the White House life of America’s first black president, Souza did the same job for the first Hollywood actor to rule from the Oval Office. From 1983 to 1989, he was Ronald Reagan’s official photographer. Perhaps his most famous picture of that era shows Ronald and Nancy Reagan meeting Michael Jackson, who is wearing a spangly military-style jacket. Reagan looks understandably confused – is this the king of pop or the commander of the Star Wars defence programme?…

Read the entire article here.

Ghana To Ban Skin Bleaching Products in August

The Root
2016-05-29

Angela Bronner Helm, Adjunct Profesor of Journalism
City College of New York

The government of Ghana will ban all products containing hydroquinone this summer.

Colorism, that which privileges lighter skin over darker, is an issue that not only affects African Americans, but pretty much all people of color around the world.

From India to Compton, Brazil to Belize, one of the ways in which colorism rears its ugly head is in skin bleaching. We have all seen photos where celebrities such as Dominican baseball player Sammy Sosa or Nigerian-Cameroonian pop singer Dencia bleached their beautiful brown skin to odd shades not found in nature, ostensibly for beauty and prestige. As far back as the 1990s, the Jamaican dancehall song “Dem a Bleach” talked about the phenomenon of using chemicals to alter the color of brown skin.

But the West African nation of Ghana is putting the kibosh on that…

Read the entire article here.

Obama signs measure striking ‘oriental’ and ‘negro’ from federal law

The Hill
2016-05-20

Jordan Fabian, White House Correspondent

President Obama has signed legislation striking outdated racial terms such as “Oriental” and “Negro” from federal laws.

Obama signed the bill without fanfare on Friday along with six other pieces of legislation, the White House said…

Read the entire article here.

Sweden: People didn’t turn on refugees; system maxed out

Cable News Network (CNN)
Amanpour
2016-05-08

Christiane Amanpour speaks with Alice Bah Kuhnke, Swedish Minister for Culture and Democracy, about the crushing refugee crisis in Europe.

A Culture of Identity Choice: Assertions of Mixed Race, Transgender, and Other Identities and the Implications for Politics

Stanford University
Black Community Services Center
The Brandon Room
Wednesday, 2016-05-18, 12:00 PDT (Local Time)

Natalie Masuoka, Associate Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

While Americans have always connected with different social identities, today we find the assertions of identities such as “biracial,” “swirlies,” “boi,” and “transwomen” to be particularly significant. What is notable about these types of identities is that they communicate a person’s preferred self-identification relating to individual features historically understood as rigid and inherent. Masuoka argues that Americans today increasingly embrace a culture of, what she calls, identity choice in the United States. In today’s post-Civil Rights context, Americans increasingly believe and accept the idea that individuals can choose identities that were once seen as immutable. This presentation will trace the historical developments that have led to this new cultural perspective and offer a discussion about the possible political implications.

This talk is part of the 2015-16 RICSRE Seminar Series Spotlight on Race and Politics, co-sponsored by the Institute on the Politics of Inequality, Race, and Ethnicity at Stanford (InsPIRES). The event is also co-sponsored by the American Politics Workshop, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

For more information, click here.