Mixed Race Studies

Zumbi dos Palmares College encourages Afro-Brazilians to study

Infosurhoy.com
2012-04-27

InfoSurHoy.com is a one-stop source of news and information about, and for, Latin America and the Caribbean. It is sponsored by the United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM).

Thiago Borges

Opened in 2004 in São Paulo, the institution reserves 50% of its enrollment for people of African descent, who account for only 13% of college students in Brazil.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil – As the country’s classrooms become gradually more diverse, the debate over racial quotas at public universities has once again reached the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The 10 judges representing the country’s highest court voted unanimously on April 26 that affirmative action based on race is legal.

Though quotas remain a controversial issue in Brazil, the path to a college education is becoming increasingly accessible for Brazilians of African descent.

In 2000, only 2% of university students in Brazil were black, according to the NGO African Brazilian Society for Social Cultural Development (Afrobras), which is working to increase the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in higher education.

That rate has risen to 13%, according to the Ministry of Education (MEC).

The federal government’s University for All Program (ProUni) provides scholarships in private universities to students with disabilities, as well as indigenous, mixed-race and black students. The number of scholarships awarded is based on percentages of each group within the overall population, using figures from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

“The situation is somewhat different because of ProUni, which made it possible for a lot of people from low-income communities to study at private universities (by granting them scholarships),” says Francisca Rodrigues, the director of communication for the Afrobras. “But the proportion is still very low when you take into account the fact that 51% of the population is black or mixed-race.”

Of the 919,551 scholarships awarded throughout Brazil by ProUni from 2005 to 2011, 35.34% went to students who declared themselves to be mixed race and 12.51% went to students who declared themselves to be black…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial students discover identities in college

USA Today
2013-04-04

Taylor Lewis, USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent

College offers multiracial students the chance to have open conversations about race, allowing them to embark on a quest that is crucial in developing their identities.

When Sam Ho receives a form where he must select his race, he has a decision to make: Will he choose “white,” or will he check “Asian”? The trick, he has found, is to alternate.

Raised by a Caucasian mother and a first-generation Chinese immigrant father, Ho, a junior at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, grew up in a multiracial household. Although he lived in predominately white Topeka, Kan., he was frequently exposed to his Chinese heritage. But because of his physical appearance, Ho finds himself identifying more strongly as a white man.

“My outward features aren’t particularly Asian, and living in a majority white society, that’s culturally just what has been around me for the most part,” Ho says. “I think most people assume I’m 100% Caucasian, so I think the treatment I get from others is with that assumption.”…

…”Your identity is not only impacted by how your racial group might perceive you, but how the dominant culture perceives you as a member of a different racial group,” says Belinda Biscoe, associate vice president for University Outreach at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and an coordinator of The National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE). “Regardless of how we may see ourselves, part of our identity is also inextricably woven with how others see us.”…

…Take the “one drop” rule, for example, which suggests that if you have “one drop” of African-American blood, you must identify as black. So for multiracial students who grew up in two or more cultural worlds, they had to learn to define themselves in a society that was frequently asking “What are you?”.

“A lot of the biracial students would hear, ‘I’m not black enough to be black, and I’m also not white enough to be white, so where does that leave me?'” says Willie L. Banks Jr., associate dean of students at Cleveland State University in Cleveland and author of the study “Biracial Student Voices: Experiences at Predominantly White Institutions.” “So that’s always the conundrum. That’s the question that’s always addressed to these students: Where do you fit in?”…

Read the entire article here.

Hamilton school board asks aboriginal families to “self identify”

CBC News
Hamilton
2013-04-19

Taylor Ablett

The Hamilton Wentworth District School Board is asking aboriginal families to “self identify” as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit.

“We are encouraging families to self-identify because it will enable us to determine programming and supports to increase First Nation, Métis and Inuit student success and achievement,” said Sharon Stephanian, Superintendent of Leadership & Learning in a press release. The board will keep the information collected confidential.

“The information will only be used for the purpose of developing relevant support programs, services and resources”.

The board has sent out notices to parents and caregivers of children under the age of 18 and directly to students over 18…

Read the entire article here.

Generation Mixed and the One Love Club

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-06-03

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

The popular media and specifically the Race Remixed series in the New York Times propagate the myth of multiracialism. According to this social myth, the increasing number of interracial families and multiracial children in America is transforming race and paving the way for a post-racial future. This myth assumes the existence of a growing mass of mixed youth who both identify with their multiracial heritage and who have a clear conception of its significance and transformative potential. At best, writers and audiences (popular and academic) who believe in this myth are engaged in wishful thinking. From my experience and observation, they confuse a few individuals for the many.

For instance, I remember that Timesia is colorful. She wears yellow, purple, red, and taupe colored tops with brown, indigo and maroon pants. She is awkward and sweet, sixteen or seventeen. She’s from the neighborhood and probably poor. She is brown, black, copper, beige, and she wants to start a club for mixed kids like her.

Or at least this is what she initially tells me when she asks me to be the faculty sponsor for her club. The year is 2006, and I am working as an English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Van Nuys High School. I recall that it’s my future wife, her counselor, who suggests to her that I might be the right teacher to sponsor her club.

I am more than happy to sponsor her club, but there’s a hitch. She has to complete an application: Describe the club. Explain its purpose. Give it a name…

Read the entire essay here.

A Mixed Bag: Examining the College Experience of Multi-Racial Students

INSIGHT Into Diversity
April/May 2012 (2012-03-29)

Andrea Williams, Contributing Writer

To most American youth, college is the requisite rite of passage into adulthood, an experience marked as much by self-exploration and discovery as biology lectures and late night cram sessions.
 
From managing the excitement of living away from home for the first time, to coping with the stresses of time management, college can be simultaneously exhilarating and intimidating. And for biracial students who don’t fit neatly into the predetermined ethnic categories of many colleges and universities, the journey can be especially challenging.

For Theresa Lopez, the daughter of a white mother and a Latino father, the issues started with her application to the University of Illinois. “I was not given the option to be both white and Hispanic because the boxes were marked ‘White (Non-Hispanic)’ and ‘Hispanic (Non-White),’ making me feel as though whoever created the application was under the impression that white people and Hispanics could not have babies together,” says Lopez. “I would prefer, however, to call myself both white and Hispanic without denying either ancestry.”

The problems didn’t stop there for the college senior. In a society where people are confident in their own assumptions, even going to dinner becomes a lesson in cultural sensitivity. “When we go to eat at the local Mexican restaurant here in town, my friend, who is Columbian but does not speak Spanish, is always waited on in Spanish while I am always greeted in English because of the way I look,” says Lopez, whose blonde hair and blue eyes belie her Hispanic roots. “It makes me upset sometimes because even though I continue to speak Spanish to them, they seem to think I’m just some white girl who is trying to speak their language and be a part of their people. But I’m their people, too.”…

…Luckily for Matt Kelley, he discovered during the fall semester of his freshman year at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University that the school sponsored a mixed heritage student organization. “It was the first time I was made aware of ‘people like me’ who shared the experience of not fitting neatly into generally accepted racial boxes and boundaries,” he says. Kelley subsequently learned about similar clubs at other schools and in 1998 decided to launch a national magazine that would create a community among those organizations.

The publication – given the Yiddish name MAVIN, which means “one who understands” – was immediately well received, leading Kelley to form the nonprofit MAVIN Foundation in 2000 to further the work and reach of the magazine…

Read the entire article here.

Colleges or universities with monoracial cultural centers pose a challenge for biracial and multiracial students. While we know that challenge is an important feature of the student development process, we must still think deeply about the challenges we present through the messages sent by our programs and services. Is this level of challenge harmful or helpful? Are we asking students to choose which part of themselves they are going to identify with during their time at the college or university? Are we asking students to deny a part of themselves in order to identify with another part? Are we allowing biracial students to be their whole selves? How does this current design for the delivery of cultural programs and services help with the students’ identity development? This is a critical period in which students learn about themselves and their identity… What are biracial students learning through monoracial cultural centers, and what are we teaching students about our view of the world?

Larry D. Roper and Kimberly McAloney, “Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?,” Journal of College & Character, Volume 11, Number 4, (2010): 3 pages, doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1743.

IU Libraries Film Archive a treasure chest of educational, rare films

inside IU Bloomington
Weekly news for faculty and staff from the Indiana University Bloomington campus
2013-03-07

Lynn Schoch, Office of the Vice President for International Affairs

Many of a certain age—particularly those who were in elementary school in the ’50s and ’60s—will remember 16 mm films produced by the U.S. government, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., McGraw-Hill or National Educational Television.

They often provided the only glimpses of other worlds that U.S. school children had the opportunity to see.

By the 1970s, videotape and documentaries with large budgets and prime-time aspirations, like Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation,” began to replace the older formats.

From about 1940, IU’s Audio-Visual Center (then part of the Extension Division and later, Instructional Support Services) was the depository for U.S. government films. In time, it became the state’s most active lender of educational films to schools, museums, clubs, community centers, and churches in the state.

As the move to videotape made 16 mm films “obsolete,” the center became a repository for what other institutions and organizations no longer wanted.

In 2006 what was then a collection of 34,000 reels formed the core of the IU Libraries Film Archive. IU Libraries has supported the transition from lending library to historical archive with a dedicated film achivist in the Herman B. Wells Library, support for resources to digitize the collections and an off-site storage environment designed to minimize deterioration.

“We have the largest educational film collection in any university library,” said Rachael Stoeltje, film archivist with the IU Libraries Film Archive.

There are films available nowhere else in the world, and rarities such as 30 titles from the 1950s CBS series “You Are There” and the world’s most complete collection of Encyclopedia Britannica films…

…Darlene Sadlier, director of the Portuguese Program and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, a program within the College of Arts and Sciences, has been using educational films from the collection for many years in her classes in Latin American cinema and culture.

“One film that is helpful in a discussion of the history of race relations in Brazil, for instance, is ‘Brazil: The Vanishing Negro,'” she said. The film is a 30-minute film produced for public television in the 1960s, showing Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies and the daily lives of Brazil’s black population.

“It was an informative resource when it was first produced, but it was also polemical because it discussed the benefits of racial mixing, or rather whitening, of the Brazilian African population, to the detriment of its heritage,” Sadlier said. “In recent years, Brazil has recognized its African heritage with affirmative action laws and a holiday dedicated to national race consciousness. With this film, we can look back and consider how far the country has moved to acknowledge its long-held myth of ‘racial democracy.’”

Sadlier has published extensively on the histories, languages and cultures of Brazil. Her latest book deals with the Good Neighbor policy adopted by the U.S. government during World War II to cultivate stronger alliances with countries in the Western Hemisphere…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s affirmative action law offers a huge hand up

The Christian Science Monitor
2013-02-12

Sara Miller Llana, Latin America Bureau Chief and Staff Writer

Public universities in Brazil will reserve half their seats to provide racial, income, and ethnic diversity – a law that goes the furthest in the Americas in attempting race-based equality. It will most greatly affect the large Afro-Brazilian population.

Rio de Janeiro—Thaiana Rodrigues, the daughter of an esthetician in Rio de Janeiro, tried to get into college three times. But having spent most of her childhood in poor public schools – her anatomy teacher in seventh grade never showed up to class so she simply never learned the subject – Ms. Rodrigues was unable to pass the entrance exam.

It was not until her fourth try, when she applied as a quota recipient based on her race and socioeconomic status, that she won a spot at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), a public university that pioneered a quota system for public school students.

Rodrigues graduated in August 2011 with a degree in social sciences and now has a job working as an administrative assistant in an educational exhibit in the state legislature. Although only in her first year, already she is earning what her mother makes and is positioning herself for a career in public policy.

Now, many more marginalized Brazilians may be able to reap the same benefit. A system that was an experiment at scores of universities like UERJ over the past decade has become law: public federal universities must reserve half of their spots for underprivileged students hailing from public schools, disproportionately attended by minorities.

The law, signed in August and set to be completely implemented within four years, will have the widest impact on Afro-Brazilians, who make up more than half of the nation’s population.

“Without the law, many black students could not get into the system,” says Rodrigues, who is Afro-Brazilian…

…Affirmative action has long been resisted in Latin America, which considered it an import of the US, where it was first tried. After abolishing slavery, Latin America never implemented the segregation policies of its neighbor to the north, and has intermixed racially and ethnically far more than has the US. But fuzzy definitions of race don’t preclude racism.

“The main problem is this idea that this is a mestizo country where mixed-blood people are the majority, and mixing bloods gave us democracy,” says Jaime Arocha, an anthropologist and expert on Afro-Colombians.

“This is the founding myth in most Latin America countries. [Many believe] that our systems are not as segregationist as those in the north,” Mr. Arocha says. “But if you go to a national university in Colombia, the amount of professors of African descent is not more than 2 percent. In terms of students, we do not have more than 5 percent. [Universities] should reflect the demographic profiles of the country.” (Some 10 percent of Colombia’s population is of African descent.)…

Read the entire article here.

Challenges to Affirmative Action: An Analysis of Skin Color and Verification at the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Brazil

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Florida
Volume 14, Issue 1 (Fall 2012)
8 pages

Laura Hundersmarck
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
University of Florida

Historically, Brazilian racial identity has been constructed from a color continuum rather than discrete categories. To this end, self-identification often differs from the perception of another. In light of the newly instated affirmative action policies, many have questioned the reliability of applying concrete racial categories to a country that rose out of profound mixed ethnic and racial origins. The inclusion of a verification system has generated a serious debate on the foundation and limits of racial identity construction. How does one construct their racial identity for the purpose of affirmative action? What are the advantages and limitations of verifying an individual’s identity? This paper analyzes the unique dual identification process that exists at the Universidade Federal do Paraná drawing from four qualitative interviews from the Center for Afro-Brazilian Studies located within the university.

Read the entire article here.

It Takes a Village: Building Support Structures for Mixed Race Students in Higher Education

National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) 26th Annual National Conference
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-05-28 through 2013-06-01

2013-05-31, 15:15-17:15 CST (Local Time)

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Founding Co-Director
The Asian American Literary Review, Inc.

Jennifer Hayashida, Professor and Director of Asian American Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

Marc Johnston, Candidate, Higher Education & Organizational Change
University of California, Los Angeles

Mary Danico, Professor of Sociology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

From Hunter College, CUNY, which has no mixed race student organization, to University of San Diego, which has no services or resources for mixed race students whatsoever, many of our institutions of higher learning are unequipped to support our multiracial student populations, set to increase exponentially in the coming years. How to help these young people, grappling with racial and cultural self-identity, community belonging, isolation, confusion, and discrimination? How to help our institutions develop proper services—and academic coursework? The Mixed Race Initiative (MRI) is a national project designed to provide precisely that help: in Fall 2013 MRI will connect over 40 college and university classrooms, host a virtual conversation about race and mixed race, and build support structures for mixed race students across the country. This proposed workshop would bring together key participants in MRI to discuss the project and work with attendees on the following: identifying key challenges for students, faculty, and student services; identifying key resources; building networks—opening channels of exchange across institutional spaces; employing multimedia and social media to best effect; developing and establishing mixed race courses; and tailoring resources and best practices for specific environments.

For more information, click here.