Mixed Race Studies

MSU faculty contribute to book on white privilege

Mississippi State University
2016-07-01

Contact: Allison Matthews

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Two Mississippi State faculty members helped lead a literary effort examining the basis and scope of racial identity as an American social structure.

Stephen Middleton, professor of history and director for African American Studies at MSU, along with associate professor of English and African American Studies Donald Shaffer, served on the editing team for “The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity.” A University Press of Mississippi publication, the collection of essays specifically looks at the origins of white privilege and the various social, cultural, political and economic practices that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. David Roediger of the University of Kansas also was co-editor.

“This book explores an old story in American culture,” said Middleton, the project’s lead editor. “It reviews a time when we thought about ourselves in certain ways, and the two categories that defined us more than any other were ‘white’ and ‘black.’ It’s an old story of what we’ve learned about our history and what we tell ourselves.”

“Whiteness” is a socially and legally constructed category, Middleton said, woven into the American psyche over time based on the need for cheap labor. This established a power and economic structure favorable to whites that socially and legally denied access to non-whites…

Read the entire article here.

Inclusion Policies and the Future of Racial Relations in Brazil

The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
3rd ISA Forum of Sociology
2016-07-10 through 2016-07-14
Vienna, Austria

Tuesday, 2016-07-12, 09:30 CEST (Local Time)
Room: Hörsaal 34

Oral Presentation

Valter Silvério, Associate Professor of Sociology
Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, Brazil

Antonio Guimarães, Professor
Department of Sociology
Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil

After the adoption of a new Constitution in 1988, race related issues have been transposed from the private to the public sphere. Affirmative action for blacks, native Brazilians, and the poor have been spread all over the country, and a Federal Affirmative Action statute and program was created. The Statute for Racial Equality was voted into law in Congress and Federal Education Guidelines were altered to include obligatory teaching on race relations, black Brazilian culture, and African history throughout basic education. Besides being a major symbolic break through, these new policies combined have the potential to lower the levels of racial inequality and discrimination that have plagued the country throughout its history.

Nonetheless, this whole process has not been devoid of tensions and contradictions. For example, if the recognition of a black identity put into question the narrative of miscegenation and racial harmony that underpinned Brazil’s national identity for decades. It also challenges sociologists to make sense of these ongoing changes in public policy and of the role of the State in fighting inequality and fostering identity formation. Given that scenario, a central question organizing this panel is: How societies with a history of structural inequality and racial domination can evolve toward a more equal stand and mutual recognition among social groups? Answering this question implies discussing the possible paths opened to improving the status and standing of individuals and groups in a context in which the ideology of racial democracy (or similar national narratives) still holds sway in the minds of many people, including the local elites.

The roundtable aims at addressing the above question from different perspectives, looking into the Brazilian and Latin America current debates and paying attention to the transformations and new challenges faced by these societies.

For more information, click here.

Multiracial People and the Socialization of Their Children in Britain

The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
3rd ISA Forum of Sociology
2016-07-10 through 2016-07-14
Vienna, Austria

Tuesday, 2016-07-12, 14:15 CEST (Local Time)
Room: Hörsaal 31

Oral Presentation

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Since ‘Mixed’ was first offered as an option in the ethnicity question in the 2001 England and Wales Census, Britain’s recognition of, and interest in, ‘mixed race’ (or ‘multiracial’) people and families has not abated. Recent studies have focused primarily upon how mixed (young) people identify themselves, or how parents racially identify their multiracial children. But Britain now has a population of multiracial individuals who are themselves parents, about whom we know very little. Despite the growing commonality of mixed people and families, such families can still be subject to forms of racial pathologzation and scrutiny in various settings. Extant studies of multiracial family life (especially in the US) have tended to focus upon interracial couples and their multiracial children, but we now need to look a further generation down – at their grown children. What are the particular concerns which arise for multiracial individuals in Britain who are parents? How do multiracial people who are parents experience and negotiate forms of objectification and/or prejudice from others? Do multiracial people (who are parents) want to steer their children toward a particular kind of socialization, and if so, toward what (and why)? This paper is an in-depth exploration of the ways in which different types of mixed people (South Asian/White, Black/White, East Asian/White) in Britain think about and engage in parenting.

For more information, click here.

Barack Obama, the President of Black America?

The New York Times
2016-06-24

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

What the haters and the hagiographers get wrong.

It was a crucial speech, high-stakes even for a man used to giving important speeches: The first black president of the United States had to acknowledge, and then bind up, the nation’s racial wounds. A year ago, after the massacre of nine souls at prayer at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Barack Obama traveled to Charleston, S.C., to eulogize its pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

When Mr. Obama stood in the pulpit, I saw him as thrust into a peculiar position: He nobly assumed a symbolic, though not individual, guilt for the hate that had been visited on Charleston, largely because the white killer appeared to despise black progress, and there was no clearer representation of that progress than President Obama.

The president had a lot to do in that eulogy. He had to give comfort to a grieving family and congregation. He also had to make amends for seven years of public gestures of tough love toward black folks.

To do that, the president brilliantly evoked grace as an antidote to hate and preached in a black style to forge healing and redemption. He ended with a stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace.” As the call and response of the black church came full circle, Mr. Obama was at his best when he was at his blackest. It was a rare display of unapologetic race pride.

We are now approaching the last months of the Obama era. He will be remembered as a great, but flawed, president, and many of those flaws have to do with how he has addressed race — or avoided doing so…

Read the entire article here.

Confounding Anti-racism: Mixture, Racial Democracy, and Post-racial Politics in Brazil

Critical Sociology
July 2016, Volume 42, Numbers 4-5
pages 495-513
DOI: 10.1177/0896920513508663

Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa, Assistant Professor, Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education
University of Alberta, Canada

In this article, I analyze the particularity of post-racial ideology in Brazil. I examine recent deployments of mixture and racial democracy as re-articulations of historically hegemonic versions of these ideologies that minimize the problem of racism, deny its systemic nature, and deem ethno-racial policies as threats to achieving nonracial belonging and citizenship. Drawing on scholarship on race and racism from the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America, I delineate a relational framework for analyzing the post-racial and apply this framework to three examples of post-racial ideology. Through these examples, I illustrate the problematic logics shaping aggressive investments in the post-racial as future promise to the detriment of addressing the unequal effects racial difference presents for inclusion/exclusion today. The article asserts the necessity of mounting transnational and interdisciplinary theoretical, epistemological, and practical strategies to challenge the ways post-racial ideologies rearticulate racial hierarchies, maintain racial subordination, and delimit social change.

Read or purchase the article here.

Beauty and the Bleach: This Issue is More than Skin Deep

Ebony
2016-06-20

Yaba Blay, Dan Blue Endowed Chair in Political Science
North Carolina Central University

Skin bleaching is a billion-dollar industry. Considering its global reach, Dr. Yaba Blay says we have to stop treating bleaching as just a matter of self-hate.

Over the past few years, social media has been abuzz with discussions of skin bleaching. In recent weeks, we’ve lamented Lil Kim’s ghostly shadow of her former self, ridiculed Ghanaian boxer Bukom Banku for denouncing his black skin, and dragged Azaelia Banks for becoming a virtual spokesmodel for Whitenicious by Dencia. While we talk amongst ourselves, a segment of a 2012 video investigating “unusual beauty trends” in Jamaica has resurfaced on Facebook. Viewed over two million times in less than one week, in that segment we see a soft-spoken blonde-haired European reporter “in the trenches” as she talks to a number of Jamaicans about their bleaching and offers requisite warnings about the dangers of the practice.

Whether from the perspectives of Black folks or from those of Whites, our communal voyeurism into skin bleaching tends to focus almost solely on the individuals who bleach their skin, and not the global institutions that make skin bleaching a viable option. And it’s a problem…

Read the entire article here.

Part-Latinos and Racial Reporting in the Census: An Issue of Question Format?

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
July 2016, Volume 2, Number 3
pages 289-306
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215613531

Michael Hajime Miyawaki, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas

In this study, the author examines the racial reporting decisions of the offspring of Latino/non-Latino white, black, and Asian intermarriages, focusing on the meanings associated with their racial responses in the 2010 census and their thoughts on the separate race and Hispanic origin question format. Through interviews with 50 part-Latinos from New York, the findings demonstrated that their racial responses were shaped largely by question design, often due to the lack of Hispanic origins in the race question. Many added that their responses did not reflect their racial identity as “mixed” or as “both” Latino and white, black, or Asian. Most preferred “Latino” racial categories, and when given the option in a combined race and Hispanic origin question format, they overwhelmingly marked Latino in combination with white, black, or Asian. Part-Latinos’ preference for “Latino” racial options may stem from the racialization of Latinos as nonwhite and their desire to express all aspects of their mixed heritage identity. Moreover, the contrast in racial reporting in the 2010 census and the Census Bureau’s recently proposed “race or origin” question for the 2020 census could result in different population counts and interpretations of racial statistics.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brazil, Mixture Or Massacre? Essays in the Genocide of a Black People

The Majority Press
1989
214 pages
5.5 x 0.4 x 8.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0912469263

Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2014)

Translated by Elisa Larkin Nascimento

Nascimento explodes the myth of a “racial democracy” in Brazil. The author is a major figure in Afro-Brazilian arts, politics and scholarship. He founded the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio de Janeiro in 1944 and was an elected member of the Brazilian Congress from 1982 to 1986.

Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil

Princeton University Press
2016
328 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780691169385
eBook ISBN: 978140088107

Tianna S. Paschel, Assistant Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the most important cases in the region: Colombia and Brazil.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics. The strategic actions of a small group of black activists—working in the context of domestic unrest and the international community’s growing interest in ethno-racial issues—successfully brought about change. Paschel also examines the consequences of these reforms, including the institutionalization of certain ideas of blackness, the reconfiguration of black movement organizations, and the unmaking of black rights in the face of reactionary movements.

Becoming Black Political Subjects offers important insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin American politics and provokes readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements.

Table of Contents

• List of Organizations
• 1. Political Field Alignments
• 2. Making Mestizajes
• 3. Black Movements in Colorblind Fields
• 4. The Multicultural Alignment
• 5. The Racial Equality Alignment
• 6. Navigating the Ethno-Racial State
• 7. Unmaking Black Political Subjects
• 8. Rethinking Race, Rethinking Movements
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil

Rutgers University Press
November 2001
278 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3000-0
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-5602-4

Robin E. Sheriff, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of New Hampshire

In the 1933 publication The Masters and the Slaves, Brazilian scholar and novelist Gilberto Freyre challenged the racist ideas of his day by defending the “African contribution” to Brazil’s culture. In so doing, he proposed that Brazil was relatively free of most forms of racial prejudice and could best be understood as a “racial democracy.” Over time this view has grown into the popular myth that racism in Brazil is very mild or nonexistent.

This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians’ views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?

Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Hill
• Chapter 2 Talk: Discourses on Color and Race
• Chapter 3 Silence: Racism and Cultural Censorship
• Chapter 4 Narratives: Racism on the Asphalt
• Chapter 5 Narratives: Racism at Home
• Chapter 6 Whiteness: Middle-Class Discourses
• Chapter 7 Blackness: Militant Discourses
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Dreaming
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index