Mixed Race Studies

Dark-Skinned Or Black? How Afro-Brazilians Are Forging A Collective Identity

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-08-12

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, South America Correspondent

Sisters Francine and Fernanda Gravina have German, Italian, African and indigenous ancestry. (Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR)

If you want to get a sense of how complex racial identity is in Brazil, you should meet sisters Francine and Fernanda Gravina. Both have the same mother and father. Francine, 28, is blond with green eyes and white skin. She wouldn’t look out of place in Iceland. But Fernanda, 23, has milk chocolate skin with coffee colored eyes and hair. Francine describes herself as white, whereas Fernanda says she’s morena, or brown-skinned.

“We’d always get questions like, ‘How can you be so dark skinned and she’s so fair?'” Fernanda says. In fact, the sisters have German, Italian, African and indigenous ancestry. But in Brazil, Fernanda explains, people describe themselves by color, not race, since nearly everyone here is mixed.

All of that is to say, collecting demographic information in Brazil has been really tricky. The latest census, taken in 2010, found for the first time that Brazil has the most people of African descent outside Africa. No, this doesn’t mean that Afro-Brazilian population suddenly, dramatically increased. Rather, the new figures reflect changing attitudes about race and skin color in Brazil…

…”We should see the history of Brazil as a history of racial inequality,” Heringer says — and that’s a fairly new idea. For a long time, Brazilians have believed in what’s been called “the myth of racial democracy,” she explains. Part of that myth-building was a controversial survey that the government conducted the 1970’s. It asked people to describe their skin color, and the answers varied a lot. All together, respondents used at least 134 different terms…

Read the article here. Listen to the story (00:05:38) here. Download the story here.

How Canadians celebrate their identity — it’s all in the hyphen

The Toronto Star
2015-05-02

Eric Andrew-Gee, Staff Reporter

Hyphenated identities — Ukrainian-Canadian, Somali-Canadian and the like — have played an outsized if ambiguous role in Canada.

The Canadian poet Fred Wah is a bard of hyphens.

He has described them, variously, as “a boundary post,” “a chain,” “a bridge,” “a knot,” and “a floating magic carpet.”

In his work, hyphens do more than glue surnames together and solder on prefixes. They are also skeletons of the self — giving shape to, among other things, Wah’s own Scottish-Irish-Chinese-Swedish-Saskatchewanian heritage.

It’s not a coincidence that one of Canada’s most distinguished writers of verse would concentrate so much creative power on the humble punctuation mark: hyphens have played an outsize, if ambiguous, role in the history of identity in this country.

They have acted as a knot — sometimes securing, sometimes restricting — and their meaning has mutated over time, from boundary post to bridge, first marking people out, then connecting worlds.

Along the way, the hyphen has budded into a kind of metaphor for what we think it means to be Canadian.

American political culture, with its melting pot ideal, has long been hostile to multiple, punctuated identities. Then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson described them as tantamount to treason, using his own vivid metaphor, in a 1919 speech:

“And I want to say — I cannot say it too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review: Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.

Jennifer L. Ruef
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

Urban Education
Volume 50, Number 6 (September 2015)
pages 776-783
DOI: 10.1177/0042085913519339

H. S. Alim, G. Smitherman (2012). Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. xv + 199 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-199-81298-1.

This review highlights the ways in which race is heard and played to advantage or disadvantage. From Barack Obama’s redefinition of presidential—through his deft linguistic style-shifting—to the ways race is read in the speech of students and the general public, Articulate While Black (AWB) challenges the notion of a postracial United States and persuades the reader that who decides the power of racialized English is an open question. Furthermore, it is a call to action for teachers to change the ways race is heard, leveraged, and celebrated in classrooms dedicated to equity and social justice.

Read or purchase the article here.

Greason: Quiet reflections on the impact of race perception

The Times-Herald
Norristown, Pennsylvania
2015-08-05

Walter Greason, Executive Director
International Center for Metropolitan Growth

Imagine looking white, but not being white. It is an experience that exposes the limitations of racial perception, while reinforcing its power. As a child, the experience unfolds through the whispers of a community’s rejection. Hurried words and sudden glances as adults explain to each other – “he’s not really what he looks like.” It is the loss of unspoken opportunities, the isolation from an elite social circle, glimpsed but never joined. It is a daily pain and a forced passage into a marginal status where racial meaning constantly shifted regardless of ancestry.

Imagine the child of such a person, a child representing the first generation after the Loving v. Virginia decision (a landmark civil rights decision of the US Supreme Court which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriages). This “unwhite” person might seek refuge in a community color-struck with admiration for lighter complexions. A darker-skinned family of social status might perceive an opportunity to open doors for children who would not experience the depths of anti-black attitudes in the United States – if they were light enough, if their hair was good enough. Such a marriage, such a family, might come to represent both an affirmation and a denial of the racial politics at the end of the twentieth century. This child could pick from a variety of cultures and identities – but somehow, he could never become white…

Read the entire article here.

Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2015-07-31

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Correspondent

Brazil’s national mythology is built on the idea of a democracia racial – a country whose population is uniquely mixed and has moved beyond racism.

The lived experience of its citizens, especially the majority who are black or mixed-race, tells a different story. Three residents of Bahia, known as the country’s “blackest” state, share their personal stories with The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.

‘It’s not easy to start working when you’re 12’

Cleusa de Jesus Santos was one of eight children whose father left when she was small. Her mother, illiterate and living in a slum, had no way to feed them all. “A friend of my mum’s said, ‘There is a person who needs a girl, just to watch her son, to keep him company.’”

So Ms. Santos was sent. “But when I got there, the reality was completely different: They said they were going to put me in school and so on, and they didn’t. I didn’t have vacation. I couldn’t see my family.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s colour bind

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2015-07-31

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Correspondent

Brazil is combating many kinds of inequality. But one of the world’s most diverse nations is still just beginning to talk about race

When Daniele de Araújo found out six years ago that she was pregnant, she set out from her small house on a dirt lane in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and climbed a mountain. It is not a big mountain, the green slope that rises near her home, but the area is controlled by drug dealers, so she was anxious, hiking up. But she had something really important to ask of God, and she wanted to be somewhere she felt that the magnitude of her request would be clear.

She told God she wanted a girl, and she wanted her to be healthy, but one thing mattered above all: “The baby has to be white.”

Ms. de Araújo knows about the quixotic outcomes of genetics: She has a white mother and a black father, sisters who can pass for white, and a brother nearly as dark-skinned as she is – “I’m really black,” she says. Her husband, Jonatas dos Praseres, also has one black and one white parent, but he is light-skinned – when he reported for his compulsory military service, an officer wrote “white” as his race on the forms.

And so, when their baby arrived, the sight of her filled Ms. de Araújo with relief: Tiny Sarah Ashley was as pink as the sheets she was wrapped in. Best of all, as she grew, it became clear that she had straight hair, not cabelo ruim – “bad hair” – as tightly curled black hair is universally known in Brazil. These days, Sarah Ashley has tawny curls that tumble to the small of her back; they are her mother’s great joy in life. The little girl’s skin tone falls somewhere between those of her parents – but she was light enough for them to register her as “white,” just as they had hoped. (Many official documents in Brazil ask for “race and/or colour” alongside other basic identifying information.)

Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres keep the photos from their 2005 wedding in a red velvet album on the lone shelf in their living room. The glossy pictures show family members of a dozen different skin colours, arm in arm, faces crinkled in stiff grins for the posed portraits. There are albums with similar pictures in living rooms all over this country: A full one-third of marriages in Brazil are interracial, said to be the highest rate in the world. (In Canada, despite hugely diverse cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, the rate is under five per cent.) That statistic is the most obvious evidence of how race and colour in Brazil are lived differently than they are in other parts of the world.

But a range of colours cannot disguise a fundamental truth, says Ms. de Araújo: There is a hierarchy, and white is at the top.

Many things are changing in this country. Ms. de Araújo left school as a teenager to work as a maid – about the only option open to a woman with skin as dark as hers – but now she has a professional job in health care and a house of her own, things she could not have imagined 15 years ago. Still, she says, “This is Brazil.” And there is no point being precious about it. Black is beautiful, but white – white is just easier. Even middle-class life can still be a struggle here. And Sarah Ashley’s parents want her life to be easy.

Brazil’s history of colonialism, slavery and dictatorship, followed by tumultuous social change, has produced a country that is at once culturally homogenous and chromatically wildly diverse. It is a cornerstone of national identity that Brazil is racially mixed – more than any country on Earth, Brazilians say. Much less discussed, but equally visible – in every restaurant full of white patrons and black waiters, in every high rise where the black doorman points a black visitor toward the service elevator – is the pervasive racial inequality…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

The colour black, Mixed-race people

Thinking Allowed
BBC Radio 4
2015-07-22

Laurie Taylor, Host

Black: the cultural and historical meaning of the darkest colour. From the ‘little black dress’ which epitomises chic, to its links to death, depression and evil, ‘black’ embodies many contrasting values. White Europeans exploited the negative associations of ‘black’ in enslaving millions of Africans whilst artists & designers have endlessly deployed the colour in their creative work. Laurie Taylor talks to John Harvey, Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, about his new book which explores how ‘black’ came to have such ambiguous and varied meanings. They’re joined by Bidisha, the writer and broadcaster.

Also, the last 20 years has seen a major growth in the number of people of mixed racial heritage. Miri Song, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, talks about her research into the ways that multiracial parents with white partners talk to their their children about race and identity.

Producer: Jayne Egerton.

Listen to the episode (00:27:58) here. Download the episode here.

“The Illogic of American Racial Categories”

Jefferson’s Blood: Thomas Jefferson, his slave & mistress Sally Hemings, their descendants, and the mysterious power of race.
Frontline
Public Broadcasting Service
2000

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Excerpted from the chapter “The Illogic of American Racial Categories” in Racially Mixed People in America, Maria P. P. Root, ed., (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992), 12-23.

In most people’s minds … race is a fundamental organizing principle of human affairs. Everyone has a race, and only one. The races are biologically and characterologically separate one from another, and they are at least potentially in conflict with one another. Race has something to do with blood (today we might say genes), and something to do with skin color, and something to do with the geographical origins of one’s ancestors. According to this way of thinking, people with more than one racial ancestry have a problem, one that can be resolved only by choosing a single racial identity.

It is my contention in this essay, however, that race, while it has some relationship to biology, is not mainly a biological matter. Race is primarily a sociopolitical construct. The sorting of people into this race or that in the modern era has generally been done by powerful groups for the purposes of maintaining and extending their own power. Not only is race something different from what many people have believed it to be, but people of mixed race are not what many people have assumed them to be…

Most systems of categorization divided humankind up into at least red, yellow, black, and white: Native Americans, Asians, Africans, and Europeans. Whether Australian aborigines, Bushmen, and various brown-skinned peoples—Polynesians and Malays, for example—constituted separate races depended on who was doing the categorizing…

Read the entire article here.

Jose Antonio Vargas on Donald Trump, Rachel Dolezal and His MTV Documentary, ‘White People’

The New York Times
2015-07-22

Jonathan Wolfe

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigration activist. His new documentary “White People,” which airs tonight on MTV, follows Mr. Vargas as he travels the country speaking to young people about issues of race, particularly what it means to be white and experience white privilege. Because, Mr. Vargas said, “You cannot have a conversation about race in this country and not include white people in it.”

The documentary is part of MTV’s Look Different campaign, which aims to erase hidden gender, racial and anti-LGBT bias and uses data from a 2014 MTV survey of 14- to 24-year-olds that found that people in this age group are more tolerant and diverse than previous generations but are uncomfortable talking about race and adhere to the ideal of color blindness.

Mr. Vargas spoke about the controversy surrounding the documentary, Donald Trump’s comments about immigration and Rachel Dolezal. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:…

…Q. What is your definition of white privilege?

A. I think people get tripped up by the word “privilege.” I’m talking about systematic institutionalized differences. I had a lot of people writing me emails saying, I’m not privileged. For example, this weekend I was with Martin O’Malley in front of progressive liberal activists. Responding to the “Black Lives Matter” protest at the conference, he said: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” And the audience, which was diverse, gasped. They actually booed him. Because institutionally, if you look at incarceration rates, if you look at the criminal justice system, black people are at a disadvantage. So the moment he said that, he took it back and apologized. And some people took offense to that. Why did Martin O’Malley have to apologize for saying white lives matter? And this woman on Twitter was genuinely hurt; her tweet to me was, “My white life matters.” And I tweeted back at her and I was like, “Of course it does.” Of course it does, but your life mattering has been a given…

…Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?

A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?

Q. What do you think about Rachel Dolezal?

A. For me, that’s an example of what white privilege is. She can pass. There are many black people who can say that they are white as much as they can but who will never look physically white…

Read the entire interview here.

It’s Impossible to Lie About Your Race

The Huffington Post
2015-07-01

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

There’s an important question being left out of the furor over charges that Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter, has been “lying” about her race: How can you lie about something that doesn’t have any objective truth to it in the first place?

The frenzy over Dolezal has erupted because her claim to black identity defies a longstanding American belief that human beings come in three or four or five flavors called “races,” which are linked to the geographical areas from which our ancestors came, and which are characterized by physical characteristics that are passed down from one generation to the next. According to this dominant view, Dolezal is objectively white because her parents are white Americans whose recent ancestors were from Europe.

But instead of being a matter of natural, objective facts, race is more like astrology. It’s a way of dividing human beings up into different categories, and we are the ones who invent those categories, not Mother Nature. The idea that there are “black” people and “white” people is no different than the belief that there are Geminis and Scorpios. Indeed, astrology and racial classification both claim to be grounded in nature. Race ostensibly reflects our biological constitution, while sun signs are meant to capture planetary forces that imprinted us at birth. But it’s not too hard to see that a whole lot of human cultural thinking has gone into both. The reality is that scientists are far from any agreement on what race has to do with genes. And the racial classifications so familiar to Americans today are actually products of the 1700s, when they were forged by Europeans who were trying to explain the physical, social and moral qualities of peoples they had come to colonize across the world.

So when Rachel Dolezal says she is black when we consider her white, it’s akin to her claiming to be a Virgo when by our lights she’s a Leo. Would it really be a lie to say you’re a Virgo instead of a Leo when both of those categories are made up in the first place?…

Read the entire article here.