Mixed Race Studies

Internal migration and ethnic division: the case of Palmas, Brazil

The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Volume 22, Issue 2, August 2011
pages 203–219
DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00134.x

Mieke Schrooten
Anthropology Department
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven

Starting from the observation that Brazilian history has led to the development of a very distinct system of race relations, this paper focuses on the (re)creation of ethnic divisions in a new city, Palmas, the capital of the Brazilian state Tocantins. Because the city was only founded in 1990, internal migration has heavily influenced the composition of the city’s population. The research shows that residential proximity and interaction between whites and non-whites is largely limited to the poor neighbourhoods of the city. Subtle racism continues to exist, deriving from a way of thinking that naturalises the racial hierarchy. The absence of clearly defined racial categories and the centrality of miscegenation to the Brazilian identity complicate the further dismantling of this racist culture.

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Community Profiles – Melissa Nobles

MIT School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences
Great Ideas Change the World
2013-04-21

Leda Zimmerman

“All societies periodically have to do soul-searching,” says Melissa Nobles, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. With research that illuminates historic episodes of racial and ethnic injustice, Nobles has developed a deep understanding of how different nations go about the process of self-examination and attempt to right the wrongs of the past. Such efforts, believes Nobles, require rigorous honesty and “making sure all voices are heard.”

Budding Political Aspirations

A self-described “political person,” Nobles learned early on about speaking up in the public arena. She was class president during most of her high school years in New Rochelle, NY and remembers attending forums in city hall to protest the school board “taking our school’s money away.” The daughter of parents born and raised in the American South, Nobles grew up during a racially fraught era, and was riveted by news accounts of the civil rights movement, as well as profoundly interested in the political struggles and history of black Americans.
 
Politics and Race
 
This passion to understand politics and its relation to race found an outlet during Nobles’ undergraduate years at Brown University in the early 1980s. Through courses on Latin America, she became fascinated with Brazil, a slave-holding country like the U.S. well into the 19th century. The prevailing academic wisdom was that post-slavery, Brazil evolved into a racial democracy with “no sharp lines of racial demarcation,” while the U.S. saw reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial violence and socioeconomic inequities.
 
But as scholars scrutinized the lives of contemporary Brazilians of color, the disparity (between U.S. and Brazilian national stories) began to crumble. According to Nobles, who eagerly absorbed the new findings, “all socioeconomic indicators that make democracy meaningful didn’t look so good for them, and in a further irony, things looked better for black Americans.” She recalls thinking, “If I’d been born in Brazil, looking the way I do, I wonder what my life outcomes would have been.”…

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Notes on the Racial Contours of Visual Culture in São Paulo, Brazil

Flow
Volume 17 (2012-12-18)

Reighan Gillam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

In this three part series of essays I will consider some of the aspects of race and visuality in Brazil. This article will lay out the dominant ways in which Afro-Brazilians are represented in the public sphere and describe the racial logics that sustain these images. The next two articles will probe the domestic and international incursions into the racial visual field.

On one of my meetings with Renato Ribeiro, an Afro-Brazilian media worker, we walked along the crowded streets of São Paulo en route to eat lunch and talk about his experience working in mainstream and alternative black media. I jogged beside him in order to keep up with his short, brusque strides, and listened to him tell me about the hegemony of whiteness in the national media. He suddenly stopped in front of one of the bancos das revistas or magazine stands that punctuate the city’s sidewalks and illustrated his point by gesturing towards the covers facing us and saying, “look at the capas (covers) of the magazines facing us. They are all white people…of course except for Revista Raça (Race Magazine).” Race Magazine is Brazil’s only national magazine that represents Afro-Brazilians and a quick scan of the magazine’s stand’s content proved his point. In recognizing the magazine stands as visual sites of racial representations, Renato also drew attention to the ways in which visual culture is embedded within the landscape of the city and the racial implications of its depictions.

That someone would point out the dominance of whiteness in the media is not new. What is different is the national context of Brazil and the racial ideologies that underpin the forms that some representations take. Although becoming increasingly more common, racial critiques of the media and other areas of power have largely been silenced or ignored by the belief in racial democracy that many Brazilians sustain. The idea of racial democracy in Brazil ascribes the origins of the national population to mixture between Portuguese, African, and Indigenous peoples. It is commonly thought that this mixture blurred the boundaries between distinct racial groups and thus acts as a barrier against racism or racial prejudice. Although scholars have documented the ways in which racism continues to marginalize Afro-Brazilian access to economic, political, and social power, general ideas about racial democracy continue to underwrite a pervasive silence around discussing race or racial inequality among the general Brazilian populace. Thus when Renato levies a racial critique of the magazine stand’s visual contents, he articulates a view often unheard among many segments of the population…

Read the entire article here.

Read part 2, “Watching Everybody Hates Chris in Brazil” (2013-03-05).
Read part 3, “Afro-Brazilian Public Sphere” (2013-05-07).

A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980

Duke University Press
2007
256 pages
29 illus., 8 tables, 1 map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4081-2 
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4060-7

Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In A Discontented Diaspora, Jeffrey Lesser investigates broad questions of ethnicity, the nature of diasporic identity, and Brazilian culture. He does so by exploring particular experiences of young Japanese Brazilians who came of age in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s, an intensely authoritarian period of military rule. The most populous city in Brazil, São Paulo was also the world’s largest “Japanese” city outside of Japan by 1960. Believing that their own regional identity should be the national one, residents of São Paulo constantly discussed the relationship between Brazilianness and Japaneseness. As second-generation Nikkei (Brazilians of Japanese descent) moved from the agricultural countryside of their immigrant parents into various urban professions, they became the “best Brazilians” in terms of their ability to modernize the country and the “worst Brazilians” because they were believed to be the least likely to fulfill the cultural dream of whitening. Lesser analyzes how Nikkei both resisted and conformed to others’ perceptions of their identity as they struggled to define and claim their own ethnicity within São Paulo during the military dictatorship.

Lesser draws on a wide range of sources, including films, oral histories, wanted posters, advertisements, newspapers, photographs, police reports, government records, and diplomatic correspondence. He focuses on two particular cultural arenas—erotic cinema and political militancy—which highlight the ways that Japanese Brazilians imagined themselves to be Brazilian. As he explains, young Nikkei were sure that their participation in these two realms would be recognized for its Brazilianness. They were mistaken. Whether joining banned political movements, training as guerrilla fighters, or acting in erotic films, the subjects of A Discontented Diaspora militantly asserted their Brazilianness only to find that doing so reinforced their minority status.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: The Limits of Flexibility
• Introduction: The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World
• 1. Brazil’s Japan: Film and the Space of Ethnicity, 1960-1970
• 2. Beautiful Bodies and (Dis)Appearing Identities: Contesting Images of Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity, 1970-1980
• 3. Machine Guns and Honest Faces: Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity and Armed Struggle, 1964-1980
• 4. Two Deaths Remembered
• 5. How Shizuo Osawa Became Mario the Jap
• Epilogue: Diaspora and Its Discontents
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

Contact of Races in Brazil

Social Forces
Volume 19, Number 4 (May, 1941)
pages 533-538
DOI: 10.2307/2571211

Arthur Ramos
University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

BRAZIL, as well as other American countries, was originally a land of conquests; the growth of its population has developed by the contact or confluence of European settlers with the Indians. In this vast laboratory of races, the New World, Brazil affords a splendid field for investigation of how heterogeneous peoples from many sources have mingled and formed one homogeneous people, one language, and one culture.

When the Portuguese settlers came to Brazil in 1500 with the caravel guided by Pedro Álvatres Cabral, they met an Indian population occupying the Brazilian coast in an extension of about 5,000 miles. With the Portuguese settlers in the six-teenth century came an enormous number of Africans, at first from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as slaves for agricultural work, and afterwards for work in mining and other tasks. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, other European contingents immigrated to Brazil. In addition to the Portuguese there were Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and other European peoples, and also some oriental peoples such as the Japanese.

Because of the heterogeneous sources of its population, Brazil is a splendid field for investigation of human hybridism. Unfortunately the field researches are few and without any definite conclusion. But we have at our disposal several centuries of a vast experience of contact of races, this contact being moulded according to a very old Portuguese tradition, that is, the contact between the Portuguese and the peoples they discovered in their exploration and colonization. In the contact between Portuguese and Negroes, for instance, Brazil never had anything similar to the Black Code and other legal prohibitions of contacts of races by miscegenation and intermarriage such as were very frequent elsewhere in the New World, especially in the English America.

The religious feeling has also favored interbreeding, and it was very common among the colonists. Many have emphasized the action of Catholicism with its doctrine of essential equality of mankind and its estimation of racial scruples. This position of Catholicism has been adopted by many Protestant countries influenced by modern missionaries. Important also is the legislation and the strength of the public opinion in several South American countries with reference to miscegenation and intermarriage. In…

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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…

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Affirmative Action in Brazil: Slavery’s Legacy

The Economist
Americas View: The Americas
2013-04-26

H.J.
São Paulo

TO SUM up recent research predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few centuries, he says, we will all “look like Brazilians”. Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they displaced. But with many more free blacks during the era of slavery, no “Jim Crow” laws or segregation after it ended in 1888 and no taboo on interracial romance, colour in Brazil became not a binary variable but a spectrum.

Even so, it still codes for health, wealth and status. Light-skinned women strut São Paulo’s upmarket shopping malls in designer clothes; dark-skinned maids in uniform walk behind with the bags and babies. Black and mixed-race Brazilians earn three-fifths as much as white ones. They are twice as likely to be illiterate or in prison, and less than half as likely to go to university. They die six years younger—and the cause of death is more than twice as likely to be murder…

…Brazilians’ notions of race are indeed changing, but only partly because of quotas, and more subtly than the doom-mongers fear. The unthinking prejudice expressed in common phrases such as “good appearance” (meaning pale-skinned) and “good hair” (not frizzy) means many light-skinned Brazilians have long preferred to think of themselves as “white”, whatever their parentage. But between 2000 and 2010 the self-described “white” population fell by six percentage points, while the “black” and “mixed-race” groups grew.

Researchers think a growing pride in African ancestry is behind much of the shift. But quotas also seem to affect how people label themselves. Andrew Francis of Emory University and Maria Tannuri-Pianto of the University of Brasília (UnB) found that some light-skinned mixed-race applicants to UnB, which started using racial preferences in 2004, thought of themselves as white but described themselves as mixed-race to increase their chances of getting in. Some later reverted to a white identity. But for quite a few the change was permanent…

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Race, Policy, and Culture: An Identity Crisis for Sickle Cell Disease in Brazil

Melissa S. Creary, MPH, Doctoral Candidate
Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts
Emory University

Professor Howard Kushner, Chair
Professor Jeffrey Lesser, Co-Chair

Abstract of Dissertation Prospectus

In 2001, Cândida and Altair, a married couple, started a national organization to increase the rights of sickle cell patients, and thereby gave birth to the sickle cell disease (SCD) movement in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Cândida, the wife, who carries sickle cell trait, now heads the municipal SCD unit for Salvador. She, with light skin and wavy brown hair, might be considered white in the United States, but when I asked her why she had created the organization she responded: “Eu sou negra!” (I am black). Her darker-skinned husband, who considers himself a black activist, coordinates the national SCD association and helped craft policy for SCD. As a family, Cândida and Altair shift between multiple roles: genetic carrier, parent, government official, and SCD advocate. Together these two activists have helped shape the racial discourse on SCD by associating the disease with “blackness” on the individual, organizational, and national level.

Sickle cell disease is the most common hereditary hematologic disorder in Brazil and throughout the world. In Brazil, the estimated prevalence is between 2% and 8% of the population. My research explores how patients, non-governmental organizations, and the Brazilian government, at state and federal levels, have contributed to the discourse of SCD as a “black” disease, despite a prevailing cultural ideology of racial mixture. Specifically, this project analyzes how the Brazilian state, advocacy, and patient communities within the nation have, at times, branded SCD an Afro-Brazilian disease. At the state level, I’ll describe the reigning racial ideology and how the development of racialized health policy contests their own viewpoint. On the organizational level, I’ll investigate the alignment of the SCD movement with the black movement of Brazil and the decisions made by some of these organizations to influence health policy using anti-racist motives. Lastly, I will explore the actual embodiment of SCD in the patient population and the “identity crisis” many may experience upon being diagnosed with a “black” disease.

With this framework in mind, I aim to answer the question—How are different actors (re)defining race and health through culture, biology, policy and politics in contemporary Brazil? This multi-level identity crisis is in constant contestation of competing racial frameworks at the micro, meso, and macro level. I will manage these complexities with a flexible notion of biological citizenship that considers frameworks of biology, social determinants, and policy in ways that is uniquely responsive to the cultural and historical specifics of how race, identity, health, and legitimacy operate in Brazil.

To do this, I will spend ten months in Brasília, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro investigating the construction of sickle cell disease on three different levels: advocacy organization around patient rights, individual patient and family experience, and governmental policy development and implementation. To assess the social, geographical, and political context of my subjects, I will use a series of historical and qualitative methodologies.

My work will deepen and re-think narratives of Brazil’s racial history through the lens of SCD. It also stands to generate a better understanding of the historical genealogy as it informs the current implementation of SCD policy. This analysis can provide lessons to both Brazil and the US on how future policy can be designed. Specifically, whether policy developed around populations (or sub-set of populations) can be measured against and be as effective as policy developed around disease.

The Puzzling Whiteness of Brazilian Politicians

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Center for Latin American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2012
pages 30-32

Jean Spencer, Outreach and Publications Coordinator
Center for Latin American Studies

Is Brazil really a racial democracy? The idea of racial democracy, originally put forth by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, holds that racial discrimination is much more moderate in Brazil than in countries like the United States, due in part to widespread racial mixing. If Brazil is truly a racial democracy, however, why are the city council members in both Salvador and Rio de Janeiro significantly whiter than their electorates? Thad Dunning, an associate professor of Political Science at Yale University, designed a study to discover the reason for this lack of descriptive democracy.

The first problem Dunning faced was a basic one: defining terms. In Brazil, black, white, and brown are in the eye of the beholder. To get “a quick and dirty” baseline for how different politicians are perceived, he conducted an internet survey where participants were asked to assess the race of a random sample of elected officials and unelected candidates using several different scales. In one, candidates were evaluated on a zero-to-10 scale with zero being the lightest and 10 being the darkest; in another, respondents located candidates in one of multiple color categories; and in a third, participants were asked to place the candidates in one of the five categories used by the Brazilian census: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigena (indigenous). In general, Dunning found that there was a good match between the results of the scales, with the pardo category generating the most heterogeneous responses. Comparing the codings of politicians with census data on residents of Salvador and Rio, he also found that whites were heavily overrepresented on the city councils of both cities, just as he had suspected.

But why? Dunning considered three main possibilities: whites hold racist attitudes toward other groups; black and brown voters have internalized disparaging attitudes about their own groups; or voter preferences are more influenced by class than race. To test these hypotheses, Dunning ran an experiment designed to tease out voters’ underlying racial biases. He hired black and white actors to create videos that followed the same format as the free hour of coverage that Brazilian television gives to candidates for city council. In order to compensate for differences in the personal appeal of individual “candidates,” he hired six black and six white actors for each city…

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Racialisation in Brazil [Karina Round]

Mapping Global Racisms Project (2012- )
University of Leeds
Working Papers
10 pages

Karina Round

This paper is going to explore the processes of racialisation in Brazil, a country were race is supposed to be irrelevant. Racialisation is the dynamic and complex process through which racial categories, concepts and divisions become embedded into social practices. In 2001 the United Nations World Conference against Racism acknowledged that no country could claim to be free of racism and that racism is a worldwide concern and requires a global response. Brazil is a highly fascinating case study to investigate because of the racial divisions, categories and hierarchies that have become deeply rooted in society. Brazilians envisage themselves living in a truly anti-racist nation, a “racial democracy” and this has been embedded in their minds for decades, as a result many academics have strived to give visibility to racism in Brazil. Looking back to when I was a tourist Brazil in 2010, I witnessed the renowned Rio Carnival and what I saw was a country in celebration of its mixed cultural heritage, but little did I know the extent to which racism was fixed into Brazilian’ society. This essay is going to first give a general overview of the situation in Brazil, focusing on Brazil’s principal inequalities. It will then be spilt into four different themes. The first topic will look at the myth of racial democracy and how this has become embedded in Brazilian lives. The second topic will centre on the racial categorisations that exist in the Brazilian system. The third topic focuses on how racism and racial discrimination plays a huge part in educational inequalities and the black population’s exclusion from the labour market. Lastly, this essay will look at the indigenous population’s marginalised position within Brazil.

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