Mixed Race Studies

Post-Raciality or a Re-Imagining of Whiteness: an Interview with Clarence E. Walker

Platform: Journal of Media and Communication
Volume 3, Issue 1, Media and “Race” (April 2011)
pages 26-34
ISSN: 1836-5132

Sandy Watson, University of Melbourne, Australia

Clarence Walker is recognised as one of the leading historians of American race relations, and is noted for his advocacy of critical historical analysis of race relations and discourses as a way of understanding the present. Walker has written widely on issues relating to black American history, including five books covering variously race and politics (2009), race and the national imaginary (2010); Afrocentrism and discourses of black Africanism (2001, 1999) and the history of nineteenth century black religion (1982).

Introduction

Walker’s most recent work, with Gregory Smithers, explores the emergence of discourses of post-raciality during the 2008 United States election campaign (Walker and Smithers 2009) where Walker argued that the historical superficiality of journalism exacerbates racial tensions rather than creating greater cultural understanding on racial issues (2009, p. 39). In this interview, he discusses the applicability of what he describes as reactionary discourses (that of post-raciality, colour blindness and colour neutrality) in the context of shifting media usage and tensions arising from perceived challenges to the dominant, white-centred national imaginary.

The critique of white-centred accounts of history has been central to Walker’s recent work, and was the subject of his compelling book Mongrel Nation (2010), in which he argues for the need to recognise the interracial founding of the United States. The book contextualises the controversy surrounding 1990s claims that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, had one or more children in an interracial relationship with a slave girl called Sally Heming. These accounts were refuted heatedly by segments of academia who pointed to Jefferson’s documented concern about the dangers of amalgamation as an indication of the unlikely nature of his having an interracial affair. Walker argues persuasively and with historical force that such refutations need to be contextualised as reactionary discourses within a history of white-centred historicising and imagining of the national identity in the United States…

PLATFORM: The idea that American society is post-racial gained renewed ascendancy with Barack Obama’s election as the first (self-identifying) black President of the United States. However, narratives of post-race have been circulating in the US since the Civil Rights Act (1964). Can you elaborate on the nuances between narratives such as post-raciality, colour-blindness and race neutrality as a basis for informing analysis of their presence in political and media debates over the past two years?

Clarence Walker: In my view these are all reactionary movements. They are constructed around an attempt to efface race as a site of conflict in the American past and present. To say that one is colour-blind rather than colour-conscious is to say that you see something in someone that you don’t want to see, that is their colour. It’s also to say that you think that these issues are somewhat superficial and that if we want to wish them away we can. You can see this in the whole construction of Asians as some kind of model minority here because they’re successful academically and economically, at least in some sectors of the population. You can also see it in the hysteria over immigration with the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people over recent years.

It is the case in America that most white people do not want to talk about race. They prefer to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has effaced the racial problem, and that if there is a racial problem here it is because black people are basically angry or have refused to accept this new reality in which race is no longer a problem. But if race is no longer a problem, then why are there so many young black men between the ages of 18 and 25 including Mexicans also in American prisons? They constitute approximately one and a half million of two million people in American prisons.

Yet the Obama election was very much a racial election, despite these discourses of post-raciality. It was racial in the sense that it required white people to overcome their historical animosity towards the idea of a successful black candidate. I tend to think that up until the leaking to the media of the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as Gregory Smithers and I discuss in The Preacher and The Politician, there was little attention to the fact on the part of many white Americans that Barack Obama was black. In the case of black Americans there was great suspicion of him because he was not associated with the two historically defining moments of black American history, one being of course the question of slavery and Jim Crow, the other being the Civil Rights Movement. It was only when Jeremiah Wright’s comments were leaked and it came out that Obama was associated with this Church which was part of a Christian black nationalist movement, a particular congregation that was Afro-centric and black nationalist, that attention started to be paid to the fact that Obama was black. This led to speculation about whether Obama therefore might have a subtext of black militancy that he wasn’t talking about. This was one of the signature moments in terms of race becoming part of the election debate.

The Obama presidency has if not reignited the other being the issues about race and colour then certainly shown that they haven’t gone away. In many ways the emergence of this black man as the President of the United States is comparable to the emergence of prominent Jews in France and Germany and the political and cultural life of those countries in the nineteenth century. There were elements in those societies who were opposed to Jewish civil and political equality just as there are elements in this country who feared the election of Obama or any black person as the President of the United States.

The discourse of post-racialism which emerged in relation to the 2008 campaign was itself really a product of the chattering classes, by that I mean the media commentators and academics who talked about the ‘Obama moment’ as the post-racial moment. For example, I teach a course called the History of Race in America here at the University of California and I have just finished teaching 80 undergraduates. I have talked about this subject in the way I have done for the 37 years of my career in that I don’t mince words and I am very direct about what I want to say. Many of my students find this very disturbing because their views have been shaped by the media and some of them were very resistant to the notion that this in fact was not a post-racial society because we had a black president and that because he was of mixed race nobody talked about the fact that he had a white mother. I said to my students, “How would his history have been different if his mother was black and his father white rather than the other way around?” It had never occurred to them that this would have created a different historical narrative and a different historical actor, and one whom many white people in this country would never have voted for because his cultural experience rather than being that of a white working class family would have been that of a black family…

PLATFORM: I’d like to return to a consistent theme in your work, that of the argument that a critical appraisal of historiography is vital in understanding contemporary debates and discourses on race. In Mongrel Nation you particularly emphasised the resistance of historians and others to the notion of an interracial founding of America rather than the dominant constructions of whiteness that have underpinned renderings of history in the US. This was in relation to claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children in an interracial relationship with Sally Hemings. How can this historical perspective inform our understanding of the role of discourses such as post-racialism?

CW: In the national imaginary up until recently the United States was historically imagined by historians as purely a white nation. This is changing with the work of the very distinguished historian Annette Gordon Reed and others, as well as in my work, where you see a rethinking of the American past that is more in line with what the country was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what it is like today. The resistance to this arises out of the fact that it is very hard for some people, older people in particular, to think of the United States as anything other than ‘whiteland’ or ‘whitetopia’ and the fact that they refuse to come to grips with this. You see this most clearly in their hostility to Barack Obama. His election is something that is contrary to fact. If this is a white nation then what is it doing with a “coloured” president? And if this is a white nation, then what does it mean for the future? It means that we will have an Asian president, it means that we may even have a Muslim president, we may even have a woman president, and I hope we do. It’s not just that every generation writes history according to its own desires but that there has to be a recognition in the United States that although it was the product of white colonial settlers that the country did not remain white very long…

Read the entire interview here.

Advertising “Interraciality” and “Multiraciality” In ObamaLand—Representations and Images in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
34th Annual National Council for Black Studies
Sheraton New Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
2010-03-17

William Berry

This study examined the representation and contextualization of interraciality and multiraciality in newspaper advertising supplements . Since the election of Barack Obama, media reports have expressed that pre-2008 constructs/contexts of race and ethnicity have evolved into what scholars have theorized as the “post-racial” era. A literature review determined that the advertising industry was among the last sites of consumerism to bring African Americans into typical roles as users of general market products/services, except when they appeared in advertisements placed in Black newspapers/magazines. A content analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which representations of multiracial families, couples, and friends—from childhood through adulthood—have appeared in advertisements from national retail chains, including JC Penney, Sears, and Wal-Mart. The study found that while interraciality and multiraciality are presented prominently in advertising supplements, these representations rarely depict individuals engaging in interactions that suggest they are family members or involved in intimate relationships, or that these engagements can be expected to occur within the home or other private, personal spaces where individuals significantly are more likely to interact closely with others of the same race or ethnic descent. Implications of the findings are that intimate interracial relationships may continue to be taboo and forbidden, in effect continuing as the “third rail” of the consumer society, consistent with how such advertisements were not produced or presented during most of the twentieth century.

Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008

Communication Studies
Volume 62, Issue 4, 2011
Special Issue:“Race Matters” in the Obama Era
pages 389-405
DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2011.588074

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama from the election campaign period of 2007–2008. These images were largely user-generated and disseminated and fall into two camps that each represent a form of anti-Black racism: overtly racist images and inferentially racist images. While representations of Obama as an ape, thug, or terrorist were generally recognized as clear forms of anti-Black racism, images I identify as inferentially racist operate within a postracial ideology in which Obama is figured as a messiah, whites’ “Black best friend,” or a mythical creature. For some viewers, these inferentially racist images did not incite the controversy of those read as overtly racist because the former were read as positive portrayals of uplift and progress. Yet, these inferentially racist images are reliant upon the same stereotypes of Blackness as the explicitly racist pictures, as Obama becomes a positive figure only when he can metaphorically transcend his Blackness.

Within a week of moving to an area of South Seattle designated by the 2010 U.S. Census as the most diverse in the country, I was cautioned by a well-intentioned, liberal White neighbor about the frequent incidence of car burglaries in the neighborhood. In our shared parking lot the neighbor told me, gesturing to her Obama/Biden bumper sticker, that her car was burgled “even though we have an Obama sticker!” I was so baffled by this comment that I mumbled a goodbye, got into my car and drove away, my mind exploding with questions. Did my neighbor think that car burglars were united in their proclivity to be Obama fans? Was she really assuming that all car vandals in South Seattle were Black? Did she mean that since she was ‘‘down with the cause’’ by publicly endorsing Obama, her car should have been immune from what she imagined to be Black-perpetrated crime? Was her bizarre performance of Obama-fandom intended to make her appear antiracist for us, the new family of color next door?

Since Obama’s presidential election campaign I have come to intimately understand that signifiers of our first African American president are deployed by some people to express anxiety, desire, guilt, discomfort, and, oftentimes, fear of Blackness. Such fear, which I read in the case of my neighbor as an assumption of Black criminality, must be seen as part-and-parcel of a more coded, more polite, but still virulent and destructive racism against African Americans that occurs, confusingly, through a celebration of Barack Obama. This complicated performance of support, when accompanied by controlling ideas of Blackness, reveals a barely sublimated anti-Black racism that flourishes in popular discourse because, in the words of Henry Giroux, ‘‘since it is assumed that formal institutions of segregation no longer exist,’’ racism against Black Americans also no longer exists (Giroux, 2003, p. 193). I use the phrase “anti-Black racism” as opposed to “racism” or ‘‘prejudice’’ not just to signal discriminatory feelings of Whites towards people of color but instead to signify the institutional, structural, and cultural forces that foment the inequality of people of African descent in our society.1 The featuring of Obama images, whether on a bumper sticker, t-shirt, poster, mug, or Facebook profile picture, is not a simple matter of one’s displaying political affiliation. As Obama is the first African American U.S. president, the production, consumption, and circulation of his image denotes conflicting emotions of race, identity, Blackness, belonging, and, yes, sometimes entrenched-yet-coded anti-Black racism…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracialism on The Real World and the Reconfiguration of Politics in MTV’s Brand During the 2000s

Popular Communication
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2010
pages 132-146
DOI: 10.1080/15405701003676105

Jon Kraszewski, Assistant Professor of Communication
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersery

The Real World’s focus on multiracial identity is part of the MTV’s efforts to rebrand itself as being more tolerant of all political opinions in the 2000s. Post-2000 seasons of The Real World contain two different portraits of multiracialism that appeal to viewers across the political spectrum. The liberalism in these seasons comes from multiracialism functioning as a liberal utopia free of racism, one where fluidity, not hostility, defines race relations. At the same time, these seasons appeal to conservative sensibilities by making multiracial cast members models of neoliberal self-management that conservatives recently have used to justify dismantling the welfare state and civil rights initiatives. While neither the liberal nor the conservative portraits of multiracialism on post-2000 seasons of The Real World appear to be overtly racist, I unearth subtext where The Real World articulates multiracialism to white supremacy and anti-blackness.

The Real World is one of the longest running series in American television history. Premiering in 1992. the series has already completed 22 seasons, and MTV recently contracted for four more. Scholars have interrogated the racial politics of the series, but they have equated race with either blackness, specifically the series’ stereotypical portraits of black masculinity, or tensions between urban blacks and rural whites (Bell-Jordan, 2008; Kraszewski, 2009; Orbe, 1998; Park, 2008). This focus has excluded scholarly engagement with other racial identities on the series. This essay unsettles the scholarly equation of race with blackness in The Real World by exploring the politics of multiracialism on the series in the 2000s. A list of multiracial characters on recent seasons includes Aneesa from The Real World, Chicago; Irulon and Arissa from The Real World, Las Vegas; Adam from The Real World, Paris, and Brianna from The Real World, Hollywood. These cast members has one parent who is black and one who is white. The erasure of these characters from discussions about race relates to a larger omission of mixed-race people from media studies scholarship. In Mixed Race Hollywood, Beltrán and Fojas (2008) write that despite “the veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in Hollywood film and media culture today, there has been little published scholarship to dale on the history or current representation of mixed-race individuals, romances, families, or stars on screen” (p. 2).

Analyzing a long-running series such as The Real World presents methodological and historical problems: a channel undergoes branding changes over the course of 18 years, which…

Read or purchase the article here.

Students Break Out of Fixed-Race Box

Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center
2011-11-15

Pamela Cytrynbaum, Instructor of Journalism
Northwestern University

My journalism students were brainstorming topics for their final story projects. I urged them to come up with compelling ideas that relate to their experiences but that push deeply into national trends.

“Stop letting all the midlife writers (like myself) tell your stories,” I pushed. “Tell your own.”

As they went around the room, several pitches swirled around the same theme: the dramatic increase in multi-racial students and the issues of identity and self-definition they face.

The idea caught fire and sparked a fascinating class discussion. Turns out, they identified a trend that is transforming our classrooms—and should transform our teaching as well…

Read the entire article here.

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

University of Virginia Press
October 2009
160 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN: 0-8139-2886-9

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

Gregory D. Smithers, Visiting Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright’s sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America’s fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obvious.

With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency.

The authors situate Wright’s preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama’s connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim.

Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. The Preacher and the Politician is a concise and timely study that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

Table of  Contents

• “They Didn’t Give Us Our Mule and Our Acre”: Introduction
• “The “Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost”: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Black Church
• “I Don’t Want People to Pretend I’m Not Black”: Barack Obama and America’s Racial History
• “To Choose Our Better History?” Epilogue
• Text of Barack Obama’s March 18, 2008, Speech on Race
• Notes
• Index

Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
Volume 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 18-25
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
ISSN: 1943-1880

Desiree Valentine, Departments of Philosophy and Communication Studies
Marquette University

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

I was in kindergarten when I had a clear understanding of the racialized world in which we live, when I had to check a box on my school registration papers recognizing myself as either black or white. This simple action can be quite complicated when one is a daughter of a black father and white mother. I was finally offered the choice of “mixed” by the time I reached Jr. High. But what is this concept of “mixed” and what does it offer a nation still infused with racism years after the time period known as the “Civil Rights Era” has ended?

Questions of mixed race bring with them complications to the established black/white binary system and thus offer new ways of theorizing race as well as the sociopolitical implications of mixed race designation. As Lewis Gordon states, “In spite of contemporary resistance to ‘binary’ analyses, a critical discussion of mixed-race categories calls for an understanding of how binary logic functions in discourses on race and racism. Without binaries, no racism will exist.” Can a breakdown of the current binary logic, which places social and political advantages on white individuals, occur with the inception of a critical mixed race theory? And could this lead to a society free of racism?

This essay will focus on the views of theorists Lewis Gordon and Naomi Zack and their conceptions of the racial binary system and mixed race. I will begin by looking at both theorists’ views on the racial binary system, posing the question, “How do we understand the spectrum of race?” From there, I will explore the approaches each theorist offers for deconstructing the binary, followed by a comparison and critique of both theorizations, with the end goal of offering my own interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within a critical mixed race theory. It is my view that what often gets overlooked in these theorizations is the effect of visual incoherency to the black/white binary that can be provided by the mixed race individual. The concept of the “visibly mixed race person” will be used in this essay to explore the transformative areas for a society still enmeshed in the ugly history of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s Presidential (Mixed) Race: Framing and Ideological Analysis of Blogs and News

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
July 2011
217 pages

Iliana P. Rucker

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States brought a heightened awareness to the role of race and produced speculation about the idealized notion of the achievement of a post-racial United States.

This dissertation examined mediated conversations on mixed race identity in response to some of the significant events in the Obama campaign and the first months of the Obama presidency. Specifically, this study examined the ways that newspapers and blogs construct discourses about race, mixed race, and racism. Further, I explored the biological, legal, and social implications as they relate to current constructions of mixed race identity. This dissertation centered the data collection around four pivotal discourses in the Obama era: (1) Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy; (2) Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech; (3) Obama’s election to the presidency; and (4) the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Gates. The parameters of these pivotal discourses allowed me to focus on what bloggers say about the events and how the newspapers reported them. Ideological criticism and framing analysis guided my study on racial identifications and negotiations related to Obama from three newspapers: New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times; as well as four blogs: Mixed Roots, Beige-World, Light-skinned-ed Girl, and Twisted Curlz.

Three dominant frames emerged from the news coverage on the four discursive moments: race, dialogue, and history. I define the race frame as stories about the issues concerning race and racism; the dialogue frame as stories about a conversation, specifically at the national level; and the historical frame as stories about historic events. Three frames also emerged from the framing analysis of the blog posts: awareness, personalization, and racism. The awareness frame consists of postings about news and celebrity in mixed race community; the personalization frame as personal postings; and the racism frame as postings relating to issues concerning racism.

Ideological criticism facilitated the analysis of the news articles and blogs and allowed me to uncover several ideologies about race and mixed race emerge from these discursive constructions. The newspapers perpetuated the invisibility of Whiteness, the Black and White binary, hybrid heroism, and the erasure of racism ideologies. The preference for Obama as President, the salience of mixed race matters, and promotion of anti-racist work are ideologies in the blogs. While the blogs and news articles are different in format, style and purpose, taken together they give a look at the ongoing conversation that impacts discourses on race, racism, and mixed race. The interpretation of the findings explains how the media I examined reveal the social construction of race, the rhetoric of race, and agenda setting in each of the discursive moments in order to discuss current conceptualizations of race in the United States. In addition to an in-depth interpretation of framing and ideological analyses findings, the theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • Personal Perspective
    • Researcher Perspective
    • Rationale
    • Data Collection and Analysis
      • News Media
      • Weblogs
    • Obama, Race, and Identity
      • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
    • Assumptions
    • Research Questions
  • Key Concepts
    • Mixed Race Identity
    • Post-Racial United States
    • Media Conversations
  • Overview
• CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
  • Racial Identity
  • Biological Assumptions
    • One-drop rule
  • Legal Assumptions
    • Social Implications
  • Socially Constructing Race
    • Media Framing
    • Rhetorical and Ideological Framing
    • Rhetoric of Race
    • Terministic screens
      • Mixed Race and Media Representations
• CHAPTER 3: METHODS
  • Discursive Moments
  • Data Collection
  • Research Questions
  • Methods
    • Ideological analysis
    • Locating myself in the research
• CHAPTER 4: FRAMING ANALYSIS
  • Framing Analysis
    • Defining Frames
  • Framing Analysis of Newspapers
    • Race Frame
      • Racialized Obama script
      • Race is biological
      • Progressing past racism script
    • Dialogue Frame
      • National script
      • Debate script
    • History Frame
      • From the past script
      • Witnessing history script
  • Framing Analysis of Blog Posts
    • Awareness Frame
      • Mixed Race News script
      • Celebrity script
      • Questions script
    • Personalization Frame
      • Positionality
      • 2008 election experience
    • Racism Frame
      • Racial divide
      • Racial hatred
      • Challenging stereotyping and racial profiling script
• CHAPTER 5: IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
  • Defining Ideology
  • Ideological Analysis of News Discourse
    • Invisibility of Whiteness
    • Black and White Binary
    • Hybrid Heroism
    • Erasing Racism
  • Ideological Analysis of Blog Discourse
    • Obama for President
      • Defending Barack Obama
      • Acceptance
      • Obama is mixed
    • Anti-Racist Work
• CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATION
  • Social Construction of Race
    • Rhetoric of race
  • Agenda Setting
  • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION
  • Findings
    • RQ1: How do pivotal discourses during Obama’s campaign and early presidency stimulate conversations about race, mixed race identity, racism?
      • RQ1a: How do newspapers frame race and mixed race identity?
      • RQ1b: How do blogs frame race, mixed race, and racism?
    • RQ2: What ideologies about race, racism, and mixed race emerge from newspapers and blogs?
      • Newspapers
      • Blogs
    • RQ3: How do media discourses contribute to constructions of race?
    • RQ4: In what ways do the constructions suggest the possibility of a post-racial United States?
    • RQ5: How do newspapers and blogs set agendas that reinforce and oppose each other?
  • Contributions
    • Contributions to theory
    • Contributions to method
  • Future Research
  • Final Thoughts
  • References

Read the entire dissertation here.

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Number 21 (November 1979)
pages 20-22

Joan R. Dassin

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos Milagres), says its director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a clear direct film that confronts a human question—that of racial discrimination—with great frankness and humor.

Completed in December 1975 and first shown in Brazil in October 1977, Tent of Miracles, based on Jorge Amada’s novel, is indeed a richly-peopled, plain-speaking, and even light-hearted picture about the persecution and survival of black African culture in Brazil. With this focus, Nelson Pereira—the patriarch of nationally-minded filmmakers in Brazil for nearly 25 years—has challenged the most widely-held false belief in his society: the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

…This visual parable of “whitening” reveals the ideology implicit in the film’s defense of racial crossbreeding. It also undercuts the energetic and upbeat presentation of an autonomous Afro-Brazilian culture. Unwittingly, perhaps, Nelson Pereira repeats the error of both his literary source (Bahian novelist Jorge Amado’s 1969 novel, Tent of Miracles) and an earlier classic of Brazilian social history (Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves of 1933). Both works uncritically advocate miscegenation.

Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character. In contrast, the recognition that in siring the Brazilian race the Portuguese colonizers brutally imposed their will on black female slaves—after largely exterminating or subjugating recalcitrant Indian laborers—has spread very slowly. Indeed, historical truth has only recently made inroads into the national myth that Brazilians are the harmonious products of these three races, and live in an untroubled racial democracy.

As Brazilian culture critic Sergio Augusto has pointed out, miscegenation—both as a practice and as a widely espoused doctrine—has had two pernicious effects. Rather than fostering egalitarianism, miscegenation has promoted “whitening.” Most seriously, it has denied to blacks (Indians being long out of the picture) the opportunity to develop their cultural identity as an independent group. Another Brazilian commentator, Muniz Sodré, seconds this view. Miscegenation’s hidden value of “whitening,” he asserts, is in fact a rejection of black culture in Brazil, a relegation of the Afro-Brazilian inheritance to a “source of sensationalism, a plethora of genital tricks, and an eternal supplier of recipes.”

Lamentably, Tent of Miracles does not explore these negative consequences of miscegenation for black cultural survival in Brazil. On the contrary, the philosophy of “whitening” that lies behind supposedly egalitarian racial crossbreeding is visually and emotionally reinforced by the “success story” of Tadeu Canhoto. The U.S. viewer will probably miss the subtle racist implications of lauding miscegenation, because here the “mixed” population is considered black, and as such, is clearly subject to the will of the white majority. But in Brazil, the color line is not drawn so sharply. Indeed, the “democratic” mixing of races is the cornerstone of the dominant national ideology of race, ironically described by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes as “the prejudice of having no prejudice.”

Defenders of the doctrine of miscegenation and the myth of racial democracy come from all quarters in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, who with Jorge Amado is the greatest popularizer of Brazil for North Americans, has proudly noted that Brazil is growing ever “browner.” Freyre sees this trend as “proof” that the Brazilian “meta-race,” supposedly formed in equal parts by blacks, Indians and whites, is at last emerging.  Even some Brazilian blacks have themselves proposed miscegenation so that “the negro will disappear and we will not have racial conflict like they do in the United States.” As the young black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento recently reflected, the 18th century dictum that “Brazil is a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattos” is still the accepted national vision. The vision has only one catch: it is predicated on the “total disappearance” of those who live in “hell.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Multiracialism with Dr. Ralina Joseph

Voxunion
2010-03-23

Jared A. Ball, Host and Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communications
University of Washington

The struggles surrounding the politics of identity seem at new heights these days and to help bring some historical context we spoke with Dr. Ralina Joseph who joined us for a discussion of her recent article for Black Scholar, “Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, And Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, by Rebecca Walker.” We also discussed the politics of multiracial identity in terms of the history of the “tragic mulatto,” the upcoming census and Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview here (00:32:44).