Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

The Husslington Post
2011-12-04

Amil Cook, Correspondent

In this interview, Husslington Post correspondent, Amil Cook, goes in depth with journal/scholar/activist Daniela Gomes about her fight against racism in Brazil. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a series of interviews by Amil.

How influential is Hip-Hop and African American culture in Brazil?

For a long time Afro Brazilians didn’t have access to information about the black leaders in our history. The myth of the racial democracy created an important issue in our country, where a lighter skin person didn’t consider him/herself as black. So for many years for mixed people in Brazil to be black was a shame. In some cases this still happens. So after a long time we were without any understanding about black consciousness but during the 1970s some cultural and political movements started to be inspired by Afro American movements and heroes such as: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. And Hip Hop is a part of this because of its cultural influence.

What is racial democracy for those who may not be familiar with this term?

Racial democracy was a theory created in the early 1900s. The main creator was Gilberto Freyre, who used to affirm that Brazilian society was totally different from other countries because it was a racially mixed country and as a mixed country there wasn’t racism here. He taught that we should value our three races [indigenous (native), African and European] that formed our society because it made us better, made our slavery less painful and things like that. It is important to explain that before Freyre the theory that used to be adopted in Brazil, was the ‘whitening theory’, it was used to affirm that if we started to mix the country we could clean our race and it was believed that in little time black people would be extinct in Brazil. The main thinker of this theory was Nina Rodrigues, a doctor who used to see the black population as a shame. Gilberto Freyre was Rodrigues’ student, and “improved” Rodrigues’ racist theories when he decided to hide the racial issue in Brazil. These two theories are fundamental to understand racial thought in Brazil. The first one [Rodrigues], made Brazilians believe that if they are mixed they aren’t black and the second one [Freyre] made them believe that we are special because we are mixed; there isn’t racism in our country so we don’t need to fight against it. And although the black struggle in my country never stopped, ideas like that made our mission harder…

Read the entire interview here.

Ecco To Publish Pulitzer Prize Winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memoir

HarperCollins Publishers
2012-06-28

Michael McKenzie

New York, NY (June 28, 2012) – Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is thrilled to announce that it has won the rights to publish Pulitzer Prize winning United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s untitled memoir in a very heated auction. Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America. Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.

The deal was negotiated between Daniel Halpern, President and Publisher of Ecco, and Rob McQuilkin of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. Halpern says, “I can’t remember a more emotionally intense auction for a book, ever. I truly admire Natasha’s spirit, her graceful presence on these pages, which tell a story that no one is likely to forget.”

Trethewey adds, “I am honored to work with this venerable press, and with Daniel Halpern in particular, on a book I know will be difficult to write even as it seems that the past—and geography—have rendered me destined to do so.”

The book, which Ecco acquired the North American rights to, is tentatively scheduled for 2014…

Read the entire press release here.

For Daughters of the American Revolution, a New Chapter

The New York Times
2012-07-03

Sarah Maslin Nir

Olivia Cousins can trace her family in the United States to a soldier who joined the rebelling colonists when he was just 17. But when a friend suggested she join the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization whose members can prove they are related to someone who aided the rebels in 1776, Dr. Cousins nearly laughed.

Dr. Cousins is black. And the D.A.R., as it is commonly called, is a historically white organization with a record of excluding blacks so ugly that Eleanor Roosevelt renounced her membership in protest.

Yet last week, in a circa-1857 stone chapel in Jamaica, Queens, Dr. Cousins was named an officer in a small ceremony establishing a new chapter. Her daughter took photos. The pictures documented a singular moment for the D.A.R., founded in 1890: 5 of the 13 members of the new chapter are black.

Perhaps more strikingly, the Queens chapter is one of the first in the organization’s nearly 122-year history that was started by a black woman: Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly, from Rosedale, who is also its regent, or president. Ms. Kelly traces her origins to the relationship between a slaveholder and a slave, who appear to have considered themselves married, and her new position is part of a remarkable journey for both her family and the organization.

“My parents understood that they were Americans and that they were a real important part of the American story,” said Dr. Cousins, who, like the other members, is a passionate student of genealogy. Her Revolutionary War ancestor was a free man of mixed race. “Their whole thing was that segregation is unacceptable,” she said of her parents. For her, she said, “de facto segregation was unacceptable.”…

Read the entire article here.

Follow MixedRaceStudies.org on Twitter

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-07-04

Steven F. Riley

Thanks to a suggestion by University of Wisconsin History Professor Gregory Carter, all new posts on MixedRaceStudies.org will be simultaneously “tweeted” on Twitter at @mixed_race.

Freedom Road Spotlights St. Augustine History

VisitFlorida.com
2012-06-29

Amy Wimmer Schwarb

Derek Hankerson wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

A St. Augustine company is trying to reshape the American story – not to rewrite history, but to retell it.

Derek Hankerson, the man at the helm of Freedom Road, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., learning the same tales of America’s birthplace that are told in children’s textbooks throughout the United States. But he often visited relatives in St. Augustine  and could never reconcile the history he found there with what he learned in school.

“The sign in St. Augustine said, ‘Established in 1565,’ and then I go back to school, and I don’t see a thing about Florida. I don’t see a thing about blacks,” Hankerson said. “All I see is 1776.”

Hankerson spotted that disparity when he was about 10 years old, and announced to his family that he planned to correct it. He wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

Today, Hankerson is the managing partner of Freedom Road, which offers in-depth bus tours of northeast Florida that give visitors insight into an early American story that might be new to many of them.

“Our tours deal with five centuries of history,” Hankerson said. “This is history related to the New World. I say ‘the New World’ because that’s different than the United States of America. We’re talking pre-United States of America.”…

…James Bullock, the creative director for Freedom Road, is typically the guide for the tours. Dressed in period costume, he walks guests through how different cultures – Spanish, African, Native American, German, Irish, Greek – made their lives in the New World…

And Bullock and Hankerson stress that while much of U.S. history has focused on the separation of races, Spanish Florida brought a different culture to the New World. Even the geography of the Old World played a role: Only 11 miles separate Spain from Africa at their closest point, so trade, relationships and inter-marrying were common even before the groups came across the Atlantic...

Read the entire article here.

The creation and intepretation of ‘mixed’ categories in Britain today

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

The growth and recognition of ‘Mixed’ in Britain

It is difficult to imagine a society (such as Britain) in which ethnic and racial categories, and the powerful imagery and ideologies associated with notions of ethnic and racial difference, do not exist. The population of the UK is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, and national identity. While not new, one major demographic development is the significant growth of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain.

Accompanying the growth in mixed relationships and people is the increased social and media attention they have received in recent years. For instance, mixed celebrities are impossible to avoid in various contemporary British (and other) media.Furthermore, the BBC has just shown a whole series of programs called ‘Mixed Britannia’, in which we learn, among other things, that being mixed was by no means a new phenomenon in the earlier parts of the 20th century, whether in Tiger Bay, or in the docks of Liverpool. Various analysts have argued that, in many parts of contemporary, metropolitan Britain, being mixed, and the everyday interactions between disparate groups, is absolutely ordinary.

This growth of mixed people has engendered the creation and institutionalization of new ethnic and racial categories by official bodies, such as the Office of National Statistics (ONS). For the first time, the growth in mixed people was officially recognized by the inclusion of ‘Mixed’ categories in the 2001 England and Wales census, in which about 677,000 people (or about 1.2% of the population) were identified as mixed…

Read the entire article here.

‘ORPHEUS’; Legacy of Domination

The New York Times
2000-09-03

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

To the Editor:

In his observations about the differences in the Brazilian and foreign receptions of two very distinct cinematic renditions of the Orpheus tale [“Orpheus, Rising From Caricature,” Aug. 20], Caetano Veloso makes a number of larger, insightful points about the intense processes of creolization in Brazilian popular culture, which confound easy labels like ”global” and ”local” as well as ”authentic” and ”pure.”

Two points raised by Mr. Veloso are in tension, however, with his advocacy of what he has called ”subversive Pan-Americanism.” First, Mr. Veloso seemingly abides by a key tenet of Gilberto Freyre’s views about Brazilian race relations, one that equates miscegenation with ”racial democracy.” Although Mr. Veloso rightly acknowledges that ideas of whitening are not peculiar to Brazil, he does not mention the effects of such ideologies on darker-skinned African-descended people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas—which, in the case of someone like Michael Jackson (whom Mr. Veloso mentions), are more than a case of playful hybridity.

Like Gilberto Freyre, Mr. Veloso seems to be suggesting that miscegenation leads to racial tolerance, whereas hypodescent (the one-drop rule) does not. If one were to apply Mr. Veloso’s premise, that racial miscegenation equals racial democracy, to race relations in the United States, South Africa or Haiti, then the fact of miscegenation would have helped engender societies that were more tolerant of alleged racial differences among their populations. It did not.

The point here is that miscegenation, in Brazil and in other former slave-holding societies, began as acts of dominance and not as an egalitarian principle that led to the erosion of unequal relations. It is important to remember that the etymological origin of the term miscegenation (as well as mulatto, by the way) is to ”mis-mate,” or mate badly. In Brazil, the celebration of miscegenation has occurred simultaneously in national popular culture and mythology with terminology that denigrates darker-skinned Brazilians, while upholding Northern European ideals of feminine and masculine beauty. Thus, miscegenation cannot be considered outside the lens of power and aesthetics…

Read the entire letter here.

‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Daniel McNeil, Associate Professor of History, Migration and Diaspora Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Many conservative commentators reacted to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 with platitudes about the clash of civilizations. Robert Fulford, a prominent cultural critic for the Canadian National Post, was one of the few to tie a post-9/11 context to the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. In an article strategically published at the beginning of Black History Month, Fulford claimed that Fanon’s classic texts were invoked and not read, as if The Wretched of the Earth was just another ironic commodity for consumers full of sound and fury who wear images of Malcolm X and Che Guevara without knowing anything about their commitment to human rights. To go further, he maintained that Fanon should be remembered as a ‘poisonous thinker’ who helped usher in a culture of violence and victimization in the West.

Providing a critical alternative to Fulford, activists and scholars marked the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s passing with extensive discussions of his impact on social justice movements and intellectual debates about existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This short article takes a rather circuitous route to their commentaries on the legacy of Fanon’s explorative, suggestive and provocative work. It argues that the loaded metaphors Fanon used to target ‘half-breed’ translators in the 1950s and 60s have been creatively adapted by transnational intellectuals in their critique of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism that privilege the multiracial American citizen as a subject more universal and legitimate than even the multicultural world citizen.

The article revolves around three sections and three conceptual metaphors in its attempts to address an oft-repeated element of Fanon’s work that has rarely been the subject of extended analysis or critical inquiry. The first section introduces three popular metaphors about mixed-race objects and ‘racial bridges’ that Fanon used to invoke the threat of bestial, immature and consumerist Others – metaphors that were not swept away by the winds of change in the 1960s, or the decline and fall of Black internationalist movements in the 1970s. It contends that similar metaphors and similes continue to frame representations of mixed-race individuals that emerged after the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 80s called for ‘new’ multicultural identities to replace ‘old-fashioned’ notions of racial essences. The second section documents how intellectuals such as David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy and Lewis Gordon have engaged with Fanon and mixed-race metaphors in order to critique the slyness of neoliberal agents in the age of Obama. The third and final section also addresses three writers – Jared Sexton, Paul Spickard and Mark Anthony Neal – who have developed work on multiracial national subjects in the United States. The short conclusion contends that Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism avoids some of the pitfalls of national consciousness evident in the work of Spickard and Neal – and engages with the diasporic work of Fanon and ‘Fanon’s children’ in order to challenge multiracial, and post-racial, environments that deny the legitimacy of African American anger. In short, it uses Sexton’s vision of a global African American studies to illuminate some of the discordant affinities between more insular visions of ethnic American studies and the cultural project of neoliberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…

Read the entire article here.

Brazilian ethnoracial classification and affirmative action policies: Where are we and where do we go?

Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Should we count, how should we count and why?
2007-12-06 through 2007-12-08
Montreal, Quebec Canada

September 2007
12 pages

José Luis Petruccelli, Senior Researcher
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Brésil

Brazilian society is characterized by persistent racial fragmentation, which constitutes a significant variable structuring social outcomes and is evident in the socioeconomic inequalities constantly observed in field research. A variety of information converges to demonstrate ethnoracial criterion as a decisive parameter of exclusion and of social subordination. Particularly salient among the reasons for this reality is the permanence of several discriminatory practices in public and private institutions against the populations of African and indigenous descent.

Although statistics of race have been incorporated in a continuous way in surveys only since the 1980’s, the country has a reasonable tradition of statistical experience of racial classification. In this sense, two aspects must be outlined: first, the majority of Brazilians identify according to a relatively restricted group of color representations; second, open-ended responses to racial self-classification, as well as pre-codified classic categories, demonstrate a fair amount of stability.

But an important ambiguity persists with respect to the category applied to the miscegenated groups, at the national level and particularly in some areas of the country that have been, historically, less influenced in their population composition by the Atlantic slave traffic. As a matter of fact, the pardo (brown) term designates a residual category in the racial classification system, inside which at least three types of ethnic groups can be distinguished: firstly, the group that identifies in this way due to phenotype that is perceived to be of African origin, which is, without any doubt, the most numerous in this category; secondly, a group that can be identified as predominantly of Indian descent, characteristic of the areas mentioned above; finally, a group that expresses an adhesion to a specific historical-geographical condition and does not actually constitutes a proper ethnic identification in the sense of physical appearance, since, in terms of social relationships, they don’t suffer racial discrimination.

In this way, it does have methodological pertinence to continue investigating the best possible means of identifying the mentioned racial categories, which present temporal persistence and sociological consistence. As a result, more finely tuned information would be available, indispensable for an appropriate elaboration of targeted affirmative action policies, understanding that the purposes of the ethnoracial classification range from allowing free expression of identities to the facilitation of formulating laws and nondiscrimination policies.

The reflections in this work aim to begin answering the following questions: Is the current system of racial classification in use, reasonably correct? Furthermore, is it possible to elaborate a classification system essentially “correct” ? What would the most appropriate number of ethnoracial categories be then? Or even, what would be the best means of accounting for the mentioned specific characteristics, granting the necessary recognition to the expression of socially relevant identities and of regional differences?

…The question of racial classification raises diverse arguments, from orthodox Marxism up to ideological right-wing positions, trying to depict the difficulties of identifying who the beneficiaries of the proposed actions would be. The ghost of the miscegenation ideology rises again to contest the justice of the compensatory policies. If Brazilians are all miscegenated, runs the argument, they would be all “equal” and it could not be a means of differentiating blacks from non-blacks, since all would have something to do with African origins. To this “ideological” position a “scientific” point of view recently emerged: the geneticists discourse about the genealogical mixture of the ancestries of Brazilian whites, shuffling genomic characteristics with social representation of ethnoracial identity, in spite of the well known differences between origin (and DNA) and colour (or mark). Yet, whatever the extent of racial mixture in the country “the majority have lacked the basic rights associated with citizenship for most of the twentieth century and for all of the country’s earlier history” (Nobles, 2000)…

Read the entire paper here.

Coming Into their Own? The Afro-Latin Struggle for Equality and Recognition

Grassroots Development Journal
Inter-American Foundation
African Descendants and Development (2007)

Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology
George Washington University

Most Americans have at least a passing familiarity with the history of Afro-Americans in the United States. The epic story of slavery, the Civil War and Emancipation, Jim Crow, the civil rights struggle, and the Black Power movement has become part of our common heritage. This wasn’t always the case. A few short decades ago, the history of Americans of African descent was largely unknown even by black Americans. It was the province of a small number of specialists, not part of our general education or popular culture. The civil rights movement and the demand for a more inclusive history helped change that, bringing about a greater awareness of the role of Afro-Americans in the history of the United States.
 
Still few Americans know that the Afro-American experience in the United States is but a small part of a much larger hemispheric history. Only about 6 percent of Africans brought to the Americas came to what is now the United States. Today probably less than a third of the hemisphere’s Afro-Americans are in the United States. Latin American slavery lasted longer and was more intense than its U.S. counterpart. The Portuguese and Spaniards began enslaving Africans early in the 15th century, before Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. Slavery would finally end in the hemisphere when Cuba and Brazil abolished it in the late 1880s.
 
Latin American historians have long studied slavery in the colonial era. But far less is known about Latin Americans of African descent after independence. There are significant Afro-American populations throughout the region, although some have been reluctant to acknowledge them. Throughout the 20th century, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile have insisted that they were white nations with few or no citizens of African descent. In the last decade, largely due to the insistence of local Afro-American activists, there has been an increased recognition that African descendants are not just a part of these countries’ history but very much a part of the present, even if in small numbers. Peru and Mexico have tended to emphasize their Spanish and indigenous lineage, ignoring the substantial African heritage. In the Dominican Republic, people visibly of African descent constitute a majority, but because African ancestry is stigmatized it is commonly denied even when it is obvious. In all of these countries, Afro-Latin activists are changing the national dialogue by insisting that the African and Afro-American contribution to the national culture be recognized…

…Afro-Latin activists face daunting challenges, perhaps most importantly a lack of basic information on Afro-American populations. Often it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain from census and other official records an accurate picture of the social and economic circumstances of different racial groups. Despite substantial populations of African descent throughout the Americas, their history is often not well-known, even by regional specialists. Racial classifications further complicate the task. Who should or should not be categorized as Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Colombian or Afro-Mexican can be unclear and, frequently, a matter of dispute. Students of race in the United States study a society whose culture and law have traditionally dictated that all persons with any traceable African ancestry belong to a single group—variously called colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African American—but a unified group nonetheless. There has been occasional recognition that some individuals are of mixed ancestry and stand apart; terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were used in the past and there are contemporary debates about proposed census categories like biracial or multiracial. But recognition of mixture has not disturbed the consensus placing people with traceable African ancestry into a single group.

No such consensus exists in Latin America. If race is a social construct, it is often an elusive one for Latin Americans as well as outsiders. Spanish and Portuguese have meticulous vocabularies detailing every conceivable combination, real and imagined. Latin American lexicons include terms like negro, preto, pardo, moreno, mulato, trigueño, zambo and others detailing presumed degrees of African, European and indigenous admixtures. Traditionally individuals of partial African descent have rejected identification as negro, or black, a rejection supported by the prevailing culture. Some individuals with known African ancestry are accepted as white. In Latin America racial identity often is a complex negotiation involving ancestry, phenotype, social status and family connections. Classification is contextual. A hierarchy exists to be sure and it prizes European descent and appearance more than African ones. Yet at times whites will allow Afro-Latins to proclaim a whiter status than phenotype and ancestry might dictate, partly as a courtesy, partly because it confirms the view of many whites that they live in essentially white societies. Despite this, the individual of visible African descent who claims to be white will often be the victim of race- or color-based exclusion. The picture becomes even cloudier when individuals who look white or nearly white identify with Afro-Americans for familial or cultural reasons.

This notion of racial fluidity has created difficulties both for scholars researching Afro-Latins and for Afro-Latin activists seeking to mobilize a constituency. In many important ways, legal discrimination in the United States helped to forge a unified group. In Latin America, the multiplicity of racial/color categories coupled with the ideologies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento that read Afro-Americans out of the history and culture also served to blunt the development of Afro-American group consciousness and identity. This was true even in areas where people of visible African ancestry faced considerable racial discrimination. And yet if group consciousness and concerted action have been difficult, Latin America does have a history of Afro-American political and social activism that has challenged class and color barriers. This theme has been explored by, among others, George Reid Andrews in his book Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. The Afro-Latin struggle against racial subordination began in slavery. Colonial Latin America was dotted with cimarrón settlements of runaway slaves defying recapture. Their descendants are still to be found in Brazilian quilombos and similar enclaves throughout the hemisphere…

…Racism prevailed throughout the hemisphere. New ideologies at the start of the 20th century were helping to move the Afro-American and indigenous peoples of Latin America further to the margins of their nations’ societies and cultures. For students of U.S. history, the role of scientific racism and social Darwinism in providing the intellectual underpinnings for Jim Crow and disenfranchisement are well known. These forces influenced thinking in Latin America, but in different ways. Latin American elites saw the problem less as in terms of protecting their privilege and status than in attaining the white majority they believed required for progress and modernity. To this end large-scale European immigration was encouraged, often by generous land bounties. It would transform Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. Other nations would receive far fewer Europeans, but their strong desire for blanqueamiento further marginalized Afro-Latins. Cultural dynamics from the slave era had long dictated that the individual should strive for racial mobility via lighter racial classification. If the national ethos dictated that the nation was white, it was all the more prudent, particularly for those of mixed ancestry, not to declare an African heritage. Thus mestizaje and blanqueamiento both contributed to the pronounced unwillingness of many Afro-Latins to identify as such, even when phenotype made such identification and the resulting discrimination inescapable…

Read the entire article here.