Mixed Race Studies

(Miscege)nación en O Cortiço

Trans: Revue de Littérature Générale et Comparée
Issue 5 (2008)
10 pages (24 paragraphs)

Brian L. Price, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Wake Forest University

Written a year after the proclamation of Brazilian independence, O Cortiço by Aluisio Azevedo depicts the demographic composition of the country with a naturalistic sense of detail and examines the possible dangers of miscegenation in the new republic. Influenced by racist European theories, Azevedo and his contemporaries feared that the mixing of races would eventually result in diluting the European ancestries which had to be the base of the new society. In the novel, the cortiço—a kind of small proletarian town which abounded in the 19th century—works as a laboratory where the different racial elements converge, entangle and destroy each other. The present essay examines the historical context during which that novel was written and its critical eye focuses on the two main love affairs. In both, a European man marries (has a love relationship with) a woman of inferior race and pays a high moral price for that. In both, the man loses the purity which the author expects from the new nation. Eventually contrary to what Azevedo expected, mixed-race Brazil triumphs over the European colony and turns into a cortiço.

Read the entire article (in Spanish) in HTML or PDF format.

Decline In U.S. Whites, Rise Of Latinos Blurring Traditional Racial Lines

The Huffington Post
2013-03-17

Hope Yen
The Associated Press

Associated Press writers Elaine Ganley in Montfermeil, France, Jenny Barchfield in Rio de Janeiro and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Welcome to the new off-white America.

A historic decline in the number of U.S. whites and the fast growth of Latinos are blurring traditional black-white color lines, testing the limits of civil rights laws and reshaping political alliances as “whiteness” begins to lose its numerical dominance.

Long in coming, the demographic shift was most vividly illustrated in last November’s re-election of President Barack Obama, the first black president, despite a historically low percentage of white supporters.

It’s now a potent backdrop to the immigration issue being debated in Congress that could offer a path to citizenship for 11 million mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants. Also, the Supreme Court is deciding cases this term on affirmative action and voting rights that could redefine race and equality in the U.S.

The latest census data and polling from The Associated Press highlight the historic change in a nation in which non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in the next generation, somewhere around the year 2043.

Despite being a nation of immigrants, America’s tip to a white minority has never occurred in its 237-year history and will be a first among the world’s major post-industrial societies. Brazil, a developing nation, has crossed the threshold to “majority-minority” status; a few cities in France and England are near, if not past that point.

The international experience and recent U.S. events point to an uncertain future for American race relations.

In Brazil, where multiracialism is celebrated, social mobility remains among the world’s lowest for blacks while wealth is concentrated among whites at the top. In France, race is not recorded on government census forms and people share a unified Gallic identity, yet high levels of racial discrimination persist.

“The American experience has always been a story of color. In the 20th century it was a story of the black-white line. In the 21st century we are moving into a new off-white moment,” says Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a global expert on immigration and dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

“Numerically, the U.S. is being transformed. The question now is whether our institutions are being transformed,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

The portrait of a nation: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s study on the Brazilian ‘anthropological types’, 1910-1920 (Retratos da nação: os ‘tipos antropológicos’ do Brasil nos estudos de Edgard Roquette-Pinto, 1910-1920)

Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas
Volume 7, Number 3 (September/December 2012)
pages 645-670
ISSN 1981-8122
DOI: 10.1590/S1981-81222012000300003

Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

The article analyses the studies carried out by the anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto (1884-1954) on the classification of ‘anthropological types’ of Brazil. Affiliated to the Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, the anthropologist collected data on the anatomical, physiological and psychological characteristics of the Brazilian population in the early decades of the 20th century. The racial classification put forward by Roquette-Pinto resulted not only from the ongoing national intellectual context, but also resulted from technical and theoretical influences from abroad, in particular from Germany and the United States. The anthropologist’s goal was to produce an ‘anthropological portrait’ of Brazil. His research aimed at revealing the racial characteristics involved in the formation of the nation, as well as evaluating the biological viability of the population, especially the ‘mixed race types’.

Read the entire article (in Portuguese) here.

Throughout the various media realms—television, film, news media, and the less clearly defined intersecting worlds of music, sports, and youth culture—representations of interracial sex and relationships follow certain patterns, and what emerges is a delicate dance between interracial sex sells and interracial sex alienates.  The small number of representations as well as the particular types of depictions of interracial relationships, when they are shown, reveals the lingering opposition to interracial sexuality and marriage as well as the persistent racialized images of racial Others and the protection of whiteness. Interracial representations are symbolic struggles over meaning, not only in how interracial relationships are portrayed but also in how they are received, understood, and responded to in the larger society.  In particular, interracial images are used to perpetuate negative stereotypes yet are simultaneously marketed as an example of how color-blind we have become and of the declining significance of race. Yet one may ask, Why are interracial relationships shown at all if they are still widely opposed by whites and other racial groups? The answer is twofold, as we have seen throughout the book, that showing interracial relationships is a necessary piece of the current rhetoric that asserts race no longer matters and the representations are only shown in ways that either deviantize these relationships, privilege whiteness, or support the contention that America is color-blind.

Erica Chito Childs, Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009): 177-178.

Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture

Rowman & Littlefield
May 2009
250 pages
Cloth: 0-7425-6079-1 / 978-0-7425-6079-6
Paper: 0-7425-6080-5 / 978-0-7425-6080-2

Erica Chito Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

There is no teasing apart what interracial couples think of themselves from what society shows them about themselves. Following on her earlier ground-breaking study of the social worlds of interracial couples, Erica Chito Childs considers the larger context of social messages, conveyed by the media, that inform how we think about love across the color line. Examining a range of media—from movies to music to the web—Fade to Black and White offers an informative and provocative account of how the perception of interracial sexuality as “deviant” has been transformed in the course of the 20th century and how race relations are understood today.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Fade to Black and White
• 1. Historical Realities and Media Representations of Race and Sexuality
• 2. The Prime-Time Color-Line: Interracial Couples and Television
• 3. It’s a (White) Man’s World
• 4. When Good Girls Go Bad
• 5. Playing the Color-Blind Card: Seeing Black and White in News Media
• 6. Multiracial Utopias: Youth, Sports and Music
• Conclusion

Critical mixed race studies (CMRS) is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological forces that inform their identity and experience. CMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of race. In keeping with sociologists Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory, CMRS acknowledges that the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics, but the selection of specific human features for the purposes of racial signification is a constantly changing sociohistorical process. Accordingly, CMRS emphasizes the constructed nature of race and the notion that racial categories are unstable and decentered structures of sociocultural meanings that are continuously being created, inhabited, contested, transformed, and destroyed. Finally, CMRS underscores the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique local and global systemic injustices rooted in processes of racialization and social stratification based on race, as well as the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with sex, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference.

—G. Reginald Daniel

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® is Moving On and Making Room

2013-03-18

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® lives on, but only in our own hearts, voices and its original mission.

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® celebrated its final event in June 2012. I hope that you will honor its original mission, and all of the ways in which it touched the Mixed community and beyond by celebrating its accomplishments and continuing its mission through your own vital organizations and activities. If you are looking for ways to continue to celebrate the Mixed experience, here are just a few of the wonderful places to turn to:

• Critical Mixed Race Studies
• MixedRaceStudies.org
• Mixed Heritage Center
• Mixed & Happy
• Swirl
• Hip Hapa Homeez
• Mixed in Canada
• Mixed Roots Japan
• KhanishaFoster.tumbler.com
• Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)
• LOMA
• Multicultural Familia
• MixedRootsStories.org (launching April 1st)
• MixedAmericanLife
• Jennifer Frappier is making a documentary: chillthedocumentary.com
• Mixed Marrow 
• Hapa Japan Conference

I am doing anti-racist and racial identity work with my solo show and documentary: OneDropofLove.org, and Heidi Durrow has applied for a number of trademarks associated with continued work in the Mixed community; however, she may not use our registered trademark Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® in connection with any of her activities (this includes on the @mxroots twitter account and the www.mxroots.org website). If you have any questions whatsoever or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact me: fanshenmc(at)gmail(dot)com.

Hardships for Filipino mixed-race children

Al Jazeera
2013-02-26

Jamela Alindogan

Thousands of mixed-race children grow up without their fathers in the Philippines. Most of them are of Korean or American descent.

Many often end up living on the streets without any support.

Al Jazeera’s Jamela Alindogan reports from Manila.

POWER: Post-racial Canada still a dream

The Chronicle Herald
Halifax, Nova Scotia
2013-03-17

Megan Power

And we’re reluctant to face it, says Hill

Calling Canada a multicultural paradise is simply delusional, says author Lawrence Hill.
 
He made his comments prior to a public reading in Halifax last week, in which he was candid and forthright about the state of race relations in Canada. He doesn’t agree with Toronto Life magazine’s high-profile March cover story—the feature describes his book Black Berry, Sweet Juice as “quaint”—which proclaims Toronto the first post-racial city and declaring the end of single ethnicity status in the country’s megalopolis.
 
“I detest that idea. I find it quite repulsive. … It’s just not true. Ask a thousand black students in high schools across Canada if they’ve escaped the challenges of race and I’m pretty sure that 995 of them will tell you absolutely not. I feel that it’s kind of self-serving and self-congratulatory to talk about a post-racial world.
 
“I’m not talking about myself. I’ve had a very fortunate life. But I’m not convinced that many black kids in society today are living in a post-racial world. Acting as if Toronto is some nirvana and everybody is happy and mixed, I think, is a slide into la la land.”…

…Hill was in town to give two readings at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. The morning session featured a reading from Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, his 2001 non-fiction book about racial identity. The afternoon session featured his blockbuster, prize-winning novel The Book of Negroes (2008)….

Read the entire article here.

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.

Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,” The Saturday Review of Literature, October 11, 1947: 13