Mixed Race Studies

Challenges to Affirmative Action: An Analysis of Skin Color and Verification at the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Brazil

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Florida
Volume 14, Issue 1 (Fall 2012)
8 pages

Laura Hundersmarck
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
University of Florida

Historically, Brazilian racial identity has been constructed from a color continuum rather than discrete categories. To this end, self-identification often differs from the perception of another. In light of the newly instated affirmative action policies, many have questioned the reliability of applying concrete racial categories to a country that rose out of profound mixed ethnic and racial origins. The inclusion of a verification system has generated a serious debate on the foundation and limits of racial identity construction. How does one construct their racial identity for the purpose of affirmative action? What are the advantages and limitations of verifying an individual’s identity? This paper analyzes the unique dual identification process that exists at the Universidade Federal do Paraná drawing from four qualitative interviews from the Center for Afro-Brazilian Studies located within the university.

Read the entire article here.

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

1. Introduction
2. Independence and Race
3. Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
4. Liberalism and the Indian Question
5. Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
6. The Science of Racism
7. Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
8. Indigenismo in the Andes
9. Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
10. Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.

Canada’s Métis win 142-year-old land ruling

BBC News
2013-03-08

Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled the government failed to hand out land grants properly to the Métis indigenous group 142 years ago.

In a 6-2 ruling, the top court said the failure was “not a matter of occasional negligence, but of repeated mistakes and inaction”.

The Métis are descendants of indigenous people and European immigrants.

The land was promised in a 1870 law, to settle a rebellion of existing Métis amid a wave of settlement in Manitoba.

After delays, it was eventually distributed via a lottery that largely benefited European settlers.

The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF), which brought the suit, celebrated the end of three decades of legal challenges over the land-grant provision…

Read the entire article here.

Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 2, Number 1 (2006) Whiteness and the Horizons of Race

Satoshi Mizutani

It has been a while since critical race and whiteness studies have disseminated the now-familiar notion that whiteness is not a given but a social construct. The idea, however, is yet to be fully explored, with many untouched areas and methodologies of potential importance. This paper is a humble attempt to make a contribution to the field from the perspective of colonial history. Drawing on a historical case study on British Indian society from the late nineteenth century onwards, it firstly focuses on the oft-neglected social world of white colonials of ‘respectable’ standing, enquiring what defined their whiteness and under what material conditions it was to be acquired. This is to be followed by an examination of how these whites differentiated themselves from, and in turn controlled the lives of, the so-called ‘domiciled’ population, members of which were of white descent, permanently based in India, often impoverished and frequently (if not always) racially mixed. Such a two-level approach to the people of white descent is to reveal that the colonial invention of whiteness depended both on the securing of a ‘bourgeois’ social milieu for middle-class whites and on the vigilant control of the impoverished domiciled. The paper shows the complex ways in which the insidiously unsound nature of such a construction of whiteness repeatedly posed a political challenge to the colonial racial order. The case of colonial India may be taken as a vivid example of how whiteness may come charged with inevitable self contradictions and ambiguities, and with those counter-measures that seek to contain the socio-political unrest resulting there from.

Read the entire article here.

Nathan Crowell on Racial Identity: Gloucester County, Virginia, revisited

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-01-14

Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Some time ago, in response to my 10 November 2011 post, “Free People of Color in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County,”  (which I encourage you to read or reread) I received a long email message from Nathan Crowell, who traces his own mixed-heritage ancestry back to Gloucester County. Nathan shared not only his family research with me, but also certain insights that he gained over the years from listening to his ancestors—particularly his grandmother: insights into what it meant to be a “free person of color” in a slaveholding society, what it meant to be defined as “black” when one’s skin was fair. His remarks remind us that life in the Old South was far more complex than most of us realize, and that “race” was an imposed category of human existence that had no rational biological basis, but had very real legal, social, and psychological consequences that shaped the experiences and consciousness of all members of society.

With Nathan’s permission, I have created the following post from his remarks…

Read the entire article here.

Examining ‘Latinidad’ in Latin America: Race, ‘Latinidad’ and the Decolonial Option

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 8, Number 2, (2012) Directions and Intersections
11 pages

Eugenia Demuro, Visiting Fellow
School of Language Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Australian National University

This article provides a critical account of the idea of race, conceived of and derived from European colonisers in the New World. The paper argues that race became a crucial category to the colonising projects of the New World, and in particular in the distribution of power during colonialism. The paper further examines how the notion of Latinidad (Latinity), entrenched in the term Latin America, continued to enact a discourse of racial superiority/inferiority even after the battles for Independence had taken place. Employing the critical vocabulary and framework of Decolonial theory, the paper introduces key arguments against Western European universality, and calls for a re-reading of the processes that structure privilege across racial and ethnic lines.

Introduction

Following the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, the concept of race, as a category, became instrumental to social organisation and, significantly, continues to be a powerful stratagem today. This is clearly evident in the idea of Latinidad (Latinity) that underscores the nomenclature ‘Latin America’, which continues to elevate European heritage to the detriment of all other racial or ethnic groups. We can see this, for example, in the fact that whilst an Aymaran Amerindian from Bolivia may not share much with an Afro-Cuban from Santiago, or with a porteño from Buenos Aires, or a Mexican from Tijuana, each is deemed to be Latin American. Given the cultural heterogeneity of the region, it seems imprecise to speak of Latin America as though there were no marked differences between the nations, regions, cultures and peoples of the huge landmass that extends from the south of Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. It is difficult to employ the term Latin America with any validity for a number of reasons: to reiterate, it is the referent of an incredibly vast and heterogeneous region; additionally, the term emerged as the result of conflicts between imperial nations and was hence applied to the region from outside (see Mignolo 2005); and, most importantly, the very idea of Latinidad functions to define Latin American identity in relation to the European heritages, and erases and marginalises the racial and cultural diversity of people residing in Latin America. For these reasons, the term Latin America and its continued usage must be seen as part of a larger program of coloniality that began with the inception of the Americas as the New World in the 15th century, and that continues today through global, Western capitalism and its accompanying epistemology. In Latin America, the colonial project that began with the arrival of Europeans did not end with the cessation of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. In fact, coloniality persists today and is evident in the distribution of wealth and resources across the region and the globe…

…The Emergence of Race

For Europe, the so-called discovery of America opened vast territories to be appropriated, riches to be extracted, and inhabitants to be indoctrinated into European culture and Catholicism. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, the conquest and colonisation meant complete domination, and went hand-in-hand with slavery, serfdom, genocide and the overall destruction of previously existing social formations. It goes without saying that the destruction of culture also meant the destruction of knowledge/s and worldviews that differed from that of the Europeans. The legitimizing discourse of this enterprise, based on the supposed superiority of the European colonisers and the supposed inferiority of the dominated, rested on a newly emergent notion of race.

The classification Indio to refer to the vast numbers of societies and civilisations not only obscured the differences between the groups which inhabited the region, it served as the construction of an identity whose main purpose was to differentiate the indigenous from the colonisers. The term summarised a category that was entirely negative and inferior. The same process was repeated when it came to the people transported as slaves from Africa, although they came from different regions and belonged to different groups—Ashantis, Yorubas, Congos, etc.—in the colonial period they became Negros (Quijano 2000: 551-2). Both Indios and Negros were conceived as inferior identities to their European counterparts, and this inferiority was defined specifically in terms of their race. These identities became configured in asymmetrical relations of power within the new colonial system; they had a corresponding place within the colonial hierarchies, the organisation of labour, and corresponding social roles. Both Indios and Negros existed outside the domain of civilised society, as a repository of labour to be exploited for the advantage of Europeans. Interestingly, race became associated with colour, perhaps as one of the most salient differences of phenotype, and social organisation and privilege can be traced to a gradient of colour: the darker the subject the lesser freedom they exercised and possessed. In this way, the concept of race was instrumental to conquest and colonisation: there is a direct link between the idea of race that emerged at the onset of the conquest of the Americas—and that was later spread around the world—and the division and organisation of labour. From the beginning, the distribution of wealth, power, domination and resources was established in terms of the newly invented categories of identity that the concept of race facilitated—Indio, Negro, Mestizo, Spanish, Portuguese, European. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this emergence of race as a new mode of power, efficiently employed as a means to codify the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, and to justify the atrocities, and the violence, that the conquest and colonial enterprise entailed…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution and Genetics of Latin American Populations

Cambridge University Press
December 2001
528 pages
12 b/w illus. 128 tables
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780521652759
Paperback ISBN: ISBN:9780521022392
eBook ISBN: 9780511837128

Francisco M. Salzano
Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Maria C. Bortolini
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

The human genetic make-up of Latin America is a reflection of successive waves of colonization and immigration. There have been few works dealing with the biology of human populations at a continental scale, and while much data is available on the genetics of Latin American populations, most information remains scattered throughout the literature. This volume examines Latin American human populations in relation to their origins, environment, history, demography and genetics, drawing on aspects of nutrition, physiology, and morphology for an integrated and multidisciplinary approach. The result is a fascinating account of a people characterized by a turbulent history, marked heterogeneity, and unique genetic traits.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Origins
• 2. Environment and history
• 3. Socioeconomic indices, demography, and population structure
• 4. Ecology, nutrition, and physiological adaptation
• 5. Morphology
• 6. Health and disease
• 7. Haemoglobin types and haemoglobinopathies
• 8. Normal genetic variation at the protein, glycoconjugate, and DNA levels
• 9. Gene dynamics
• 10. Synthesis.

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Review)

French History
Volume 27, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 135-137
DOI: 10.1093/fh/crs158

Emily Musil Church, Assistant Professor of History
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. By Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. 312 pp. ISBN: 978 0 8122 4172 3.

Rebecca Hartkopf Scholss’ investigation of the end of slavery in the French Caribbean island of Martinique is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of the Francophone Black Atlantic world. Schloss’ book builds on existing works by exploring the complex dynamics that existed amidst and between the various racial and economic groups in Martinique, as well as between the metropole and colony. The author’s writing style makes a long, complicated colonial history with a complex cast of characters both engaging and accessible. She uses a wide variety of sources—ranging from court proceedings to diaries to demographic statistics—to reconstruct how Martinique, and the French empire more broadly, defined and redefined racial categories and their meanings. Although she uses class and racial categories to describe the social framework, Schloss is careful to reinforce that the categories she describes—such elite Creoles, poor whites, free mixed-race persons, enslaved Africans, and so on—were fluid designations and not united, cohesive groups. The…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Myth of Post-Racialism: Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Stories About Race and Racism in the United States

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Post-Racial States)
pages 2-25

Babacar M’Baye, Associate Professor of Pan-African Literature and Culture
Kent State University

In the United States, hegemonic narratives reproduce post-racial ideals by developing popular myths that either minimise the prevalence of racial inequalities or blame their persistence on African Americans, who are represented as dysfunctional and resistant to mainstream American culture. Hegemonic narratives are not only racist and prejudiced but also deceptive because they move race away from the unequal policies that produce structural-level inequities for lower and working class African Americans, putting the latter at a greater disadvantage in relationships to middle and upper class white Americans and African Americans. Hegemonic stories are misleading since they claim that racial equality is possible even when the majority of white Americans have a claim to socioeconomic and political privilege and have a vested interest in maintaining that advantage at the expense of others. Using both past and recent critical race theories, this article critically analyses the major differences between hegemonic stories which accept the myth of post-racialism in the United States and counterhegemonic stories which contest this myth. By analysing these stories, the essay reveals the racially disadvantageous conditions the majority of blacks in the United States continue to face despite the 2008 election of a black president. The essay identifies persistent structural racism that the myth of post-racialism seeks to efface. It also suggests that American social and economic institutions work to entrap African Americans and other non-white minorities into a racist prison industrial complex, limited education and health facilities and rampant poverty which drastically reduce their opportunities in the United States.

Read the entire article here.

Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe [Review]

H-net Reviews
H-SAfrica
April 2007

Elizabeth Schmidt, Professor of History
Loyola University Maryland

James Muzondidya. Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005. xviii + 323 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59221-246-0.

Based on a wide range of archival sources and more than two dozen interviews, James Muzondidya’s book provides a major historical reassessment of Zimbabwe’s colored community from the early twentieth century to 1980. This small community has largely been ignored in Southern African historiography. The few works focusing on the colored population generally have perpetuated a distorted view, arguing that the mixed-race community had no authentic identity. Rather, they posit that “colored” was a state-imposed category without roots in popular experience or consciousness. According to this view, coloreds were merely a product of the colonial state’s divide-and-rule tactics. While Africans viewed them as dupes, collaborators, and beneficiaries of the colonial system, Europeans dismissed them as a marginal population that was more African than European and, as such, unworthy of European rights and privileges.

In this important contribution to the historical literature, Muzondidya reassesses the construction of colored identity, rejecting the proposition that colored social and political identities were solely state-imposed. He argues instead that these complex and contested identities were the product of colored historical agency and the political, economic, and social structures in which the actors operated. He disaggregates the mixed-race category, too often viewed as homogeneous, in terms of gender, generation, class, culture, and historical background. In a particularly fascinating section, he explores the deep divisions between South African-born Cape Coloreds (or Cape Afrikanders) and the indigenous “EurAfrican” population. Cape Colored immigrants to colonial Zimbabwe were predominantly Muslim, Afrikaans-speaking descendants of African and Asian slaves, the Cape’s original Khoikhoi inhabitants, and Afrikaner settlers. Generations removed from their exclusively African or European past, they belonged to the Western-educated middle and professional classes…

Read the entire review here.