Mixed Race Studies

Blackout: How Argentina ‘Eliminated’ Africans From Its History And Conscience

International Business Times
New York, New York
2013-06-04

Palash Ghosh, Senior Writer, World

Tens of millions of black Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands from the 16th century to the 19th century to toil on the plantations and farms of the New World. This so-called “Middle Passage” accounted for one of the greatest forced migrations of people in human history, as well as one of the greatest tragedies the world has ever witnessed.

Millions of these helpless Africans washed ashore in Brazil—indeed, in the present-day, roughly one-half of the Brazilian population trace their lineage directly to Africa. African culture has imbued Brazil permanently and profoundly, in terms of music, dance, food and in many other tangible ways.

But what about Brazil’s neighbor, Argentina? Hundreds of thousands of Africans were brought there as well—yet, the black presence in Argentina has virtually vanished from the country’s records and consciousness…

…But blacks did not really vanish from Argentina – despite attempts by the government to eliminate them (partially by encouraging large-scale immigration in the late 19th and 20th century from Europe and the Near East). Rather, they remain a hidden and forgotten part of Argentine society.

Hishaam Aidi, a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, wrote on Planete Afrique that in the 1950s, when the black American entertainer Josephine Baker arrived in Argentina, she asked the mixed-race minister of public health, Ramón Carilio: “Where are the Negroes?” In response, Carilio joked: “There are only two—you and I.”

As in virtually all Latin American societies where blacks mixed with whites and with local Indians, the question of race is extremely complex and contentious.

“People of mixed ancestry are often not considered ‘black’ in Argentina, historically, because having black ancestry was not considered proper,” said Alejandro Frigerio, an anthropologist at the Universidad Catolica de Buenos Aires, according to Planete Afrique.

“Today the term ‘negro’ is used loosely on anyone with slightly darker skin, but they can be descendants of indigenous Indians [or] Middle Eastern immigrants.”

AfricaVive, a black empowerment group founded in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, claimed that there are 1 million Argentines of black African descent in the country (out of a total population of about 41 million). A report in the Washington Post even suggested that 10 percent of Buenos Aires’ population may have African blood (even if they are classified as “whites” by the census).

“People for years have accepted the idea that there are no black people in Argentina,” Miriam Gomes, a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, who is part black herself, told the Post.

“Even the schoolbooks here accepted this as a fact. But where did that leave me?”

She also explained that almost no one in Argentina with black blood in their veins will admit to it.

“Without a doubt, racial prejudice is great in this society, and people want to believe that they are white,” she said. “Here, if someone has one drop of white blood, they call themselves white.“…

Read the entire article here.

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Santita Jackson Show (WVON AM, Chicago) with Rainier Spencer

The Santita Jackson Show
WVON 1690 AM
Chicago, Illinois
2011-02-16, 15:05Z (09:05 CST, 10:05 EST, 07:05 PST)

Santita Jackson, Host

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The topic of discussion will be the so-called “one-drop rule.”  Listen to the interview here (39.6MB, 00:43:21).

Dr. Spencer is the author of the new book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011) in where he argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

Selected bibliography:

• “Racism and the Multiracial Label,” commentary in the “Room for Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma” section, The New York Times, February 12, 2011.
• “Mixed-Race Chic,” The Chronicle Review, May 19, 2009.
• Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Listen to the interview here (39.6MB, 00:43:21).

Hay winner’s search for identity

BBC News
2003-05-27

A first-time writer who travelled halfway round the world to trace her roots has won the Welsh Book of the Year award at the Hay Festival.

Charlotte Williams’ tale of her search for her identity, entitled Sugar and Slate, took her to three different continents.

Ms Williams, who has Welsh, African and Latin American heritage, wrote the book following trips across the world to find more about her background.

She overcame challenges from 60 other writers to claim the £3,000 first prize.

The daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and a black father from Guyana in the Caribbean, Ms Williams said the journey to research her past became a confrontation with herself and the idea of Welshness.

In the book she recalls feeling as a child growing up in Llandudno, north Wales, that “somehow to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole at all”…

Read the entire article here.

“An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.”

—Wilma Pearl Mankiller, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief (1985 to 1995)

How the ‘Loving’ Case Changed the US

The Root
2013-06-12

Kelli Goff, Special Correspondent

The legacy of the interracial-marriage case looms large on the 46th anniversary of the landmark decision.

Forty-six years ago, on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia law prohibiting Mildred Jeter Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, from marrying because of their race was unconstitutional. Their family name, “Loving,” was so perfect for a case about love that it probably would have been dubbed unbelievable if the story were being pitched as fiction.

The case transformed the landscape of America. In a statement to The Root, Kim Keenan, general counsel for the NAACP, said of Loving v. Virginia’s impact, “Along with other key cases, it brought an end to a separate-and-unequal legally sanctioned way of life in America.”

Below is a list of the top ways that Loving v. Virginia has directly and indirectly changed America.

It gave the United States its first black president. Barack Obama was born in 1961, and the Loving case was decided in 1967, but the Lovings were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C. They were arrested upon returning to their native Virginia for defying the state’s anti-miscegenation statute. Their sentence of one year in prison or the option of leaving their home state set the groundwork for their landmark Supreme Court case. In doing so they made it possible for families like that of President Obama, which consisted of his black African father and white American mother, to legally exist in the state nearest to the city that the president and his family now call home…

Read the entire article here.

The Truth About Loving v. Virginia and Why it Matters

MixedRaceStudies.org
2013-06-12

Steven F. Riley

On June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark civil-rights case Loving v. Virginia that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law (known as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924) was unconstitutional. It did not as some suggest, legalize interracial marriage in the United States. It legalized interracial marriage in the 15 states that still had anti-miscegenation laws that prevented such unions.

Repeating this untruth actually undermines the legacy of our courageous American heroes Mildred and Richard Loving because it was their legal marriage in Washington, D.C. in June 1958 and subsequent prosecution in Virginia that began their saga on the road to the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the Lovings did not as some commentators also suggest, “win their right to marry” in their Supreme Court case because they were already married—and were raising three children. To reinforce the point, one need look no further than the now famous message Richard Loving relayed via his lawyers to the bench on April 10, 1967, when he stated simply, “Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of the state legislatures that repealed their anti-miscegenation laws before Loving v. Virginia.

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of the states New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. which never enacted anti-miscegenation laws.

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of over 100 years of litigation against such laws including the unsuccessful Pace v. Alabama (1883), the War Brides Act (1945), the successful Perez v. Sharp (1948) which legalized interracial marriage in California, and McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) and which abrogated the cohabitation aspect of the Florida’s anti-miscegenation law. These cases and others laid the groundwork for the successful outcome of Loving v. Virginia.

Lastly, repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of centuries of lawful marriages across racial boundaries.

For posts about Loving v. Virginia click here.

^©2013, Steven F. Riley

Are Mixed Race Couples and Families Still Fighting for Acceptance in Alberta?

Alberta Primetime
Edmonton, Alberta
2013-06-12

Jennifer Martin, Host

Monica Das, Registered Psychologist

Yvonne Breckenridge
University of Alberta

Alberta Primetime is a daily current affairs show airing weeknights from 7pm MST to 8pm MST. Airing across Alberta on CTV Two Alberta, Alberta Primetime drills through the surface of current issues to explore the ideas and concerns of Alberta’s real energy sector – its people.

The face of Alberta families is changing, but are Albertans still struggling to catch up?

We talk to Monica Das, registered psychologist and Yvonne Breckenridge, from the University of Alberta.

Watch the video here.

Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed-Race Americans [Interview]

KING-TV 5, Seattle Washington
2013-06-11

Margaret Larsen, Host
New Day Northwest

June 12 marks the 46th Anniversary of a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court which overturned a ban on interracial marriage that had been place on many states. But even before the ruling, couples of different races were getting married, some going great lengths to hide their differences to do so.

Sociologist Cathy Tashiro interviewed a number of people who either broke the law or found some other way to be with the ones they love.

The result is a new book, Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed-Race Americans.

Cathy joined Margaret to talk about the inspiration behind the book and her own upbringing as the child of a mixed race couple. She also shared some of the experiences shared by the men and women she interviewed for the book…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

Is Interracial Marriage Still Scandalous?

Room For Debate
The New York Times
2013-06-13

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Gary B. Nash, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Heidi W. Durrow, Author and Co-Founder
Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival

Diane Farr, Actress and Writer

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

This month marks almost 50 years since the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage legal nationwide. Marriages between people of different races have climbed since, to a high of 8.4 percent in 2010.

Does this mean that we have achieved a colorblind society, or just that the hate has moved to YouTube? In an age when white people are becoming a minority, is interracial marriage still scandalous?

Kevin Noble Maillard, a professor of law at Syracuse University, suggested this discussion.

Read the entire discussion here.