Mixed Race Studies

Two Cities: Guangzhou/Lagos

Nokoko
Institute of African Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Volume 2 (Fall 2011)
pages 174-197

Wendy Thompson Taiwo, Assistant Professor of African American Studies
San José State University, San Jose, California

I was in Nigeria in May, the year I turned twenty-nine. And aside from the few hours of electricity per day, the way most of the food twisted my stomach or burned my tongue, and that the terrible stifling heat made life difficult at times, I was excited to be exactly where I needed to be: Lagos. Once the political center of Nigeria, it is still reigning as the financial and economic capital. And from what I saw, it was a thriving, bustling, chaotic metropolis where swindling police officers, savvy market women, racing okadas, and the occasional goat shared the streets with everyday Lagosians.

I was pursuing the second leg of a research project devoted to examining the everyday lives of Yoruba traders I had met in Guangzhou. In 2009, a series of news reports shifted focus to a sizable West African trading community in southeastern China following a protest by an approximated two hundred African men in front of a police station that drew a crowd and shut down traffic. The protest was in response to earlier events in which an immigration raid staged by Chinese police in a clothing mall frequented primarily by Nigerian traders led to at least two reported injuries, one critical…

…I had so many questions and saw this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to sort out some of the anxieties I had about race, borders, and the bodies of my parents—one black and one Chinese. I assumed that many African traders would have had to interpret and negotiate these same themes and embarked on my journey to encounter these new global citizens…

Read the entire article here.

Two worlds… One reflection

IDEATE: The Undergraduate Journal of Sociology
University of Essex, Colchester, England
Volume 10, Summer 2013
19 pages

Yasmin Currid

Introduction

I went through most of my childhood believing that my family was just the same as everybody else’s. I did not realise that there was something slightly different about the dynamics and the structure of my family as opposed to, I suppose, what people would call a “normal” family. Even now, I still consider my family to be just like anyone else’s… Why should the colour of our skin matter? Let me start from the beginning: my mum and my biological father, Jimmy, broke up before I was born. Then when I was a few months old she met Jason, the man I call my dad. They eventually got married and had my two brothers, Kyshon and Kofi. The only thing that happens to be slightly different about this situation is that I have a multiracial family. Both my mum and I are white, my dad is black, and my two brothers are mixed race, so half of my extended family is white and half is black. I do not consider the dynamics of my family to be weird, if anything, I believe I am lucky to be brought up in a multiracial family- I get to experience the best of both… Although I am sure not everyone sees it that way.

I do not remember exactly how old I was when I started questioning the difference in our skin colours, all I know is that I was a lot older than you would expect. I assume it just never occurred to me as it was not as big a deal as some people would make out. We were still a family. My dad was still my dad, and my brothers were still my brothers, no matter what we looked like from the outside and how much we differed in skin colour. However, what I do remember, down to the very last minute detail, is where we were and exactly how I phrased it. I know we were in the car, my dad was driving and I was in the back, between my two brothers and before I knew what I was saying, I just blurted it out “Why is dad black and I’m white?” The answer, however, I do not remember…

…It is quite difficult because there is no one else I know or have even heard of who has the same type of family dynamic as I have. When I type “inter-racial families” into Google, thousands of websites come up advertising a black and white couple who have mixed race kids… But never families where a white child has a white mum, a black dad and mixed race brothers. The lack of sociological research in this particular field has challenged me in finding different sociologist’s ideas I can use to analyse my own experience of belonging to an inter-racial family. Due to this lack of research I have had to look at specific sociologists, such as Mills, Goffman and Cooley, and try to adapt and apply their theories and perspectives to my particular situation regardless of whether they intended it in the same way which I have interpreted it. Throughout my journal, I am going to attempt to take my family biography and link it to the larger social structures within society…

Read the entire article here.

Race Reconciled Re-Debunks Race – Anthropology 1.6

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-02-27

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

In May 2009, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published Race Reconciled, a special issue with cutting-edge work by biological anthropologists. These researchers have read the critique of Richard Lewontin, and some have been in the forefront of re-examining Lewontin’s work (see previous section Attacking Anthropology and the Race Revival and see also the post on Teaching Race Anthropologically). These researchers do not agree on everything, and they have pointed debates. They are from the number-crunching and bone-measuring side of anthropology. Some of the articles are dense and difficult reading, with enough numbers, statistical tables, and computer simulations to make it hardly like reading at all.

Still, it is important to plow through the findings, because it is what our best bone measurers and number crunchers can accomplish. They very clearly recognize human biological variation. They see variation and measure it every day, examining things people cannot even visibly discern, like tiny bone markers and genetic material. And with all the disagreements, number-crunching, and consideration of how much humans vary, they agree,

“Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation” –Heather J.H. Edgar and Keith L. Hunley, Race Reconciled, 2009:2

Why?…

Read the entire article here.

CERS hosts Critical Mixed Race Studies postgraduate symposium

School of Sociology and Social Policy
Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies
University of Leeds
2013-08-08

Peter Edwards, Faculty Web Development Officer

Mixing Matters: Critical Intersectionalities

The Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) held its first interdisciplinary, international postgraduate symposium on the 18th May 2013 entitled ‘Mixing Matters: Critical Intersectionalities.’ This symposium aimed at engaging with ideas from the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) was the first of its kind in the UK and enabled national, international and Leeds based postgraduate students to present their research in this dynamic field. The debates within CMRS have been circulating for some time within various disciplines but which simultaneously have remained marginal within broader studies on ethnicity and ‘race’. Furthermore, the debates have largely been centred on the United States context and not taking into account the globality of mixed-race identity which varies across time and space, an idea which the keynote speaker (Rebecca King O’Riain) discusses in her book Global Mixed Race. This symposium was developed in response to this marginalisation focusing on describing and analysing mixed-race identities in both the UK and international contexts.

It was well attended and received by staff and students from within the faculty and beyond. There were a significant number of non-academic participants who travelled from far afield to engage with the day’s presentations and debates. Dr Rebecca King O’Riain (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) gave a keynote addressing the importance of expanding mixed-race studies beyond US borders and explored the dynamics of mixing in Zambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Germany and Japan, among other locations. Dr. Shirley Tate (University of Leeds) who conceived of the idea of the symposium gave a second keynote on the mixed race question in regards to Black beauty.

The symposium was also comprised of two panels with papers on a variety of topics which reflect the diversity of research interests in the field:

• Theory, experience and activism in CMRS
• Mixed race male experiences in UK education
• Chicano epistemology
• Mixed-heritage in fostering and adoption policy
• Bio-power and the politicisation of mixed-race in East Africa
• Dougla identities in Trinidad
• The influence of hip hop on mixed-race identity…

…Speakers: Emma Dabiri, Remi Salisbury, Veronica Cano, Julia Koniuch-Enneoka, Angelica Pesarini, Kav Raghunandan, and Jenn Sims

Read the entire report here.

Study analyzes ambiguities in the works of Aluísio Azevedo

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP —The Mulatto, by Aluísio Azevedo, is a title that refers to the collective human state. It does not mention a character or a specific situation, but rather a human category that is very important for understanding the process of Brazil’s formation.

This analysis is presented by sociologist Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida in the book A realidade da ficção. Ambiguidades literárias e sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The reality of fiction. Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo), released by Alameda Casa Editorial on March 15. 

The starting point for this analysis is the second book published by Aluísio Azevedo, The Mulatto. The researcher analyzes the contradictions found in this book, as these contradictions marked the entire literary trajectory of the Maranhão author. Critics normally divide Azevedo’s work into two categories: engaged (or activist) romance, filled with social criticism, and feuilletonesque novels. 

“This ambiguity remains throughout the career of Aluísio. The writer himself made it clear in correspondence and newspaper texts that he was conscious of it and struggled with it. But I try to show that there is continuity in his works,” commented Estramanho de Almeida in an interview with Agência FAPESP…

Read the entire article here.

Psychologically, the mulatto is an unstable type.

In the thinking of the white race, the mulattoes generally are grouped with the backward race and share with them the contempt and dislike of the dominant group. Nowhere are they accepted as social equals. The discrimination varies all the way from the more or less successfully concealed contempt of the Brazilian white for the socially ambitious metis, to the open and bitter hatred of the South African for the “coloured man” and the Native boy, but it seems to be present everywhere. The origin of the half-castes was everywhere an irregular one; this is a point about which prejudice can always center. Their nearer approach in physical appearance to the white type is simply taken as evidence of additional irregularities in ancestry. The two things—the lower ancestry and the presumption of a dubious origin—are the focal points about which the white man’s contempt for the mixed-blood group centers.

By the native race, the mixed-blood group is generally accepted as superior. The possession of white blood is an evidence of superiority. The ancestral blot excites no prejudice. The mulattoes are envied because of their color and enjoy a prestige among the darker group because of it.

Between these two groups, one admiring and the other despising, stand the mixed-bloods. In their own estimation, they are neither the one nor the other. They despise the lower race with a bitterness born of their degrading association with it, and which is all the more galling because it needs must be concealed. They everywhere endeavor to escape it and to conceal and forget their relationship to it. They are uncertain of their own worth; conscious of their superiority to the native they are nowhere sure of their equality with the superior group. They envy the white, aspire to equality with them, and are embittered when the realization of such ambition is denied them. They are a dissatisfied and an unhappy group.

It is this discontented and psychologically unstable group which gives rise to the acute phases of the so-called race problem. The members of the primitive group, recognizing the hopelessness of measuring up to the standards of the white race, are generally content and satisfied with their lower status and happy among their own race. It is the mixed-blood man who is dissatisfied and ambitious. The real race problem before each country whose population is divided into an advanced and a backward group, is to determine the policy to be pursued toward the backward group. The acute phase of this is to determine the policy to be adopted toward the mixed-bloods. To reject the claims and to deny the ambition of the mulattos may cause them to turn back upon the lower race. In this case, they may become the intellectual leaven to raise the race to a higher cultural level, or they may become the agitators who create discord and strife between the pure-blood races. To form them into a separate caste between the races, is to lessen the clash between the extreme types and, at the same time, to deprive the members of the lower race of their chance to advance in culture by depriving them of their natural, intellectual leaders. To admit the ambition of the mulattoes to be white and to accept them into the white race on terms of individual merit, means ultimately a mongrelization of the population and a cultural level somewhere between that represented by the standards of the two groups.

Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto In The United States: Including A Study Of The Role Of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout The World, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1918). 102-104. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7040137M/The_mulatto_in_the_United_States

What Do I Tell My Blond Son About Being Black?

Gawker
2013-08-17

Anita DeRouen, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing and Teaching
Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi

“I think we should teach him to use his privilege to his advantage.”

It’s Sunday morning, July 14, 2013. My husband and I are talking, have been talking, will always be talking about race in our world and how it shapes our understanding of race in our home. Melissa Harris-Perry’s show is on, and she’s wearing black, and she and her guests are subdued-yet-passionate as they do a post-postmortem on that dead black boy in Florida, on so many dead black boys, on what black parents should say to their sons and daughters about dead black boys. Our son is sitting next to me playing with his alphabet game while his father and I talk about him like he isn’t there.

I am not sure where to take my husband’s statement, but the horse is out of the barn, so someone’s gotta ride it.

“Why? He’s never going to be profiled the way Trayvon was.”

And he won’t. My just-about-white-passing child is unlikely to ever have a person cross to the opposite side of the street when they see him coming, is unlikely to be followed through stores as he browses, is unlikely to wonder if a cop’s behavior on a traffic stop is shaped by the color of his skin.

I know these things as sure as I know that a day will come when that sweet dirty-blond headed, blue eyed boy will have to decide whether he will see his half-blackness (and, therefore, me) as a blessing or a curse. My husband disagrees, though, and I find myself having a conversation about skin tones and shades of blackness that leaves me questioning the facts I’ve long just known about race in America…

Read the entire article here.

About Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.

Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.
2013-06-18

Zebulon Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

The idea for this blog came from several discussions with students and young people who come from mixed-race backgrounds, especially so-called “white and black” biracials who, for whatever reason, grew up without learning very much about African-American life, history or culture. Whether they be trans-racially adopted, grew up in a home without the biological black parent or were perhaps raised in an area without many black people, the probability for people of mixed race descent to grow up without a solid, positive grounding in the black experience is much higher for reasons that will become fairly obvious. Not so obvious at times, however, is the more complicated truth of racism in America, a past deeply rooted in the ugly practice of white supremacy and centuries of stigmatization of African-American culture, heritage and contributions. This phenomenon, known to some scholars as “Anti-blackness”, has done more to confuse and ultimately divide than perhaps any other factor…

Read the entire article here.

A Realidade da Ficção: Ambiguidades Literárias e Sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The Reality of Fiction: Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo)

Alameda Casa Editorial
2013-03-15
201 pages
ISBN: 978-85-7939-169-9
Format: 21.0 x 14.0 cm
In Portuguese

Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida, Professor of Sociology
Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo (FESPSP)

Neste livro fica provado que ainda é possível produzir dissertações nos padrões de outros tempos, quando o trabalho acadêmico exigia o domínio da língua, ampla leitura, revisão inteligente do conjunto da obra do autor, enquadramento histórico-social.

Ressalta-se: nem a Literatura, nem a Sociologia foram ofendidas – o texto literário foi trabalhado como texto literário, a Sociologia de acordo com a sua própria especificidade. Mais ainda, o entrelaçamento da Sociologia com o sociopolítico, com a abordagem compreensiva das Ciências Sociais e com as Ciências Humanas (Literatura e Sociedade). Nesse ponto e vista cada vez mais abrangente, ocorre a relação entre pensamento social e a estrutura da sociedade brasileira do século XIX, quando analisa os seus “ismos” (naturalismo, positivismo, republicanismo, anticlericalismo, abolicionismo).

A esta síntese do trabalho de Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida deve-se agregar a feliz escolha (como convém) de epígrafe retirada da obra de Dercy Ribeiro: “Posto entre os dois mundos conflitantes – o do negro, que ele rechaça, e o do branco, que o rejeita – o mulato se humaniza no drama de ser dois, que é o ser ninguém”.

Trata-se, enfim, de uma bem feita e oportuna contribuição para o estudo da literatura e sociedade no Brasil.

In this book it is proved that it is still possible to produce dissertations standards of other times, when the academic work required mastery of the language, wide reading, smart revision of the whole work of the author, historical and social framework.

We emphasize: neither literature nor sociology were offended – the literary text was worked as a literary text, Sociology according to its own specificity. Moreover, the intertwining of Sociology with the sociopolitical, with the comprehensive approach of the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Literature and Society). At this point and looking increasingly comprehensive, is the relationship between thought and social structure of the Brazilian society of the nineteenth century, when considering their “isms” (naturalism, positivism, republicanism, anticlericalism, abolitionism).

The synthesis of this work Estramanho Rodrigo de Almeida should be added the happy choice (as it should be) an epigraph taken from the work of Dercy Ribeiro: “Tour between the two conflicting worlds – that of the black, which he rejects, and white, the rejects – the mulatto humanizes the drama to be two, which is to be one.”

It is, in short, a well made and timely contribution to the study of literature and society in Brazil.

Empathetic eye

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – In 1865, an expedition led by Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Harvard University travelled around Brazil for 15 months to study the country. Among the voluntary collectors that participated in the expedition was a 23 year old medical student, William James (1842-1910), who would later become one of the most influential American thinkers, known mainly as one of the creators of pragmatic philosophy. 

Organized by professor Maria Helena Toledo Machado of the History Department of Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences School (FFLCH), the book Brazil through the eyes of William James covers  the large volume of writing and drawings produced by the young James during the expedition. Unlike the travel logs typical of the period, the material left by James reveals a sensitive and empathetic traveler with unique perspectives on the nature and society of Brazil.

The book was launched on April 7 at the USP’s Maria Antônia University Center, during the opening of the exhibition Rastros e raças de Louis Agassiz: fotografia, corpo e ciência (Traces of Louis Agassiz: photography, body and science), a collection of a series of photographs obtained during the expedition on Brazilian racial types…

…James’ perspective also significantly contrasts with the bias expressed by the expedition. Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, intended to collect fish specimen and data on their geographic distribution in Brazil, with a view to contesting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he opposed.

During the trip – known as the Thayer Expedition because it was financed by magnate Nathaniel Thayer-, Agassiz became interested in studying the population, taking the initiative to document Brazilian racial types through photography with a view evaluating the results of miscegenation. The work is one of the main photographic registers of Brazil in the 19th century.

“Agassiz was a creationist and the scientific and racial focus of the expedition is a bit backwards. But this did not affect James’ perspective. Highly sensitive, he developed what I would characterize as empathy, which would be manifested throughout his work. He shows a great capacity to understand the world from the other’s perspective. Instead of the paternalistic and pious approach common among other travelers of the time, he got involved with people and managed to understand the profound differences of this unfamiliar society,” affirms Machado.

Miscegenation

According to the historian, the position James exhibited in his expedition diaries are reflected throughout the life of the thinker. Later, he would fight against imperialism, defend Darwinism, become a follower of relativism – which garnered much criticism – and would develop the notion of stream of consciousness.

“All these ideas are coherent to his manner of approaching reality, manifested during his time in Brazil. In his writings, he deconstructs the exotic perspective, the incomprehensible other, the foreigner alienated from the codes of local social life,” says Machado…

Read the entire article here.