Mixed Race Studies

New Man in the Tropics: The Nietzschean Roots of Gilberto Freyre’s Multiracial Identity Concept

Luso-Brazilian Review
Volume 51, Number 1, 2014
pages 93-111
DOI: 10.1353/lbr.2014.0005

Jeroen Dewulf, Associate Professor of German
University of California, Berkeley

Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), a obra secular de Gilberto Freyre, foi traditionalmente interpretado de um ponto de vista sociólogo e histórico. Esta interpretação deixou duas questões essenciais em aberto: 1) Como se pode explicar que Freyre interpretou a noção de miscegenação de uma forma (muito) mais positiva do que sociólogos anteriores e 2) Como se pode explicar as tendências elitistas e aristocráticas na sua obra? Este artigo explore estas duas perguntas analisando a influência em Freyre da filosofia de Friedrich Nietzsche através da interpretação de Henry L. Mencken. Argumenta que a influência de Mencken foi maior do que tradicionalmente tem sido admitido e que na obra de Mencken sobre Nietzsche se pode encontrar a mesma interpretação de miscigenação que Freyre mais tarde explorou em Casa-grande & Senzala. Argumenta também que Mencken profundamente influenciou Freyre com as suas ideias aristocráticas e elitistas.

The Masters & Slaves (1933), the secular work of Gilberto Freyre, has been traditionally interpreted from the point of view of history and sociologist. This interpretation left two key questions unanswered: 1) How can one explain that Freyre interpreted the notion of miscegenation in a way (much) more positive than previous sociologists and 2) How was the elitist and aristocratic tendencies in his work? This article explores these questions by analyzing the influence Freyre in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by interpreting Henry L. Mencken. I Argue that the influence of Mencken was greater than has traditionally been accepted and that the work of Mencken on Nietzsche can find the same interpretation of miscegenation that Freyre later explored in The Masters & Slaves. Mencken also argues that profoundly influenced Freyre with their aristocratic and elitist ideas.

Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground–Dr. Laura Tugman’s topic for 18th Union, June 28

Melungeon Heritage Association: One People, All Colors
2014-05-20

18th Melungeon Union
Vardy, Tennessee and Big Stone Gap, Virginia
2014-06-27 through 2014-06-28

Dr. Laura Tugman will discuss her doctoral dissertation, entitled Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground: Ethnic Identity Development and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia. Her research examined the experience of Melungeon ethnic identity development through ethnographic interviews with Melungeon individuals in Southern Appalachia. Her study concluded that the identity development process and group dynamics occurring within the Melungeons present challenges to the current multicultural psychology literature regarding ethnic identity development. As recently as the early 1990s, many believed that the Melungeons would soon be completely assimilated into mainstream white America. More recently, the formation of the Melungeon Heritage Association has renewed ethnic pride for many Melungeons who have either previously concealed their heritage—or were not even aware of it—due to a long-standing generational practice of concealing Melungeon heritage. Dr. Tugman examined the ethnic identity development process and life experiences of Melungeons, particularly the impact of social dynamics, both within and outside the group, on self-identification.

For more information, click here.

Skin Tone Stratification among Black Americans, 2001–2003

Social Forces
Volume 92, Number 4, June 2014
pages 1313-1337

Ellis P. Monk Jr., Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology
University of Chicago

In the past few decades, a dedicated collection of scholars have examined the matter of skin tone stratification within the black American population and found that complexion has significant net effects on a variety of stratification outcomes. These analyses relied heavily on data collected between 1950 and 1980. In particular, many scholars have utilized the National Survey of Black Americans (1979–1980). This leaves the question of whether or not the effect of skin tone on stratification outcomes remains decades later. Newly available data from the National Survey of American Life (2001–2003) are used to examine this question. I find that skin tone is significantly associated with black Americans’ educational attainment, household income, occupational status, and even the skin tone and educational attainment of their spouses. Consequently, this study demonstrates that skin tone stratification among black Americans persists into the 21st century. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial inequality in the United States and beyond.

‘Belle’: Romance, Race And Slavery With Jane Austen Style

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2014-05-29

Michel Martin, Host

British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw was brought up on Jane Austen adaptations. “You know, the Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle was something I watched on a weekly basis with my mum at home in Oxfordshire,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

But as the biracial actress completed her training at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she watched her peers win roles in “the Downton Abbeys of this world” and realized those period dramas weren’t calling her. It made Mbatha-Raw ask: “Why can’t I be in something like this?”

Now she is. Mbatha-Raw plays the title character in Belle, a film based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy and an enslaved African woman. When she is a child, Dido’s father entrusts her to his uncle, one of the most powerful men in the country.

“She goes on this massive journey to become a woman who has the courage to stand up for who she is and what she believes in,” Mbatha-Raw says…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview here (00:12:53). Read the transcript here. Download the audio here.

China Turns To Africa For Resources, Jobs And Future Customers

Fresh Air, WHYY-FM Philadelphia
National Public Radio
2014-05-27

Terry Gross, Host

Dave Davies, Senior Reporter

China’s economic engagement in Africa can be measured in dollars — for instance, the $71 million airport expansion contract in Mali, funded by American foreign aid, that went to a Chinese construction firm.

More remarkably, it can be measured in people: More than a million Chinese citizens have permanently moved to Africa, buying land, starting businesses and settling among local populations.

Journalist Howard French, who spent years reporting on Africa and China for The New York Times and The Washington Post, has a new book that looks at these trends. In China’s Second Continent, French draws on interviews with Chinese and African businesspeople, government officials and ordinary citizens to explore China’s presence in 15 African countries.

He says there’s a debate about the long-term consequences of China’s push into the African continent: Will it create development and prosperity, or will it lead to exploitation reminiscent of 19th-century European colonialism?

French tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies that African citizens, for their part, would like Chinese businesses to be more open and transparent. He also explains that when Chinese leaders look at Africa, they don’t just see arable land and natural resources — they see a potential market for Chinese products…

…DAVIES: You spent some time in Mozambique with a Chinese immigrant, Hao Shengli – is that – am I getting close to his name?

FRENCH: Hao Shengli.

DAVIES: Hao Shengli. Just tell us a little bit about how he got there and what kind of farming business he established.

FRENCH: So Hao Shengli had a been sort of a moderately successful businessman back in China who had a peculiar marital history. He had taken on several wives in succession, but after each divorce, had maintained an intimate and financial relationship with the past wife, even as he took on a new wife. And so this led to a need for him to continually amass more and more money. And this drove him eventually to seek opportunity outside of China.

He initially tries to open some businesses in the Middle East. They don’t succeed. And he went to a trade fair in southern China where, for the first time, he’s exposed to talk about opportunities in Africa. And he decided to try his hand there, and this leads him to go to Mozambique where he believed, because it was a Portuguese-speaking country, he wouldn’t find any Chinese people. He -Hao Shengli was driven by this very common motive that we’ve talked about before, where, you know, he wants to get to a place where there’s not going to be any competition from other Chinese people. And so he goes to Mozambique, and I meet him in the capital, Maputo. And he very generously drives me to his farm.

DAVIES: And how is he able to buy so much arable land?

FRENCH: So Hao had come with a certain amount of savings. He was a businessman. In China, he had had a reasonable success. He had saved up – I don’t know – over $100,000, which he had arrived with. And he described a process to me where he sort of makes his way from county to county ingratiating himself to local officials. And in the county where he finally settled, he had apparently helped in the construction of some local roads there. And this had won him great favor with local officials. And he ends up using these relationships to secure interest in this land.

He made a payment for the land, and then he settles on the land. He begins farming Stevia, which is a plant that produces sweeteners that are used in diet sodas. And his scheme is to become a giant Stevia producer and to export to the likes of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, etc. Hao very quickly, though, runs into trouble with residents of the surrounding villages around his land who are resentful of the fact that he secured this very rich and irrigated valley, which had been years earlier owned and run by Portuguese colonials.

And so he develops this scheme to bring his sons to Mozambique – teenage sons, one of them about 17, one of them a few years younger. And his idea that he comes up with is that if he marries off or at least has his sons procreate with local women, that the children of these couplings will become part of his clan. And as Mozambican citizens, they will be able to own the land legally in perpetuity. And his hold on this rich valley then can’t be challenged.

DAVIES: Well that’s – that’s an entrepreneurial spirit to family building, isn’t it?

FRENCH: Absolutely.

DAVIES: This immigrant, Shengli, who had bought this land and was bringing his sons over and had big plans, how exactly did he figure his son would get African wives? I mean, what would they do to get them? Is it a matter of dating? Is it a matter of visiting their parents?

FRENCH: Very good question. I mean, so the exact details are a bit hazy here. But as I began to talk through these questions with Shengli, it emerges that he himself may have had something of a relationship with the girl who ends up being the girlfriend of his first son—either that or he had a relationship with a friend of the girl who becomes the girlfriend of his son.

As we talk these things through, he tells me that through a variety of payments made to essentially the family members of the clan of eligible girls—eligible in his view—girls, he had been able to secure relationships with various local girls. And he exhibited a great deal of impatience for his younger son, who he called Little Fatty. This is a prepubescent – I don’t know – I want to say 14-year-old, who had just arrived very recently from China and really had no sort of native interest in girls yet. And Hao was deeply irritated by this, saying, you know, we’ve got to get on with this, we’ve got to get on with this. You know, he’s thinking about building his clan, and he’s paired off the older son with a girl and – who knows? – but they may have had children by now. And he’s very anxious to see this happen with the younger boy as well…

Read the article here. Listen to the interview (00:26:23)  here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

Knopf
2014-05-20
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0307956989
9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches

Howard W. French, Associate Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa—a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people.

A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages—French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China’s economic, political, and human presence across the African continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.

We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts’.

French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.

Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future.

Presentation on ‘African Heritage in Classical Music’ followed by the screening of ‘The Black Mozart in Cuba’

Marcus Garvey Library
Tottenham Green Centre
1 Phillip Lane
Tottenham, London N15 4JA
Saturday, 2014-06-14, 17:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

Black History Studies in association with the Marcus Garvey Library presents ‘Sankofa Saturdays’

African Heritage in Classical Music

Music is an important part of our cultural heritage. In this presentation, Black History Studies will uncover the hidden contributions of musicians and composers of African descent to the genre of classical music.

The Black Mozart in Cuba

Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de St George, was a Black classical composer and violin virtuoso born in Guadeloupe in the mid 18th century. The son of a Senegalese enslaved African and a French nobleman, he achieved enormous success as a musician, fencer, and military man. Yet, when he died in 1799, he was all but erased from history due in part to Napoleon’s efforts.

The Black Mozart in Cuba is the latest act in the rehabilitation of the memory of this extraordinary human being. The film skillfully combines biographical information with performances of his works. In this documentary, Cuba dedicates a week of cultural activities to his memory and welcomes Saint Georges as “a great hero of the Caribbean.”

In French, English and Spanish with English subtitles…

For more information, click here.

“You Just Said ‘We’”: The complexity of not being White and not being a person of color.

Nick Franco
May 2014

Nick Franco, Coordinator for the Student Affairs/SOLES Collaborative
University of San Diego

This past Tuesday night, I did a mock presentation of my dissertation proposal for my dissertation seminar course. It went fairly well, and feedback from the professor and my colleagues was really, really helpful.

During the Q&A/debrief portion of my presentation, I talked about White people and said “we,” suggesting that I was a White person speaking on behalf of my fellow White people. A colleague pointed it out, and I really wasn’t surprised or upset about it. I simply responded with, “Well, my own racial identity is a separate dissertation.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Color Of Health: Skin Color, Ethnoracial Classification, And Discrimination In The Health Of Latin Americans

Social Science & Medicine
Available online: 2014-06-01
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.054

Krista M. Perreira, Professor of Public Policy and Associate Dean Office for Undergraduate Research
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Highlights

• Uses newly collected data on 4921 adults from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru
• Examines multiple measures of race/ethnicity and their associations with health
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in self-reported health.
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in class-based discrimination and low SES.
• SES and class-based discrimination largely account for disparities in health by skin color.

Latin America is one of the most ethnoracially heterogeneous regions of the world. Despite this, health disparities research in Latin America tends to focus on gender, class and regional health differences while downplaying ethnoracial differences. Few scholars have conducted studies of ethnoracial identification and health disparities in Latin America. Research that examines multiple measures of ethnoracial identification is rarer still. Official data on race/ethnicity in Latin America are based on self-identification which can differ from interviewer-ascribed or phenotypic classification based on skin color. We use data from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru to examine associations of interviewer-ascribed skin color, interviewer-ascribed race/ethnicity, and self-reported race/ethnicity with self-rated health among Latin American adults (ages 18-65). We also examine associations of observer-ascribed skin color with three additional correlates of health – skin color discrimination, class discrimination, and socio-economic status. We find a significant gradient in self-rated health by skin color. Those with darker skin colors report poorer health. Darker skin color influences self-rated health primarily by increasing exposure to class discrimination and low socio-economic status.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mo Asumang: Confronting racism face-to-face

BBC News Magazine
2014-05-13

Mo Asumang is the daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother.

As a well-known TV presenter in Germany she became the target of racist extreme right-wingers and neo-Nazis, who based their attacks on Asumang’s “non-Aryan” background.

So she decided to look into the racist ideology and to find out more about those who consider themselves “Aryan“.

In her new documentary, The Aryans, she confronts racists, both in Germany and among the Ku Klux Klan in America.

Mo Asumang spoke to BBC News about her experiences making the film…