Mixed Race Studies

The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race

Stanford University Press
March 2016
227 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804793940
Paper ISBN: 9780804797542
Digital ISBN: 9780804797573

Anthony Christian Ocampo, Associate Professor of Sociology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Is race only about the color of your skin? In The Latinos of Asia, Anthony Christian Ocampo shows that what “color” you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans, for example, helped establish the Asian American movement and are classified by the U.S. Census as Asian. But the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines means that they share many cultural characteristics with Latinos, such as last names, religion, and language. Thus, Filipinos’ “color”—their sense of connection with other racial groups—changes depending on their social context.

The Filipino story demonstrates how immigration is changing the way people negotiate race, particularly in cities like Los Angeles where Latinos and Asians now constitute a collective majority. Amplifying their voices, Ocampo illustrates how second-generation Filipino Americans’ racial identities change depending on the communities they grow up in, the schools they attend, and the people they befriend. Ultimately, The Latinos of Asia offers a window into both the racial consciousness of everyday people and the changing racial landscape of American society.

Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000

Harvard University Press
March 2016
136 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
2 maps, 2 graphs, 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674737594

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Of the almost 11 million Africans who came to the Americas between 1500 and 1870, two-thirds came to Spanish America and Brazil. Over four centuries, Africans and their descendants—both free and enslaved—participated in the political, social, and cultural movements that indelibly shaped their countries’ colonial and post-independence pasts. Yet until very recently Afro-Latin Americans were conspicuously excluded from narratives of their hemisphere’s history.

George Reid Andrews seeks to redress this damaging omission by making visible the past and present lives and labors of black Latin Americans in their New World home. He cogently reconstructs the Afro-Latin heritage from the paper trail of slavery and freedom, from the testimonies of individual black men and women, from the writings of visiting African-Americans, and from the efforts of activists and scholars of the twentieth century to bring the Afro-Latin heritage fully into public view.

While most Latin American countries have acknowledged the legacy of slavery, the story still told throughout the region is one of “racial democracy”—the supposedly successful integration and acceptance of African descendants into society. From the 1970s to today, black civil rights movements have challenged that narrative and demanded that its promises of racial equality be made real. They have also called for fuller acknowledgment of Afro-Latin Americans’ centrality in their countries’ national histories. Afro-Latin America brings that story up to the present, examining debates currently taking place throughout the region on how best to achieve genuine racial equality.

Table of Contents

• 1. On Seeing and Not Seeing
• 2. On Counting and Not Counting
• 3. Afro-Latin American Voices
• 4. Transnational Voices
• 5. On Acting and Not Acting
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

2016 Duke Global Brazil Conference

Duke University
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (FHI Garage)
C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse
Durham, North Carolina
2016-03-04, 09:00-17:30 EST (Local Time)

Co-sponsored by FHI Global Brazil Lab and the Duke Brazil Initiative

Invited guests include:

• Keynote: Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (USF) – The Color of Love in Bahia
• Dr. John Collins (CUNY) – Race, Violence, and the State in Bahia
• Dr. William Pan (Duke) – Environment and Health in the Amazon
• Dr. Bryan Pitts (U.Ga) – Sound and Politics
• Guilherme Andreas (JMU) – Flute recital with piano by Gianne Ge Zhu

For more information, click here.

‘Pinky’ and the Origins of Interracial Oscar-Bait

Bitch Flicks
2016-02-26

Hannah Graves
Department of History
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

This guest post by Hannah Graves appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Twentieth Century-Fox’s Pinky is far from the first Hollywood feature film that depicts an interracial relationship. Despite the evolution of various censorship codes that forbid depicting “miscegenation,” Hollywood has a rich history of mining the salacious or elicit potential from interracial pairing on screen, from Broken Blossoms to Duel in the Sun, Showboat to Imitation of Life. Yet, Pinky was quite distinct in tone from the films that came before it.

Produced by Fox’s studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, Pinky was part of a spate of post-war social problem films that earnestly sought to address topical issues. Studios promoted these films as evidence that their medium was maturing, littering their advertising with exaggerated claims about the power of their pictures. As one of Pinky’s screenwriters, Phil Dunne, wrote in a New York Times article, “What we say and do on the screen in productions of this sort can affect the happiness, the living conditions, even the physical safety of millions of our fellow citizens.” Pinky is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience. It is a tradition that informs films from A Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Monster’s Ball and the forthcoming Loving…

Read the entire article here.

Why I Created #ObamaAndKids

Medium
2016-02-21

Michael Skolnik

(Pete Souza/White House)

THURSDAY, February 18, 2016. The White House. Washington, DC. President Barack Obama was about to enter the room, when I noticed a young boy standing next to me, dressed in a jacket and tie, looking to get to the front of the crowd. This would be the last Black History Month celebration at The White House during the presidency of the first African-American in the history of The United States to hold the highest office in the land. When I asked the young boy if he needed help, he turned to me, and with a smile, he kept it moving, with his mother behind him, he led her around the various adults in his way, ultimately disappearing into the crowd in front.

Historical, this event would become. Not because of any major announcement the President or The First Lady would make from the podium, but because of a photo of that young boy, dressed in a jacket and tie, that would capture the attention of the world. They ultimately got to the front, standing against the rope that separated, by only a few feet, the audience from Barack and Michelle.

When the President finished his speech, he came down to the rope-line to greet the invited guests, and eventually arrived at the feet of the young boy. The President reached out to touch the boy’s face, and the remarkable White House photographer Pete Souza, did what he does best; snapped another iconic photograph of President Obama and a child who innocently knows nothing of the importance of that moment…

Read the entire article here.

“Look, a [picture]!”: Visuality, race, and what we do not see

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 102, Issue 1, 2016
pages 62-78
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2015.1136074

Elizabeth Kaszynski
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University

This article argues that understanding vision and visuality as associated but distinct terms has significant implications for the ways in which we engage with racial constructions of identity. Expanding the ways in which we visualize race beyond simply the visual offers us a more comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of and response to race in the twenty-first-century United States. This article moves from theoretical implications of non-visual visualizations like tactile visuality and audial visuality through photographs taken by blind photographers to ask how race and racial identity are implicated in conversations about both vision and visuality.

Read or purchase the article here.

Photo Series Celebrates The ‘Black Girl Power’ Of Brazilian Women

The Huffington Post
2016-03-02

Zeba Blay, Voices Culture Writer

It highlights women who are Afro-Brazilian and proud.

For the past two years, Brazilian journalist Weudson Ribeiro has been documenting the beauty of Afro-Brazilian women by photographing spontaneous portraits of them in an ongoing project. The result was released this month in a photo essay called “Superafro: O poder da mulher negra” or “Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER.”

The project, which features candid portraits of black women from Brazil, seeks to highlight women who proudly stand in their own blackness as a political statement.

Ribeiro, a 24-year-old journalist and political scientist based in Brasília, has been taking photos for nearly a decade. He is the only son of mixed-race parents, and says that for a long time he struggled with “understanding and accepting my own blackness.”

“It’s a problem that affects the vast majority of Brazilians as a result of our highly mixed ethnic backgrounds,” Ribeiro told The Huffington Post…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Korean Adoptees Use DNA to Search For Roots

NBC News
2016-03-02

Young Jin Kim

Sarah Savidakis, 55, lived in South Korea until she was nine years old, at which time she was adopted by a Connecticut family.

For Savidakis, who says she has grappled with the effects of early childhood trauma, memories of her life in Korea — including those of her birth mother — vanished around the time she arrived in the United States in 1970.

“I have some flashbacks here and there,” Savidakis, who lives in Tarpon Springs, Florida, told NBC News. “But to this day, my mother is [like] a ghost or a silhouette.”

Savidakis is among the thousands of mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the Korean War to American or U.N. soldier fathers and Korean mothers — many of whom were adopted into American families.

Seeking information about her birth parents, Savidakis in September tested her DNA through a commercial genealogy service and identified a first cousin, once removed. The relative helped her identify and connect with a half-brother and half-sister. She learned that her father — who was of Scottish and Irish descent — had passed away in 2014…

Read the entire here.