Mixed Race Studies

Citizen of The Year: Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced

Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ)
2017-11-13

The Editors

He’s been vilified by millions and locked out of the NFL—all because he took a knee to protest police brutality. But Colin Kaepernick’s determined stand puts him in rare company in sports history: Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson—athletes who risked everything to make a difference.

In 2013, Colin Kaepernick was on the cover of this magazine because he was one of the best football players in the world. In 2017, Colin Kaepernick is on GQ’s cover once again—but this time it is because he isn’t playing football. And it’s not because he’s hurt, or because he’s broken any rules, or because he’s not good enough. Approximately 90 men are currently employed as quarterbacks in the NFL, as either starters or reserves, and Colin Kaepernick is better—indisputably, undeniably, flat-out better—than at least 70 of them. He is still, to this day, one of the most gifted quarterbacks on earth. And yet he has been locked out of the game he loves—blackballed—because of one simple gesture: He knelt during the playing of our national anthem. And he did it for a clear reason, one that has been lost in the yearlong storm that followed. He did it to protest systemic oppression and, more specifically, as he said repeatedly at the time, police brutality toward black people.

When we began discussing this GQ cover with Colin earlier this fall, he told us the reason he wanted to participate is that he wants to reclaim the narrative of his protest, which has been hijacked by a president eager to make this moment about himself. But Colin also made it clear to us that he intended to remain silent. As his public identity has begun to shift from football star to embattled activist, he has grown wise to the power of his silence. It has helped his story go around the world. It has even provoked the ire and ill temper of Donald Trump. Why talk now, when your detractors will only twist your words and use them against you? Why speak now, when silence has done so much?

At the same time, Colin is all too aware that silence creates a vacuum, and that if it doesn’t get filled somehow, someone else will fill it for him. In our many conversations with Colin about this project, we discussed the history of athletes and civil rights, and the indelible moments it called to mind, and we decided that we’d use photography—the power of imagery and iconography—to do the talking…

Read the entire article here.

The Matrix of Race: Social Construction, Intersectionality, and Inequality

SAGE Publishing
October 2017
480 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1452202693

Rodney D. Coates, Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Abby L. Ferber, Professor of Sociology
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia

The Matrix of Race: Social Construction, Intersectionality, and Inequality is a textbook that makes race and racial inequality “visible” in new ways to all students in race/ethnic relations courses, regardless of their backgrounds–from minorities who have experienced the impact of race in their own lives to members of dominant groups who might believe that we now live in a “color blind” society. The “matrix” refers to a way of thinking about race that reflects the intersecting, multilayered identities of contemporary society, and the powerful social institutions that shape our understanding of race. Its goals are to help readers get beyond familiar “us vs. them” arguments that can lead to resistance and hostility; promote self-appraisal; and stimulate more productive discussions about race and racism.

Contents

• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PART I. INTRODUCTION TO RACE AND THE SOCIAL MATRIX
  • Chapter 1. Race and the Social Construction of Difference
    • The Social Construction of Race
    • The Social Matrix of Race
    • The Operation of Racism
    • Our Stories
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 2. The Shaping of a Nation: The Social Construction of Race in America
    • Race Today: Adapting and Evolving
    • Indigenous Peoples: The Americas before Columbus
    • Discovery and Encounters: The Shaping of Our Storied Past
    • The U.S. Matrix and Intersectionality— Where Do We Go from Here?
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
• PART II. THE MATRIX PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
  • Chapter 3. The Social Construction and Regulation of Families
    • Historical Regulation of the Family
    • Family Inequality Theories
    • Family Inequality through the Matrix Lens
    • Transforming the Ideal Family Narrative
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 4. Work and Wealth Inequality
    • Recent Trends in Work and Wealth
    • Theories of Economic Inequality
    • Applying the Matrix to the History of Economic Inequality in the United States
    • Transforming the Story of Race and Economic Inequality
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 5. Health, Medicine, and Health Care
    • Patterns of Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Theorizing Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Applying the Matrix to Health Inequity and Inequality
    • Resisting and Transforming Inequality in Health and Health Care
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 6. Education
    • The Shaping of the Matrix of U.S. Education
    • Theories of Education
    • Examining the Concealed Story of Race and Education through the Matrix
    • Alternative Educational Movements and the Future of Education
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 7. Crime, Law, and Deviance
    • A History of Race, Crime, and Punishment
    • Sociological Stock Theories of Crime and Deviance
    • Applying the Matrix to Crime and Deviance
    • Transforming the Narrative of Race, Crime, and Deviance
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 8. Power, Politics, and Identities
    • Contemporary Political Identities
    • Critiquing Sociological Theories of Power, Politics, and Identity
    • Applying the Matrix of Race to U.S. Political History
    • Building Alternatives to the Matrix of Race and Politics
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 9. Sports and the American Dream
    • The State of Sport Today
    • Examining Stock Sociological Theories of Sport
    • Applying the Matrix to Sports in the United States
    • Creating a New Playing Field
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Chapter 10. The Military, War, and Terrorism
    • Class, Gender, and Race in the U.S. Military
    • Military Sociology Stock Theories
    • Applying the Matrix Approach to U.S. Military History, War, and Terrorism
    • A More Inclusive Future
    • Key Terms
    • Chapter Summary
  • Conclusion
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

The Afro-Turks: Turkey’s Little-known Black Minority Reclaims Its Past

Haaretz
2017-10-26

Davide Lerner and Esra Whitehouse

An Afro-Turk farmer, Gungor Delibas, whose family is originally from Sudan, with a picture of her and her Turkish husband, in Haskoy, Turkey, October 2017. Davide Lerner

IZMIR, Turkey – Dotted along Turkey’s Aegean coastline are a smattering of villages that the country’s Afro-Turks call home.

“The first generation suffers, the second generation denies and the third generation questions,” reads the opening line of Mustafa Olpak’s book, the first and the last autobiographical and introspective study of Turkey’s dwindling black minority. Olpak coined the term Afro-Turk and founded the movement to help resurrect their identity, but the history of the estimated 1.3 million people who were forced into slavery and shipped from Africa to the territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire remains little more than a footnote of Turkish history.

While “the library of the Congress of the United States of America has over 600 personal accounts of African-American slaves, none could be found in Ottoman archives,” notes Turkish historian Hakan Erdem in his commentary to Olpak’s book. Before his death last year, Olpak had dreamed of delivering a copy of his book to former U.S. President Barack Obama, and had even traveled to Istanbul’s airport in a hopeless attempt to meet him as he landed for a state visit.

Today the number of Afro-Turks is estimated at only a few tens of thousands. Many still live in the villages of Haskoy, Yenicifler and Yenikoy, near Izmir, while some reside in rural areas around Ayvalik, Antalya and Adana, as well as in Istanbul. Most were first brought to Turkey to work as domestic servants or in the tobacco and cotton fields along the Aegean Sea; they settled near Izmir once they were freed. Although the slave trade was officially made illegal in 1857 following pressure from Britain and other European powers, it took until the beginning of the 20th century to eliminate the practice altogether and to liberate those who were owned by Ottoman families since before the slave trade was outlawed.

In Izmir, the state provided safe houses for former slaves as well as assistance to integrate them into the labor market; whole villages and neighborhoods inhabited by the Afro-Turks were dubbed “Arap” areas – the Turkish word for Arab, which is still used as slang to refer to black people…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: A Roundtable

Civil War History
Volume 63, Number 4, December 2017
pages 400-420

Joseph Beilein (JB), Assistant Professor of History
Pennsylvania State University, Behrend

Margaret Storey (MS), Professor of History and Associate Dean
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Andrew Slap (AS), Professor of History
East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tenneessee

Jarret Ruminski (JR), Freelance Writer, researcher, and Consultant
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ryan Keating (RK), Civil War History book review editor; Assistant Professor of History
California State University, San Bernardino

The summer of 2016 saw the release of the first large-budget Civil War film since 2012’s critically acclaimed Lincoln. The Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross and starring Matthew McConaughey, is not simply, however, another film about the Civil War. Based on historian Victoria Bynum’s acclaimed book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, this film marks an important shift in the popular depiction of America’s greatest conflict as it takes viewers inside the complex inner civil wars many Americans fought during this period. Long defined as a conflict pitting the north against the south, the realities of the Civil War were, as this film attempts to show, much more complex. Questions of loyalty and issues of patriotism have become an important part of the historiography of the Civil War era, illustrating the ways average men and women, North and South, struggled with the collision of national and local issues. Although the nuances of patriotism and loyalty have long driven the scholarly community, these issues have played a less important role in public, and especially Hollywood, portrayals of the war and the Reconstruction era. Certainly, past films have touched on the subject. Ride with the Devil, Pharaoh’s Army, and Cold Mountain, for example, all touch on patriotism and loyalty, as the main characters struggle with the consequences of the war on the home front. Based on a true story, Free State of Jones, is, however, the first to truly analyze this struggle through the lens of southern dissent. Following the experiences of Mississippian Newton Knight, a disillusioned southern soldier who returns home to lead a revolt against Confederate authorities in Mississippi, the film strikes at the heart of the complex nature of identity, patriotism, and loyalty during the Civil War and Reconstruction and gives viewers a rare glimpse into aspects of the war often overlooked by Hollywood film.

Brazil is both proud of its history promoting miscegenation and racial mixture and deeply ashamed of its status as a “mongrel” nation that lacks the culture, civilization, and modernity associated with racial whiteness. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, individuals, families, and nation-states have long struggled to acquire and display whiteness, harboring both implicit and explicit fears that they will never shed their associations with nonwhiteness, which includes both African and indigenous heredity. Whiteness suggests decorum, respectability, and civilized control. But the presumed lack of racial purity in Brazil – what has been called “virtual whiteness” or the implication that one is “branco por procuração” (white by proxy) – means that one’s whiteness is always vulnerable. I find this racial anxiety productive in suggesting that critical whiteness scholars should question the presumed “normalcy” and stability of whiteness, even in the United States. In particular, I am intrigued by the cultural and linguistic work that people (of different racial backgrounds) do to associate themselves with whiteness, in order to benefit from racial privilege. (Though people like the rappers and rap fans I worked with could also choose to explicitly reject the push for racial whitening or assimilation.) In the book, I examine three social and racial imperatives that uphold Brazilian racial hierarchy: (1) the need to display whiteness, (2) the desire to avoid blackness, and (3) the obligation to remain racially “cordial.” I believe that the United States shares with Brazil this orientation towards whiteness and away from blackness, though ideologies of racial purity clearly differ. In Brazil, the ideal national color is “moreno” or brown. —Jennifer Roth-Gordon

Ilana Gershon, “Jennifer Roth-Gordon on her new book, Race and the Brazilian Body,” CaMP Anthropology, September 4, 2017. https://campanthropology.org/2017/09/04/jennifer-roth-gordon-race-and-the-brazilian-body/.

Gerald and I want Langston to know where he comes from — so that he can take pride in his culture, his people, his identity. We want him to appreciate that the history of black people does not begin at slavery and end after the civil rights era. We want his Chinese American influences to be more than just a footnote to a largely white and black narrative, more than a mention of Lunar New Year every winter. Home schooling, we thought, could be the answer to many of these concerns.

Tracy Jan, “Worried about racism’s impact on her biracial son, a mother looks at home schooling,” The Washington Post Magazine, November 9, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/worried-about-racisms-impact-on-her-biracial-son-a-mother-looks-at-homeschooling/2017/11/08/09da0baa-b509-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html.

Jennifer Roth-Gordon on her new book, Race and the Brazilian Body

CaMP Anthropology
2017-09-04

Interview by: Ilana Gershon, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Indiana University, Bloomington

Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

If you were at a wedding, and the person at your table happened to be a scholar of African-American experiences of the Jim Crow South who wanted to know a bit about your book, what would you say?

Can the person sitting next to the Jim Crow scholar at our table be someone who witnessed the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville? I think I might open by saying to them that I study race relations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a context which is both very similar and very different from the ones that they are immersed in. My book is an investigation into how we can watch people draw on and perpetuate racial hierarchy in daily conversations and interactions, in a national context where noticing racial difference is (and has long been) taboo. These racial ideas – about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness – are the same ideas that were legalized in the Jim Crow South and that white people marched to uphold just a few weeks ago, in defense of statues meant to keep nonwhite people “in their place.” I can point to very little that changes, over time or across national boundaries, in the civilized/uncivilized and upstanding/dangerous distinctions between what whiteness and nonwhiteness are thought to represent.

Brazil also suffers from incredibly high levels of structural racism that almost always exceed statistics from the present-day U.S. (from racial gaps in education levels, income, and where people live, to what scholars have called a black genocide of thousands of Afro-descended youth killed by police each year). Despite these national similarities, Brazil has long used incidents like Charlottesville (such as the Civil War, lynchings, the LA riots and Rodney King beating, Ferguson, and so on) to define themselves in contrast to the violent history and aggressive nature of race relations in the U.S. Though they are now more aware of racism than ever before, many Brazilians continue to take pride in their reputation for racial mixture and racial tolerance. While most would admit that Brazil is not (and has never been) a “racial democracy,” there is a strong belief that inequality in Brazil is socioeconomic, rather than racial.

My book seeks to explain the “comfortable racial contradiction” that surrounds Rio residents with signs of blackness and whiteness but discourages them from describing what they see in racial terms. It’s not a contradiction that is “comfortable” for all, but I argue that this contradiction is surprisingly easy to live within, even as it may be hard to unravel and explain – in the same way that we now have to contemplate what it means to live in a “colorblind” America that has people on both ends of the political spectrum loudly proclaiming that race matters. I study how racial ideology allows us to live in societies that promote themselves as tolerant and equal, even as we are daily surrounded by (and participating in) profoundly racially unequal and unjust circumstances. Laws and torches are not the only ways to maintain white supremacy, and swastika-flag bearers are not the only ones who keep systems of racial hierarchy in place…

Read the entire interview here.