Mixed Race Studies

Brazil’s census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves

The Guardian
2010-08-25

Tom Phillip

Interviewers plan to reach 190m people, including the long-ignored Kalunga, by motorbike, plane, canoe and donkey

When Jorge Moreira de Oliveira’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather arrived in Brazil in the 18th century he was counted off the slave-ship, branded and dispatched to a goldmine deep in the country’s arid mid-west. After years of scrambling for gold that was shipped to Europe, he fled and became one of the founding fathers of the Kalunga quilombo, a remote mountain-top community of runaway slaves.

On Wednesday last week, more than 200 years later, it was Moreira’s turn to be counted—this time not by slavemasters but by Cleber, a chubby census taker who appeared at his home clutching a blue personal digital assistant (PDA).

“I’m Kalunga. A Brazilian Kalunga,” Moreira told his visitor from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, who diligently noted down details about the interviewee’s eight children, monthly income and toilet arrangements.

Such is Brazil’s 2010 census—a gigantic logistical operation that aims to count and analyse the lives of more than 190 million people in one of the most geographically and racially diverse nations on earth…

…Identity

“It is a question of identity,” said Ivonete Carvalho, the government’s programme director for traditional communities. “When you assert your identity you are saying you want [government] action and access to public policies. [The census] is a fantastic x-ray.”

The Kalungas’ fight for recognition is part of a wider movement for racial equality in Brazil, a country with deep roots in Africa but where Afro-Brazilian politicians and business leaders remain few and far between. According to Carvalho, only one of Brazil’s 81 senators is black, despite the fact that Afro-Brazilians represent at least 53% of the population. The last census found that fewer than 40% of Afro-Brazilians had access to sanitation compared with nearly 63% of whites.

Just as descendents of Brazil’s runaway slaves are finding their voice—and telling the census takers about it—so too are Brazil’s officially black and indigenous communities swelling as a growing number of Brazilians label themselves “black” or “indigenous” rather than “mulatto” when the census takers come knocking.

“People are no longer scared of identifying themselves or insecure about saying: ‘I’m black, and black is beautiful,’ ” Brazil’s minister for racial equality, Elio Ferreira de Araujo, told the Guardian…

Read the entire article here.

Mulattobama

The Guardian
2008-08-14

Emily Raboteau, Associate Professor of English
The City College of New York

As Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has shown, being mixed race in America means balancing black and white identities

My boyfriend, Victor, and I flew into Kingston the day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic party nomination. We were giddy. A trip to Jamaica and a potential black president. We were discussing Obama’s campaign on the flight down when Victor suddenly asked: “How would you feel if our baby came out looking white?”

“Negro, puhleez,” I said, polishing off my airline peanuts. “I am not pregnant.”

“Answer the question,” he pushed…

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Woods: Black, white, other

The Guardian
2010-05-29

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

Before he was engulfed in a sex scandal Tiger Woods was a poster boy for a multiracial America. Gary Younge on the real legacy of golf’s fallen hero

On 13 April 1997 Tiger Woods putted his way to golfing history in Augusta, Georgia. The fact that he was the first black winner of the US Masters was not even half of it. At 21, he was the youngest; with a 12-stroke lead, he was the most emphatic; and finishing 18 under par, he was, quite simply, the best the world had ever seen.

…But within a fortnight of black America gaining a new sporting hero, it seemed as though they had lost him again. From the revered perch of Oprah Winfrey’s couch, Woods was asked whether it bothered him being termed “African-American”. “It does,” he said. “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m a ‘Cablinasian’.”

Woods is indeed a rich mix of racial and ethnic heritage. His father, Earl, was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent. His mother, Kutilda, is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. “Cablinasian” was a composite of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. When he was asked to fill out forms in school, he would tick African-American and Asian. “Those are the two I was raised under and the only two I know,” he told Oprah. “I’m just who I am … whoever you see in front of you.”…

…In 1998, the American Anthropological Association declared, “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (eg DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means there is greater genetic variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.” In short, we really are more alike than we are unalike. If race is an arbitrary fiction, then “race-mixing” is a conceptual absurdity. To the extent to which “mixed race” makes any sense at all, we are all mixed race…

…Economically and politically, all of this made perfect sense. Intellectually, it was and remains a nonsense. As Barbara J. Fields pointed out in her landmark essay Ideology And Race In American History, it meant that “a black woman cannot give birth to a white child” while “a white woman [is] capable of giving birth to a black child”…

…Similarly, those who insist that, because Barack Obama has a white mother and grandmother who raised him, he could just as easily be described as another white president as the first black president are in a losing battle with credibility. “Obama’s chosen to identify as an African-American male,” explains Jennifer Nobles, the campaigner for multiracialism. “It’s the same thing with Halle Berry. That’s their choice and it makes sense. But he could identify as white. The trouble is no one would receive it that way.”…

Read the entire article here.

Don’t tell me who I am

The Guardian
2002-01-12

Libby Brooks, Deputy Comment Editor

Jackie Kay has become used to all kinds of assumptions being made about her identity—literary, national, sexual and familial. The more annoying, because the joy of being a writer is that you can create any persona you like. On the other hand, she does want to stand and be counted. She explains to Libby Brooks

Jackie Kay tells a tale of mistaken identity. “I went to sit down in this chair in a London pub and this woman says, ‘You cannae sit doon in that chair – that’s ma chair.’ I said, ‘Oh, you’re from Glasgow, aren’t you?’ and she said, ‘Aye, how did you know that?’ I said, ‘I’m from Glasgow myself.’ She said, ‘You’re not, are you, you foreign-looking bugger!'” Kay roars delightedly. “I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from. They won’t actually hear my voice, because they’re too busy seeing my face.” Meanwhile, in Glasgow, her black female friends are stopped in the street and asked if they’re Jackie Kay…

…Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, Kay herself was adopted by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow. A lesbian – she lives in Manchester with poet Carol Ann Duffy, her own 13-year-old son, Matthew, and Duffy’s daughter, Ella, six – Kay has found her own identities too easily commodified for comfort. “Your characters are fiction, but when you’re a public writer people often try to make them you. Often, they have this real need, which seems to come out of our culture, to relate things back to this big thing called the personality. There’s something discomforting about that gaze being on you because, by writing, you’ve deliberately chosen to put yourself behind the scenes…

…Kay has always read and always written. As a young girl growing up in predominantly white Glasgow, books such as Anne Of Green Gables and the Famous Five series offered her other lives, while writing gave her the chance to create her own. When she was 12, she wrote the 80-page One Person, Two Names in a school jotter, illustrated by a pal, about a girl living in the States who was black but pretended to be white. “It interests me that I still write about the same things,” she notes dryly…

Read the entire article here.

Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

The Guardian
2010-01-10

Hugh Muir

It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF ­cadets learning science and ­engineering at the place that was dubbed the People’s University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.

The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.

But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from ­another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different ­languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. “I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time,” said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. “They bought into it.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.