Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007). Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology. (Volume 114, Number 3, 2008): 577–614.

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Course Offerings, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Native Americans/First Nation, Slavery, United Kingdom on 2013-03-10 16:56Z by Steven

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

Introduction
Independence and Race
Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
Liberalism and the Indian Question
Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
The Science of Racism
Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
Indigenismo in the Andes
Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.

Tags: Cuba, Paulo Drinot, University College of London

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Mixed Race Studies

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

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