Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
If we accept the definition of Black which we have been given—a definition which historically defined anyone with “one drop of Black blood” as Black—we ignore the existence of multiracial people. We ignore people whose experiences may be different from those experiences which have been defined as constituting the Black experience—that is, the “essentialized” Black experience. By so essentializing, we assume that the taxonomy of race proposed by nineteenth-century white supremacists—that human beings can be classified into four races and everyone fits neatly into one slot—is a valid one. On the other hand, if we do classify multiracial people as Black, the potential for group solidarity is much greater. “We are all Black,” we say. “You cannot divide us.”
This year’s November celebration of African culture in Argentina is dedicated to the memory of Maria Magdalena Lamadrid — “La Pocha” — an Afro-Argentine activist who died in September. In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there are no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.
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Julia Cohen Ribeiro poses for a photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. Ribeiro had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then at age 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Her hair was curly, but her skin was light. She had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black.
“I was never told I was Black growing up,” said Ribeiro, now a 25-year-old film student at the University of Buenos Aires. The daughter of a white mother and Black father, she has since embraced that identity and joined a burgeoning Afro-Argentine movement that seeks to eliminate the persistent myth that there are no Black people in the country and to combat discrimination against them.
The 2010 census recorded about 150,000 people of African descent in Argentina, a nation of 45 million, but activists estimate the true figure is closer to 2 million following a surge of immigration — and because many Argentines have forgotten or ignore African ancestry…
