Category: Articles

  • Black Hole Brazzill November 1999 Kathleen Bond, Missioner Maryknoll Lay Missioners It is often said that Brazilians live under a racial democracy, meaning that in Brazil miscegenation has created a cultural mélange in which all races are equally valued. Nothing is farther from the truth. During the elections of 1997, Margarida Pereira da Silva was…

  • Race-Based Fantasy Realm: Essentialism in the World of Warcraft Games and Culture Volume 7, Number 1 (January 2012) pages 48-71 DOI: 10.1177/1555412012440308 Melissa J. Monson Metropolitan State College of Denver, Denver, Colorado This article explores issues of racial essentialism and ethnicity in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). The fantasy world…

  • Racial Democracy in Brazilian Marriage: Toward a Typology of Negro-White Intermarriage in Five Brazilian Communities The American Catholic Sociological Review Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer, 1960) pages 146-164 Austin J. Staley, O. S. B. Revised version of paper read at the Twenty-first Annual Convention of the American Catholic Sociological Society, Mundelein College, Chicago, Illinois, August…

  • Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance Games and Culture Volume 7, Number 5 (September 2012) pages 375-396 DOI: 10.1177/1555412012454224 Nathaniel Poor Brooklyn, New York, USA Elves are a long-standing cultural trope in the West, where they have often represented the other and fears associated with otherness. Elves continue to…

  • Pink and Blue in Black and White: Why Binary, Prescriptive Approaches to Human Categorization Still Won’t Yield the Desired Result IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law Honors Scholars Program 2010 23 pages Karlyn Meyer INTRODUCTION: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND MISCEGENATION A Texas court asked “can a physician change the gender of a person with a scalpel, drugs…

  • Obama and Myths of Racial Democracy NACLA Report North American Congress on Latin America 2008-11-17 Marisol LeBrón Political pundits have celebrated president-elect Barack Obama’s sweeping and historic victory as evidence that the United States has taken an initial step toward a “post-racial” or “colorblind” society. In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Shelby Steele provocatively…

  • Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912 Latin American Research Review Volume 34, Number 3 (1999) pages 39-73 Alejandro de la Fuente, UCIS Research Professor of History University of Pittsburgh This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of…

  • Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history The Washington Post 2012-08-13 Benjamin Gottlieb Amelia Singh Netervala points to her mother’s chicken curry enchiladas as the best metaphor for her childhood. Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and Mexican mother, her family was full of cultural contradictions: She went to church on Sundays with her mother…

  • Obama and the black wave: Deconstructing myths, building strategies Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice 2009-02-19 (Issue 420) Raquel Luciana de Souza Having closely followed Barack Obama’s electoral success, Raquel Luciana de Souza considers the prospects for a presidential candidate of African descent within the South American giant of Brazil. Scrutinising the historical…

  • Time to drop racial categories in census The Chicago Tribune 2012-08-16 Arthur Caplan, Director of Division of Medical Ethics Department of Population Health New York University The U.S. Census Bureau announced that it wants to make a number of changes in how it counts membership in a race. The change is based on an experiment…