Mixed Race Studies

Black Lives Matter in the Dominican Republic

teleSUR
2015-08-11

Auset Marian Lewis

Racial profiling is not just happening in the U.S., Haitians in the Dominican Republic suffer the same discrimination.

“Black lives matter” is a resounding cry heard around the world. The UN Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent said as much in a recent news release regarding the deportation of Haitian residents and migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. Mirelle Fanon Mendes France, head of the U.N. group stated, “The Dominican Republic does not recognize the existence of a structural problem of racism and xenophobia, but it must address these issues as a matter of priority so the country can live free from tension and fear.”

Since June 21 some 19,000 Haitians have fled the Dominican Republic for Haiti fearing the unfair deportation policies that make it difficult for legal residents to comply with demands, which not only disregard the Dominican Constitution but also violate international norms.

In 2013, the constitutional court of the Dominican Republic ruled that offspring of undocumented immigrants would become illegal retroactive to 1929. This immediately invalidated the legal status of an estimated 200,000 Dominican citizens. Of the 450,000 Haitian migrant workers in the country, 290,000 met a filing deadline for legal status. Of those who filed, the government ruled that only 2 percent were legal.

The clash between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola has a strained history beyond the obvious racial differences. Haitians are the dark progeny of the French African slave trade while Dominican Republicans are mulattoes of Spanish descent. The enmity between the two countries is not only racial, but also cultural and historical. However, just as the world witnesses how little Black lives matter in American extrajudicial killings, the mistreatment of dark Haitians could well inspire a #Haitian Lives Matter twitter campaign…

Read the entire article here.

Tais Araujo: Fighting Brazil’s Racism Takes More Than A Hashtag

teleSUR
2015-11-18

Leopoldo Duarte

Taís Araújo‬’s profile picture on her Twitter account. | Photo: Twitter, @taisdeverdade

Most Brazilians take pride in living in a “racial democracy.” According to them Brazil is supposedly a country that evaded racism through the amicable blending of its native, African and European inhabitants. But an event earlier this month is once again challenging this myth, when popular Black Brazilian actress Taís Araujo gained media coverage because of a series of racist comments made on her Facebook page.

Twitter user @LeonaDivaa shares screenshots of the racist commentary on Tais’ fanpage. Dozens of social media users compared the actress to a “monkey” and a zoo animal, while making sexually derogatory comments and taunting her for her skin color and natural hair.

Tais left the highly offensive comments on her Facebook account, deciding to publicize and take legal actions against the racist insults rather than erase them. In Brazil, for the last 20 years racism has been a non-bailable offense, however most offenders rarely face punishment.

Brazilians, in response, seemed to be taken aback by the rampant and open attacks against the actress, who has been called “Brazil’s Beyonce.” What followed evidently was an outpouring of solidarity on social media, using the hashtag #SomosTodosTais (or #WeAreAllTais) Brazilians started an online campaign, which was widely reported in the Brazilian and international press.

“I still can’t handle the fact that racism is still alive in such a mixed country such as ours. #SomosTodosTaís” 

…But while, hashtags like (#WeAreAllAFamousWrongedBlackPerson) have become popular recently, many Black activists in Brazil have voiced their discontent with these campaigns.

Most Afro-Brazilian social activists were thrilled Taís decided to publicize every step of her legal process—images of her leaving a precinct after making a testimony made headlines and stirred emotions—but activists are also at odds with how most (white) Brazilians only address racism when a celebrity is involved.

Famous Afro-Brazilian activist and blogger, Stephanie Ribeiro, went as far as writing an article entitled: “Please Stop Individualizing Racism.“…

…Brazilians have been taught that we live in “racial democracy”. According to this belief, Brazil evaded racism through amicable blending of its three primary peoples, Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous Americans. This myth is rooted in the book, The Masters and the Slaves, by sociologist Gilberto Freyre in 1933. Freyre argued that racial hierarchy was abolished with slavery, despite the fact that Brazil was the last colony to formerly free its slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil sees a rise in number of people who consider themselves black

El País
Madrid, Spain
2015-11-17

Marina Rossi
São Paulo, Brazil

English version by Martin Delfín.

Participants in the “Curly Hair Pride March,” which was held in July in São Paulo. / CORDON PRESS

• Sociologists say changes in attitudes have made people more open about their origins
• Más brasileños se identifican como negros y mulatos

More and more Brazilians say they are black or multiracial when asked to describe their race, a new study reveals.

In a survey taken by the Brazilian Geographical and Statistics Institute (IBGE) last year, 53% of Brazilians classified themselves as either being black or multiracial while, 45.5% considered themselves white.

In the same National Household Survey taken 10 years earlier, 51.2% of Brazilians polled said they were white while 47.9% replied with black or multiracial…

…Katia Regis, a coordinator for African and Afro-Brazilian studies, believes that the increases among the population who identify themselves as black can be attributed to long battles waged by the country’s black organizations, as well as more access to higher levels of education…

Read the entire article here.

An African King in Bolivia

The New York Times
2015-11-17

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist; Lens Blog Co-Editor

King Don Julio Pinedo being helped by his son, Rolando Pinedo, the prince, into a royal cloak. Queen Angelica oversees the details of her husband’s royal dress. Don Julio is shy and does not feel comfortable dressing as a king. (Susana Giron)

Tucked away in an isolated part of Bolivia, there is a royal family whose existence is as surprising as it is humble. Despite his title, King Don Julio I and his wife live in a small apartment atop a small store in Mururata, Bolivia, where he farms coca leaves and other crops.

Yet this modest monarch can trace his lineage to West Africa, where his ancestor Prince Uchicho was enslaved in 1820 and taken by the Spaniards to work in the silver mines of the region. That era gave rise to the country’s Afro-Bolivian population, which sustained the tradition, which was largely ceremonial, said Susana Giron, a Spanish photographer who was intrigued by the life of the current king, who was born 73 years ago as Julio Pinedo…

…Ms. Giron said that a historian who purchased the old hacienda — where the Pinedos had taken the names of the slave owners — learned about the royal connection to Africa and set about to find an heir. His efforts, she said, led him to Julio Pinedo, who was named king in 1992.

“He is a symbolic figure,” she said. “For the Afro-Bolivians, he is important because he gives them a cultural identity. It shows they are a people descended from Africa. It is about their history and culture.”

The history of Africans in Latin America has been coming more and more to the fore in recent years. In Bolivia, it was not until recently that they were even counted in the national census, with their 2012 population pegged at some 23,000 in a country of 10 million. They still face discrimination and socioeconomic obstacles…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

‘Mejorar la Raza’: An Example of Racism in Latino Culture

Latino Voices
Huffington Post
2015-06-15

Maria Alejandra Casale-Hardin
University of California, Hastings, Law Class of 2018

Samuel Lange Zambrano portraying a 9-year-old Venezuelan boy obsessed with straightening his hair in the 2013 film Pelo Malo.

‘Mejorar la raza’ is a common phrase used in Latin American countries, which means ‘improve the race.’ It implies that you should marry or have children with a whiter person so you’ll have better-looking kids. The phrase is used by people of any race without much thought. A year ago, a Facebook post by a Latina living in Europe started a heated argument about the history of whitewashing in Latin America. She said ‘mejorar la raza’ to justify the massive rape of Indigenous women by European colonizers. A few hours later, the girl erased the post and dismissed it as a joke. I like to hope she felt embarrassed after being called a racist on social media.

As a child, I heard my aunt asking my cousin to break up with the girl he was dating because he should ‘mejorar la raza’. Her biggest concern seemed to be the girl’s Afro-Latino heritage, “You don’t want to bring ugly kids into the world. What if you have a girl and she comes out with pelo malo?” My aunt thought she was talking some sense into her son. After all, “pelo malo” literally translates to ‘bad hair’ but it really means ‘afro-textured hair.’ She didn’t think she was being racist or mean-spirited, she thought it was her duty to point out how hard her imaginary granddaughter’s life will be if she inherited her mom’s curls…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ struggle — even deadlier

GlobalPost
Public Radio International
2015-11-03

Will Carless

The police committed more than 1 in every 6 of Rio de Janeiro’s homicides between 2010 and 2013.

And 4 out of 5 of those who are slain overall were under 29 years old — and of African descent.

These startling figures come from an analysis of official homicide data by Amnesty International. The problem spans far beyond Rio, and more recent incidents have raised concern that it’s not going away.

Earlier this month, five police officers in Rio de Janeiro were arrested after a cellphone video showed them altering a crime scene by placing a gun in the hands of a black teen they had just shot dead.

Echoing United States movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #RiseUpOctober, activists in Brazil are fighting to draw attention to the problem of killings of young black Brazilian men, frequently by police. One of the leading local movements is Amnesty International’s “Jovem Negro Vivo,” meaning “Young Black Alive.”

It’s one of several awareness campaigns that are also aiming to dismantle a stricture that’s long existed in the country: a reluctance to talk about important social issues in terms of race.

“It’s difficult in Brazil to point out racism,” says Alexandre Ciconello, a human rights expert and adviser to Amnesty in Rio de Janeiro. “It’s a taboo for the elite of the country and for politicians and authorities. They always say ‘Brazil is a mixed country, we are not the US, we are not South Africa,’ and if you raise racial questions, you’re seen as trying to separate that.”…

Read the entire article and listen to the story here.

Revisiting Palmares: Maroon Communities in Brazil (Celeste Henery)

African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)
2015-11-09

Celeste Henery, Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Texas, Austin

This is a guest post by Celeste Henery, a Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. She completed a PhD in Anthropology at UT in 2010. Her research and writing focuses on issues of gendered blackness, mental wellness, and diaspora. She has conducted anthropological research in Brazil and in the United States. In addition to working on her book manuscript, she is applying her anthropological and race scholarship as a social historian for post-conviction habeas corpus proceedings. Dr. Henery is currently continuing her research on gender and race with a geographic focus on Texas and the U.S. South.

AAIHS Blogger Greg Childs’ recent post, “Visible Fugitives,” initiates a welcomed conversation about black geographies. As Childs suggests, quilombos, or maroon communities in Brazil, have played integral roles in the social constructions of such notions as the urban and rural, as well as conceptions of black subjectivity and resistance in Brazil. In the years following the fall of Palmares, quilombos persisted. In 1988, when Brazil’s current Constitution was drafted, quilombos attained state recognition and guarantees to their land. The 1988 Constitution and subsequent legislation created a bureaucratic process for quilombos to acquire land titles. According to statistics from the Fundação Cultural Palmares and the INCRA (the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), the two state agencies responsible for the recognition and land titling of quilombos, there are over 2,500 recognized communities—1,528 in the titling process and 196 possess titles.

However, much like their ancestors, many quilombolas, or quilombo descendants continue to struggle to stay connected to their lands and sustain themselves in spite of titles. Issues of geography and land are intricately woven into their livelihood and they raise pertinent questions about quilombos and the interplay of black geography and black racial politics in Brazil. For those interested in diaspora, quilombos also provide another critical subject of discussion about the familiar notions of home, dispersal, and sustainability–all factors that are pertinent to disparate black realities.

This post draws on my fieldwork in several quilombola communities in the state of Goiás, Brazil. These communities had registered, if not already had received their title by the time I began conducting research in 2005. These were all rural communities. One was more remote than the others–at a distance from infrastructure such as stores, hospitals, and social services. As a result, their geography presented distinct and ongoing challenges…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Love Lecture & Book Signing

University of South Florida
Tampa Library Grace Allen Room, 4th Floor
4202 E. Fowler Ave. LIB122
Tampa, Florida
Monday, 2015-11-16, 11:00-13:00 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Assistant Professor in Sociology and ISLAC

Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates [in her new book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families] the privileges of whiteness, by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships, and how it is connected to the distribution of affection within families. Racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality at large, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.

Open to all public. Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, click here.

The Sweet (and Sour) Enchantment of Racism in Post-Racial America

University of South Florida
Patel Center for Global Solutions Auditorium
4202 E Fowler Ave, CGS101
Tampa, Florida 33620
Friday, 2015-11-13, 12:30-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva will be on campus on November 13, 2015, for the purpose of discussing his recent works relating to racism, the “Latin Americanization” of racism in the United States, and the connections between these discourses and the topics of citizenship, democracy and human rights. Dr. Bonilla-Silva is an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker with a history of motivating intellectual thought of young scholars.

USF World is please to co-sponsor this event with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Institute, the Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC), and the Department of Government and International Affairs (GIA).

Event is free and open to the public.

The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families

University of Texas Press
November 2015
328 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4773-0238-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4773-0788-5

Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Assistant Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Study of Latin America & the Caribbean
University of South Florida

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and observations within ten core families, this study of intimate relationships as sites of racial socialization reveals a new facet of race-based differential treatment and its origins—and the mechanisms that perpetuate these strata across generations.

The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.

Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.