Mixed Race Studies

Black In The Dominican Republic: Denying Blackness

HuffPost Live
The Huffington Post
2014-06-10

Marc Lamont Hill, Host

In Latin America and Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic many deny being of African decent, despite 90 percent of the population possessing black ancestry. Where has the blackness gone in the region?

Guests:

• Biany Perez (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Graduate Student at Bryn Mawr College
• Christopher Pimentel (New York , New York) Finance Student at Baruch College
• Robin Derby (Los Angeles, California) Associate Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles
• Kimberly Eison Simmons (Columbia, South Carolina) Associate Professor, Anthropology and African American Studies, University of South Carolina
• Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse, New York) Professor of English, Syracuse University

World Cup Racism Undercuts Brazil ‘We Are Equal’ Campaign

Bloomberg News
2014-05-30

Tariq Panjq
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Anna Edgerton
Brasilia, Brazil

It was just a regular evening of monkey noises and racial slurs for Brazilian soccer referee Marcio Chagas. Then he left to go home.

As he entered the parking lot after overseeing the March 6 state championship game in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil’s south, the black physical education teacher found his tormentors had vandalized his car and piled bananas on the windshield. One was inserted into the exhaust pipe.

“I felt offended, like I’d been the victim of violence,” Chagas, 37, said by telephone from his home in Porto Alegre. “It was a cowardly act because I couldn’t defend myself. The jeering is normal. This kind of action was new for me.”

Racism in soccer came to the fore over the past month when Brazilian defender Daniel Alves ate a banana thrown at him by a fan while playing for Barcelona in the Spanish league. While the incident caused an uproar back home in Brazil, the outpouring of support masked how far the World Cup host has to go to eliminate prejudice in the country with the largest black population in the world after Nigeria.

Acts of racism in soccer stadiums have tarnished the image of tolerance that the government is trying to portray, according to Jorge da Silva, a political science professor at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

“Brazilians are used to saying that Brazil is a racial democracy: That’s just a myth,” da Silva said. “If you go to an elegant shopping center you won’t find black people there, not even working. If you board a plane in Brazil you will not see black people working, maybe one or two, let alone as passengers.”

Antiracism Message

In a country whose most famous person is black soccer icon Pelé, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is planning to use next month’s World Cup, played in 12 new and refurbished stadiums across the country, to promote the antiracism message. An advertisement currently on Brazilian television has the following tagline: “The cup of cups without racism.”

“Such a multicultural country, where all of the world’s races may be found, provides the possibility for interventions against racism and discrimination,” she said in January after meeting soccer governing body President Sepp Blatter.

Blatter said in an interview posted online by FIFA today that he will ask member associations to ratify tougher rules against racist behavior at a meeting in Sao Paulo on June 11.

In 2011 Brazil’s census showed for the first time its population was majority black and mixed race, with 51 percent declaring themselves as such…

…Determining who is black isn’t easy.

European settlers, mainly from Portugal, brought almost 5 million slaves to the country between 1502 and 1867, almost half of all Africans entering the new world and 10 times the number headed to the U.S. Interracial marriage was common and an official policy of “whitening” the population by inviting Europeans to the country until the middle 20th century has meant there are a more than 100 definitions of skin color, according to a government survey.

In a case at the University of Brasilia, identical twins in 2007 applied for entry as part of a quota system the institution has introduced. Only one was deemed black…

Read the entire article here.

“When I discovered I was black”, by Bianca Santana

Black Women of Brazil
2013-02-22
Originally published on 2010-02-12 by Bianca Santana as “quando me descobri negra”

Bianca Santana

I have been black for less than a year. Before, I was morena. My color was practically a prank of the sun. I was a morena for the Catholic school teachers, classmates – who maybe didn’t get as much sun – and for the family that never liked the subject. “But Grandma is not a descendant of slaves?”, I kept asking. “And of Indian and Portuguese as well,” was the most that they responded on the origins of my black grandmother. I even thought it was beautiful to be so Brazilian. Maybe because of this I would accept the end of the conversation…

Read the entire article here.

687.8: The Apple Does NOT Fall FAR from the Tree: Offspring of Interracial Marriages in Brazil

XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology: Facing an Unequal Word: Challenges for Global Sociology
International Sociological Association
Yokohama, Japan
2014-07-13 through 2014-07-19

Wednesday, 2014-07-16, 09:54 JST (Local Time)
Room: Booth 54

Kaizô Iwakami Beltrão
Ebape, FGV, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sonoe Sugahara
Ence, IBGE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Moema De Poli Teixeira
Ence, IBGE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Starting from colonial times, Brazil has a long history of racial miscegenation. How do families structure themselves with respect to a concept of racial hierarchy? Several censuses and survey from the Brazilian Central Statistical Office (IBGE) incorporates some ethnic enumeration with information on race/skin color of the respondent, though mostly self-reported. Alternatives are: “White”, “Black”, “Asian”, “Mixed race” and “Native Brazilian”. Though it is possible that some subjectivity is inherent to the process, temporal consistency is observable, within a 5% error margin. Analyzing census data, one can perceive a time trend towards “whitening” of the population until 1991, with a slight reversal in 2000, resuming the “whitening” trend up to 2010 (the latest census). But how do offspring of interracial marriages self-report themselves? Among possible alternatives, is the race/skin color of the father or the mother the determinant factor? Is this choice affected by geographical region or social status? Is there a noticeable time trend in choices made?  The study analysis data from five Brazilian censuses, between 1960 and 2010, in order to identify patterns and trends among offspring of interracial marriages.

Among exogamic couples where one of the partners is “White”, this is the dominant race/skin color alternative for the offspring. When the mother is “White” the difference with respect to other alternatives is even wider, less so, when the father is “Asian”. The reported proportion of “White” children increases with socio-economic status. Among “Black”/”Mixed-race” couples, the preference is for reporting “Mixed-race” offspring, with a higher proportion of “Black” if the father is also “Black”.

For more information, click here.

JS-44.12: A Global Look at Mixed Marriage

XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology: Facing an Unequal Word: Challenges for Global Sociology
International Sociological Association
Yokohama, Japan
2014-07-13 through 2014-07-19

Wednesday, 2014-07-16, 18:00 JST (Local Time)
Room: 315

Erica Chito Childs, Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Mapping attitudes toward intermarriage—who is and who is not an acceptable mate—offers an incisive means through which imaginings of belonging—race, ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship and culture—can be critically evaluated.  In particular, social constructions of race and difference involve discussions of purity, race identity and taboos against interracial sex and marriage. Drawing from qualitative interviews and ethnographic research in six countries on attitudes toward intermarriage, this paper explores these issues of intermarriage in a global context.  Through a comparison of qualitative data I collected in Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Portugal, South Africa and the United States, I offer a theoretical framework and provide an empirical basis, to understand the concept of intermarriage and what it tells us about racial boundaries in a global context. For example, in the United States, the issue of intermarriage is discussed as interracial with less attention paid to inter-religious or inter-ethnic, to the point that those concepts are rarely used.  Similarly in South Africa, despite the end of apartheid decades ago, marriage across racial categories is still highly problematized and uncommon.  Yet globally there is less consensus of what constitutes intermarriage—sometimes intercultural, interethnic, or any number of words with localized meanings.  In South America and Australia, the debate seems to revolve more around indigenous status, citizenship and national identity such as who is Australian or who is Ecuadoran?  As indigenous populations rally for rights and representation how does this change the discourse on what intermarriage mean?  Looking globally, what differences matter? What boundaries are most salient in determining the attitudes of different groups toward intermarriage?  How are various communities responding to intermarriage, particularly if there are a growing number of “mixed” families? This research on attitudes toward intermarriage adds to our understanding of constructions of race, racism and racialized, gendered and sexualized beliefs and practices globally.

For more information, click here.

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

University of Virginia Press
October 2013
224 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780813934884
Paper ISBN: 9780813934891
Ebook ISBN: 9780813934907

Colleen C. O’Brien, Associate Professor of English
University of South Carolina, Upstate

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O’Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child—O’Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources—fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises—to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.

Presentation on ‘African Heritage in Classical Music’ followed by the screening of ‘The Black Mozart in Cuba’

Marcus Garvey Library
Tottenham Green Centre
1 Phillip Lane
Tottenham, London N15 4JA
Saturday, 2014-06-14, 17:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

Black History Studies in association with the Marcus Garvey Library presents ‘Sankofa Saturdays’

African Heritage in Classical Music

Music is an important part of our cultural heritage. In this presentation, Black History Studies will uncover the hidden contributions of musicians and composers of African descent to the genre of classical music.

The Black Mozart in Cuba

Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de St George, was a Black classical composer and violin virtuoso born in Guadeloupe in the mid 18th century. The son of a Senegalese enslaved African and a French nobleman, he achieved enormous success as a musician, fencer, and military man. Yet, when he died in 1799, he was all but erased from history due in part to Napoleon’s efforts.

The Black Mozart in Cuba is the latest act in the rehabilitation of the memory of this extraordinary human being. The film skillfully combines biographical information with performances of his works. In this documentary, Cuba dedicates a week of cultural activities to his memory and welcomes Saint Georges as “a great hero of the Caribbean.”

In French, English and Spanish with English subtitles…

For more information, click here.

The Color Of Health: Skin Color, Ethnoracial Classification, And Discrimination In The Health Of Latin Americans

Social Science & Medicine
Available online: 2014-06-01
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.054

Krista M. Perreira, Professor of Public Policy and Associate Dean Office for Undergraduate Research
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Highlights

• Uses newly collected data on 4921 adults from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru
• Examines multiple measures of race/ethnicity and their associations with health
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in self-reported health.
• Finds significant skin-color gradients in class-based discrimination and low SES.
• SES and class-based discrimination largely account for disparities in health by skin color.

Latin America is one of the most ethnoracially heterogeneous regions of the world. Despite this, health disparities research in Latin America tends to focus on gender, class and regional health differences while downplaying ethnoracial differences. Few scholars have conducted studies of ethnoracial identification and health disparities in Latin America. Research that examines multiple measures of ethnoracial identification is rarer still. Official data on race/ethnicity in Latin America are based on self-identification which can differ from interviewer-ascribed or phenotypic classification based on skin color. We use data from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru to examine associations of interviewer-ascribed skin color, interviewer-ascribed race/ethnicity, and self-reported race/ethnicity with self-rated health among Latin American adults (ages 18-65). We also examine associations of observer-ascribed skin color with three additional correlates of health – skin color discrimination, class discrimination, and socio-economic status. We find a significant gradient in self-rated health by skin color. Those with darker skin colors report poorer health. Darker skin color influences self-rated health primarily by increasing exposure to class discrimination and low socio-economic status.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Black Atlantic’ Cultural Politics as Reflected in Panamanian Literature

University of Tennesee, Knoxville
August 2005
256 pages

Sonja Stephenson Watson

A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree

The diaspora experience is characterized by hybridity, diversity and above all, difference. The nature of the diaspora experience therefore precludes an exclusive articulation of identity. Black identity in Panama is one characterized by this same multiplicity. My dissertation examines race, culture, and ethnicity in the development of Panamanian national identity and is informed by the critical theories of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon. The articulation of Afro-Panamanian identity is both intriguing and complex because there are two groups of blacks on the Isthmus: Spanish speaking blacks who arrived as a result of slavery (15th -18th centuries) and English speaking blacks who migrated from the West Indies to construct the Trans-isthmian Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1904-1914).

The country’s cultural and linguistic heterogeneity not only enriches the study of Panama and illustrates that it is a nation characterized by multiplicity, but it also captures the complexity of the African Diaspora in the Americas. This plurality is evidenced in Afro-Panamanian literary discourse from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. This study analyzes the representation of Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Antilleans during different time periods in Panamanian literature, the literature written by Afro-Hispanics, and the literature written by Afro-Antilleans which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, I address how the discourse of both groups of blacks converge and diverge.

Panamanian literature has been grossly understudied. While its history, geography, and political ties to the United States have been examined extensively by intellectuals from the United States and Latin America, with the exception of a few studies, its literature has been virtually ignored by the Hispanic literary canon. Within the field of Afro-Hispanic literature, black Panamanian literature has also been understudied. With the exception of works published about Gaspar Octavio Hernández, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, and Gerardo Maloney, Afro-Panamanian literature has not been examined comprehensively. My dissertation seeks to fill this void in the field of Afro-Hispanic literature and, hopefully, it will enrich the field of Latin and Central American literature and literary criticism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter one: The Rhetoric of Nation and the Invisibility of Blackness in the New Republic of Panama
• Chapter two: The Black Image in Early Twentieth-Century Panamanian Literature
• Chapter three: The Social Protest Novels of Joaquín Beleño Cedeño: A Study of the Inherent Conflicts and Contradictions of Anti-imperialism and Negritude in the Canal Zone
• Chapter four: The Afro-Caribbean Works of Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson and his (Re) Vision of Panamanian History
• Chapter five: Race, Language, and Nation in the Works of Three Contemporary Panamanian West Indian Writers: Gerardo Maloney, Melva Lowe de Goodin, and Carlos E. Russell
• Conclusion: Afro-Panamanian Discourse: From Invisibility to Visibility
• List of References
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

But your hair is so beautiful…

Black Women of Brazil
2014-05-08

Stephanie Paes (orginally published on 2013-06-12 as “Mas seu cabelo é tão bonito…” in Falando sem permissão)

I know that it is. And only I understand the time I needed to take account of this (1).

My hair is crespo (curly/kinky). It has gone through several phases (natural and later chemical changes), but it never stopped being crespo. When I was a kid it had little curls and was huge, until the sad night in which my mother, tired after a day of work and not managing to detangle my ends, silently took scissors and cut my curls without telling me. After that my hair started to change, I don’t know if it was because of cutting it or because hormonal influences, but it never ceased to be what it is: Crespo…

…What I hear now, with one or another variation is the following sentence: “Your hair is so beautiful! It’s a little cacheadinho (curly), not those ugly naps.”

What is the problem with this sentence?

1. Slandering a phenotypic characteristic of my race, you are slandering me. It doesn’t matter if you think that because my hair has a looser curl that it automatically ceases to be crespo. In fact, even if my hair was naturally straight, I don’t cease being black, and you would still be slandering me.
2. By exalting a feature that makes clear my miscegenation (racial mixture) and not allowing the black phenotype to be manifested completely, you are valuing my embranquecimento (white attributes). I’m not saying it’s bad to have a non-black feature, I’m saying that when you use it to say that my hair is better than another more genuinely kinky, you’re being racist…

Read the entire article here.