Mixed Race Studies

Walter Tull should get Military Cross, says Tottenham MP David Lammy

BBC News
2018-03-23

Richard Conway, BBC Radio 5 live sports news correspondent

Walter Tull died on the battlefields of northern France in 1918

Walter Tull – one of England’s first black professional footballers – should be awarded a Military Cross 100 years after his death, says Tottenham MP David Lammy.

Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, died aged 29 when he was shot on the battlefields of France during World War One.

He was Britain’s first black Army officer to command white troops.

“His service on behalf of this country was immense,” Lammy said…

Read the entire article here.

A black female politician was gunned down in Rio. Now she’s a global symbol.

The Washington Post
2018-03-19

Anthony Faiola, South America/Caribbean Bureau Chief
Miami, Florida

Marina Lopes, Reporter
São Paulo, Brazil

Demonstrators rally for a second consecutive day last Friday to mourn Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro councilwoman, black rights activist and outspoken critic of police brutality who was fatally shot in an assassination-style attack in the city on March 14. (Lianne Milton/For The Washington Post)

RIO DE JANEIRO — Before stepping into her Chevrolet Agile at 9:04 p.m. last Wednesday, Marielle Franco had just done what she did best: fire up a room.

“Let’s do this,” the 38-year-old politician with the cascading Afro had said as she wrapped up a speech at Rio’s House of Black Women calling for black empowerment.

Brazil needed it, she said. Across this troubled metropolis, police brutality and extrajudicial killings were ravaging the slums. Elected last year as the only black woman on Rio’s 51-member city council, she had gone after those responsible while reframing the debate in an uncomfortable new way.

In a society that has long seen itself as post-racial, Franco argued, the slaughter was not just a war on the poor. It was also a war on blacks…

…Racism in Brazil has a complex history.

The country imported 4 million slaves, more than 10 times the number brought to the United States. In the United States, intermixing of races was discouraged. But in Brazil, where Portuguese settlers were outnumbered by their slaves, it was endorsed as a way to “whiten” the population.

Miscegenation soon became a cornerstone of national identity, with 53 percent of Brazilians now seeing themselves fluidly as black or mixed-race.

“In Brazil, you bump up against this narrative of racial mixture, that black identity or white identity is an import — that the concept of racism was imported by Americans,” said Glen Goodman, professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Critics say that the myth of a post-racial Brazil silences conversations about deep-rooted discrimination and violence…

Read the entire article here.

Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans

David Marx: Book Reviews
2018-01-27

David Marx

Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans
Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen
Policy Press – £18.39

[..] some argue that multiracial identity has the potential to undo race in the United States as long as it attends to social justice and does not present itself as a racially superior category, while other scholars contend that multiracial identity is supportive of White supremacy and is a throwback to earlier, simplistic, and racist conceptualizations of the American mulatto.

Rainier Spencer

I’m almost inclined to embark on this review with just one word: discuss.

The above is the nigh perfect examination question in relation to that of the book’s title, Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans, wherein it could be said that each of these twelve, exceedingly well-researched and seemingly provocative essays, act as differing answers.

Admittedly, some may home in more than others, simply due to having been written from a different perspective by an assortment of very fine scholars. But all twelve are undoubtedly designed to make one think, perhaps ponder and no doubt deliberate…

Read the entire review here.

The Recursive Outcomes of the Multiracial Movement and the End of American Racial Categories

Studies in American Political Development
Volume 31, Issue 1 (April 2017)
pages 88-107
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X17000074

Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Political Science
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

After a protracted national discussion about racial mixture in the early 1990s, the Office of Management and Budget made the unprecedented decision in 1997 to allow Americans to “mark one or more” racial categories on the 2000 census. A small “multiracial movement” provoked this fundamental change in the way the government collects racial data. This case study shows that even very small and modest social movements can have profound effects on public policy through their unintended consequences. In winning a redefinition of how the U.S. government defines and counts by race, the multiracial movement of the 1990s set in motion a process that has both amplified and been amplified by broader structural and cultural changes in how Americans perceive race. The modest impact of a small social movement can ultimately produce very big consequences.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil

University of Minnesota Press
2018-02-13
320 pages
9 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-1-5179-0156-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-5179-0155-4

Jaime Amparo Alves, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Staten Island of the City University of New York
also: Associate Researcher
Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos of Universidad Icesi/Colombia

An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas reveals the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil

While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity.

The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities.

The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”

Table of Contents

• Introduction: On Our Own Terms
• 1. Macabre Spatialities
• 2. “Police, Get off My Back!”
• 3. The Favela-Prison Pipeline
• 4. Sticking Up!
• 5. Bringing Back the Dead
• Conclusion: Blackpolis
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawaii

University of Hawai’i Press
March 2018
288 pages
1 b&w illustration
Cloth ISBN: 9780824869885

Edited by:

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and American Studies
University of Virginia

Rudy P. Guevarra, Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and African American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Written by scholars of various disciplines, the essays in this volume dig beneath the veneer of Hawai‘i’s myth as a melting pot paradise to uncover historical and complicated cross-racial dynamics. Race is not the primary paradigm through which Hawai‘i is understood. Instead, ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. Racial inequality is disruptive to the tourist image of the islands. It ruptures the image of tolerance, diversity, and happiness upon which tourism, business, and so many other vested transnational interests in the islands are based. The contributors of this interdisciplinary volume reconsider Hawai‘i as a model of ethnic and multiracial harmony through the lens of race in their analysis of historical events, group relations and individual experiences, and humor, for instance. Beyond Ethnicity examines the dynamics between race, ethnicity, and indigeneity to challenge the primacy of ethnicity and cultural practices for examining difference in the islands while recognizing the significant role of settler colonialism in the islands. This original and thought-provoking volume reveals what a racial analysis illuminates about the current political configuration of the islands and in so doing, challenges how we conceptualize race on the continent.

Recognizing the ways that Native Hawaiians or Kānaka Maoli are impacted by shifting, violent, and hierarchical colonial structures that include racial inequalities, the editors and contributors explore questions of personhood and citizenship through language, land, labor, and embodiment. By admitting to these tensions and ambivalences, the editors set the pace and tempo of powerfully argued essays that engage with the various ways that Kānaka Maoli and the influx of differentially racialized settlers continue to shift the social, political, and cultural terrains of the Hawaiian Islands over time.

Why Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to take a DNA test to prove Native American ancestry was probably a smart move

The Washington Post
2018-03-14

Tara Bahrampour

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) rejected a call this week by a Massachusetts newspaper to take a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage, saying it is a cherished piece of family lore and noting that she has never used it to get ahead.

She might also add that such a test may not prove anything — or at least it couldn’t establish the absence of Native American ancestry her critics might be hoping to find.

If Warren were to take one of the widely available commercial “spit tests” and DNA related to a Native American tribe showed up, she would have positive proof that her family stories are true.

But if no such DNA were evident, that would not mean she didn’t have Native American ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Are you racially fluid?

Cable News Network (CNN)
2018-03-02

Story by John Blake, CNN
Video by Tawanda Scott Sambou, CNN

The blurring of racial lines won’t save America. Why ‘racial fluidity’ is a con

(CNN) He was a snappy dresser with slicked back hair and a pencil mustache. A crack bandleader, musician and legendary talent scout, he was dubbed the “Godfather of R&B.”

But Johnny Otis’ greatest performance was an audacious act of defiance he orchestrated offstage.

Most people who saw Otis perform during his heyday in the 1950s thought he was a light-skinned black man. He used “we” when talking about black people, married his black high school sweetheart and stayed in substandard “for colored only” hotels with his black bandmates when they toured the South.

Johnny Otis, though, wasn’t his real name. He was born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes to Greek immigrants in Northern California. He grew up in a black neighborhood where he developed such a kinship with black culture that he walked away from his whiteness and became black by choice.

“As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black,” he wrote in his 1968 book, “Listen to the Lambs.”

“No number of objections such as ‘You were born white … you can never be black’ on the part of the whites, or ‘You sure are a fool to be colored when you could be white’ from Negroes, can alter the fact that I cannot think of myself as white.

“I do not expect everybody to understand it, but it is a fact. I am black environmentally, psychologically, culturally, emotionally, and intellectually.”…

…What if racial fluidity leads not to less racism, but to more?

That’s the warning being issued by many who study racial fluidity — including some who are racially fluid themselves. They say people are naïve if they believe expanding the menu of racial choices will lead to more tolerance; that racism is deeper and more adaptable than people realize.

A brown-skinned man with a white mother can gush all he wants about his DNA mix, but that won’t stop him from being racially profiled, says Rainier Spencer, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has written extensively about mixed-race identity, including his own.

“If I stand on a corner holding a sign saying, ‘I’m racially fluid,'” says Spencer, “that still doesn’t mean I’m going to get a cab.”…

Read the entire article here.

Learning to Transgress: Law 10.639 and Teacher-Training Classrooms in São Paulo, Brazil

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 24, Issue 1, April 2016
Pages 70–79
DOI: 10.1111/traa.12058

Reighan Gillam, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

Signed in 2003, Law 10.639 makes teaching Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in primary school lessons. Training programs to educate teachers on this material have proliferated in the state of São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. This paper illuminates non-elite Brazilians’ lived, personal engagements with ideas of racial inequality by way of these training programs. Participants in these classrooms did not express direct rejection or acceptance of these ideas but rather relied on personal experiences to negotiate their conceptions of racial identity and racial inequality that deviate from traditional ideas of racial democracy. As Brazil takes further steps to consider race when facilitating access to resources and confronting racial inequality directly, it is imperative that the everyday iterations of this shift are understood.

As part of a series of training sessions¹ to instruct teachers on how to integrate Afro-Brazilian history and culture into their curricula, trainer Flávia Gomes² screened clips from the film Everyone’s Heroes (Heróis de Todo Mundo). This movie features prominent Afro-Brazilians and explains their role in national history. Flávia told the teachers that they could show this movie in their classrooms, or they could integrate the information from the movie into their lessons. Five female educators and I sat at our desks and quietly watched the clips that briefly recounted the lives and accomplishments of figures like Auta da Souza, an Afro-Brazilian writer, and Milton Santos, an Afro-Brazilian geographer. After showing the video, Flávia said a few words: “Violence is to whiten Black heroes. This silences the place of Blackness in the classroom. Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto. There is no way to silence this. (Não da para silenciar).” One of the participants raised her hand; Flávia called on her. She was a principal at an elementary school and participating in these classes to oversee the curricular changes at her school. Before saying anything, she began to sob, taking the entire class by surprise. “I feel so troubled because I didn’t know these people had been left out. I have heard of them but didn’t know they were Black. I liked reading the poems of Auta da Souza, but I always pictured her as White. The lack of information that we have…” Her comments trailed off as she wiped her tears. This response occurred toward the end of class, leaving Flávia with little time to initiate a conversation. Instead, she concluded class by adding a few words about using this video to educate children about the people presented in the movie before dismissing everyone for the day.

This scene played out in a teacher-training program in its first year in Flor do Campo, Brazil, in the state of São Paulo. These teacher-training programs resulted from the passage of Law 10.639, which made Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory material for all Brazilian public primary schools. Since its passage, teacher-training programs have proliferated throughout the country to provide teachers with classroom material about Afro-Brazilian history and culture to satisfy the legal mandate of Law 10.639. The teacher-training classrooms in which I participated were dynamic spaces of conversation, interaction, and engagement where Brazilians, like the principal above, could encounter new ways of thinking about race² that run contrary to the common belief that racism cannot naturally exist in a mixed-race society. This article aims to examine changing understandings of race in Brazil, not as it transforms larger social and political structures, but as it is continuously reframed on the micro-social or everyday level. I argue that the critical practice of learning about and responding to subjugated knowledge and alternative experiences have the potential to transgress boundaries of belonging and recognition of racial difference in Brazil.

This article takes as a point of departure the issue of the personal in an era of changing conceptions of Brazilian race relations. This shift involves not only the macro changes of law and policy but also the personal, lived, everyday interactions of particular people as well. It uses the personal anecdotes, stories, and conversations of Brazilians offered during teacher-training sessions to examine how social change is a personal matter and how it plays out within everyday interactions. The “personal” broadly references the lived experiences of human beings. In several instances, the personal becomes the prism through which people perceive or react to macro-structural events and changing environments. I suggest that many Brazilians offer more personal responses to the shift from racial democracy based on their local and particular experiences as a way to account for the changes they are confronting in classroom education. While I would not say that these conversations were always successful at producing a shared understanding of the ways in which inequality can be tracked along racial lines, these teacher-training classrooms became sites and spaces of struggle over the limits and meanings of racial democracy and racial recognition, informed by the participants’ personal experiences of race that they frequently voiced….

Read the entire article here.

Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean
University of South Florida
IBL Conference Room (FAO 296)
4202 E. Fowler Avenue
Tampa, Florida
Thursday, 2018-03-01, 14:00 EDT

Presenter

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Profess Mitchell-Walthour is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil.

For more information, click here.