Mixed Race Studies

How the mixed-race mestizo myth warped science in Latin America

Nature
Number 600 (2021-12-13)
pages 374-378
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-03622-z

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Science Journalist
Mexico City, Mexico

Researchers are trying to dismantle the flawed concept of homogeneous racial mixing that has fostered discrimination in Mexico, Brazil and other countries.

Nicéa Quintino Amauro always knew who she was.

She was born in Campinas, the last city in Brazil to prohibit slavery in 1888. She grew up in a Black neighbourhood, with a Black family. And a lot of her childhood was spent in endless meetings organized by the Unified Black Movement, the most notable Black civil-rights organization in Brazil, which her parents helped to found to fight against centuries-old racism in the country. She knew she was Black.

But in the late 1980s, when Amauro was around 13 years old, she was told at school that Brazilians were not Black. They were not white, either. Nor any other race. They were considered to be mestiços, or pardos, terms rooted in colonial caste distinctions that signify a tapestry of European, African and Indigenous backgrounds. And as one single mixed people, they were all equal to each other.

The idea felt odd. Wrong, even. “To me, it seemed quite strange,” says Amauro, now a chemist at the Federal University of Ubêrlandia in Minas Gerais and a member of the Brazilian Association of Black Researchers. “How can everyone be equal if racism exists? It doesn’t make sense.”

Amauro’s concerns echo across Latin America, where generations of people have been taught that they are the result of a long history of mixture between different ancestors who all came, or were forced, to live in the region…

Read the entire article here.

Thinking in Colour: A BBC Radio Collection of Documentaries on Race, Society and Black History

BBC Digital Audio
2021-02-12
00:57:00
ISBN: 9781529143560

Gary Younge, Professor of Sociology
University of Manchester

Gary Younge Gary Younge (Read by) Robin Miles (Read by) Amaka Okafor (Read by) Full Cast (Read by) Ricky Fearon (Read by)

Gary Younge explores race, society and Black history in these five fascinating documentaries

Author, broadcaster and sociology professor Gary Younge has won several awards for his books and journalism covering topics such as the civil rights movement, inequality and immigration. In this documentary collection, the former Guardian US correspondent turns his attention to current American political and social issues, including populist conservatism, and African-American identity.

In Thinking in Colour, he examines racial ‘passing’: light-skinned African-Americans who decided to live their lives as white people. Looking at the topic through the prism of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing, Gary hears three astonishing personal stories, and probes the distinction between race and colour.

Recorded shortly after the historic 2008 election, The Documentary: Opposing Obama follows Gary as he travels through Arkansas and Kentucky, talking to people who see Barack Obama’s presidency as nothing but bad news, and hearing their hopes and fears for the future.

In The Wales Window of Alabama, Gary recounts how the people of Wales helped rebuild an Alabama church, where bombers killed four girls in 1963. Hearing of the atrocity, sculptor John Petts rallied his local community to raise money, and subsequently created a new stained glass window that has become a focus for worship and a symbol of hope.

In Ebony: Black on White on Black, we hear the history of Ebony, the magazine that has charted and redefined African-American life since its launch in 1945. But what is its place in the world today, and does it still speak to contemporary African-Americans?

And in Analysis: Tea Party Politics, Gary assesses the Tea Party movement, a US right-wing protest group that objects to big government and high taxes. He finds out what sparked this grass-roots insurgency, who its supporters are, and analyses its impact.

Mixed-race Brazilians increasingly embrace blackness

France 24
2021-11-19

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – When Bianca Santana was little, her grandmother used to put her forearm alongside her mother’s and her own, proudly showing how the family’s skin had lightened across the generations.

Now 37, Santana, a Brazilian writer and activist, sees the long-loaded issue of race in her country through a different lens: she is proud to call herself black.

“When a child was born with lighter skin, that was cause for celebration,” says Santana, recalling the messages she received about race growing up.

She remembers how her black grandmother used to make her pull her hair into a tight bun, so she wouldn’t look like “‘those little blackies.'”

“She liked to talk about how my mother’s father had Italian blood, how his mother had blue eyes,” she says.

Today, Santana, author of the book “How I Discovered I Was Black,” proudly wears her hair in an afro, a style she only embraced at age 30.

Her shifting sense of identity is increasingly common in Brazil, the country with the largest black population outside Africa.

Brazil, which will celebrate Black Consciousness Day Saturday, struggles with structural racism and the legacy of slavery, which it only abolished in 1888 — the last country in the Americas to do so.

But for the large mixed-race population in this sprawling country of 213 million people, the stigma long attached to blackness is fading.

“Mixed-race people in Brazil increasingly identify as black,” Santana says.

“They’re straightening their hair less, they’re embracing black identity more and more.”…

Read the entire article here.

Morning Joe finally admits GOP ‘radicalization’ is ongoing racist backlash to Barack Obama

Raw Story
2021-12-07

Travis Gettys

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has finally come around to admitting that Republicans’ radicalization was a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.

The “Morning Joe” host, a former Republican himself, said he had long been skeptical of that notion, but he said the evidence had become too obvious to deny.”I have been a skeptic for quite some time that the election of Barack Obama was such a shock to so many white Americans that they just never got over it,” Scarborough said.

“I was always a skeptic of that. I saw his election, even though they didn’t agree with him ideologically on a lot of things. I saw that as a moment that all Americans — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals — could stop and go, ‘Wow, okay, the United States of America is the first majority white country that elected a Black man as their leader,’ something to celebrate.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Impact of the Browning of America on Anti-Blackness

The New York Times
2021-11-14

Charles M. Blow

One of the things I often hear as a person who frequently writes about race, ethnicity and equality is that the browning of America — the coming shift of the country from mostly white to mostly nonwhite — is one of the greatest hopes in the fight against white supremacy and oppression.

But this argument always flies too high to pay attention to the details on the ground. For me, white supremacy is only one foot of the beast. The other is anti-Blackness. You have to fight both.

The sad reality is, however, that anti-Blackness — or anti-darkness, to remove the stricture of a single-race definition for the sake of this discussion — exists in societies around the world, including nonwhite ones.

In too many societies across the globe, where a difference in skin tone exists, the darker people are often assigned a lower caste.

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Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas

University of Virginia Press
August 2021
342 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780813946238
Paper ISBN: 9780813946238
eBook ISBN: 9780813946238

Thomas Genova, Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Minnesota, Morris

In the long nineteenth century, Argentine and Cuban reformers invited white women from the United States to train teachers as replacements for their countries’ supposedly unfit mothers. Imperial Educación examines representations of mixed-race Afro-descended mothers in literary and educational texts from the Americas during an era in which governing elites were invested in reproducing European cultural values in their countries’ citizens.

Thomas Genova analyzes the racialized figure of the republican mother in nineteenth-century literary texts in North and South America and the Caribbean, highlighting the ways in which these works question the capacity of Afro-descended women to raise good republican citizens for the newly formed New World nation-states. Considering the work of canonical and noncanonical authors alike, Genova asks how the allegory of the national family—omnipresent in the nationalist discourses of the Americas—reconciles itself to the race hierarchies upon which New World slave and postslavery societies are built. This innovative study is the first book to consider the hemispheric relations between race, republican motherhood, and public education by triangulating the nation-building processes of Cuba and Argentina through U.S. empire.

University of Maryland Medical System drops race-based algorithm officials say harms Black patients

The Washington Post
2021-11-17

Ovetta Wiggins, Local reporter covering Maryland state politics

Uchenna Ndubisi was blown away when she first noticed the “African American” notation on a diagnostic test designed to show doctors how well her kidneys are working.

What did her race have to do with the toll lupus was taking on her body? The answer left her more resigned than surprised: an equation used to estimate how well a person’s organs filter waste included a decades-old racist assumption about Black bodies.

In this case, clinicians assumed Ndubisi had more muscle mass than a White patient would. For many Black kidney patients, like Ndubisi, the equation overestimates how well their kidneys are functioning, leading to the loss of critical time for necessary treatment.

“It’s being Black in America,” said Ndubisi, 35, who lives in Prince George’s County. “Another reminder . . . that there’s hurdles into health care for African Americans in this country.”…

Read the entire article here.

Argentine movement tries to make Black heritage more visible

The Associated Press
2021-11-26

Christiana Sciaudone

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — It wasn’t until Julia Cohen Ribeiro moved to Argentina that she discovered she was Black.

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…

Read the entire article here.

Long before Charlottesville, ‘great replacement theory’ found its champion in a racist senator

The Washington Post
2021-11-15

Martha Hamilton

Four years ago, torch-bearing “Unite the Right” demonstrators, including Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, marched into Charlottesville, shouting, “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter.” The next day, they clashed with counter-protesters, leaving one woman dead and a nation stunned.

Two-dozen participants in the rally are now on trial in a civil case, accused of conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.

Some of the Charlottesville demonstrators were motivated by an ideology known as the “great replacement theory,” which warns that an increase in the non-White population fueled by immigration will destroy White and Western civilization.

That ideology has inspired a lot of recent violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where the shooter warned of “White genocide” before pleading guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and engaging in a terrorist act.

But the great replacement theory isn’t new. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization. And as with the Charlottesville defendants, his incitements to racial violence that gave him a spotlight also got him into serious trouble.

Theodore G. Bilbo had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History…

Read the entire article here.

A British betrayal: the secret deportations of Chinese merchant sailors

The Guardian
2021-11-10

Presented by: Nosheen Iqbal with Dan Hancox and Yvonne Foley
Produced by Joshua Kelly and Axel Kacoutié
Executive producers Phil Maynard and Archie Bland

During the second world war, Chinese sailors served alongside their British allies in the merchant navy, heroically keeping supply lines open to the UK. But after the war hundreds of them who had settled in Liverpool suddenly disappeared. Now their children are piecing together the truth

Liverpool is home to the longest-established Chinese community in Europe having built sea links with Shanghai from the 19th century onwards. A thriving Chinatown is among the city’s present day inheritance of the era. But there is a darker side to the story of Liverpool’s Chinese community.

During the second world war, Chinese men served alongside their British comrades in merchant vessels that kept supply lines of food and other essentials flowing into the UK. It was incredibly dangerous work as the enormous cargo ships were ready targets for German U-boats and many of the seamen perished. After the war, many of the Chinese sailors settled in Liverpool with some starting families. But from 1946 onwards many started to go missing from the city.

On a day that Britain remembers the sacrifices of its war dead, writer Dan Hancox tells Nosheen Iqbal how he began investigating what had happened to the missing Chinese sailors and found a story of betrayal that is largely unknown in the UK. In the months following the war, the Home Office carried out thousands of secret deportations of Chinese seamen leaving their wives and children to believe they had been abandoned.

Yvonne Foley tells Nosheen she was 11 when she was told the truth about her Chinese heritage and has been trying ever since to find out what happened to her biological father she has never known.

Listen to the story (00:30:52) here. Download the story here.