Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Latinas Work for Cultural Survival

teleSUR
2015-03-20

Mai’a Williams
Quito, Ecuador

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of Afro-Latino youth in the U.S. rooting themselves, their families and their communities in their African heritages as a way to create cultures of resistance to the dominant narratives of colonization and white supremacy.

These movements have been for the most part led by Afro-Latina women who live within the intersections of oppression, gender, class, race, and immigration. They take inspiration from the past, as well as the future. And they work to co-create cultures that can fight against the overwhelming tide of erasure of their own African diasporic existences.The work of embracing Afro-Latino identity is a work for cultural survival and connection.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2010, 2.5 percent of the 54 million Latinos living in the United States co-identified as black. Many Latinos say that number is a significant undercount. Nicholas Jones, chief of the Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch said, “I believe that what we’re hearing from the Afro-Latino community is that they do not believe that those numbers accurately illustrate the Afro-Latino community presence in the United States, and that’s the dialogue that we’re having.”

In the same census, over half of Latinos also identified themselves as white and 36 percent marked themselves as “some other race.”…

Read the entire article here.

The challenges of being multiracial

The Santa Fe New Mexican
2015-11-16

Sakara Griffith, Sophomore
Santa Fe High School, Santa Fe, New Mexico

There is a photo of a black family featuring smiling faces of joy, with some of the participants wearing ugly, matching sweaters that grandma knitted and a brother and sister caught on camera fighting over who gets to sit in the front.

And in the center of the photo is a girl with green eyes, tan skin and blond curly hair. She is Santa Fe High School sophomore Irie Charity, whose racial background is a mix of African, Hawaiian and German.

“Yup, I’m the white words on the chalkboard in that picture,” Charity said. She said everyone knows she is of “mixed” race.

Brandi Wells, program adviser for the African American Student Services program at The University of New Mexico, said coming from two different racial backgrounds impacts even the most minute details of your home life.

She should know, as she is a mix of African-American and Hispanic.

“Even your menu at home becomes huge, like I grew up eating fried chicken and enchiladas. I was eating jambalaya one day and beans and chile the next,” Wells said.

Is growing up with a mix of two (or more) racial and cultural backgrounds difficult? Wells thinks so.

“America’s not ready to handle mixed people,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Living Room – March 26, 2010

Living Room
94.1 KPFA
Berkeley, California
2010-03-26

LIVING ROOM Friday 26 March 2010 Healthcare eternal battle; Blended Nation. Healthcare insurance reform has passed—sort of; yet more hurdles continue to be erected. We look at reality. PLUS: the reality of race, as a blend, not an absolute. With host Kris Welch, noon to one.

Guests:

Ellen Shaffer, co-dir Center for Policy Analysis
Prof. Robt. Schapiro, Emory University School of Law
Enzo Pastore, health policy specialist, Progressive States Network
Michael Lighty, California Nurses Association

Mike Tauber, Pamela Singh, co-authors “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America”

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Census Bureau Statement on Classifying Filipinos

United States Census Bureau
2015-11-09
Release Number: CB15-RTQ.26

Public Information Office: 301-763-3030

NOV. 9, 2015 — The Census Bureau has no current plans to classify Filipinos outside of the Asian race category. Filipinos are classified as Asian on Census Bureau forms based on the Office of Management and Budget’s definition, which specifically states that people whose origins are from the Philippine Islands are part of the category Asian.

According to OMB, Asian refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand and Vietnam.

At this time, the Census Bureau is conducting the 2015 National Content Test and is testing the design of the race question for the 2020 Census. This test will frame the recommendations for the 2020 Census race question, which has Filipino as an example under the Asian category.

Census change may result in fewer ‘white’ Americans

The Los Angeles Times
2015-11-22

Associated Press

The Census Bureau is considering changes to its race and ethnicity questions that would reclassify some minorities who were considered “white” in the past, a move that may speed up the date when America’s white population falls below 50%.

Census Director John Thompson told the Associated Press that the bureau is testing a number of new questions and may combine its race and ethnicity questions into one category for the 2020 census. That would allow respondents to choose multiple races.

The possible changes include allowing Latinos to give more details about their ethnic backgrounds and creating a distinct category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent…

…William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, says the proposed changes would grant residents more freedom to define their races and ethnicities.

“I don’t know if this will make a huge difference in the 2020 census on whites becoming the minority, but it could later,” said Frey, author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”

In the past, “white” was the only racial option available to Arab American respondents, a classification that didn’t truly reflect their social standing and hurt efforts for their political empowerment in post-Sept. 11 America, said Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“If you are going to classify me as white, then treat [me] as white,” Khalaf said. “Especially when I go to the airport. So, yeah, it’s inaccurate.”…

Read the entire article here.

Q&A with Miriam Jiménez Román

Los Afro-Latinos: A Blog Following the Afro-Latino Experience
2012-03-30

Kim Haas

In February, Latina magazine listed “6 Afro-Latinas Who Are Changing the World.” Naturally, Miriam Jiménez Román was second on the list.

Her work as a writer, professor and head of the Afro-Latin@ Forum has educated the world about the Afro-Latin experience and made her an authority on the subject. Her latest work, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, has been hailed for critics for its diverse portrait of Black Latinos in America.

Jiménez sat down to speak with Los Afro-Latinos about the book, Afro-Latinos in the media and bridging the gap between African Americans and Latinos.

Los Afro-Latinos: Why did you publish The Afro-Latin@ Reader?

Miriam Jiménez Román: After the 2000 Census was released [the mainstream media], basically posed Latinos and African-Americans in a Black vs. Brown dynamic. And it gave the sense that the [United States] was evolving into this post racial state and we didn’t really have to talk about race anymore. Latinos didn’t have a concern about race because the Census says Latinos, the largest minority group, can be of any race and this is a demonstration of overcoming race in [the United States]. My co-editor [Juan Flores] and I and a number of other people were appalled by that kind of analysis.

First, we’re not in a post racial state. Race is still a very important part of how all of us – globally – live our lives. African-Americans and Latinos need to get together, create change that will benefit not just Latinos and African-Americans but all people of color…

Read the entire interview here.

Check Both! Afro-Latin@s and the Census

NACLA: Reporting on the Americas Since 1967
2010

Miriam Jiménez Román

Earlier in 2010 a series of public service announcements circulated on the Internet in anticipation of the U.S. Census. The three short videos, produced and disseminated by the afrolatin@ forum, a New York–based educational nonprofit, urged Latin@s to identify both racially and ethnically, to “Check Both” on the census form. Targeting Black Latin@s, the campaign sought to challenge the prevailing notion of Latin@s as uniquely exempt from standard racial categories. By claiming both national origins and Black identity, Afro-Latin@s assert the continuing significance of race, both within Latin@ communities and in the broader society. At the very least, being counted on the census as Black and Latin@ brings attention to a social group that has long been invisible and subject to ongoing social and political marginalization…

…Latin@s may well be the only social group in the world who so emphatically insist on their ethnoracial mixture. But even as mestizo, or mixed identity—expressed variably as raza, “rainbow people,” or “mutts”—is a commonplace collective designation, Latin@s are also understood to be “of any race.” This apparent contradiction can be traced to the convergence of two seemingly distinct racial formations. On the one hand, the national ideologies of our countries of origin emphasize racial mixture and equate it with racial democracy—even as whiteness continues to be privileged, and indigenous and African ancestry are viewed as something to be overcome or ignored. On the other hand, in the United States Latin@s have been allocated an ambiguous racial middle ground that invisibilizes those too dark to conform to the mestizo ideal, while simultaneously distancing them from other communities of color, particularly African Americans…

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.

Afro-Mexicans Are Pushing For Legal Recognition in Mexico’s National Constitution

Remezcla
2015-11-09

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

The myth of the Latin American racial democracy, scholars believe, began in Brazil following the abolishment of slavery in 1888, when government officials declared that high rates of racial mixing had officially absolved the nation of its racial problems. This thinking eventually transcended Brazil and spread to a host of other Latin America countries, including Mexico.

But Mexico had its own nuanced understanding of the Latin American racial democracy – one called mestizaje, that was created by government officials, intellectuals, and artists following the 1910 Mexican Revolution: the erroneous belief that Mexico’s ethnic and racial mixture was solely composed of indigenous and European ancestry. This was also a time period when Mexico’s citizenry began to believe that “Mexicanness” and blackness were mutually exclusive and could not co-exist. Mestizaje, however, did not only exclude blackness from its national patrimony, but also left out a host of other racial identities from Mexico’s conversation about race…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Our Future: Race in the 21st Century

HarperCollins
1999
288 pages
6.125 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 0 (d)
Paperback ISBN: 780688175801

Farai Chideya

Two years ago, Newsweek named Farai Chideya to its “Century Club” of a hundred people to watch as we approached the year 2000. Beautiful, savvy, and wired for sound, she’s an ideal guide to the new, multiracial America that’s emerging as the next generation grows up and begins to shape our society. From coast to coast, from urban ‘hoods to Indian reservations to lily-white small towns, she talks to young men and women about their views on race, painting a vivid portrait of a notion in transition, as America ceases to be defined by the black/white divide and enters a more complex multiethnic era. Most of all, she allows the voices of the next generation — black, while, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity.

Since the Civil Rights movement, most Americans have thought of race as a black and white issue. That won’t be the case for long. By the year 2050, there will be more nonwhite than white Americans, and most of the nonwhite population will be Asian and Latino, not black. Increasingly, America is becoming a multiracial society. Americans in their teens and twenties are at the forefront of this cultural revolution. In The Color of Our Future, young journalist Farai Chideya explores how members of the next generation deal with race in their own lives and how the decisions they make determine America’s ethnic future.

From urban hoods to Native American reservations to lily-white small towns, Chideya talks to young men and women about their personal views of race, painting a vivid portrait of a nation in transition. In clear, compelling language, she describes young people dealing with the complexities of diversity in their everyday lives. She writes of a young interracial couple pitted against their community in the South and of the white teens in Indiana, birthplace of the Klan, who get their black, hip-hop aesthetic from MTV. She interviews a Native American who wants to be the next Bill Gates, bringing computer access to his reservation in Montana, and a Mexican-American woman, working for the border patrol in El Paso, who catches the destitute Mexicans who flock into the United States to work for affluent white Texans. All these young people have clear, strong ideas about the impact of race on everything from education to pop culture. They are honest, sometimes brutally so, about their own prejudices. Their moving stories are the blueprint for the future of America. With a discerning ear and sharp insight, Chideya allows the voices of the next generation — black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity and guide us to the kaleidoscope of our future.