Mixed Race Studies

Too black for Brazil | Guardian Docs

The Guardian
2016-02-09

Nayara Justino thought her dreams had come true when she was selected as the Globeleza carnival queen in 2013 after a public vote on one of Brazil’s biggest TV shows. But some regarded her complexion to be too dark to be an acceptable queen. Nayara and her family wonder what this says about racial roles in modern Brazil.

5 Years After Muslim Ban, Middle Eastern and North African Americans Remain Hidden | Opinion

Newsweek
2022-02-08

Neda Maghbouleh, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

René D. Flores, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Ariela Schachter, Assistant Professor of Sociology​; Faculty Affiliate in Asian American Studies
Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Five years ago, President Donald Trump was sued over the Muslim ban, which prohibited immigration and travel to the United States from seven majority Muslim countries. Although it is impossible to know how many lives were thrown into disarray by the flick of President Donald Trump’s pen, at least 41,000 people were denied visas based solely on their nationality. An overwhelming majority—94 percent—were people from Iran, Syria and Yemen.

President Joe Biden, like other critics of the ban, proclaimed that those affected “were the first to feel Donald Trump’s assault on Black and brown people.” But since a 1944 lawsuit in which a Arab Muslim man successfully argued that he was white in order to become a naturalized citizen, people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA, which includes Iran, Syria and Yemen) have been counted as white in the U.S. As a result, and unlike other minorities, an estimated 3 million MENA Americans do not have a box to mark their identities on the Census or most surveys. And when MENA Americans are masked under the white category, the everyday group- and individual-level inequalities they face are made invisible, making clear that adding a MENA box to the U.S. Census is long overdue…

Read the entire article here.

2022 CMRS Conference Is Two Weeks Away!

Critical Mixed Race Studies Association
2022-01-24

*** View the program schedule here! ***

REGISTER NOW!
It is not too late to register for the 6th biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference titled Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future to be held virtually February 24-26, 2022. To register, click here.

BECOME AN EXHIBITOR
For a small $10 fee you can advertise your business and/or sell your wares during the CMRS Conference in our virtual exhibitor space. Register here.

BECOME A CONFERENCE SPONSOR
It’s not too late to become a 2022 CMRS conference sponsor. Sponsors receive advertisement on the conference website, free registration for students or community members, and conference merchandise featuring the brilliant art image “Transition” by artivist Favianna Rodriguez.

To become a sponsor please go to our Eventbrite page here.

NEW! View the program guide here.

Debate is growing over use of ‘Latinx’ for ethnic identity

The Houston Chronicle
2021-01-24

Olivia P. Tallet, Staff Writer

Latinx is a buzzword for individuals of Latin American origin in the United States, yet the use of “Latinx” as a noun to identify people of Latino and Hispanic heritage is not universally welcomed.

“Ooooo, you’ve entered the dangerous territory of ‘identity politics,’” said Rice University professor Luis Duno-Gottberg on a social media post where a journalist asked for opinions about the use of Latinx.

The word “Latinx” and its plural “Latinxs” spark passionate discussions, with supporters asserting it is more inclusive than the predominant “Latinos” or “Hispanic” to group the multifaceted identities of people who trace their origins to Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

Some analysts trace the original use of Latinx to the mid-2000s when it began to appear in web searches. The word started a slow trend upward in June 2016, according to Google Trends data. Some observers associated it with the mass shooting that month at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 injured…

Read the entire article here.

Eric Stinton: It’s Time To Recognize That Black History Is Part Of Hawaii’s History

Honolulu Civic Beat
Honolulu, Hawaii
2022-02-07

Eric Stinton

Nitasha Tamar Sharma attempts to clarify misconceptions and challenges common assumptions about race in Hawaii in her book “Hawaiʻi Is My Haven.”

On the cover of Nitasha Tamar Sharma’s recent book, “Hawaiʻi Is My Haven,” is a striking image of Kamakakēhau Fernandez wearing a pink bombax flower lei. The Na Hoku Hanohano award-winning falsetto singer and ukulele player was adopted from Arkansas by a Maui family when he was six weeks old, and was enrolled in Hawaiian language classes starting in kindergarten. He grew up in Hawaii and with Hawaii in him.

Fernandez is one of countless examples of Black locals who have contributed to Hawaiian culture and life for over 200 years, yet whose stories have largely gone unrecognized.

“Black people have been evacuated out of the narrative of who is in Hawaii,” Sharma says. “Historically we don’t think Black people were in Hawaii when they actually were.”…

Read the entire article here.

Dialogues Beyond the Master’s Map: An Invitation

Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW
2022-01-08

My journey has taken me past constructions of race,
past constructions of mixed race,
and into an understanding of human difference
that does not include race as a meaningful category.
–Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour, Rainier Spencer

Introduction

About ten years ago I invited people who resist the practice of racialization to talk with me about why, when, and how they arrived at a point beyond personal and social identity defined and confined by the dogma of race.

Since then, I’ve had the privilege of being able to write, talk, and teach about the implications of the non-racial worldview in a wide variety of contexts. And all along the way, I’ve heard from folks wishing to gather with others who share an anti-racialization orientation. This is an invitation to such a gathering.

If, despite being told and trained and pressured to embrace and perform a sense of identity that represents a false construct of human differences, you defy racial reduction and seek the company of others who resist racialization, please contact me. About a month from the posting of this invitation, sometime in early February, I’ll contact everyone who expressed interest with a date and time for our first gathering (via Zoom) where we’ll share perspectives and narratives of life beyond the master’s map…

To continue reading, click here.

The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

University of California Press
January 2022 (Originally published 1986)
676 pages
Trim Size: 6.14 x 9.21
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520367005
Paperback ISBN: 9780520337060

Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)

Introduction by: David H. P. Maybury-Lewis (1929-2007)

This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• Preface to the first English-Language Edition
• Preface to the Second English-language Edition
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• I General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil: Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-Holding and Hybrid Society
• II The Native in the Formation of the Brazilian Family
• III The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions
• IV The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian
• V The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian (continued)
• Plans showing Big House of the Noruega Plantation
• Glossary of the Brazilian Terms Used
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

How Are Black–White Biracial People Perceived in Terms of Race?

Kellog Insight
Kellog School of Management
Northwestern University

2017-12-06

Based on the Research of:

Arnold K. Ho, Associate Professor of Psychology and of Organizational Studies
University of Michigan

Nour S. Kteily, Associate Professor of Management & Organizations
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
University of Utah

Yevgenia Nayberg

As the nation has become more diverse, increasing numbers of Americans belong to more than one racial group. In 1970, just one in a hundred babies born was multiracial; these days, the share has climbed to one in ten.

This makes it critical for organizations—and the researchers who study them—to understand how multiracial individuals perceive themselves in terms of race, as well as how they are perceived by others.

“What’s the experience of being multiracial and feeling like others are categorizing you one way or another?” asks Nour Kteily, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.

The stakes are high.

Being perceived as belonging, or not belonging, to a particular group can affect well-being. An organization might categorize a multiracial person a certain way for diversity quotas, for instance—but if she does not identify with that minority, the categorization may make her feel constrained or stereotyped.

Previous research in America has focused almost exclusively on how white people regard biracial people and has shown that they tend to categorize those of mixed race as belonging to the racial category of their minority parent. In new research with two colleagues, Kteily wanted to know whether black people tended to do the same thing.

The research finds that overall, both races view black-white biracial people as slightly “more black than white,” says Kteily.

But white and black people appear to differ in why they might classify biracial people this way. Namely, white people who classify biracial people as more black tend to hold more anti-egalitarian views, while black people who classify biracial people as more black show the opposite pattern, tending to be more in favor of equality between groups…

Read the entire article here.

“You’re one of us”: Black Americans’ use of hypodescent and its association with egalitarianism.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 113, Issue 5 (November 2017)
pages 753–768
DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000107

Arnold K. Ho, Associate Professor of Psychology and of Organizational Studies
University of Michigan

Nour S. Kteily, Associate Professor of Management & Organizations
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
University of Utah

Research on multiracial categorization has focused on majority group social perceivers (i.e., White Americans), demonstrating that they (a) typically categorize Black–White multiracials according to a rule of hypodescent, associating them more with their lower status parent group than their higher status parent group, and (b) do so at least in part to preserve the hierarchical status quo. The current work examines whether members of an ethnic minority group, Black Americans, also associate Black–White multiracials more with their minority versus majority parent group and if so, why. The first 2 studies (1A and 1B) directly compared Black and White Americans, and found that although both Blacks and Whites categorized Black–White multiracials as more Black than White, Whites’ use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup antiegalitarianism, whereas Blacks’ use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup egalitarianism. Studies 2–3 reveal that egalitarian Blacks use hypodescent in part because they perceive that Black–White biracials face discrimination and consequently feel a sense of linked fate with them. This research establishes that the use of hypodescent extends to minority as well as majority perceivers but also shows that the beliefs associated with the use of hypodescent differ as a function of perceiver social status. In doing so, we broaden the social scientific understanding of hypodescent, showing how it can be an inclusionary rather than exclusionary phenomenon.

Read or purchase the article here.

Americans Color Outside the Lines

The Dispatch
2021-04-26

Chris Stirewalt, Contributing Editor

Even today, bigots and the progressive proponents of race science hold fast to the idea of fixed race and ethnicity. Thankfully, Americans largely ignore them.

In his autobiography, Life on the Color Line, Gregory Williams tells the story of discovering at the age of 10 that he was black—or at least that the world saw him that way.

Williams, who would go on to serve as president of both City College of New York and the University of Cincinnati, was raised as a white boy when and where it really mattered: rural, central Virginia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But when his parents’ marriage broke up and his mom ran off, his no-account, alcoholic father could not manage to care for his two sons. So, Williams’ dad moved them to his hometown of Muncie, Indiana. It was on the bus trip there that Williams’ dad told his boys that he was not the Italian-American called “Tony” who ran a roadhouse west of Richmond but a light-skinned black man from the wrong side of tracks in the industrial Midwest. “Miss Sallie,” the black woman who had worked at the family bar for a time, was really the boys’ grandmother.

Ultimately abandoned by both of his parents, Williams found himself brutally rejected by both cultures. And what a time to live on that line. In 1954, the year after he arrived in Muncie, the Supreme Court struck down school segregation laws. Segregationists had warned after Harry Truman integrated the military six years earlier that the federal government was intent on the mixing of the races—and ultimately making intermarriage appear to be normal, leading to the dilution of the white race. The blending of children in classrooms was to them just the next step in the demise of America’s dominant white culture by miscegenation. Williams remembered a Klansman on television saying the court was trying to encourage race mixing and the rise of the “bestial mongrel mulatto, the dreg of human society.”…

Read the entire article here.