Mixed Race Studies

Racial Theories in Context (Second Edition)

Cognella
2013
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60927-056-8

Edited by:

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters — past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.

The authors of Racial Theories in Context discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:

• First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
• Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
• There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
• The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.

Contents

• Introduction / Jared Sexton
• A Long History of Affirmative Action—For Whites / Larry Adelman
• The Cost of Slavery / Dalton Conley
• Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
• Introduction To Racism: A Short History / George M. Fredrickson
• Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West / Darlene Clark Hine
• Understanding the Problematic of Race Through the Problem of Race-Mixture / Thomas C. Holt
• The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics / Martha Hodes
• The Original Housing Crisis / Derek S. Hoff
• The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America? / Joshua Holland
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American / Michael Hout
• Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco-Roman Antiquity / Benjamin Isaac
• Colorblind Racism / Sally Lehrman
• The Wealth Gap Gets Wider / Meizhu Lui
• Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
• Unshackling Black Motherhood / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Is Race -Based Medicine Good for Us? / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Understanding Reproductive Justice / Loretta J. Ross
• The History of the Idea of Race / Audrey Smedley
• The Liberal Retreat From Race / Stephen Steinberg
• “Race Relations” / Stephen Steinberg

“La Negrita,” Queen of the Ticos: The Black Roots of Costa Rica’s Patron Saint

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 3, January 2013
pages 323-355
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2013.0025

Russell Lohse, Assistant Professor of History
Pennsylvania State University

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica’s relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation’s supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica’s tradition of “rural democracy.”

Many writers have traced Costa Rica’s democratic tradition to the colonial period. In the mid-twentieth century, Carlos Monge Alfaro advanced the classic articulation of the myth of “rural democracy,” an enduring staple of conventional Costa Rican historiography. In his Historia de Costa Rica, read as a textbook by generations of Costa Rican students, Monge Alfaro argued that colonial Costa Rica developed as an egalitarian society of small landholders, unique in Latin America. According to this widely accepted version of national history, colonial Costa Rica remained for centuries an impoverished backwater, neglected by the Spanish Empire. Deep class divisions never emerged because all members of society toiled equally for their meager subsistence. The province’s isolation and chronic poverty forced all of its residents to work with their own hands, for each to make of the situation what he would.

Monge Alfaro and others further contended that colonial Costa Rica was a racially homogeneous society. The racial component of the myth is based on the notion that the few Indians living in Costa Rica at the time of the conquest were peacefully absorbed into Hispanic society, obviating the bloody racial conflicts that plagued other Central American regions. Similarly, the marginalizing character of the subsistence economy precluded the entrenchment of African slavery and the sistema de castas. Spanish peasant immigration accounted for the overwhelming preponderance of the country’s racial stock. Racially homogeneous, Costa Rica was therefore free of racial prejudice and discrimination. The lighter complexion of the population and the absence of racial tension made Costa Rica resemble a tranquil European country more than its Central American neighbors. Racial homogeneity predisposed the region to the harmonious coexistence (convivencia) accepted as a national characteristic. More overtly racist ideologues envisioned Costa Rica’s relative political stability, high literacy rate, economic prosperity, and “European” standards of civilization as results of the absence of indigenous and African populations.

But the popular legend of the apparition of the Virgen de los Angeles openly challenges key tenets of the myths of rural democracy and racial homogeneity. The central theme of the legend of the Virgin’s apparition demands recognition not only of Costa Rica’s racial diversity, but of the reality of racial prejudice and discrimination in the nation’s past.

Legend of the Apparition

As the legend has been recounted in the twentieth century, on August 2, 1635, a woman was gathering firewood near her home in Puebla de los Pardos, the segregated district where people of African descent lived on the outskirts of Cartago, the capital of the Spanish province of Costa Rica. On that day she was surprised to find a black stone image of the Virgin Mary and Child perched on a large rock. Elated, she put the small statue in a basket and carried it home. The next day, she returned to the woods for more firewood and there she found an identical image on the same rock. Thinking she had found a secaond statue, she returned home to find, to her surprise, that the image of the day before was gone….

The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism

Indiana University Press
2007-05-22
320 pages
22 b&w photos
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-21927-5; Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-34902-6

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz exposes and challenges the common assumptions about whom and what Jews are, by presenting in their own voices, Jews of color from the Iberian Peninsula, Asia, Africa, and India. Drawing from her earlier work on Jews and whiteness, Kaye/Kantrowitz delves into the largely uncharted territory of Jews of color and argues that Jews are an increasingly multiracial people—a fact that, if acknowledged and embraced, could foster cross-race solidarity to help combat racism. This engaging and eye-opening book examines the historical and contemporary views on Jews and whiteness as well as the complexities of African/Jewish relations, the racial mix and disparate voices of the Jewish community, contemporary Jewish anti-racist and multicultural models, and the diasporic state of Jewish life in the United States.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• A Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Are Jews White?
  • What’s White
  • The People of Contradictions
  • Apartheid/American Style
  • Jews: Race or Religion?
  • Christian Centricity
• 2. Black/Jewish Imaginary and Real
  • Real 1: The Black/Jewish Tangle
  • Real 2: Am I Possible?
  • Imaginary 1: Exodus
  • Imaginary 2: Media Coverage
  • Imaginary 3: Media Hype
  • Real 3: Solidarity
  • Real 4: Nationalism and Feminism
• 3. Who Is This Stranger?
  • The Cultures of Jews
  • Mizrahim
  • Sephardim
  • Post-Colonial Jews
  • Feminist Ritual
  • Ashkenazim
  • De-Ashkenization
  • U.S. Jews
• 4. Praying with Our Legs
  • Fighting Slumlords, Building Coalitions: Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (Chicago)
  • Confronting Power in the Jewish Community: Jews United for Justice (St. Louis)
  • Trying to Change Congregational Life: Jewish Community Action (Minneapolis)
  • Bringing Our Bodies to the Picket Line: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (New York)
  • The Place to Go for a Progressive Jewish Voice
• 5. Judaism Is the Color of This Room
  • The Temple of My Familiar: Ayecha (National)
  • Crossing Many Borders: Ivri-NASAWI/Levantine Center (International)
  • A Mixed Multitude: Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation (Chicago)
  • Respect and Knowledge: Beta Israel of North America (International)
  • Hospitality Is the First Principle: Congregation Naharat Shalom (Albuquerque)
  • Jews Were All People of Color: Center for Afro-Jewish Studies (Philadelphia)
  • I Promised Them It Wasn’t Going to Happen Again: Central Reform Synagogue (St. Louis)
  • Jews of Color Speak Out
  • Transformation in Partnership
• 6. Toward a New Diasporism
  • If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem
  • If I Forget Thee O Doikayt, O Haviva Ottomania
  • Home
  • Diasporism and the Holocaust
  • Israel and Diasporism
  • Anti-Semitism and Diasporism
  • A Jewish Tradition: Radical Justice-Seeking
  • To Change the Way Racism Is Fought: Shifting the Center
  • Diasporism and the Colors of Jews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Can Drake Save the Bar Mitzvah?

The Jewish Week
Blog: Well Versed
2012-04-12

Eric Herschthal

When Drake’s new video, “HYFR,” dropped [was released] over the weekend—in which the Jewish, biracial hip-hop superstar raps at a bar mitzvah—I was thrilled. Initially.

For years, pop culture references to the Jewish rite of passage have been stuck in the same mode of self-mockery.  Self-criticism is great, and in retrospect I partly appreciate the brutal truth that films like the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” show to us Jews—that this once incredibly powerful, meaningful rite had become totally cauterized, stripped of any real substance.  The bar mitzvah has become just another excuse to get the family together—half of which you may not even like—and torture a poor 13-year-old with a foreign tongue he’s probably less comfortable with than trigonometry.

But the Coen brothers didn’t invent that trope; it’s been around for years.  What felt so refreshing about Drake’s video, and still sort of does, is how it isn’t self-mocking at all.  Here’s a rapper so at ease in the self-conscious, status-driven world of pop star culture, that he can brandish his Jewish identity with little self-pity.  He brings his Jewishness to a world—the hip-hop world, and the millions who love it, myself included—that’s mainly known Jews as a stereotype.   The Jew, in hip-hop, is either the boss behind the scenes or, on the rare occasion (as with the Beastie Boys), the nerdy white kids who are lovingly embraced—but still, let’s be clear, as nerdy white kids.

Drake’s changed all that.  In large part that’s because his Jewishness is not the first fact about him.  Many see him mainly as a black rapper, if a light-skinned one.  And even when he broke onto the scene a few years ago and, when asked, would talk about his upbringing by a white Jewish mother in Canada—who sent him to a Jewish day school, and had him bar-mitzvahed—you didn’t get the sense he was trying to hide it.  But I’m actually less interested in what Drake’s openness about Judaism says about the changing world of hip-hop—and my sense is that, in many ways, it’s far more evolved in terms of black-Jewish relations than much of the country—than what it might say about Jews’ perceptions of themselves…

…As much as I want to stick up for Drake, I think Kuehne is right.  The song and the video still have many of the hallmarks of what’s problematic with hip-hop—mostly, the objectification of women.  Plus, there’s a ton of profanity.  “But she was no angel, and we never waited,” Drake raps at one point. “I took her for sushi, she wanted to f*** / So we took it to go, told them don’t even plate it.”

The song’s title, “HYFR,” stands for “Hell Yeah F***ing Right.”…

Read the entire article here.

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

Cornell University Press
2010-08-05
248 pages
7 Illustrations
6.1 x 9.3 in
ISBN-10: 0801446422; ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4642-9

Gwenn A. Miller, Assistant Professor of History
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts

From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia’s only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed “kreol” community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia’s modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people.

In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia’s North Pacific venture. Although Russia’s Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the “discovery” and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia’s Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller’s attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Comparative Timeline
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. An Economy of Confiscation
• 2. Beach Crossings on Kodiak Island
• 3. Colonial Formations
• 4. Between Two Worlds
• 5. Students of Empire
• 6. A Kreol Generation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Baylor University Press
2010-10-01
260 pages
9in x 6in
Hardback ISBN: 9781602582934

Brian Bantum, Neil F. and Ila A. Professor of Theology
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois

How mulatto identity challenges racial religiosity and existence

The theological attempts to understand Christ’s body have either focused on “philosophical” claims about Jesus’ identity or on “contextual” rebuttals—on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity.

But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus’ own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human.

In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto—one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a “hybridity” of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Renunciation: Racial Discipleship and the Religiosity of Race
  • 1. I Am Your Son, White Man! The Mulatto/a and the Tragic
  • 2. Neither Fish nor Fowl: Presence as Politics
• Part II: Confession: Christ, the Tragic Mulatto
  • 3. Unto Us a Child Is Born or “How can this be?” The Mulatto Christ
  • 4. I Am the Way: Mulatto/a Redemption and the Politics of Identification
• Part III: Immersion: Christian Discipleship or the New Discipline of the Body
  • 5. You Must Be Reborn: Baptism and Mulatto/a ReBirth
  • 6. The Politics of Presence: Prayer and Discipleship
• Benediction
• Notes

Redeeming Mulatto: Race, Culture, and Ethnic Plurality from Quest Church on Vimeo.

Race, Religion Collide in 2012 Campaign

The Associated Press
2012-05-05

Jesse Washington, National Writer, Race and Ethnicity

Rachel Zoll, National Religion Writer

How unthinkable it was, not so long ago, that a presidential election would pit a candidate fathered by an African against another condemned as un-Christian.

And yet, here it is: Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, an African-American and a white Mormon, representatives of two groups and that have endured oppression to carve out a place in the United States. How much progress has America made against bigotry? By November, we should have some idea.

Perhaps mindful of the lingering power of prejudice, both men soft-pedal their status as racial or religious pioneers. But these things “will be factors whether they’re explicitly stated or not, because both Obama and Romney are minorities,” said Nancy Wadsworth, co-editor of the anthology “Faith and Race in American Political Life.” Mormons are 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center; African-Americans are 12.6 percent

“Americans like to obsess about ways that people are different,” said Wadsworth, a political science professor at the University of Denver. Voters of all types say that a candidate’s race or religious beliefs should not be cause for bias, “but Americans are really conflicted about this, and they talk out of both sides of their mouth.”…

Read the entire article here.

Forecast of Miscegenation

Los Angeles Herald
1906-07-24
page 6, column 3
Source: Library of Congress: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

In the course of a sermon delivered last Sunday before n local negro audience. Bishop Hamilton of the Methodist church said: “It might create a sensation if I should say a union of the races of this world Is possible. The papers would take it up In the morning if I should tell you the blacks and whites will eventually merge into one people. This I know: all discriminations must come to an end and it is not a question which nation shall reign in this world.”

Bishop Hamilton has an unquestionable right to his views on the subject of miscegenation and likewise to the personal demonstration of them if he sees fit. It is not the purpose of The Herald to reopen an issue that was supposed to have been buried with the abolition party nearly half a century ago. Every one to his or her liking in regard to the old question whether a negro Is “a man and a brother,” and, inferentially, whether a negress is a woman and a sister.

It is the effort of such preachment to a negro congregation as Bishop Hamilton is credited with that The Herald especially criticizes. The bishop practically tells hundreds of negroes to their faces, and through them he tells the whole negro race In the United States, that miscegenation is foreordained by the almighty. Note what the bishop says following the above quotation: “It won’t matter whether a man Is white or black, if he is a son of God, he shall become an individual part of that people which shall eventually own this earth.”

The effect of such preaching to negroes cannot be otherwise than pernicious. Its tendency is to fill the negro mind with notions of social equality, going the full length to amalgamation of the white and black races. And with these notions well rooted, is it not logical to suppose that such present negro crimes as are reported almost daily, would be multiplied indefinitely?

Not one white American in a thousand will indorse the miscegenation doctrine, substantially, which Bishop Hamilton is preaching to the negroes.

New Latin American pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio not a person of color?

New York Amsterdam News
New York, New York
2013-03-21

Courtenay Brown, Special to the AmNews

The installation of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I on March 13 caused a stir of questions regarding his race. Yes, he was the first pope from Latin America, but should he be considered the first pope of color?

By definition, a “person of color” is an all-encompassing, typically American term that categorizes non-whites, which include Asians, Indians, Native Americans, Blacks and Latinos.

This classification may work in the U.S., but it does not function so well in Latin America. According to a study by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 31.4 percent of immigrants to Argentina came from Spain, while 44.9 percent came from Italy from 1857 to 1940. This helps quantify just how many immigrants came from these specific countries as opposed to other places in Europe.

Pope Francis’ own parents were immigrants to Argentina. Since the children of two Italian citizens are legally regarded as Italian no matter where they are born, according to Italian legal tradition, Pope Francis is technically regarded as Italian.

According to Argentina native Martin Pereyra, a law student at the University of Buenos Aires, many Argentines would not identify as people of color because of the great deal of European influence in the country. The country is often even nicknamed the “Paris of South America.”

“I don’t think we have just one ‘color,’” Pereyra said. “But at the same time, we are considered Latinos.”…

…So while prescribing to a single “race” is far from a universal concept for the Latino community, Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, professor in the Chávez Department of Chicano/a Studies at the University of Central Los Angeles (UCLA), believes that Bergoglio should be considered Latino and thus a person of color—despite the pope’s Italian roots. According to Hinojosa-Ojeda, using lineage to determine who is Latino would “eliminate a large part of Latin America and a lot of Latinos,” he told LA Weekly last week.

“More important is the experience, not the genetic background,” he continued…

Read the entire article here.

Ben-Ur awarded study grant by Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

In the Loop: News for Staff and Faculty
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2012-12-13

Associate professor Aviva Ben-Ur of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies has been awarded a Senior Grant in History from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for her book project “Eurafrican Identity in a Jewish Society: Suriname, 1660-1863.”
 
Ben-Ur’s book project focuses on slave society in the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Jews of Iberian origin were among the earliest colonists. She examines the ever-shifting boundaries and bridges of Jewish communal belonging in Suriname and focuses on the special role enslaved and free Eurafrican women played in expanding the definition of Jewishness and collapsing the social hierarchies that distinguished whites from non-whites. Ben-Ur argues that from the start of Jewish settlement in the colony in the 1650s, females of African descent were key to both Jewish community building and the transformative adaptation of Jewish culture to a multi-ethnic slave society…

Read the entire article here.