Mixed Race Studies

Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response

Cambridge University Press
October 2012
254 pages
2 maps; 1 table
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107024861
Paperback: 9781107695436
Adobe Ebook Reader ISBN: 9781139786676

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University, New York

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America yet Afro-descendants have been consistently marginalized as undesirable elements of the society. Latin America has nevertheless long prided itself on its absence of U.S.-styled state-mandated Jim Crow racial segregation laws. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of Latin America’s legally benign racial past by comprehensively examining the existence of customary laws of racial regulation and the historic complicity of Latin American states in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies. Tanya Katerí Hernández is the first author to consider the salience of the customary law of race regulation for the contemporary development of racial equality laws across the region. Therefore, the book has a particular relevance for the contemporary U.S. racial context in which Jim Crow laws have long been abolished and a “post-racial” rhetoric undermines the commitment to racial equality laws and policies amidst a backdrop of continued inequality.

Features

• Provides a comprehensive examination of the entire Latin American region with regard to racial inequality
• Hernández is the first author to thoroughly consider the role of customary law in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies
• Offers a comprehensive examination of development of racial equality laws across the region

Contents

• Maps
• 1. Racial Innocence and the Customary Law of Race Regulation
• 2. Spanish America Whitening the Race – the Un(written) Laws of Blanqueamiento and Mestizaje
• 3. Brazilian “Jim Crow”: The Immigration Law Whitening Project and the Customary Law of Racial Segregation – a Case Study
• 4. The Social Exclusion of Afro-Descendants in Latin America Today
• 5. Afro-Descendant Social Justice Movements and the New Antidiscrimination Laws
• 6. Brazil: At the Forefront of Latin American Race-Based Affirmative Action Policies and Census Racial Data Collection
• 7. Conclusion: The United States–Latin America
• Connections
• Appendix A: Afro-Descendant Organizations in Latin America
• Appendix B: Typology of Latin American Racial Antidiscrimination Measures
• Bibliography
• Index

I don’t think there is much racism in [Latin] America because we are a mix of races of all kinds of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and other races that were or will be; but I understand that in many other parts there is racism, above all in the United States and Europe, is where there is the most racism.¹

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America, representing about one-third of the total population (see Maps 1 and 2). Yet, these are considered conservative demographic figures given the histories of undercounting the number of persons of African descent on Latin American national censuses and often completely omitting a racial/ethnic origin census question. At the same time, persons of African descent make up more than 40 percent of the poor in Latin America and have been consistently marginalized and denigrated as undesirable elements of the society since the abolition of slavery across the Americas. Yet, the view that “racism does not exist” is pervasive in Latin America despite the advent of social justice movements and social science researchers demonstrating the contrary. When the BBC surveyed Latin Americans in 2005 regarding the existence of racism, a significant number of respondents emphatically denied the existence of racism. Many, for instance, made statements such as “Ibero-Americans are not racist,” and “Ibero-America is not a racist region, for the simple fact that the majority of the population is either indigenous, creole, or mixed.”

Thus the denial of racism is rooted in what many scholars have critiqued as the “myth of racial democracy” – the notion that the racial mixture (mestizaje/mestiçagem) in a population is emblematic of racial harmony and insulated from racial discord and inequality. Academic scholarship has in the last twenty years critiqued Latin American “mestizaje” theories of racial mixture as emblematic of racial harmony. Yet, Latin Americans still very much adhere to the notion that racial mixture and the absence of Jim Crow racial segregation are such a marked contrast to the U.S. racial history that the region views itself as what I term “racially innocent.” Indeed, the extensive survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s “Americas Barometer 2010” demonstrates that biased Latin American racial ideologies have not completely evolved despite the existing scholarly critiques of mestizaje as a trope of racial innocence. For instance, in the Americas Barometer 2010 survey of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, the vast majority of the country populations (of all races) agreed with the mestizaje notion that “racial mixture is good for the country.” In fact, more than 75 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement and largely endorsed the idea of interracial marriages. Yet, the Americas Barometer data also show that for those Latin Americans who did express disagreement with the idea of their children marrying black partners, the opposition level was dramatically greater from white respondents in contrast to black respondents. Specifically, in those countries where the Americas Barometer asked whether there was disagreement with one’s own children marrying a black person, such as Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador, the opposition by whites to interracial black marriages was on average 60 percent greater than the opposition of blacks to such marriages. (Other countries were asked about marriage to a person of indigenous descent.) These results thus accord with the long-standing data that marriage patterns in Latin America are generally racially endogamous.

The Americas Barometer 2010 data also indicate that white respondents in several Latin American countries are considerably more likely than other groups to state a preference for lighter skin. For instance, in Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic, on average 26 percent of white respondents agreed that they would prefer lighter skin, in contrast to the 13 percent average of black respondents who prefer lighter skin. In Mexico and Peru, blacks on average had greater rates of preference for lighter skin (37%) than whites (26%). In Brazil the rate of white preference for lighter skin closely approximated blacks’ lighter-skin preference rate. Even socialist Cuba continues to manifest a preference for whiteness and a white opposition to interracial marriage. Moreover, in a 2004 comparison of implicit and explicit racial bias in the United States, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, the rates of both implicit and explicit racial bias were higher in all three Latin American contexts as compared to the United States. Thus despite the overwhelming articulation of mestizaje as an indicator of racial harmony across much of Latin America and the different ways that it is articulated within each country, attitudes of racial distinction and superiority persist beneath the celebration of racial mixture. In part, the absence of a legal critique of the Latin American comparisons to the Jim Crow United States has enabled the Latin American “racial innocence” stance to remain. This book seeks to fill in that gap in the literature and provide the legal critique.

Specifically, this book is about the ways in which the Latin American denial of racism operating in conjunction with the notion that true racism can only be found in the racial segregation of the United States veils the actual manifestations of racism in Latin America. I will argue that an examination of the role of the state after the abolition of slavery in regulating race through immigration law and customary law disrupts this picture of Latin America as “racially innocent.” I will then assess the ways in which the contemporary Latin American antidiscrimination laws seek to eradicate the legacy of racial inequality wrought by the historic racism of the state. Finally, I will conclude the book with insights as to how the examination of the Latin American context may be helpful to the U.S. racial justice movement today, given the growing denial of the existence of racism in the United Sates. In doing so, I shall adopt the term “Afro-descendants,” which Latin American race scholars and social justice movement actors use to encompass all persons of African descent in Latin America who are affected by antiblack sentiment whether or not they personally identify as “black” or adopt a mixed-race identity such as mulatto or mestizo. This book will not focus upon the racial inequality issues of indigenous groups in Latin America given the extensive literature that already exists regarding that topic. Instead the analysis will focus upon the particular history of Afro-descendants’ relationship to the state as formerly enslaved subjects seeking visibility as citizens and full participants in the national identity despite the societal denial of racism…

Denying Brazil (Review)

African Film Festival: More than just a festival
Essays & Articles
2002

John D. H. Downing, Professor Emeritus of International Communication
Southern Illinois University

The documentary, Denying Brazil, is a plain-speaking and fascinating unmasking of the white racism endemic in Brazilian television’s most popular genre, which in the USA we would call the soap opera, but which throughout Latin America is known as the telenovela.
 
The telenovela is more than a soap opera. It has a centrality in everyday life in much of Latin America way beyond its cousin in the USA. At times a series will comment very directly on current events, rather like the special “West Wing” episode produced after 9/11. People are glued to the set across social classes, the audience includes lots of men as well as women — and we’re talking prime time, not daytime. Telenovelas are not only amazingly prominent, but also have a format different to soap operas. Soaps usually run once a week and often for years on end, whereas telenovelas run every weekday night for some months and then come to a final climax.

The genre is now worldwide. Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, in particular, but also other Latin American countries even export their telenovelas quite successfully around the world. Exclusive US rights to the plot-concept of Colombia’s hugely popular “Ugly Betty (Betty La Fea)” were not long ago sold for serious money. In other words, when we’re talking telenovelas, we’re talking about something ultra high profile.

So how they portray— or don’t— people of color is a really big deal in our multi-colored hemisphere. There have been some hard-hitting documentaries on racism in US media, such as the late Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions and Color Adjustment, and Deborah Gee’s Slaying The Dragon. In Denying Brazil Brazilian director Joel Zito Araújo zeroes in on the very same issue: persistent white racism in media, with Brazilian telenovelas — usually acknowledged as the best there are in Latin America — in close-up…

…To properly grasp the documentary’s message, one needs to take a step back and understand the way race works in Brazil and many Latin American nations. In the USA for most purposes, there is a binary code — one is either black or white, however light-skinned. In much of Latin America, however, the code that dominates is one which puts value on the lightness of skin color, the nearness to being white.
 
This code obviously still prizes being white as the index of both beauty and intelligence, and disfavors being black as signifying unattractiveness and stupidity, but there is no fixed In-Out as there is in the USA. There is instead a microscopically detailed ladder of racial acceptability, where the more you can “whiten” yourself the better things get for you. It is referred to as branqueamento in Portuguese, blanqueamiento in Spanish and can be translated to whitening in English.
 
Over the past hundred years this different system has permitted many Latin American commentators to claim that racism is peculiar to the USA, and that Brazil, for instance, is a “racial democracy” or that Venezuela is a “coffee-colored” country where lots of folk are at least a little mixed in origin, so being lack doesn’t matter. Denying Brazil rips the mask off this comforting myth…

Read the entire review here.

The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: a review focused on Brazil and the United States

Cadernos de Saúde Pública/Reports in Public Health
Volume 20, Number 3, Rio de Janeiro, (May/June 2004)
pages 660-678
DOI: 10.1590/S0102-311X2004000300003

Claudia Travassos
Departamento de Informações em Saúde
Centro de Informação Científica e Tecnológica,
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

David R. Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Race has been widely used in studies on health and healthcare inequalities, especially in the United States. Validity and reliability problems with race measurement are of concern in public health. This article reviews the literature on the concept and measurement of race and compares how the findings apply to the United States and Brazil. We discuss in detail the data quality issues related to the measurement of race and the problems raised by measuring race in multiracial societies like Brazil. We discuss how these issues and problems apply to public health and make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research.

“Race is a social construct, but as for other aspects of social stratification, with biological consequences.”

The notion that health is influenced by the social position of individuals has been known for many centuries. Nancy Krieger notes that since Hippocrates the relationship between health and social position has been acknowledged. It has also been shown that social disparities in mortality exist for almost all causes of death in most societies, and these disparities have been increasing in recent decades in several developed countries.

Race has been used extensively in the medical and public health literature, especially in the United States, to measure social differences in health outcomes and treatment, and its use has increased in recent decades. In the US, there is a vast literature that relates race to disparities in health outcomes, which shows that race is an important predictor of health status. “Blacks” in the US are disadvantaged compared to “Whites” on most indicators of economic status and health. Despite a reduction in these racial inequalities on both of these indicators during and immediately after the Civil Rights movement (the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s), they have remained large or have widened ever since. In the US, adjustment for socio-economic status (SES) always reduces and sometimes even eliminates racial disparities in health. A recent publication of the Institute of Medicine also documented that there are large racial differences in the quality and intensity of medical treatment in the US, even after adjustment for access factors, SES, and severity of illness.

In Brazil, there are fewer studies of racial inequalities in health. Batista, using data from death certificates, has shown that “Black” men and women had the highest crude mortality rates in 1999 in the State of São Paulo. Data based on census and national household surveys show that aggregate infant mortality in Brazil in the years 1977, 1987, and 1993 was higher for “Blacks and “Pardos” (“Browns”) and that it declined at a lower rate when compared with “Whites”. Martins & Tanaka, using data from the Committee on Maternal Mortality, have also shown large differences in the risk of dying due to maternal causes in the State of Paraná in the years 1993 and 1997, which disproportionately affected “Black” and “Yellow” (Asian) women. Maternal mortality did not differ between “Parda” (“Brown”) and “White” women. Dachs, using data from the 1998 National Household Survey (PNAD), found no statistically significant difference by “skin color/ race” in self-assessed health status after adjusting for education and income level. Barros et al., based on longitudinal data, have shown worse health outcomes for “Black” children in Southern Brazil, which is reduced after adjustment for SES and various other variables (marital status, maternal age, parity, planned pregnancy, social support, smoking, work during pregnancy, and antenatal care). The study results also suggest that “Black” mothers receive lower quality of care as compared to “White” ones. There are also indications that in Brazil racial inequalities are more common in treatment than in access to health care services.

The objective of this article is to review the literature related to the concept and measurement of race with a focus on the US and Brazil. We will discuss both the measurement of race in these two multiracial societies and data quality problems. We also make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research. Although the use of race in public health research has been discussed in relation to definitional and methodological problems in the United States, the Brazilian public health literature has not discussed in detail how such problems apply to Brazil. This article is intended to review the literature and introduce a discussion regarding broader as well as country-specific questions and problems related to the use of this category in public health…

…Despite the fact that race has been used as a surrogate for genetic information until the onset of molecular genetics, there is no scientific support to continue using race in Public Health as a marker for genetic susceptibility. Parra et al. have recently shown that skin color in Brazilians cannot be used as a genetic marker, because physical traits have been shown to be a poor predictor of African ancestry in this population. In both the United States and Brazil, although the risk of sickle-cell anemia varies by race, race is not a reliable predictor of sickle-cell anemia…

…Despite existing controversies in the biomedical literature, it is widely accepted that racial/ethnic categories are imprecise and changing measures that are historically, administratively, and politically constructed. The salience given to race, as well as the meaning and the measure of race itself in census and health data, varies across countries and across time. The history of race classification in the US and Brazil are good examples of these variations as will be discussed later in this article…

…Measuring race in admixed populations

The question of whether populations of mixed origins can be categorized into any simple, finite, discrete categories is becoming central to racial/ethnic taxonomy. Some societies have large proportions of admixed people and many others are increasingly becoming admixed. Immigration in the US, especially from Latin American countries, increased in the last few decades, making its population much more heterogeneous. The projection of the US Census Bureau is that by 2050 one half of the US population will be “Non-White” and 21% of the population will be of multiple ancestry.

Despite the possibility of answering questions with multiple races, the new OMB classification in the US is not a good solution for classifying admixed people. For miscegenation that goes back many generations, individuals simply do not know about their ancestry. Whenever people’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents descend from intermarriages of admixed people, “pure” ancestry becomes very difficult to trace. In Latin American countries such as Brazil where miscegenation occurred at very early stages, it is difficult for a large number of people to answer questions about their origins.

It can also be argued that people do not know their ancestry because origin played a distinct role in societies with early miscegenation. As a result, many people may not find a place in any of the selected discrete “races” categories. In the 2000 US census, 43% of people that identified themselves as “Hispanic or Latino” chose, in the race question, to answer “some other race” (http://www.census.gov/mso/www/rsf/racedata/sld008.htm, accessed on 10/Oct/ 2002). And they usually inserted their country of origin or an alternative term for their Hispanic ethnicity for their race.

When assessing their own race, recent immigrants from countries where race is not as central in social structure as in the US may apply criteria adopted in their original country. On the other hand, descendents of migrants are more likely to respond to the race question using different criteria from the ones used by their parents. The fact that this classification is based on pure-race categories of ancestry and the absence of a multiracial category increases the chance of misclassification or non-specification for admixed people. On the other hand, multiracial categories tend to be very heterogeneous, and the greater the admixture in a population, the lower the discriminatory power of racial classifications.

Therefore, fluidity and ambiguity of racial measurement increases as the population becomes more multicultural and admixed. The more admixed a society, the greater the misspecification and heterogeneity of racial categories based on ancestry. Bias will also affect classifications that allow people to be classified in more than one pure-race category, as in the new US classification. Multiracial categories also tend to be very heterogeneous. At the same time, US data on children born to Black/White unions indicate that infants with a Black mother and White father consistently have higher health risks than those with a White mother and Black father, suggesting that in at least some situations there may be health risks linked to the specific pattern of multiracial status.

The use of skin color may be a more adequate proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination in admixed societies than racial measurement based on ancestry. Ethnicity or nationality may also be more meaningful in societies with recent migrants…

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Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States

Duke University Press
2009
408 pages
19 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4440-7
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4426-1

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship
• 2. Maxixe’s Travels: Cultural Exchange and Erasure
• 3. Playing Politics: Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro
• 4. Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic
• 5. Another “Global Vision”: (Trans)Nationalism in the Sao Paulo Black Press
• 6. Black Mothers, Citizen Sons
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index

Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
ISSN 1940-0764
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2009)

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of self as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to “be” Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on “nation drag,” they passed not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.

Read the entire article here.

Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 25: Conference on Latin American History 3
Thursday, 2012-01-03: 13:00-15:00 CST (Local Time)
Conti Room (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Matt D. O’Hara, University of California, Santa Cruz

Papers:

• “Picturing Families in Black and White: Race, Family, and Social Mobility in Colonial Minas Gerais, Brazil” / Mariana L. Dantas, Ohio University
• “On ‘Infected Roots’ and ‘Foul Origins’: Social Mobility and the Memory of Race among Ranching Families in Late-Colonial Western Mexico” / Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College
• “A Family Story: Seven Generations of Africans and Afro-Descendents in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais” / Douglas Libby, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• “Between Freedom and Slavery: Articulating Kinships and Achieving Manumission in Colonial Peru” / Rachel Sarah O’Toole, University of California, Irvine

Comment: Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, University of Kansas

Over the last three decades, scholars of colonial and early national Latin America have worked to organize archives and compile quantitative data relative to the demographic composition and patterns of social interaction that marked those societies. Thanks to their efforts, we now have a better understanding of the impact Iberian, African and Indigenous peoples had on the formation of a colonial population; what the dominant patterns of family formation and population growth were; how the social and economic behavior of colonial elites supported the social reproduction of white privilege; how the social and economic behavior of Blacks and Indios challenged or at least complicated the existing social and racial hierarchies. These efforts, moreover, have now resulted in rich datasets that allow historians to follow individuals and their families over time to understand better the impact family formation and their various social and economic behaviors have had on the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups, as well as the history of particular localities, in this formative period of Latin American societies. The papers in this panel employ the study of families in a generational perspective as a new methodological approach to explore further issues of social mobility among persons of non-Iberian of mixed descent and their relevance to the development of a colonial or early national social order in Latin America. Through their focus on specific families and their local connections, moreover, the papers help to elucidate questions about the long term impact of individual social improvement on, and the importance of local practices and circumstances to, the social standing of families whose members transcended the social boundaries between free and slave, black/indio and white. Together these papers advance the current scholarship on race relations and social mobility in colonial and early national Latin America in two fundamental ways. First, they integrate historical narratives of black, white, and indigenous social experiences—which still tend to be developed separately—and demonstrate that certain social practices and behaviors that shaped social orders in the past resulted sometimes from the coordinated (and not oppositional) actions and efforts of members of mixed-race family and social units. Second, they highlight how socio-economic practices and behaviors that influenced local realities first, and broader regional, national, or imperial realities second, were born out of strategies individual families pursued generation after generation to ensure the well-being of their members.

Hue & Phenotype: Colorism… Even More Complex

50shadesofblack.com | Fueling Conversation
2012-09-21

Dash Harris
In.a.Dash.Media

I have interviewed over 100 people for this docu-series and recently I’ve come across more and more interviewees who ask me about my background. I’ve had a handful of Caribbeans ask me if I were ‘dougla,’ a person of Indian or indigenous and African ancestry and when I was in Honduras I was called a mulatta, which means the same. Usually someone who identifies as a mulatto is of european and african ancestry but that’s not how it was used in Honduras among the people who described me as such. I asked the reasons for these assumptions and people pointed out that my skin wasn’t “very dark” and my hair was curly and my eyes were “different.” I found that interesting because I consider myself a chocolate brown, my hair has gone days without a comb being ran through it because of the wrangling that it calls for and I see my eyes as any other person’s eyes can be. One Garifuna young man said I wasn’t ‘black enough’ and I could remedy that by getting a ‘super black boyfriend,’ he graciously volunteered himself. All courting aside, I thought he and many others were just pointing out the phenotypes that guide perception and categorization of ancestry in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is important to note that the U.S. is the only country that followed the one drop rule of hypo-descent, where you were considered ‘Black’ no matter what other ancestry you had. This did not exist in Latin America so it gave way to many ways to describe someone based on skin tone, hair color, hair texture, size of nose, lips, eyes. These all decide what category you’ll fit into. Your desciptors may also vary just based on individual perception. In Brazil there are 134 color descriptors. In the Dominican Republic ‘javao’ describes someone who is of pale of light complexion with “African features,” the list below shows more…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s Affirmative-Action Quotas: Progress?

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2012-11-05

Ibram H. Rogers, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
State University of New York, Albany

Brazil recently passed what was probably the most sweeping affirmative-action law in the modern history of higher education. While the livelihood of affirmative action in the United States is in the hands of the Supreme Court, Brazil now requires its public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for its low-income students and compels its institutions to diversify significantly.
 
Yes, Brazil instituted what was firmly resisted by liberals and conservatives in the post-civil-rights-American push for affirmative action—quotas. The law comes after Brazil’s Supreme Court in April unanimously upheld the racial quota at the University of Brasilia, enacted in 2004, reserving 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race  students. The Law of Social Quotas will most likely face a challenge in the courts but, based on this earlier decision, it seems likely to stand.
 
The law forces the nation’s superior and largely free public universities to assign spots according to the racial makeup of each of the 26 states and the capital. Lawmakers and educators know that will lead to a surge in diversity in states with large black or mixed-race populations (well, surge may be putting it mildly). Officials expect the number of black students to jump nearly sevenfold, from 8,700 to 56,000.
 
The law gives public universities just four years to ensure that half of their entering classes come from public schools, which low-income students disproportionately attend. (Middle- and upper-class students, who are more likely to be white, typically attend private elementary and seconday schools.)
 
The law is nearly universally popular among Brazilian lawmakers. Only one out of 81 senators voted against it last month. President Dilma Rousseff signed it into law on August 29. Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told The New York Times he is “completely in favor” of quotas.
 
“Try finding a black doctor, a black dentist, a black bank manager, and you will encounter great difficulty,” Da Silva said. “It’s important, at least for a span of time, to guarantee that the blacks in Brazilian society can make up for lost time.”…

…For scholars of race, Brazil and the United States present a fascinating contrast, despite some similarities. The United States and Brazil have the two largest populations of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. A slight majority of Brazil’s 196 million people identify as black or mixed-race. Like in the United States, many of these black and mixed-race people are subjected to forms of racism that prevent access to higher education. Unlike in the United States, however, denial of this reality is not a problem. There is a vibrant national mainstream discussion of racism, and new dynamic legislators and laws to undo its effects…

Read the entire article here.

Quilombismo and the Afro-Brazilian Quest for Citizenship

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 43, Number 8 (November 2012)
pages 847-871
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712461794

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Between the radicalism of Black Brazilian movements of the 1980s, an aftermath of the negation and rejection of the myth of “racial democracy” that denies Brazilian subtle racism, the rise of re- Africanization sensibilities among Afro-Carnival groups, and the current ambivalent co-optation that has been packaged as “affirmative action” in the new millennium, a missing link to the many quests for Afro-Brazilianness lies in the (dis)locations that permeate the issues of identity, consciousness, and Africa-rootedness. Recent studies have remained invested in the polarity between the rigidity of “race” (one-drop rule) from the North American perspective and the fluidity of identity as professed by the South American miscegenation thesis. Regardless of the given schools of thought, or discourses, that have not resolved the oppressive sociopolitical realities on the ground, one must face the many levels of (dis)locations that define Afro-Brazilian identities. This essay draws upon the cultural productions of five Afro-Brazilian poets from various regions of Brazil, namely, Oliveira Silveira, Lepê Correia, Jamu Minka, Abelardo Rodrigues, and Carlos de Assumpção. Beyond exposing the marginalized poets to a wider readership in English, the essay also engages the current debate in the shift from racial democracy to affirmative action in Brazil and the implications for continued racial tensions and contradictions in the Brazilian state.

Read or purchase the article here.

Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy

University of Rochester Press (an imprint of Boydell & Brewer)
2009-04-01
443 pages
9 x 6
Hardback ISBN: 9781580462624
eBook ISBN: 9781580467100

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power.

In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time.

Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts.

Contents

1. Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
2. Two Faces of Racial Democracy
3. Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
4. Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
5. (Un)Broken Linkages
6. The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
7. Afro-Brazilian Carnival
8. Film and Fragmentation
9. Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
10. The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
11. (Un)Transgressed Tradition
12. Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
13. Quilombo without Frontiers
14. Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandao
15. The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production