Mixed Race Studies

For the first time, blacks outnumber whites in Brazil

Miami Herald
2011-05-24

Taylor Barnes, Special to the Miami Herald

Brazilians are no longer reluctant to admit being black or ‘pardo,’ experts said.

RIO DE JANEIRO—In the past decade, famously mixed-race Brazilians either became prouder of their African roots, savvier with public policies benefiting people of color or are simply more often darker skinned , depending on how you read the much-debated new analysis of the census here.

A recently released 2010 survey showed that Brazil became for the first time a “majority minority” nation, meaning less than half the population now identifies as white.
 
Every minority racial group—officially, “black,” “pardo” (mixed), “yellow” and “indigenous”—grew in absolute numbers since 2000. “White” was the only group that shrank in both absolute numbers and percentage, becoming 48 percent of the population from 53 percent 10 years ago.

Experts say the shift reflects a growing comfort in not calling oneself white in order to prosper in Brazil and underscores the growing influence of popular culture. Paula Miranda-Ribeiro, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said another factor was the increase in bi-racial unions with mixed-race kids.

While Americans look at race as a question of origin, Brazilians largely go by appearance, so much so that the children of the same parents could mark different census categories, she said…

…Activists and artists here say they’ve seen a greater mobilization for mixed-race Brazilians to call themselves black or pardo in recent years.

“The phenomenon I perceive are people getting out of that pressure to whiten themselves, and assuming their blackness,” says visual artist Rosana Paulino, whose doctoral work at the University of São Paulo focused on the representation of blacks in the arts.
 
She sees a rising self-esteem on the part of mixed-race Brazilians who stop using middle-ground terms like “moreninho” (“a little tan”) or “marrom-bombom” (“brown chocolate”) and simply call themselves black…

Read the entire article here.

Reliability of race assessment based on the race of the ascendants: a cross-sectional study

BMC Public Health
Volume 2, Number 1 (2002-01-16)
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-2-1
5 pages

Sandra C. Fuchs
Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Sylvia M. Guimarães
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Cristine Sortica
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Fernanda Wainberg
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Karine O. Dias
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Mariana Ughini
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

José Augusto S. Castro
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Flavio D. Fuchs
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Race is commonly described in epidemiological surveys based on phenotypic characteristics. Training of interviewers to identify race is time-consuming and self identification of race might be difficult to interpret. The aim of this study was to determine the agreement between race definition based on the number of ascendants with black skin colour, with the self-assessment and observer’s assessment of the skin colour.

…Methods

A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 50 women aged 14 years or older, which were systematically selected from an outpatient clinics of a University affiliated hospital in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. Participants included in the study answered to a pre-tested and structured questionnaire, which collected information on the number of black ascendants (parents and grandparents), school attendance, and included a self-assignment of the colour of skin as well as the observer assessment of skin colour.
 
In a preliminary phase, a training was provided to the observers to standardise the identification of the skin colour and in the details of several phenotypic characteristics employed in Brazil before [10] such as the colour of hair, lines and hands’ palm surface. Following the training, the principal investigator and the research assistants observed 28 women and compared their findings of the physical features. The research team reached full agreement for skin colour (white, mixture or black), hair colour (blonde, light brown, medium brown, dark brown or black), lines and hands’ palm surface (pink palm and colourless lines, pink palm and red lines or white palm and dark lines) for the last 15 women observed. We also investigated the race of ascendants, through the question: “Which are the race of your ascendants: parents and grandparents?”. A total of six research assistants were certified for the study.
 
During the study, after the informed consent was obtained, one interviewer applied the questionnaire asking questions to the participants and the research team independently registered the information on physical characteristics, observing the women under sunlight. All interviewers were blinded to each other answers. Skin colour was described by the observers as white, mixed or black, the self-assigned skin colour used white, black, mixed, and local words meaning light mulatto and dark mulatto. The race of the parents and grandparents was investigate using a heredogram, which incorporated two generations to the assess the inheritance. Even though information could be reported for a maximum of six ascendants some women did not know the father or grandparents. Therefore, we collapsed the categories with more than 3 ascendants of black origin in the category of at least three black ascendants. There was investigated a sample of 50 women, which did not include the 28 women at the training phase. This sample size was sufficient to detect an agreement of at least 85%, with an error of 10%, and a confidence interval of 95%. In order to calculate the kappa coefficients, self-reported mixed skin colour was collapsed with light mulatto and dark mulatto. Analysis were carried out through Chi-square for contingency tables and kappa statistics to calculate to what extent the observers agreed beyond what we would expect by chance alone [15]. Kappa coefficients were calculated from observation of six interviewers and the skin colour self-assigned by the participant. The Kappa statistic was calculated for each two categories (white vs. non white; black vs. non black and mixed vs. non mixed) and a global Kappa with 95% confidence interval for all three categories. Kappa greater than 0.75 was taken as an excellent agreement, between 0.75 and 0.40 intermediate to good agreement, and below 0.40, poor agreement. The reliability of self-assigned black, mixed, or white skin colour with the number of black ascendants was obtained by weighted kappa. Weights were giving to the frequencies in each cell of the table according to their distance from the diagonal that indicates agreement [16]. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of our Institution and all participants gave their informed consent to participate…

Read the entire article here.

Y-STR diversity and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples

Genetics and Molecular Biology (Former title: Brazilian Journal of Genetics)
Volume 29, Number 4 (São Paulo  2006)
pages 605-607
DOI: 10.1590/S1415-47572006000400004
ISSN 1415-4757

Luzitano Brandão Ferreira
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Celso Teixeira Mendes-Junior
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Cláudia Emília Vieira Wiezel
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Marcelo Rizzatti Luizon
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Aguinaldo Luiz Simões
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

We investigated 50 Mulatto and 120 White Brazilians for the Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers (DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392 and DYS393) and found 79 different haplotypes in the White and 35 in the Mulatto sample. Admixture estimates based on allele frequencies showed that the admixture of the white sample was 89% European, 6% African and 5% Amerindian while the Mulatto sample was 93% European and 7% African. Results were consistent with historical records of the directional mating between European males and Amerindian or African females.

The Brazilian population is a result of interethnic crosses of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians, and is one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. When the first European colonizers arrived (1500 AD), 1-5 million Amerindians already lived in the region that now is known as Brazil (Salzano and Callegari-Jacques, 1988). Before 1820, European colonization was almost exclusively composed of Portuguese while between 1820 and 1975 the great majority of immigrants were from Portugal and Italy, followed by a small number by people from Spain, Germany, Syria and Japan (Carvalho-Silva et al., 2001). Between the 16th and 19th centuries approximately 3.5 million Africans were brought as slaves to Brazil, coming mainly from West, West-Central and Southeast Africa (Curtin, 1969). The colonization of Brazil involved mostly European men, many of whom produced children with Amerindian and African females.

Although the classification of races is wrong from genetic standpoint (Templeton, 1998), Brazilians are classified for census purposes based on color. According to the last Brazilian government census of the 170 million Brazilians, 84 million were males, of which 52% were White, 39% were Brown, 6% were Black and 3% were classified in other categories (IBGE, 2000). Mulatto is the term commonly used in Brazil to designate the offspring result from the union of White and Black people. We used five Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers, recognized as good markers for population studies, to investigate genetic polymorphism and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples.

We investigated 170 healthy, unrelated, individuals seeking paternity investigation at the Ribeirão Preto University Hospital, in the city of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, Southeastern Brazil. The race of the individuals in the sample was determined based on their biomedical records, 120 individuals being White and 50 Mulatto, from Ribeirão Preto and the surrounding towns…

Read the enire article here.

Racial inequalities and perinatal health in the southeast region of Brazil

Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
Volume 40, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1187-1194
DOI: 10.1590/S0100-879X2006005000144
ISSN 1678-4510

L. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

R. A. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

A. A. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

H. Bettiol
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

M. A. Barbieri
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

Few studies are available about racial inequalities in perinatal health in Brazil and little is known about whether the existing inequality is due to socioeconomic factors or to racial discrimination per se. Data regarding the Ribeirão Preto birth cohort, Brazil, whose mothers were interviewed from June 1, 1978 to May 31, 1979 were used to answer these questions. The perinatal factors were obtained from the birth questionnaire and the ethnic data were obtained from 2063 participants asked about self-reported skin color at early adulthood (23-25 years of age) in 2002/2004. Mothers of mulatto and black children had higher rates of low schooling ( £ 4 years, 27.2 and 38.0%) and lower family income ( £ 1 minimum wage, 28.6 and 30.4%). Mothers aged less than 20 years old predominated among mulattos (17.0%) and blacks (14.0%). Higher rates of low birth weight and smoking during pregnancy were observed among mulatto individuals (9.6 and 28.8%). Preterm birth rate was higher among mulattos (9.5%) and blacks (9.7%) than whites (5.5%). White individuals had higher rates of cesarean delivery (34.9%). Skin color remained as an independent risk factor for low birth weight (P < 0.001), preterm birth (P = 0.01), small for gestational age (P = 0.01), and lack of prenatal care (P = 0.02) after adjustment for family income and maternal schooling, suggesting that the racial inequalities regarding these indicators are explained by the socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by mulattos and blacks but are also influenced by other factors, possibly by racial discrimination and/or genetics.

Introduction

Natives, mulattos, blacks, and whites occupy unequal places in the social networks, with differential aspects related to birth, growth, disease, and dying. Racial inequality is not limited to socioeconomic indicators related to quality of life, income and schooling but also occurs in health indicators. In the United States, which have a tradition of research on racial questions, the rates of preterm birth, low birth weight and infant mortality are higher among blacks than among whites (1,2).

Although Brazil is considered to be a country in which racial discrimination is not so significant and in which “racial democracy” prevails, significant socioeconomic inequalities related to diverse ethnic groups exist in this country (3,4). Even in cities in the south of the country, where there is better access to health services, black women have fewer opportunities to receive ideal prenatal care, with repercussions on perinatal health (5-7). In the town of Pelotas, black children have a higher prevalence of low birth weight, preterm birth and restricted intrauterine growth (8). In a study conducted in Rio de Janeiro, black mothers had lower schooling, a greater proportion of smokers and lower prenatal care attendance, cohabited less, and had a higher prevalence of pregnancy during adolescence (9). In Brazil in general, infant mortality is higher among blacks and native Indians (10).

The race/ethnic group category is not useful as a biological category, but is a social construct (11,12). In Brazil, the term race is normally used to refer to phenotype (physical appearance) rather than to ancestrality (origin), as is the case in the US. While US research is based on categories of “pure” races, in Brazil the “brown” or “mulatto” category is commonly used also to refer to cross-bred individuals (13). The determination of race in health studies is usually done by the interviewer, whereas the more recommended procedure is self-classification (11).

Few studies regarding ethnic inequalities and perinatal health have been conducted in Brazil, mainly due to low availability and/or quality of the data or to inadequate instruments for the measurement of race/ethnic origin. Questions related to the inequalities existing between individuals of mulatto and black skin colors have not been fully clarified, with these groups being usually analyzed as non-white in relation to whites. It has not been clarified whether the inequalities existing between ethnic groups regarding perinatal factors are due to socioeconomic factors or to other cultural or genetic factors. To clarify these questions, a study was conducted to analyze a cohort of individuals born in Ribeirão Preto, SP, in which skin color self-reported in adulthood in 2002/2004 was related to the social, economic, obstetrical, and perinatal characteristics of the subjects at birth in 1978/79.

Read the entire article here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Pennsylvania State University Press
2006
384 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-271-02883-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-271-03288-7

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Although both Brazil and the United States inherited European norms that accorded whites privileged status relative to all other racial groups, the development of their societies followed different trajectories in defining white/black relations. In Brazil pervasive miscegenation and the lack of formal legal barriers to racial equality gave the appearance of its being a “racial democracy,” with a ternary system of classifying people into whites (brancos), multiracial individuals (pardos), and blacks (pretos) supporting the idea that social inequality was primarily associated with differences in class and culture rather than race. In the United States, by contrast, a binary system distinguishing blacks from whites by reference to the “one-drop rule” of African descent produced a more rigid racial hierarchy in which both legal and informal barriers operated to create socioeconomic disadvantages for blacks.

But in recent decades, Reginald Daniel argues in this comparative study, changes have taken place in both countries that have put them on “converging paths.” Brazil’s black consciousness movement stresses the binary division between brancos and negros to heighten awareness of and mobilize opposition to the real racial discrimination that exists in Brazil, while the multiracial identity movement in the U.S. works to help develop a more fluid sense of racial dynamics that was long felt to be the achievement of Brazil’s ternary system.

Against the historical background of race relationsin Brazil and the U.S. that he traces in Part I of the book, including a review of earlier challenges to their respective racial orders, Daniel focuses in Part II on analyzing the new racial project on which each country has embarked, with attention to all the political possibilities and dangers they involve.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Historical Foundation
  • 1. Eurocentrism: Racial Formation and the Master Racial Project
  • 2. The Brazilian Path: The Ternary Racial Project
  • 3. The Brazilian Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Ternary Racial Project
  • 4. The U.S. Path: The Binary Racial Project
  • 5. The U.S. Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Binary Racial Project
• Part II. Converging Paths
  • 6. A New U.S. Racial Order: The Demise of Jim Crow Segregation
  • 7. A New Brazilian Racial Order: A Decline in the Racial Democracy Ideology
  • 8. The U.S. Convergence: Toward the Brazilian Path
  • 9. The Brazilian Convergence: Toward the U.S. Path
• Epilogue: The U.S. and Brazilian Racial Orders: Changing Points of Reference
• Notes
• References
• Index

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves

The Guardian
2010-08-25

Tom Phillip

Interviewers plan to reach 190m people, including the long-ignored Kalunga, by motorbike, plane, canoe and donkey

When Jorge Moreira de Oliveira’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather arrived in Brazil in the 18th century he was counted off the slave-ship, branded and dispatched to a goldmine deep in the country’s arid mid-west. After years of scrambling for gold that was shipped to Europe, he fled and became one of the founding fathers of the Kalunga quilombo, a remote mountain-top community of runaway slaves.

On Wednesday last week, more than 200 years later, it was Moreira’s turn to be counted—this time not by slavemasters but by Cleber, a chubby census taker who appeared at his home clutching a blue personal digital assistant (PDA).

“I’m Kalunga. A Brazilian Kalunga,” Moreira told his visitor from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, who diligently noted down details about the interviewee’s eight children, monthly income and toilet arrangements.

Such is Brazil’s 2010 census—a gigantic logistical operation that aims to count and analyse the lives of more than 190 million people in one of the most geographically and racially diverse nations on earth…

…Identity

“It is a question of identity,” said Ivonete Carvalho, the government’s programme director for traditional communities. “When you assert your identity you are saying you want [government] action and access to public policies. [The census] is a fantastic x-ray.”

The Kalungas’ fight for recognition is part of a wider movement for racial equality in Brazil, a country with deep roots in Africa but where Afro-Brazilian politicians and business leaders remain few and far between. According to Carvalho, only one of Brazil’s 81 senators is black, despite the fact that Afro-Brazilians represent at least 53% of the population. The last census found that fewer than 40% of Afro-Brazilians had access to sanitation compared with nearly 63% of whites.

Just as descendents of Brazil’s runaway slaves are finding their voice—and telling the census takers about it—so too are Brazil’s officially black and indigenous communities swelling as a growing number of Brazilians label themselves “black” or “indigenous” rather than “mulatto” when the census takers come knocking.

“People are no longer scared of identifying themselves or insecure about saying: ‘I’m black, and black is beautiful,’ ” Brazil’s minister for racial equality, Elio Ferreira de Araujo, told the Guardian…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Johnson]

American Anthropologist
Volume 110, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pp. 79–80
ISSN 0002-7294; online ISSN 1548-1433
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00013.x

Amanda Walker Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? G. Reginald Daniel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 365 pp.

Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 407 pp.

These two books discuss the racial formations of blackness from the foundations of early capitalism and modernist nation-state formation through contemporary transformations. Both caution against the silencing of race, particularly the dangers of “colorblindness” in political engagement and in theorizations of globalization, but both books also forge critiques of race essentialism. Whereas Globalization and Race explores geopolitics and notions of “diaspora,” Race and Multiraciality explores lineage and multiraciality. The methodological and theoretical approaches are what most separate these texts, as Globalization and Race centers on ethnographies and anthropological theories whereas Race and Multiraciality combines analysis of secondary historical and demographic data and sociological theories…

…Race and Multiraciality compares racial formations in the United States and Brazil, particularly the dimensions of blackness and multiraciality. Daniel argues that the ending of legal segregation in the United States—coupled with challenges to the “binary racial project” or white–black paradigm by multiracial movements—and the disruption of the notion of “racial democracy” and the “ternary racial project” (or white–multiracial–black paradigm) in Brazil by the movements for African Brazilian recognition and racial equality have sent the United States and Brazil on converging paths. Daniel juxtaposes the “Latin Americanization” (p. 259) of U.S. racial politics in the context of emerging recognition of multiraciality and desires for colorblind “racial democracy” with the “Anglo Americanization” (p. 285) of Brazilian racial politics. This is done in the context of increasing dichotomization of negro–branco (black–white) and the interpellation of multiracial people into a unified and “race-d”—versus “colored” as in the colonial and census terms pretos and pardo—African Brazilian identity. Daniel seeks to disrupt the notion that multiraciality is inherently problematic as well as to expose the untenability of colorblindness, particularly in its neoliberal form.

Daniel’s historicization of trajectories of Eurocentrism that underline both “whitening” in Brazil and antimiscegenation in the United States—including the “paranoia about invisible blackness” (p. 37) and the granting of privilege in terms of behavioral and phenotypic proximity to Europeanness that pervaded both nation’s racial projects—seems to suggest that the processes of racial formation in the two nations have converged, or at least intersected, at prior historical moments to the contemporary era. Although he explores the complexity of “Latin” American colonization models in Louisiana and the Southwest as they confront the “Anglo” models of the “North and Upper South,” he overlooks the mythification of the U.S. post–Civil War “North” as itself a variant of a “racial democracy.” In my view, the linearity of his model or metaphor of “converging paths” undermines his attempts to problematize U.S. and Brazilian racial projects. Additionally, although Daniel critiques the “binary racial project” in the United States, he also tends to reify it, at times conflating multiraciality with black and white biraciality (see pp. 173, 295). The racialization of Asian Americans in the United States and Brazil disappears in both his theorization of the “binary” and “ternary” models of race and also his discussions of multiracial movements…

Read or purchase the review here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Bailey]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 36, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 535-536
DOI: 10.1177/009430610703600609

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?, by G. Reginald Daniel. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 360pp. cloth. ISBN: 0271028835.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s adoption of the mark “one or more races” format in 2000 is viewed by some scholars as a racial revolution of sorts. It may signal a changing tide from monoracial understandings of population diversity (i.e., recognizing only single racial heritages) to the interpellation of a more complex phenomenon of multiraciality. Framing this shift as from a binary (black vs. white) to a ternary racial project (white, multiracial, black), sociologist G. Reginald Daniel contributes significantly to our understanding of the contentious issues surrounding this development. Importantly, he does so as an insider, having been active in social movements promoting the recent Census recognition of multiracial identities (p. 5).

In his latest book, Daniel juxtaposes the shifting U.S. dynamic with changes underway in Brazil. Interestingly, that context appears to be moving in the opposite direction, from ternary (white, brown/multiracial, black) to binary (white vs. negro) racial understandings. Hence, he subtitles his book “Converging Paths,” situating it as a must-read for students of comparative racial dynamics. There has yet to be a census adoption of the binary project in Brazil, but it may only be a matter of time.

Framed, then, as a push and pull between binary and ternary racial projects, Daniel’s goal is to understand similarities and differences in these countries’ racial formations and their consequences for both the production of inequality and for the possibility of overcoming it. To do so, he offers an extensive exploration of the existing literature on to media (print, television, and internet) and census bureau/governmental sources, social movement activists, and observations of public behavior in Brazil and the United States. Although the exposition of this extensive material in this comparative fashion constitutes the contribution of this book, much of the material is drawn from his previously published work, as the author points out (pp. 5–6)…

Read or purchase the review here.

Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese

Portuguese Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2011-03-01)
pages 56-69

Francisco Bethencourt, Professor of History
King’s College, London

In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre’s praise of mixed-race people in Brazil challenged the idea of white supremacy, contributing to the building of a new Brazilian identity. In the 1950s, Freyre projected the idea of openness and racial mixture onto the Portuguese empire, fuelling Salazar’s colonial propaganda. The idea of Lusotropicalism was contested by Marvin Harris and Charles Boxer, who demonstrated that there were very few mixed-race people in Angola and Mozambique, and exposed the long history of racism in the Portuguese colonies. However, the fashionable notions of hybridism and creolization have been putting Freyre back on the map. The article exposes the limits of Freyre’s approach of inter-ethnic relations, structured around the flexibility (or otherwise) of white colonists. It engages with the much more interesting but problematic approach suggested by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who shifted to Kongo and African agency the creolization of the Atlantic. It suggests a reassessment of the real Christianization of Kongo and its complex chronology, drawing attention to the royal interests of conversion, the limits of conversion among the population, and the conditions for erosion of Christianity in the long run.