Mixed Race Studies

Races: Passing

TIME Magazine
1947-10-20

Greying, blue-eyed Walter White, for 16 years executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has a skin so light that he frequently has to explain that he is, in deed, a Negro. Last week, in the Saturday Review of Literature, Propagandist White talked openly about a subject many Negroes are careful to avoid: the Negro who lives secretly as a white man.  Wrote he : “Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear — people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the 14 million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is ‘passing‘ — the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites…  Often these emigrants achieve success in business, the professions, the arts and sciences. Many of them have married white people…  Sometimes they tell their husbands or wives of their Negro blood, sometimes not…”

Read the entire article here.

Africa in Mexico: A Repudiated Heritage/África en México: una herencia repudiada

Edwin Mellen Press
2007
140 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-5216-8; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5216-9

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This study explores the African presence in Mexico and the impact it has had on the development of Mexican national identity over the past centuries. By analyzing Mexican miscegenation from a perspective identified as mestizaje positivo (positive miscegenation) where an equality exists among all ethnic heritages are equal forming the glue that binds together the new ethnicity, it reveals that Mexico’s African heritage is alive and well. In the end, the author calls for further examinations into the damage caused to the majority of the Mexican population by a Eurocentric mentality that marks them as inferior.

The Africanization of Mexico from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Edwin Mellen Press
2010
212 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-3781-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-3781-4

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This work is an Afrocentric analysis that subscribes to the notion that there is one human race of multiple ethnicities. It acknowledges Mexico’s African, Amerindian (herein after called First Nations), Asian, and European ethnic heritages. Contrary to the African-disappearance-by-miscegenation-hypothesis-turned-ideology, it introduces the theory of the widespread Africanization of Mexico from the sixteenth century onward.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Álvaro Ochoa Serrano
Introduction
1. African National Names as Denigrating, Obscene and Scatological Language in Mexican Spanish
2. The Colors of Mexican Racism
3. The Africans and Afrodescendants who Constructed Veracruz and the Jarocho Ethos 1521-1778
4. The African Sahelo-Sudanic Belt in the Birth of Mexican Vaqueros and Vaquero Culture in the Veracruz Lowlands
5. Tracing the Afro-Mexican Path: 1813-1910
6. Mexican Food is Soul Food: A Medicine for National Amnesia
7. The Africanness of Mexican Traditional Medicine
8. Memín Pinguín, Hermelinda Linda and Andanzas de Aniceto: The Dark Side of “Light-Reading”
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly “separate but equal” status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages…

Wikipedia contributors, “Jim Crow laws,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.