Mixed Race Studies

The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America (Lecture by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva)

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE
University of Rhode Island
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus
Tuesday, 2010-10-12, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z)

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

Other works by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva:

• “More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review]”
• “Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America”
• “From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA”
• “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States?” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era (with David G. Embrick)

Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age (Lecture by Duana Fullwiley)

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE
University of Rhode Island
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus
Tuesday, 2010-10-05, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z)

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

Watch the lecture below:

Other articles by or about Duana Fullwiley:

• “Race and Genetics: An Attempt to Define the Relationship”
• “Race in a Genetic World”
• “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine”
• “Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?”

From “Race in a Genetic World”:

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991

Duke University Press
2000
424 pages
21 b&w photographs, 2 maps, 1 table
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2385-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2420-1

Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals, unlike their European counterparts, rejected biological categories of race as a basis for discrimination. But this did not eliminate social hierarchies; instead, it redefined racial categories as cultural differences, such as differences in education or manners. In Indigenous Mestizos Marisol de la Cadena traces the history of the notion of race from this turn-of-the-century definition to a hegemony of racism in Peru.

De la Cadena’s ethnographically and historically rich study examines how indigenous citizens of the city of Cuzco have been conceived by others as well as how they have viewed themselves and places these conceptions within the struggle for political identity and representation. Demonstrating that the terms Indian and mestizo are complex, ambivalent, and influenced by social, legal, and political changes, she provides close readings of everyday concepts such as marketplace identity, religious ritual, grassroots dance, and popular culture, as well as of such common terms as respect, decency, and education. She shows how Indian has come to mean an indigenous person without economic and educational means—one who is illiterate, impoverished, and rural. Mestizo, on the other hand, has come to refer to an urban, usually literate, and economically successful person claiming indigenous heritage and participating in indigenous cultural practices. De la Cadena argues that this version of de-Indianization—which, rather than assimilation, is a complex political negotiation for a dignified identity—does not cancel the economic and political equalities of racism in Peru, although it has made room for some people to reclaim a decolonized Andean cultural heritage.

This highly original synthesis of diverse theoretical arguments brought to bear on a series of case studies will be of interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, gender studies, and history, in addition to Latin Americanists.

Table of Contents

About the Series
Acknowledgments
Past Dialogues about Race: An Introduction to the Present
1. Decency in 1920 Urban Cuzco: The Cradle of the Indigenistas
2. Liberal Indigenistas versus Tawantinsuyu: The Making of the Indian
3. Class, Masculinity, and Mestizaje: New Incas and Old Indians
4. Insolent Mestizas and Respeto: The Redefinition of Mestizaje
5. Cuzquenismo, Respeto, and Discrimination: The Mayordomias of Almudena
6 Respeto and Authenticity: Grassroots Intellectuals and De-Indianized Indigenous Culture
7. Indigenous Mestizos, De-Indianization, and Discrimination: Cultural Racism in Cuzco
Notes
Bibliography
Index

“Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!”: Questioning the Concept of “Race” in Southern Bahia, Brazil

Ethos
Volume 35, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 383-409
DOI: 10.1525/eth.2007.35.3.383

Michael D. Baran, Preceptor in Expository Writing
Harvard University

In 2003, teachers at the municipal high school in Belmonte, Brazil, began presenting students with a radically different ideology about racial categorization: an essentialized ideology that defines anyone not “purely” branco (white) as negro (black). This system of categorization conflicts with popular belief in a mixed-race moreno identity based not only on ancestry but also on observable physical features. Through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods, I examine this apparent clash of ideologies in Belmonte with respect to academic theories on the cognition of race and ethnicity. I show how children and adults integrate certain aspects of essentialism but not others in their constructions of identity and in the way they reason about hypothetical scenarios. These nuanced solutions to the challenges posed by explicit conflicts over supposedly natural categories lead to my own questioning of race in anthropological theory.

During a March afternoon in 2003, in an eighth-grade science class in Belmonte, Brazil, racial ideologies collided. The lesson of the day dealt with human biology and basic genetics. One student in the class asked the teacher about the biology of race mixing. The teacher then tried to clarify the supposedly natural facts about racial classification for the class. She explained that there were only two races—blonde and blue-eyed brancos (whites) and everyone else, considered negros (blacks). Although a few heads nodded in approval, most of the class looked confused or upset. The teacher was presenting a particularly extreme form of the racial classification system that black movements have urged Brazilians to adopt, one in which those with any traceable African ancestry would self-identify as “negro” as a sign of positive self-image and political solidarity. While this conception of “negro” has been animating black movements for at least 25 years in Brazil’s urban centers, it has only now reached more rural areas like Belmonte. And it is not always well received.

“I’m morena, not negra!”2 cried 14-year old Paula. This claim of mixed-race “brown” identity echoes the more common ideology in Belmonte, academically labeled “racial democracy.” The roots of this ideology extend back to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s influential 1933 book, The Masters and the Slaves (1946). Freyre found strength in the biological and cultural mixing of Portuguese colonizers, native Brazilians, and slaves of African descent, whereas race scientists before him saw only physical and mental weakness (Freyre 1946; Nina Rodrigues 1938; Ramos 1939). Freyre’s foundational story, still framing Brazilian history in school texts, holds that historical mixing has created an ethnically unified population without stark racial divisions or resulting discriminations making Brazil a supposed “racial paradise.” Consistent with this ideology, most residents of Belmonte prefer to self-identify with the inclusive term morena, which can be used in various linguistic contexts to refer to almost any combination of physical features. To call someone a “negra” within this racial democracy ideology is to separate them out from the mixed Brazilian mainstream and denigrate them as a separate category of “pure” black, associated with slavery and Africa. That is just what caused a stir when Ana Maria yelled out to Paula, “Girl, you are not morena. We are negras!”

In the title of this article, the phrase “Questioning the Concept of Race” has two levels of significance. First, it refers to the questions of some students as teachers impose new identity categories that clash with previously held “common sense” beliefs about race. Second, the title of this article refers to my own questions regarding academic conceptions of race. In the literature on racial categorization in Brazil, I found two different arguments that parallel the debate in the class between Ana Maria and Paula. On the one hand, a more conventional wisdom holds that racial categories in Brazil are multiple (up to hundreds in some cases), they can change from day to day or person to person, and they are based on physical features rather than rules of descent (Harris 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983).5 On the other hand, recent critics, both anthropological and psychological, argue that racial categories in Brazil are essentialized: they are dichotomous, rigid, and defined by descent (Gil-White 2001b; Sheriff 2001). Observing the coexistence of both ideologies in Belmonte and the active construction of supposedly natural categories by local actors led me to question both sides of this scholarly debate and to question the academic concept of race more generally…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Melungeon Identity Movement and the Construction of Appalachian Whiteness

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Volume 11, Issue 1 (June 2001)
pages 131-146
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.131

Anita Puckett, Associate Professor of Appalachian Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

How this binary system is discursively constituted depends upon the ways in which elements of a repertoire interconnect to distribute or consolidate power and privilege across discursive contexts. Circulation of the revitalized lexeme Melungeon as a valued “object” within Appalachian discourse reveals linguistic processes by which white racial privilege is constructed and expanded, mixed-race classification excluded, and nonwhite disenfranchisement reproduced.

Read the entire article here.

It is impossible to evaluate the impact of multiracial politics without attention to historical and social contexts.  Without such contexts, it is tempting to conclude, as many have, that the collective efforts of multiracials are inherently progressive, inherently regressive, or even irrelevant.  Appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show, for example, a black/white woman explains to the audience that as a multiracial person she can be a bridge to promote understanding between racial groups.  In hearings over changes to racial classification, opponents to the possibility of the state enumerating mixed descent persons invoke the specter of apartheid South Africa, suggesting that new categories will create an escape hatch from blackness.  At around the same time, some scholars claim that Asian outmarriage reflects Asian self-hatred and is an attempt to leave behind a stigmatized group.  Still others state that the issue is “old news,” not important enough time commenting on it.

DaCosta, Kimberly McClain, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 174.

Ethnic Studies 064: Mixed Race Descent in the Americas

Mills College, Oakland, California
Fall 2010

Melinda Micco, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

This is an introductory course that examines the historical and theoretical development of identities and of communities of multiracial and multiethnic people. In the academy, in government, and in popular culture, the lives and experiences of racially mixed people, and how others perceive them, have become topics of intense debate and scrutiny since the late-1990s. Mostly recently, newly elected President Barack Obama’s racial and ethnic identity highlighted the issues and played a significant role in the 2008 presidential elections.

This course will examine the historical evolution of such terms as the “marginal man” and the “150% man” to understand the present concerns of racial and ethnic stereotyping. We will engage questions such as: Who are “mixed-race” people in the US? How are they perceived, described, and treated in various communities? What are the effects of various federal and state policies, such as anti-miscegenation laws, American Indian “relocation,” immigration, and Japanese American internment? What is the legacy of race-based chattel slavery on both African-American and non-African-American communities? What are racial and color hierarchies and how do they affect mixed-race people? What are real lived experiences of mixed-race people in the US?

Required Text

• Gaskins, P. F. (1999). What are you?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. New York: Macmillan.
• Ifekwunigwe, J. O. (Ed.) (2004). Mixed Race Studies: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
• Spickard, P. R., & Burroughs, W. J. (Eds.) (2000). We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

For more information, click here.

Redeeming the “Character of the Creoles”: Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 23, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 40–72
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01359.x

Yvonne Fabella, Lecturer of History
University of Pennsylvania

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau’s claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.

Read or purchase the article here.

Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba

Rutgers University Press
2010-03-01
232 pages
3 illustrations. 2 tables and 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4723-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4722-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-4923-1

Nadine T. Fernandez, Associate Professor of Social Sciences
State University of New York, Empire State College

Scholars have long heralded mestizaje, or race mixing, as the essence of the Cuban nation. Revolutionizing Romance is an account of the continuing significance of race in Cuba as it is experienced in interracial relationships. This ethnography tracks young couples as they move in a world fraught with shifting connections of class, race, and culture that are reflected in space, racialized language, and media representations of blackness, whiteness, and mixedness. As one of the few scholars to conduct long-term anthropological fieldwork in the island nation, Nadine T. Fernandez offers a rare insider’s view of the country’s transformations during the post-Soviet era. Following a comprehensive history of racial formations up through Castro’s rule, the book then delves into more intimate and contemporary spaces. Language, space and place, foreign tourism, and the realm of the family each reveal, through the author’s deft analysis, the paradox of living a racialized life in a nation that celebrates a policy of colorblind equality.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Interracial Couples from Colony to Revolution
• 2. Socialist Equality and the Color-Blind Revolution
• 3. Mapping Interracial Couples: Race and Space in Havana
• 4. The Everyday Presence of Race
• 5. Blackness, Whiteness, Class, and the Emergent Economy
• 6. Interracial Couples and Racism at Home
• Epilogue

Artist Ellen Gallagher humbled by new honor

The Providence Journal
2010-02-21

Bill Van Siclen, Journal Arts Writer

The first time her work appeared in a Whitney Biennial, the every-other-year exhibit that aims to take the pulse of contemporary art, Ellen Gallagher was just one of many up-and-coming artists vying for attention.

That was back in 1995, when Gallagher, a Providence-born painter and printmaker whose interests range from carpentry and scrimshaw to African-American history and culture, was barely out of art school.

Fifteen years later, Gallagher is Biennial-bound once again.

This time, however, she’s returning as a certified art star — someone whose work is avidly collected by major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum, and whose name is regularly mentioned alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Even the Whitney Museum, which organizes the Whitney Biennial (and where the show’s 2010 edition opens Thursday), has several of her works in its permanent collection…

…WHILE MANY ARTISTS draw inspiration from a variety of sources, Gallagher’s reference points — everything from slavery to sea creatures to Sun Ra — seem particularly wide ranging. Then again, so is her background.

Born in 1965, Gallagher grew up in a biracial household headed by her father, an American-born Cape Verdean who traced his roots back to 19th-century whalers and who did odd jobs to support the family, including occasional stints as a professional boxer.

When he left suddenly, the burden of raising Gallagher fell on her mother, a white Irish Catholic who eventually saved enough money to buy a house in Providence’s Washington Park neighborhood…

Read the entire article here.