Mixed Race Studies

Afro Latinos: everywhere, yet invisible

Our Weekly
2011-10-06

Cynthia Griffin

Struggles with self-image, assimilation mirror Black American experience

Last year, during a discussion on increasing the number of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Angel’s centerfielder Torii Hunter in a USA Today interview called the dark-skinned Latino baseball players “imposters” and said they are not Black.

Hunter’s comments strike at the heart of an issue that is one reason scholar Miriam Jiménez Román is undertaking a three-day conference called “Afro Latinos Now! Strategies for Visibility and Action,” on Nov. 3-5 in New York that will be the biggest such effort her organization, The AfroLatin@ Forum, has undertaken.

“This is the first time we have done such a comprehensive event where we discuss Afro Latinos specifically. We’re going to look at the state of the field and where we want to be, and there is going to be a heavy emphasis on youth, especially those in middle school years.”

Jiménez Román says the confusion Hunter demonstrated about the connection between Africans born in Latin America and those born in the United States is particularly acute for U.S.-based 11- to 15-year-old Afro Latinos. In the context of a racist society like America, they are not only struggling to figure out how they feel about themselves, but also how they connect in relation to others, especially African Americans.

There are millions of Afro Latinos in America who live their lives in what is essentially a “Black” context but identify themselves as White, because of the perceived stigma of being African American, said Jiménez Román, who last year came to the West Coast promoting her newly released book “Afro-Latino Reader,” co-edited with Juan Flores. The 584-page publication, which grew out of the notes the two professors always pulled together for classes they taught, explores people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean…

…“There is the idea that Latino culture is Mestizo and European and Indian, and Black people don’t belong,” said the race and ethnicity professor about how many Latin American countries think about themselves. In fact, Latinos of African descent have been in many countries for at least 200 years.

If they do acknowledge their Black citizens, Jimenez Roman said officials will say “they all live on the coast.”

“This isolates them. Or in Bolivia, for example, there are Black communities in the mountains. They are totally isolated and ignored.”

But in reality, Afro Latinos are everywhere in Latin America as they are in the United States, says the head of the AfroLatin@ Forum…

Read the entire article here.

Racist Tendencies Common in Too Many Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-05-23

Cedric Sunray, MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians
Alabama, USA

Last month’s racially motivated killings in Oklahoma, perpetrated by Cherokee Indian Jake England and his white roommate against members of North Tulsa’s black community, once again bring to light the prejudicial tendencies held by many in our Indian communities.
 
This reality is the literal “Negro Elephant in the Room,” which many tribal communities attempt to pass off as issues of sovereignty, enrollment decision making, “and, well we had it as bad as them” rhetoric. However, the real effect is that our children grow up in environments where tribal governments and tribal members broadcast their racist ideologies — such as in the more recent case of the Cherokee Freedmen—to an audience of young people who are not provided with the full histories and realities of their historical connections to the black community.
 
I have seen one too many times where the half-black grandchildren of Indian people are even marginalized by their own Indian families or are viewed as the “lone exception” to their prejudicial leanings due to their blood connection.

In 1978, Terry Anderson and Kirke Kickingbird were hired by the National Congress of American Indians to research the issue of federal recognition and present a paper on their findings to the National Conference on Federal Recognition which was being held in Nashville, Tennessee. Their paper, “An Historical Perspective on the Issue of Federal Recognition and Non-recognition” closed with the following statement:
 
“The reasons that are usually presented to withhold recognition from tribes are 1) that they are racially tainted with the blood of African tribes-men or 2) greed, for newly recognized tribes will share in the appropriations for services given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The names of justice, mercy, sanity, common sense, fiscal responsibility, and rationality can be presented just as easily on the side of those advocating recognition.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

Temple University Press
May 2012
230 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-184-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43990-183-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43990-185-4

Kristi Brian, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology and Director of Diversity Education and Training
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family.

Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called “colorblind” adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses.

Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.

Contents

• Preface: The Personal and the Political
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Adoption Matters: Beyond Catastrophe and Spectacle
• 2. Adoption Facilitators and the Marketing of Family Building: “Expert” Systems Meet Spurious Culture
• 3. Navigating Racism: Avoiding and Confronting “Difference” in Families
• 4. Navigating Kinship: Searching for Family beyond and within “the Doctrine of Genealogical Unity”
• 5. Strategic Interruptions versus Possessive Investment: Transnational Adoption in the Era of New Racism
• Notes
• References
• Index