Mixed Race Studies

Freedom Road Spotlights St. Augustine History

VisitFlorida.com
2012-06-29

Amy Wimmer Schwarb

Derek Hankerson wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

A St. Augustine company is trying to reshape the American story – not to rewrite history, but to retell it.

Derek Hankerson, the man at the helm of Freedom Road, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., learning the same tales of America’s birthplace that are told in children’s textbooks throughout the United States. But he often visited relatives in St. Augustine  and could never reconcile the history he found there with what he learned in school.

“The sign in St. Augustine said, ‘Established in 1565,’ and then I go back to school, and I don’t see a thing about Florida. I don’t see a thing about blacks,” Hankerson said. “All I see is 1776.”

Hankerson spotted that disparity when he was about 10 years old, and announced to his family that he planned to correct it. He wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

Today, Hankerson is the managing partner of Freedom Road, which offers in-depth bus tours of northeast Florida that give visitors insight into an early American story that might be new to many of them.

“Our tours deal with five centuries of history,” Hankerson said. “This is history related to the New World. I say ‘the New World’ because that’s different than the United States of America. We’re talking pre-United States of America.”…

…James Bullock, the creative director for Freedom Road, is typically the guide for the tours. Dressed in period costume, he walks guests through how different cultures – Spanish, African, Native American, German, Irish, Greek – made their lives in the New World…

And Bullock and Hankerson stress that while much of U.S. history has focused on the separation of races, Spanish Florida brought a different culture to the New World. Even the geography of the Old World played a role: Only 11 miles separate Spain from Africa at their closest point, so trade, relationships and inter-marrying were common even before the groups came across the Atlantic...

Read the entire article here.

The creation and intepretation of ‘mixed’ categories in Britain today

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

The growth and recognition of ‘Mixed’ in Britain

It is difficult to imagine a society (such as Britain) in which ethnic and racial categories, and the powerful imagery and ideologies associated with notions of ethnic and racial difference, do not exist. The population of the UK is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, and national identity. While not new, one major demographic development is the significant growth of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain.

Accompanying the growth in mixed relationships and people is the increased social and media attention they have received in recent years. For instance, mixed celebrities are impossible to avoid in various contemporary British (and other) media.Furthermore, the BBC has just shown a whole series of programs called ‘Mixed Britannia’, in which we learn, among other things, that being mixed was by no means a new phenomenon in the earlier parts of the 20th century, whether in Tiger Bay, or in the docks of Liverpool. Various analysts have argued that, in many parts of contemporary, metropolitan Britain, being mixed, and the everyday interactions between disparate groups, is absolutely ordinary.

This growth of mixed people has engendered the creation and institutionalization of new ethnic and racial categories by official bodies, such as the Office of National Statistics (ONS). For the first time, the growth in mixed people was officially recognized by the inclusion of ‘Mixed’ categories in the 2001 England and Wales census, in which about 677,000 people (or about 1.2% of the population) were identified as mixed…

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‘ORPHEUS’; Legacy of Domination

The New York Times
2000-09-03

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

To the Editor:

In his observations about the differences in the Brazilian and foreign receptions of two very distinct cinematic renditions of the Orpheus tale [“Orpheus, Rising From Caricature,” Aug. 20], Caetano Veloso makes a number of larger, insightful points about the intense processes of creolization in Brazilian popular culture, which confound easy labels like ”global” and ”local” as well as ”authentic” and ”pure.”

Two points raised by Mr. Veloso are in tension, however, with his advocacy of what he has called ”subversive Pan-Americanism.” First, Mr. Veloso seemingly abides by a key tenet of Gilberto Freyre’s views about Brazilian race relations, one that equates miscegenation with ”racial democracy.” Although Mr. Veloso rightly acknowledges that ideas of whitening are not peculiar to Brazil, he does not mention the effects of such ideologies on darker-skinned African-descended people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas—which, in the case of someone like Michael Jackson (whom Mr. Veloso mentions), are more than a case of playful hybridity.

Like Gilberto Freyre, Mr. Veloso seems to be suggesting that miscegenation leads to racial tolerance, whereas hypodescent (the one-drop rule) does not. If one were to apply Mr. Veloso’s premise, that racial miscegenation equals racial democracy, to race relations in the United States, South Africa or Haiti, then the fact of miscegenation would have helped engender societies that were more tolerant of alleged racial differences among their populations. It did not.

The point here is that miscegenation, in Brazil and in other former slave-holding societies, began as acts of dominance and not as an egalitarian principle that led to the erosion of unequal relations. It is important to remember that the etymological origin of the term miscegenation (as well as mulatto, by the way) is to ”mis-mate,” or mate badly. In Brazil, the celebration of miscegenation has occurred simultaneously in national popular culture and mythology with terminology that denigrates darker-skinned Brazilians, while upholding Northern European ideals of feminine and masculine beauty. Thus, miscegenation cannot be considered outside the lens of power and aesthetics…

Read the entire letter here.