Mixed Race Studies

Obama and Myths of Racial Democracy

NACLA Report
North American Congress on Latin America
2008-11-17

Marisol LeBrón

Political pundits have celebrated president-elect Barack Obama’s sweeping and historic victory as evidence that the United States has taken an initial step toward a “post-racial” or “colorblind” society.

In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Shelby Steele provocatively asked, “Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a ‘post-racial’ America?” Analysts on both sides of the political spectrum have answered yes. Phillip Morris of the Cleveland Plains Dealer declared, “America has completed its evolution into a racial meritocracy.” While Jonathan Kay of Canada’s National Post wrote, “Electing a black president won’t instantly cure ‘the ugly racial wound left by America’s history’ (as The Economist put it in its Obama endorsement). But it will at least prove that America has finally become a fundamentally post-racial society—a place where tribal loyalties are based on ideology, not skin color.” Meanwhile, another conservative columnist, Laura Hollis of Townhall.com, flatly claimed, “Racism is dead.”…

…U.S. commentators most often point to the concept of mestizaje as an example of Latin America’s seamless racial integration. Mestizaje, or racial mixing, is often seen as diametrically different to historical U.S. legal sanctions against miscegenation—the so-called “one-drop” rule. Mestizaje is cited as a prime example of how Latin Americans have been able to move beyond race. Although mestizaje has different historical roots and trajectories within different Latin American countries, there has been a rhetorical emphasis across the board on a kind harmonious racial exceptionalism at work in Latin America…

…The promotion of mestizaje and racial democracy in Latin America has often existed alongside, and as part of, the suppression of populations of African and indigenous descent. National identities based on mestizaje served the dual purpose of “uniting” fractious nations under one banner while at the same time promoting the mass marginalization of racial and ethnic groups by denying their discrimination.

Several scholars have helped dispel the myth of racial democracy in Latin America by documenting what is often referred to as blanqueamiento (whitening), or mejorando la raza (improving the race). In one example, blanqueamiento is actively sought out by marrying a lighter-skinned person, thereby producing lighter, racially mixed offspring. Sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario has traced the many ways blanqueamiento is promoted in Dominican society. As evidence, she points to the range of skin creams and hair products marketed to produce a whiter-looking phenotype among Dominican women…

Read the entire article here.

Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912

Latin American Research Review
Volume 34, Number 3 (1999)
pages 39-73

Alejandro de la Fuente, UCIS Research Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state’s cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.

In a very real sense, nothing can be more real than the unreal.
Ashley Montagu, Race, Science, and Humanity

Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called it “prejudice against prejudice”; U.S. sociologist Thomas Lynn Smith described it as “a veritable cult.” Both were referring to what has come to be known as the Brazilian myth of racial democracy.

In its simplest formulation, the “myth” is that all Brazilians, regardless of “race,” enjoy equal opportunities and live in a racially harmonious society. It could not be otherwise, according to the myth, because Brazil’s strength and greatness reside in the widespread racial mixture of its population. It therefore makes no sense to talk about blacks and whites in a country in which most citizens are some of both. “Race” in Brazilian society is constructed along a continuum moving from “black” to “white” based on phenotypical features (skin color, type of hair, facial features) and on social factors like education and financial status. Several centuries of intimate contact and miscegenation, biological and cultural, have created a new hybrid race that is authentically Brazilian.

The notoriety of the Brazilian case has been guaranteed by the brilliance of its myth makers, foremost among them Gilberto Freyre. But it has also been sustained by two fundamental facts: no other country in the hemisphere has a numerically larger population of African descent; and no other country enslaved its black population as late as Brazil did, until 1888. A hegemonic ideology advocating some form of racial fraternity is remarkable in a country like Brazil but hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, intellectual elites in numerous Latin American countries have articulated racial ideologies that were similar in purpose and content to the Brazilian myth. Mestizaje was exalted as the true American essence, a synthesis that incorporated (allegedly on equal terms) the best cultural and physical traits that the various ethnic and racial groups populating the Americas had to offer.

Forced to cope with the troubling aspects of a North Atlantic ideology that flatly advocated the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and the deleterious effects of racial mixing, the elites in Latin America had to reach a compromise that would allow them to reconcile the goal of modernity with the undeniably mixed nature of their populations. During this search, the mestizo was invented as a national symbol. The result was an ideological formulation that broke with the past while upholding it. The discourse on mestizaje remained prisoner of the same canon that scientific racism proclaimed as incontrovertible truths—the essentialness of race—but the discourse revolutionized social thinking by minimizing the other central tenet of the hegemonic racial gospel: biological determinism. Although race was still associated with ascribed characteristics as immutable and overpowering as those championed by genetically based racism, the emphasis was shifted to geographical, cultural, and historical factors. This is no small distinction. By placing social factors at the core of their ideological constructions, Latin American intellectuals were openly contesting the notion that their countries were doomed to failure and perpetual backwardness, while asserting (however implicitly) that social transformation was the way to reach modernity. They thus had fabricated a way out of the ideological iron cast that the North Atlantic world had manufactured by means of its high science, universities, and royal societies.

But the escape was only partial. While contesting or just ignoring the idea that racial miscegenation meant degeneration, Latin American thinkers accepted the premise that ample sectors of their populations were basically inferior and that their human stock needed to be “improved” Such inferiority was to be explained in terms of culture, geography, or climate rather than pure genetics, but the dominant vision still presented the lighter end of the spectrum as the ideal and denigrated the darker end as primitive and uncivilized. In this formulation, whiteness still represented progress. Miscegenation was perceived as the way to “regenerate” a population unfit to perform the duties associated with a modern polity, with white immigration serving as a precondition for progress. The idea that regeneration was possible at all subverted biological determinism, but the expressed need for regeneration presupposed acceptance of the idea that “race” explained the “backwardness” of Latin American societies. Whitening became the way to remove a surmountable, albeit formidable, obstacle on the road to modernity.

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Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history

The Washington Post
2012-08-13

Benjamin Gottlieb

Amelia Singh Netervala points to her mother’s chicken curry enchiladas as the best metaphor for her childhood.

Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and Mexican mother, her family was full of cultural contradictions: She went to church on Sundays with her mother and three siblings while her father waited outside in the family car. She would have langar — the daily Sikh communal meal — just once a year, when her father would embark on the five-hour journey from Phoenix to the nearest gurdwara in El Centro, a Californian border town in the Imperial Valley. Her clandestine conversations with her mother were done in Spanish, a language her father never mastered.

All the while Netervala never had any doubts about her identity.

“I’m proud of my Mexican heritage and mixed ethnicity,” said Netervala, who grew up on an alfalfa and cotton farm in Casa Grande, 50 miles south of Phoenix. “But if I had to choose, I would identify as being an Indian woman.”

Now in her mid-70s, Netervala is part of the nation’s thinning Punjabi-Mexican population, an identity forged out of historical necessity and made possible by uncanny cultural parallels…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the black wave: Deconstructing myths, building strategies

Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice
2009-02-19 (Issue 420)

Raquel Luciana de Souza

Having closely followed Barack Obama’s electoral success, Raquel Luciana de Souza considers the prospects for a presidential candidate of African descent within the South American giant of Brazil. Scrutinising the historical myth of Brazil’s racial democracy and the supposed absence of formal barriers to Afro-Brazilian social mobility in contrast to the US, de Souza considers the role of the US’s implementation of measures to address socio-racial disparities and the successful struggles of black organisations in framing the broader background behind Obama’s rise.

At last the calendar signals the much anticipated 4 November 2008, the day the long marathon of the latest American electoral process would be concluded. It is impossible to ignore the irony that after spending nine years of my life studying in the United States, I found myself in front of the television in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, homeland of Gilberto Freyre. Freyre, of course, was the very author whose racist, sexist, and fairly imaginative visions about race relations in Brazil influenced generations of national and international researchers, politicians, intellectuals, as well as common sense notions about class, race, and racism in Brazil. As the counting of the votes officially begins, a friend cautions me about the possibility of a McCain victory, which triggers an unutterable anguish in the very core of my being. However, that feeling was quickly replaced by the absolute thrill of witnessing the reconfiguration of the American electoral map. At the first hour of 5 November, it was confirmed that the US had elected its first black president. Barack Obama’s triumph was the culmination of a highly competitive political contest; the media and global frenzy surrounding the Democratic candidate’s campaign became gradually more palpable as he gained strength in opinion and voter intention polls. That day I realised that I had spent months holding my breath, immersed in an intense electoral process that was marked by unprecedented circumstances. For the first time, a black man and a woman vied to be nominated for presidential candidate of the Democratic Party…

…Therefore, while I euphorically contemplated the conclusion of an electoral process that culminated with the election of a black president for the position of commander-in-chief of the US, questions and speculations about the ramifications of such an important political development for Brazil and the African Diaspora consumed me. The triumph of a high-ranking politician, the son of a continental African from Kenya and a white American woman from Kansas, was consolidated before the whole world. Before me was a black president married to a black woman, both products of the highest quality of formal education acquired at Harvard, a prestigious university, and eloquent lawyers who demonstrated in their discourse and intervention an almost unwavering self-confidence and mastery of words that slowly but surely conquered even the favouritism of the media. As a researcher of racial issues through a comparative perspective, I realised then that such a political moment urged for perspectives and approaches that went beyond pre-established parameters. Aiming to discuss the possible ramifications of such political scenery and its broader implications more adequately, I constantly transferred my thoughts to the Brazilian context…

…Conversely, we should now consider the real scenery in which Barack Obama became the first black president of the US. In Brazil, the celebration of such a historical event has been featured prominently on the front page of all the mainstream newspapers and magazines. A sort of cynical satisfaction has also been displayed on the faces of TV anchors, political commentators, and reporters as they announced and discussed the fact that Americans had elected their first black president. Images from the US of whites, blacks, and others who celebrated Obama’s victory in euphoric tears were exhibited, demonstrating that the country had finally transcended the racism that had infested its social, legal, political, and educational relations for so many centuries. Yet, for the most accurate eyes and ears, what was implicit in accounts of celebration disseminated through Brazilian mass media was the notion that such cathartic and healing experiences were not needed in Brazil. In fact, what was almost cynically celebrated was the fallacy that finally the USA had overcome their racial injuries, while our racial problems had been resolved many decades ago, if they ever existed. After all, according to traditional hegemonic narratives that romanticise race relations in Brazil, Brazilians never had to deal with formal racial segregation that established barriers to the socio-economic ascension of Africans and their descendants, and therefore there would be no wounds to be healed and no damage to be repaired…

Read the entire article here.

Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1991
376 pages
6 x 9; 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-299-13104-3

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality. George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.

No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.

The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians’ entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery. This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers. As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites. Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s. He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.

Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy. It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Contents

• Lists of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Workers
  • Chapter 2. Slavery and Emancipation, 1800-1890
  • Chapter 3. Immigration, 1890-1930
  • Chapter 4. Working, 1920-1960
• Part 2. The Middle Class
  • Chapter 5. Living in a Racial Democracy, 1900-1940
  • Chapter 6. Blacks Ascending, 1940-1988
  • Chapter 7. Organizing, 1945-1988
• Part 3. Past, Present, Future
  • Chapter 8. One Hundred Years of Freedom: May 13, 1988
  • Chapter 9. Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Appendix A. Population of Sao Paulo State, 1800-1980
• Appendix B. Brazilian Racial Terminology
• Appendix C. Personnel Records at the Jafet and São Paulo Tramway, Light, and Power Companies
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Shifting Discourses: Exploring the Tensions between the Myth of Racial Democracy And the Implementation of Affirmative Action Policies in Brazil

Center for Latin American Social Policy – CLASPO
Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Summer Research Report
University of Texas at Austin
September 2005
29 pages

Raquel Luciana de Souza

1. INTRODUCTION

Are the recent debates surrounding the controversial topic of Affirmative Action in Brazil changing the racial landscape of the country? What impact will these laws have on issues of race, race relations, and racial identity? Will Brazil experience a shift in its racial paradigms and a restructuring of its socio-economic and political organizations in light of these latest developments. This paper is part of an ongoing research about the process of implementation of Affirmative Action policies in Brazil and the possible impacts that these laws may have in discourses about race and racial identity in that country. Those are guiding questions that I will be exploring throughout the text, but they could not possibly be answered fully in such early stages of my research. Therefore, I intend to use these questions to briefly discuss some of the pertinent issues, as well as some events concerning this momentous historical development. In this text, I also point out to the some of the implications of these developments in Brazilian politics, particularly as it relates to their possible impact on traditional discourses about race relations as well as the role of race in Brazilian society. Furthermore, I intend to place these debates within the context of a nation that has been perceived nationally and internationally as a raceless country, or, in other words, a country that does not struggle with the legacy of legally sanctioned barriers that granted or denied benefits to different groups according to their racial ancestry.

Scholars such as France W. Twine, Michael Hanchard, Anthony Marx, and others have focused on the weakness of black organizations in Brazil, especially when combating the alleged overwhelming influence of the ideology of the myth of racial democracy in the country. This myth is viewed by many as the overarching framework that shapes and informs the perceptions of Brazilians of all racial backgrounds. However, I argue that the polemics and the controversy generated by the ongoing implementation of affirmative action policies constitute a major force in the reshaping of discourses and perceptions about the role of race, racial identity, as well as racism and racial prejudice. I contend that the politically charged debates generated by these measures constitute a powerful transformative force in the traditional narratives about the harmonious nature of race relations in the country on several levels. In this paper, I also highlight the key role that black organizations have had in demanding and debating the implementation of laws that aim at compensating for centuries of socio-economic and educational opportunities. Black militants have systematically struggled and challenged traditional discourses that have historically masked Brazil as a ‘racially democratic nation’. The efforts of black organizations and their struggles for the rights of people of African descent in Brazil tend to be obliterated by mainstream narratives that usually emphasize the role of ruling elite. These discourses aim at perpetuating myths about the benevolence of ruling elites and their predisposition to “granting” rights to popular classes and minorities or oppressed sectors of its population.

Slavery and race relations in Brazil have generated an enormous amount of research, especially comparative research, in particular works that tried to establish comparisons between Brazil and the US. Many scholars across disciplines have looked at the various factors that may influence the way in which discourses around race, race relations and discrimination shift according to specific historical moments and settings. Therefore, it is my strong belief that the current controversial process of implementing affirmative action policies in Brazil will certainly contribute to the production of new original scholarship about that country…

…AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: CONTEXTUALIZING THE DEBATE

In order to shed some light into the controversy generated by the implementation of affirmative action policies in Brazil, it is necessary to contextualize them. They must be located within the parameters of a country that has historically placed great importance on the miscegenation and the whitening of its population. Such contextualization will provide the background for the arguments employed to dismiss the validity and the applicability of these policies in the country. The following session provides an overview of the discourses and historical processes that have informed and shaped historically prevailing notions about the role and the relevance of race in the country. In particular, these debates must be placed within the context of prevailing traditional ideologies and narratives about what constitutes the Brazilian. In this session, I will also elaborate on the traditional views about the institution of slavery in Brazil…

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An Exploration of Healthy Adjustment in Biracial Young Adults

Univesity of California, Davis
2008
175 pages

Tamu Corrine Nolfo

A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Human Development

Given the historically negative views of interracial marriages and mixed race children proliferating the popular American social consciousness, it is legitimate to question whether mixed race youth can achieve healthy psychosocial development in this country, and if so, what are the factors that contribute to positive outcomes despite adverse or hostile sociopolitical circumstances?

There were a total of 30 participants in this study: 13 male and 17 female, ages 22-26, living in various regions of the United States, who had one parent who identified as White/Caucasian and one who identified as Asian/Asian American, Black/African American, or Hispanic/Latino/a. The participants were free of a history of felony convictions, substance abuse and suicide attempts. They completed both an informational questionnaire and a 90-minute telephone interview.

Results of the study highlighted that biracial individuals are not doomed because of their dual heritage, despite this emphasis in earlier research. It is entirely possible to be well adjusted in a number of respects: meeting personal expectations; attainment of close family and other social relationships; comfortable with ethnic/racial identity; bicultural competence and sense of inclusion in desired community(ies); social justice; and sense of self-efficacy in raising own multiracial child(ren).

There is not agreement from the participants on a set formula for success, but overriding themes include having a loving and supportive family that preferably stays intact; connections with all of one’s cultural heritage, but not necessarily with family or community members who are belittling or disrespectful; egalitarian messages that neither promote self-oppression nor self-superiority; opportunities to explore, normalize and celebrate the mixed race experience; and the freedom to self-define over time and context, even when these choices are not congruent with family or community expectations.

All individuals, families and communities in this study demonstrated the ability to both support and hinder healthy biracial development. Results did not differ with regard to demographic nuances of gender, racial composition, socio-economic status (SES), or geographic location.

Read the entire dissertation here.