Mixed Race Studies

Dismantling the Racial Paradise

Stanford University Press Blog
March 2015

Tiffany Joseph, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Affiliated Faculty of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

How migration to and from the U.S. is transforming notions of race in Brazil.

I still remember my first trip to Brazil—I was amazed by the diversity of physical features I saw among the population, a continuous range of skin tones between what Americans think of as “white” and “black.” Everyone seemed to get along well; residential segregation levels were low and interracial couples, families and friend groups appeared to be the norm. It would have been easy to believe that Brazil was a racial paradise compared to the United States. However, as I learned Portuguese and spent more time in the country, I came to realize that Brazil was a country of racial contradictions.

Despite having seemingly more “cordial” interpersonal relations, Brazil has struggled with rampant social inequality, especially between lighter and darker Brazilians. While Brazilians espoused the beauty of its multiracial population, I was perplexed every time I passed stands full of Brazilian magazines and saw a sea of fair-skinned faces with blonde hair and blue eyes upheld as the ideal image of beauty. As a black American, I began to notice commonalities between the pervasiveness of structural racism in Brazil and the U.S. while being keenly aware of the different racial ideologies that characterized each nation’s history.

Brazil was once considered the global model for burying racial hatchets and fostering social inclusiveness, while the U.S. has garnered a reputation for being an overtly racist country. As the two largest countries in the Americas, both indelibly impacted by long histories of structural racism, Brazil and the U.S. have been the focus of countless comparative studies on race. And though the number of people traveling and migrating between each country has increased significantly in the last few decades, there are few accounts of how these migrations facilitated movement of race between these countries…

Read the entire article here.

Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race

Stanford University Press
February 2015
240 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804792202
Paper ISBN: 9780804794350
Digital ISBN: 9780804794398

Tiffany D. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Affiliated Faculty of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

Race on the Move takes readers on a journey from Brazil to the United States and back again to consider how migration between the two countries is changing Brazilians’ understanding of race relations. Brazil once earned a global reputation as a racial paradise, and the United States is infamous for its overt social exclusion of nonwhites. Yet, given the growing Latino and multiracial populations in the United States, the use of quotas to address racial inequality in Brazil, and the flows of people between each country, contemporary race relations in each place are starting to resemble each other.

Tiffany Joseph interviewed residents of Governador Valadares, Brazil’s largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S., to ask how their immigrant experiences have transformed local racial understandings. Joseph identifies and examines a phenomenon—the transnational racial optic—through which migrants develop and ascribe social meaning to race in one country, incorporating conceptions of race from another. Analyzing the bi-directional exchange of racial ideals through the experiences of migrants, Race on the Move offers an innovative framework for understanding how race can be remade in immigrant-sending communities.

Black On Black Crime And The Peculiar Responsibility Of Biracial Positionality

The Magic Mulatto
2015-03-28

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

In this piece I am 1) making the argument that anti-blackness is pervasive, and 2) concluding that biracial (black/white) people have a peculiar responsibility to confront anti-blackness.

I come to that conclusion as a result of much experience and some study, and illustrate the argument with a small slice of that experience.

First, let’s think about what “black on black crime” really means.

When the topic of police violence against black people comes up, people often change the subject. “What about black on black crime?” they ask.

This is what logicians call a red herring fallacy,

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to ‘win’ an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.

The “what about black on black crime?” argument is a particularly effective red herring because 1) it seems relevant enough and 2) it is supported by an anti-black narrative that is always hovering in the air, even when you don’t notice it.

By presenting this different argument, people not only change the subject but they shift blame.

Confronting the disproportionate killing of black people at the hands of the police means confronting systemic, culturally bound racism. Few people want to do this because if they confront systemic racism embedded in everyday life, they have to confront the racism embedded in themselves, in their everyday ways of thinking, talking and doing. This comes very close to blame, and no one wants to be responsible for “being racist.”

It is much easier to change the subject, and shift the blame, to black on black crime because this fits nicely with our hyper-individualized culture that makes people solely and completely responsible for their own conditions of living. Then one needn’t confront systemic racism, or one’s own racism, because everything that happens to you is your fault.

If you find it difficult to understand how insidious it is to change the subject from police killing blacks at disproportionately high rates to “black on black crime,” ask yourself this: would you go to a lecture about fighting cancer and ask the lecturer why she wasn’t talking about fighting AIDS? That would be absurd, would it not? You’d be chased out of the place.

Changing the subject from police violence against blacks to “black on black crime” is not only a red herring; it’s also an example of the systemic, culturally embedded, anti-black racism that nearly everyone is guilty of…

Read the entire article here.

Race In The Jewish Community: A Mischling’s Perspective

The Jerusalem Post
2015-03-30

Ella Bennett

Introduction

As a person of mixed-race black and maternal Jewish heritage, I am a mischling and feel highly motivated to stand equally against racism and anti-Semitism.  When I go out and about in the Jewish community people naturally see my colour first, and depending on whether I’m wearing my hair as an afro or in the way Anne Frank wore her hair, some people in the Jewish community do not automatically assume that I’m Jewish.  Although some say I look Israeli, I’ve learned that there’s a belief in small sections of the community that you can’t be Jewish if you’re black, a subject I wrote about in an earlier blog called “How Can I Be Jewish When I Am Black?”  There is also a belief that the presence of Ethiopian Jews in Israel is incontrovertible proof that there is no racism in the Jewish community, either towards mischlinges and black Jews or anyone else of colour.

The concern I express in this blog is that when I want to talk to some of my favourite Jewish friends and associates about my life, my experiences of racism and my efforts to tackle it, I find myself isolated, slightly ostracised, and sadly in two extreme cases, cut off completely.  By reading between the lines I have learned that racism in the community or at large is neither admitted nor discussed openly as to do so is perceived as negative and liable to attract anti-Semitism…

Read the entire article here.

Comedy Central^® Names Trevor Noah as Next Host of “The Daily Show”

Comedy Central^® Press Release
2015-03-30

Press Contact Info:

Renata Luczak
Eve Kenny

• 31 Year-Old Comedian to Take the Helm Later This Year

NEW YORK, March 30, 2015 – Trevor Noah has been selected to become the next host of the Emmy^® and Peabody^® Award-winning “The Daily Show,” it was announced today by Michele Ganeless, president, Comedy Central. His show’s premiere will be announced at a later date.

Noah (www.trevornoah.com) joined “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in 2014 as a contributor. He made his U.S. television debut in 2012 on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and has also appeared on “Late Show with David Letterman,” becoming the first South African stand-up comedian to appear on either late night show. Born in South Africa to a black South African mother and a white European father, he has successfully become the top comedian in Africa. Noah has hosted numerous television shows including his own late night talk show in his native country, “Tonight with Trevor Noah.”

“Trevor Noah is an enormous talent. He has an insightful and unique point of view, and most importantly, is wickedly funny,” said Ganeless. “For the next host of ‘The Daily Show,’ we set out to find a fresh voice who can speak to our audience with a keen take on the events of the day, and we found that in Trevor. He has a huge international following and is poised to explode here in America, and we are thrilled to have him join Comedy Central.”

“It’s an honor to follow Jon Stewart. He and the team at ‘The Daily Show’ have created an incredible show whose impact is felt all over the world,” said Noah. “In my brief time with the show they’ve made me feel so welcome. I’m excited to get started and work with such a fantastic group of people.”

Said Jon Stewart: “I’m thrilled for the show and for Trevor. He’s a tremendous comic and talent that we’ve loved working with…In fact, I may rejoin as a correspondent just to be a part of it!!!”…

To read the entire press release click here.

How can I be Jewish when I am black?

The Jerusalem Post
2015-02-09

Ella Bennett

This is a hypothetical question that I’m always, almost asked by my many Jewish friends, associates and acquaintances. In my haste I’d assumed the answer to be obvious until I discovered the subtlety behind which the real dynamics of the question are hidden.  What follows is my hypothetical ‘answer’ to the question. There are many parts to be considered before this question can be answered fully.

There are enough parts to fill a book in fact, such is the volume and complexity of the rules that are visited on he or she born inter-racial black and Jewish who then approaches the gates of the shul in search of a refuge from a sometimes racially hostile and anti-Semitic world.  I am a mischlinge, and would have been murdered alongside the 6 million had I been alive in Germany in WW2, a war in which my Jamaican grandfather fought through his service in the Royal Air Force as a 15 year old boy where he helped defend the world from Hitler, and helped save the Jews, while stationed in Berlin.  A man with such courage, candor and grace, is it any wonder that my grandmother, a Jewess, should fall in love with him on his settling in 1950’s England?…

Read the entire article here.

Kamala Harris, California’s Attorney General, Leaps to Forefront of Senate Race

The New York Times
2015-03-27

Adam Nagourney, Los Angeles Bureau Chief

CASTAIC, Calif. — When Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, was the newly elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2004, she walked into a firestorm after deciding not to pursue the death penalty for a man accused in the killing of a police officer — drawing attacks from law enforcement leaders and even Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most respected Democrats in the state.

Six years later, when Ms. Harris ran for state attorney general, national Republicans poured more than $1 million into the race, trying to defeat her with charged advertisements invoking the death penalty case. Ms. Harris barely defeated her Republican opponent, the district attorney of Los Angeles.

But now, at age 50 and after winning a second term, Ms. Harris has suddenly established herself as the dominant candidate in the race to replace Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who announced in January that she would retire next year. With a speed and efficiency that startled many in her party, Ms. Harris has appeared, at least for now, to dispatch what most people had expected would be a sprawling generational battle with powerful ethnic overtones, given that Latinos now make up nearly 40 percent of California’s population…

She herself would be a pioneering figure, if elected — simultaneously the first black and the first South Asian senator from California…

Read the entire article here.

Trevor Noah to Succeed Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’

The New York Times
2015-03-30

Dave Itzkoff, Culture Reporter

In December, Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old comedian, made his debut as an on-air contributor on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” offering his outsider’s perspective, as a biracial South African, on the United States.

“I never thought I’d be more afraid of police in America than in South Africa,” he said with a smile. “It kind of makes me a little nostalgic for the old days, back home.”

Now, after only three appearances on that Comedy Central show, Mr. Noah has gotten a huge and unexpected promotion. On Monday, Comedy Central will announce that Mr. Noah has been chosen as the new host of “The Daily Show,” succeeding Mr. Stewart after he steps down later this year.

Read the entire article here.

Rivas awarded NEH Summer Stipends award to work on book

News From Marshall University
Huntington, West Virginia
2015-03-25

Dave Wellman, Director of Communications
Telephone: (304) 696-7153

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Dr. Zelideth Maria Rivas, an assistant professor of Japanese in Marshall University’s Department of Modern Languages, has been awarded a “very competitive” National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipends award, according to Dr. R.B. Bookwalter, dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts.

Rivas is the only recipient of the Summer Stipend award in West Virginia. The award will help her work toward completion of a book she has titled “Caught In-Between: Competing Nationalisms of Japanese in Brazil.”

“Dr. Rivas is an energetic and imaginative teacher and scholar,” Bookwalter said. “We are very fortunate to have her here at Marshall and we are extremely pleased that the NEH has recognized and supported her project.”

Rivas said, “I am honored that this award will support the completion of my book through travel to Japan and time to revise existing chapters. More importantly, I am excited for the recognition this brings to the Department of Modern Languages, the College of Liberal Arts and Marshall University.”

Here is her abstract for the project:

“From the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Hamamatsu, Japan, a large diasporic population of Japanese Brazilians is ever present in media, politics and the economy as symbols of kinship and citizenship with singular national identities. And yet, these identities move beyond dualistic constructions of Japanese or Brazilian. As an NEH Summer Stipend Fellow, I will investigate these claims in my book, Caught In-Between: Competing Nationalisms of Japanese in Brazil while completing the final research needed in Japan during the summer of 2015.

Read the entire press release here.

Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times

Canisius College, Buffalo, New York
2015-03-04

Buffalo, NY – Canisius College will exhibit “Homestory Deutschland: Black Biographies in Historical and Present Times” from Tuesday, March 24 – Sunday, April 12. The exhibit will be on display in Alumni Hall, located between the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library and Old Main. It is free and open to the public.

Founded by the Initiative of Black People in Germany, “Homeland Deutschland” is a collective self-portrait that gives voice to the complex and varied histories of Afro-German women and men from the past three centuries of German history. The exhibit features not only the biographies of prominent black figures but also those of unknown “ordinary” people who found themselves characterized by stereotypical racist perceptions and struggled to be acknowledged and respected in German society. The individuals represented in the exhibit come from diverse paths of German society and from distinguished backgrounds.

The “Homestory Deutschland” exhibit originated in Berlin, Germany. In February, the exhibit was acquired by Canisius College from where it will tour the United States…

For more information, click here.