I myself identify as biracial. I have the same racial heritage as my Black president. And just like my Black president, I struggled thinking of how I wanted to identify coming into college.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2016-02-26 21:43Z by Steven

I myself identify as biracial. I have the same racial heritage as my Black president. And just like my Black president, I struggled thinking of how I wanted to identify coming into college. During that time, my identity wasn’t something that was of a massive importance to me. However, as I started to learn more about education and social justice, I started to understand the intricacies and nuances of the concept of identity — and how monotonously we view it in our society. From classes on multiculturalism and identity to TED Talks like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’sDanger of a Single Story,” I learned that we all hold multiple identities that make up who we are at any given time. More importantly, I learned that it is not any of those singular identities that define us, but how they come together in each of us, uniquely.

Michael Chrzan, “Michigan in Color: Authenticity,” The Michigan Daily, February 18, 2016. https://www.michigandaily.com/section/mic/michigan-color-authenticity.

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‘Myth of racial democracy is part of the education of the Brazilian,” says Congolese anthropologist living in Brazil

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Science on 2016-02-26 21:31Z by Steven

‘Myth of racial democracy is part of the education of the Brazilian,” says Congolese anthropologist living in Brazil

Black Women of Brazil
2016-02-16

Thiago de Araújo

The absence of Black nominees at the 2016 Oscars. ‘Black face’ is just a costume. Cotistas (quota students) surpass (scores) of non-cotista students. A black sponge doll on the reality show Big Brother Brazil (BBB) ​​of this year. Recent cases, controversial cases. In all, the discussion of the same topic: racism inside and outside of Brazil.

Historical victims of prejudice, blacks in their majority are outraged with every report of the genre. However, today there are those who deny that there is racism in Brazil. For these people, there is nothing to justify affirmative action policies, such as quotas in education and social sectors. It’s necessary to appreciate equality, crying out in the loudest voice.

Discussions of racism are not surprising to Congolese anthropologist Kabengele Munanga. At 73, the Doctor of Social Sciences and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (USP) he always stresses that Brazil has a ‘stark’ framework of discrimination. Do you think it’s an exaggeration? It’s not what the numbers show.

“The data show that, on the eve of apartheid, South Africa had more blacks with college degrees than in Brazil today,” Munanga said in a public hearing organized by the Supreme Court (STF) in 2010. The debate revolved around access to higher education policies. Opponents announced that the country was about to experience a ‘race war’. It was not what we saw.

“There were no riots, racial lynchings anywhere. No Brazilian ‘Ku Klux Klan’ appeared,” said the anthropologist. “What is sought by the policy of quotas for black and the indigenous is not to be entitled to the crumbs, but rather to gain access to the top in all sectors of responsibility and of command in national life where these two segments are not adequately represented, as the true democracy mandates.”

But what about the well-known ‘racial democracy’ born at the hands of Gilberto Freyre?…

Read the entire interview here.

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Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in “Quicksand” and “Passing”

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Women on 2016-02-26 21:10Z by Steven

Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 41, Number 1, Negotiating Trauma and Affect (Spring 2016)
Published 2016-01-25
pages 165-192
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlv083

Rafael Walker, Assistant Professor of English
Baruch College, City University of New York

Winner of MLA’s 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in LGBTQ Studies.

This paper challenges the pervasive tendency to treat Larsen’s work as explorations of black women’s lives and examines the distinctly biracial perspective that her fiction attempts to elaborate. I argue that her novels employ narratives of frustrated desire in order to show the impossibility of the racially liminal subject in a society that thinks in black and white. In developing this argument, the essay explains the aesthetic and theoretical implications that ensue from taking this biracial perspective seriously. For instance, it shows how each novel mobilizes a distinct ontology of biracial identity—biraciality as synthesis in one case (Quicksand [1928]) and biraciality as oscillation in the other (Passing [1929]). In its discussion of the aesthetics of Larsen’s fiction, the essay demonstrates how this shift in racial perspective enables us to reassess her endings, which vexed critics in her day and continue to vex readers in ours (including the scholar arguably most responsible for Larsen’s current prominence, Deborah E. McDowell). Aware that aversion to the essentialist “tragic mulatta” trope has been one of the primary impediments to concentrating on biraciality in Larsen’s work, I offer ways of understanding Larsen’s focus on biraciality as more—rather than less—subversive of American racial ideology than previous studies suggest.

The fictions of Nella Larsen have long been understood as daring explorations of black women’s sexuality and subjectivity. Deborah E. McDowell is one of the earliest and most influential exponents of this idea, suggesting that Larsen portrays “black female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic” (xvi). According to Hazel V. Carby, Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) is “the first explicitly sexual black heroine in black women’s fiction” (“It” 471). Similarly, Cheryl A. Wall claims: “Both Quicksand and Passing contemplate the inextricability of the racism and sexism that confront the black woman in her quest for selfhood” (89). The association between Larsen’s work and black women’s subjectivity was so entrenched by the time that Judith Butler wrote on Passing (1929) that she hesitates before applying psychoanalysis to the novel: “There are clearly risks in trying to think in psychoanalytic terms about Larsen’s story, which, after all, published in 1929, belongs to the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance, and ought properly to be read in the context of that cultural and social world” (173). (It becomes clear from Butler’s subsequent remarks that the “context” she has in mind is primarily racial, particularly in her claim that “both stories revolve on the impossibility of sexual freedom for black women” [178].) More recent studies have maintained this view of Larsen’s fiction, bearing such titles as “Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2011) and “The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2008).1

I mention but a few of the many examples of the critical tendency to take for granted that Larsen was chiefly concerned with black women, but they suffice to reveal what strikes me as an “elephant in the room” in Larsen studies: that all of her heroines are racially ambiguous, if not explicitly biracial. In numerous ways, Larsen takes pains to show that something about her major women characters significantly sets them apart from the less ambiguously black women around them, whether it be that they can pass for white or that they have a white parent.2 If Larsen had intended to explore the experiences, psychology, or sexuality of black women specifically, it seems odd that she should have chosen to do so, in both novels she wrote, through such ambiguously raced women. Why did she not concentrate instead on a woman like Felise Freeland, a spirited…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Latina/o Whitening? Which Latina/os Self-Classify as White and Report Being Perceived as White by Other Americans?

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2016-02-26 20:57Z by Steven

Latina/o Whitening? Which Latina/os Self-Classify as White and Report Being Perceived as White by Other Americans?

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 12, Issue 01, Spring 2015
pages 119-136
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X14000241

Nicholas Vargas, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Latino Studies
University of Florida

Some scholars argue that Latina/os in the United States may soon become White, much like the supposed Whitening of Eastern European immigrant groups in the early twentieth century. High rates of White racial identification on surveys among Latina/os is one explanation provided for this assertion. However, personal identification is but one element of racial boundary maintenance. It is when personal identification is externally validated that it is most closely associated with group-based experiences. This article maps components of the White-Latino racial boundary that may be permeable to White expansion by examining conditions under which Latina/os self-identify as White and report that they are externally classified as White by other Americans. Employing novel data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, this article shows that nearly 40% of Latina/os sometimes self-identify as White, yet a much smaller proportion—only 6%—report being externally classified as White by others. Moreover, logistic regression analyses suggest that for those with light phenotypical features and high levels of socioeconomic status, the odds of reported external Whitening are increased. Interestingly, phenotypically light Latina/os with low-socioeconomic-status levels have low probabilities of reporting external classification as White when compared to their phenotypically light and high-socioeconomic-status counterparts, suggesting that the combination of both skin color and class may be central to the White-Latino racial boundary. Results also indicate that many who report external Whitening do not prefer to self-identify as White. In sum, multidimensional measures of racial classification indicate that only a very small minority of Latina/os may be “becoming White” in ways that some previous researchers have predicted.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Latinos May Be More Educated, Wealthier: Here’s Why We Don’t Know It

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive on 2016-02-26 20:43Z by Steven

Latinos May Be More Educated, Wealthier: Here’s Why We Don’t Know It

NBC News
2016-02-24

Griselda Nevarez

U.S. Latinos may be more educated and have higher earnings than what current numbers suggest, and new research explores why.

There are individuals who have Latino ancestors, but do not self-identify as Hispanic in national demographic surveys. Therefore, these people are not included in the overall U.S. Latino population, according to Stephen Trejo, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who co-authored a research paper on the topic.

This phenomenon — often referred to as ethnic attrition — is more common among second- and higher-generation Latinos who also tend to be more educated and have higher earnings than their counterparts.

As a result “we’re probably understating the educational progress” of Hispanics in the U.S., said Trejo to NBC News Latino. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a good idea of the magnitude of this because the data that we have isn’t perfect,” he added.

While 99 percent of first-generation Latinos identify as such, it drops to 93 percent in the second generation and 82 percent in the third generation, according to Trejo’s findings. And second- and third-generation Latinos who did not identify as Hispanic were more educated than their peers – by an average of 9 months for the second generation and about 10 months for the third, the study found…

Read the entire article here.

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Trevor Noah Blasts Ben Carson for Claiming President Obama Was ‘Raised White’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-02-26 20:33Z by Steven

Trevor Noah Blasts Ben Carson for Claiming President Obama Was ‘Raised White’

The Daily Beast
2016-02-25

Matt Wilstein, Entertainment Writer

The Daily Show’ host hits back at the low-in-the-polls neurosurgeon for claiming Obama can’t relate to the ‘experience of black Americans.’

Believe it or not, Ben Carson is still running for president. And this week, he made some news by claiming in an interview that President Obama was “raised white” and therefore can’t identify with the “experience of black Americans.”

Trevor Noah isn’t having it. ”Like a glitched character on a video game, Ben Carson is just off facing the wrong direction,” The Daily Show host said Wednesday night. “Yeah, he is not attacking Trump or the other Republicans, but rather he’s chosen to attack President Obama. And it’s not for his policies and it’s not for his record. It’s for not being black enough.”

“So Ben Carson is saying that because Obama didn’t grow up poor, he didn’t grow up black,” Noah said after playing the clip of Carson’s comments. “That is such a bullshit argument. Being poor isn’t what makes you black.”…

Read the entire article here.

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