Mixed Race Studies

​black girls rule: celebrating brazilian women of colour

i-D
2016-03-08

Hattie Collins

Weudson Ribeiro’s new photobook Black Girl Power is shining a light on black female identity and LGBT women of colour in brazil.

Brasilia based photographer, journalist and political scientist Weudson Ribeiro is known for his images celebrating Brazilian queer culture. In his latest series, Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER, Ribero documents Brazilian LGBT women who proudly express their sexuality and their blackness as a political statement…

Tell us about Black Girl Power and what you wanted to document, not only regarding black female identity, but that of LGBT women of colour.

With Superafro: BLACK GIRL POWER, I intend to document the huge diversity within the Afro-Brazilian spectrum, celebrate the beauty of women of colour and, hopefully, make a positive difference in the fight for freedom and equality by raising awareness of issues that affect the reality of black people in Brazil, since we live in a society moulded by racism, pigmentocracy, disenfranchisement and sexism. With the phenomenal rise of feminism amongst young women and a greater access to information provided by digital inclusion, I notice females feel more encouraged to wear their hair natural, or as they will, express their sexuality and reject euphemisms employed to address Afro features as though Negroid was a burden…

…What do the women of your pictures represent?

Those women represent the stand against the odds of a judgemental society. Personally, meeting such beautiful and smart black women was a watershed. Being the only son of mixed-race parents, I had a hard time understanding and accepting my own blackness. It’s a problem that affects the vast majority of Brazilians as a result of our highly mixed ethnic backgrounds. So, as in the womb, this series marks to me a rebirth as a proud black LGBT man, after 24 years struggling with my racial identity…

Read the entire interview here.

The Curious Presidency of Barack Obama

Political Insight
Volume 7, Number 1 (April 2016)
pages 8-11
DOI: 10.1177/2041905816637452

James D. Boys, Associate Professor of International Political Studies
Richmond University, London, United Kingdom

After two terms in the White House, Barack Obama’s Presidency has entered its final year. James D. Boys assesses his record in office and finds an historic US President who leaves behind a nation more divided than ever.

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald published the incredible tale of a man who effectively lives his life in reverse: born old, he grows younger as each subsequent year passes. In many ways, Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button encapsulates the Presidency of Barack Obama, a President who has lived his Presidency in reverse.

Tradition holds that a president enters office with as much political capital as he will ever have and that over the course of his presidency (be that one or two terms) he expends it to such an extent that by the end of his tenure, he is a spent force, or rather, a lame duck. Tradition also suggests that as his time in office ends, a period of reflection begins, during which he is lauded for his achievements.

This has not happened, however, in the case of Barack Obama. Instead, he arrived in office garnered in plaudits, but struggled to achieve concrete goals or to find his presidential voice until late in his second term, when he suddenly hit his stride in terms of foreign policy achievements and his willingness to champion gun control efforts. Passage of ‘Obamacare’, the signature achievement of his first term, was an important exception to his narrative, but Obama’s most definable achievements have come in his second term when he was beyond the will of the electorate and when Vice President Biden had chosen not to seek office. Both aspects reveal telling factors about the Obama Presidency which betray his bold and optimistic clarion call for change that carried him to office in the election of 2008…

Read the entire article here.

Colored Perceptions: Racially Distinctive Names and Assessments of Skin Color

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 420-441
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613395

Denia Garcia
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Maria Abascal
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Scholars are increasingly employing skin color measures to investigate racial stratification beyond the dimensions of self- or other-classification. Current understandings of the relationship between phenotypic traits, like skin color, and racial classification are incomplete. Scholars agree that perceptions of phenotypic traits shape how people classify others; it remains to be seen, however, whether racial classification in turn shapes people’s perceptions of phenotypic traits. The present study is based on an original survey experiment that tests whether assessments of others’ skin color are affected by a subtle racial cue, a name. Results indicate that skin color ratings are affected by the presence of a racially distinctive name: A significant share of people will rate the same face darker when that face is assigned a distinctively Hispanic name as opposed to a non-Hispanic name. In addition, ratings of male faces are more sensitive to racially distinctive names. The findings bear important lessons for our understanding of the social construction of race and its role in producing inequalities.

Read or purchase the article here.

Shades of Race: How Phenotype and Observer Characteristics Shape Racial Classification

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 390-419
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613401

Cynthia Feliciano, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies
University of California, Irvine

Although race-based discrimination and stereotyping can only occur if people place others into racial categories, our understanding of this process, particularly in contexts where observers categorize others based solely on appearance, is limited. Using a unique data set drawn from observers’ assessments of photos posted by White, Black, Latino, and multiracial online daters, this study examines how phenotype and observer characteristics influence racial categorization and cases of divergence between self-identities and others’ classifications. I find that despite the growth in the multiracial population, observers tend to place individuals into monoracial categories, including Latino. Skin color is the primary marker used to categorize others by race, with light skin associated with Whiteness, medium skin with Latinidad, and, most strongly, dark skin with Blackness. Among daters who self-identify as Black along with other racial categories, those with dark skin are overwhelmingly placed solely into a Black category. These findings hold across observers, but the proportion of photos placed into different racial categories differs by observers’ gender and race. Thus, estimates of inequality may vary depending not only on how race is assessed but also on who classifiers are. I argue that patterns of racial categorization reveal how the U.S. racial structure has moved beyond binary divisions into a system in which Latinos are seen as a racial group in-between Blacks and Whites, and a dark-skin rule defines Blacks’ racial options.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interrogating Race: Color, Racial Categories, and Class Across the Americas

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 538-555
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613400

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Fabrício M. Fialho
University of California, Los Angeles

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

We address long-standing debates on the utility of racial categories and color scales for understanding inequality in the United States and Latin America, using novel data that enable comparisons of these measures across both broad regions. In particular, we attend to the degree to which color and racial category inequality operate independently of parental socioeconomic status. We find a variety of patterns of racial category and color inequality, but that in most countries accounting for maternal education changes our coefficients by 5% or less. Overall, we argue that several posited divergences in ethnoracial stratification processes in the United States, compared with Latin America, might be overstated. We conclude that the comparison of the effects of multiple ethnoracial markers, such as color and racial categories, for the analysis of social stratification holds substantial promise for untangling the complexities of “race” across the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.

Documenting Contested Racial Identities Among Self-Identified Latina/os, Asians, Blacks, and Whites

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 442-464
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613396

Nicholas Vargas, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Sociology
University of Florida

Kevin Stainback, Associate Professor of Sociology
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

A contested racial identity refers to incongruence between personal racial identification and external racial categorization. For example, an individual may self-identify as White, but be perceived by most others as non-White. Documenting racial contestation is important because racialized experiences are shaped not only by the racial classification that individuals claim for themselves but also the external racial attributions placed on them by others. Focusing solely on monoracial identifying adults, this study answers three key questions about racial contestation: (a) How common is it? (b) Who is most likely to report experiencing it? and (c) How is it related to aspects of racial identity such as racial awareness, racial group closeness, and racial identity salience? Employing the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, results suggest that reports of racial contestation among monoracial identifying adults are more common than some studies suggest (6% to 14%)—particularly among the fastest growing racial groups in the United States, including Latina/os and Asians—and that experiences of racial contestation are often associated with immigrant generation, ancestry, and phenotypical characteristics. Ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that individuals who report experiencing racial contestation are no more aware of race in everyday life than other U.S. adults, but they feel less close to other members of the self-identified racial group and report lower levels of racial identity salience than their noncontested counterparts. These results point to a thinning of racial identity among the racially contested.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mat Johnson: Black & White & Read All Over

The Austin Chronicle
Austin, Texas
2015-06-18

Wayne Alan Brenner

Our interview with the Houston-based author

This is an interview with Mat Johnson, who wrote the acclaimed Pym – which is somehow a popular favorite and a cult favorite, simultaneously, we’d swear – and who is most recently author of the novel Loving Day, which we’ve reviewed right here, just out via the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Penguin Random House.

Note: Johnson had written a few books before those two, yes, and – here, that’s what this link (thank you, Wikipedia) will tell you all about. And here’s the interview:

Austin Chronicle: Your Pym was one hell of a wild ride, like a fantasy thriller crossed with cultural critique, and it seemed to go all over the map. An interesting map, and hilariously drawn, but with so much stuff, like, galloping through the story. Loving Day, funny as it is, seems a lot more focused and relatively subdued.

Mat Johnson: The type of work I’ve been doing has its limitations and its strengths. And one of the strengths, I think, letting it go half wild allows me to take it to places I wouldn’t have if I was planning it meticulously. So I realize that, basically, I’ve been throwing knuckleballs. You know? You throw a knuckleball, there’s an acceptance that you’re dealing with chaos, but, hopefully – through technique and through practice – you can manage to control chaos enough to get it into the general direction. And that’s been the trick. Of course, the question is: How do you follow it up? And I don’t know if I can! [laughs] With Loving Day, what ended up being the entire book, I had imagined it as half of the book – but thank God I didn’t go on for another 300 pages. When I started it, I was interested in looking at mixed identity, mulatto identity – which, almost always in literature, is an I, singular – “This is my experience, I’m different than everybody,” and that’s the tragic mulatto archetype. And so what I wanted to do was try and say, “Okay, this is a different time, now – it’s more of a we.” What does it mean when you take something that’s so often been described as an individual experience and you start looking at it as a group experience? That was one of the original impetuses – there were a couple of them. Another was just, I wanted to write about Philly. [laughs] And the other one was that line, that opening line, “In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.” And I really liked that line, and I caught myself saying it to myself – like it was lyrics to a song – and I thought, “Oh shit, this is something. Why is this interesting to me?” Because sometimes it’s my subconscious that’s interested, and my conscious has to figure out why my subconscious cares. So it built from there. And ultimately, while I was writing it, I realized that the father-daughter story was the essential story. And so, once I had that, that’s when I had my structure…

…AC: Okay, here’s a, uh, a Tricky Race Question. There are all these wrap-ups you see in the media – The Best Of The Decade, The Best Of The Century, and so on. The Best Black Writers Of blah-blah-blah. And not that it’s a zero-sum game, but there’s gonna be some list of The Top Ten Black Writers, and if you’re on that list? And there’s some other writer, who’s almost as good as you are – like it could be gauged that precisely, so they’re definitely next on the quality tier – but you’ve knocked them out of that top ten. And they’re not mixed, they’re black. Are they gonna feel like, looking at you, “Wait a minute, what is this dude doing on the list?”

MJ: Yes, they will feel like that. Because one of the things, in the larger sense of Who Gets To Get Listened To? Part of the reason we have these lists – of The Top Ten African-American Writers or The Top Ten Latino Writers – is because when it’s just The Top Ten Writers? It’s actually The Top Ten White Writers, and with maybe one or two other kinds of people thrown in to, you know, integrate it. So the initial problem is that the black writers’ response, other ethnic writers’ response, is to the fact that there’s really a kind of antiquated segregation in publishing. So that’s part of it. The other part is, there’s not a lot of black writers writing literary fiction, so you’d have to get it down to about The Top Five, probably. [laughs] But one of the things that’s difficult for writers of color is that your success is largely based on a white audience, so people who have sort of an in into the larger white mainstream are going to get more attention. Now, sometimes those ins are, you know, white readers are interested in getting a kind of inside look into a culture that’s unfamiliar to them. And sometimes those ins are like with Loving Day – there’s my Irish father, and it’s Irish this and Irish that – so that’s also an in that kind of puts a sign on the door that says White Money Accepted Here Too. You know?…

Read the entire interview here.

“When I discovered that I’m black”: How racism is so cruel, that it makes it difficult for black people to recognize themselves as such

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2016-03-04

Jônatas Cordeiro da Silva

Originally “When I discovered that I’m black: “I’ll tell my story, because I also have one.”” from Hey Fala, January 11, 2016.

Today I feel the necessity of telling you how I discovered myself (and I’m still discovering) as black, which I will cover in a brief discussion of miscegenation.

When I see some cases, such as for example, (futebol star) Neymar who says that he’s not preto (black) or Caio (You Tuber Jout Jout’s boyfriend) who declares himself pardo (brown). I remember how difficult it was for me to recognize myself as black. I always knew that I wasn’t white, not only by the color of my skin, hair, and features, but also because of the places that neither I nor my ancestors occupied, however there is a big difference between not being branco (white) and being black.

It’s important to point out that in some way miscegenation in Brazil was historically simple, also one of the factors for miscegenation was the rape of black women enslaved by their colonizers, indigenous women were also violated. Black people were blamed for the backwardness of the Brazilian nation, there was a eugenicist plan, which envisaged that through the “mistura de raças” (melting pot or mixture of the races) the extinction of black people by 2012, so then Brazil would be a developed nation…

Read the entire article here.

We Live Here rerun: Being biracial in America

St. Louis Public Radio
90.7 KWMU, KWMU-2, KWMU-3: News That Matters.
Saint Louis, Missouri
2016-03-07

Shula Neuman, Executive Editor

We originally aired this podcast on what its like to be multi-racial about six months ago. The project was the brainchild of Emanuele Berry, one of the founding producers of We Live Here, and it’s still one of our favorite episodes — not just because we miss Emanuele (who is on a Fulbright in Macau, China), but also because the stories and interactions in this podcast are poignant and thought provoking.

Since this originally aired, the question of what it means to be called biracial, or multi-racial came up in the news. Actor Taye Diggs released a book late in 2015 called Mixed Me. It’s a children’s book (his second) that was apparently inspired by his 6-year-old son…

Listen to the story here.