Mixed Race Studies

The Rise of the Afro-descendent Identity in Latin America

teleSUR
2018-03-04

For Black History Month, Catherine Walsh, professor of Afro-Andean Studies at the University Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, shares with teleSUR her views about the achievements and challenges for the construction of an Afro-descendent consciousness in Latin America.

What in recent history would you say has contributed to the rise of a Black and Afro-descendent identity, with Black communities now embracing more than ever their culture across the continent?

Yes, this has changed radically. Several moments in recent history are important to highlight: in the 1990s, with the rise of Indigenous movements, alliances were built between Indigenous and Black people like in Ecuador.

But Black communities also began to organize by themselves, involving the construction of a notion of a Black territory, sometimes referred to as the “Gran Comarca” from the South of Panama to the North of Ecuador, where national identity does not matter. Black people living in the region often come from the same families, they have similar last names, and for many years have moved freely over the borders identifying as Afro-descendent and regardless of the national borders…

Read the entire interview here.

Kevin Sharkey wants to become Ireland’s first black president

Extra.ie
2018-03-26

Alison O’Reilly
DMG Media Ireland

Artist and former RTÉ star Kevin Sharkey has laid out his stall for his presidential election bid as he hopes to be Ireland’s first black president.

Sharkey, 56, who in recent years fell on hard times and was homeless for a period, said he intends to speak to county councils and TDs across the country in the coming months to seek their support for his nomination.

The painter recently revealed he would like to be an independent candidate in the next general election, but he is also assembling a team to help him get nominated to run for the áras…

Read the entire article here.

The idea of widespread interracial sex was central to the construction of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy. Sex and its traditional connection to intimacy and interracial reproduction were used to create a racially complex society and as an effective weapon of subjugation for the enslaved. Sex was attributed a transcendental meaning by many of the nation’s white elite and racial theorists; that is, sex and reproduction had the capacity to erase barriers and served as proof that race could be and had been transcended. This conceptualization of sex and its connection to race was central to Portuguese colonialism and became the very basis of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy.¹ The silencing and sanitization of the nation’s history of rape, sexual violence, and abuse during slavery and its aftermath laid the foundation for an enduring legacy of erasure that then created the illusion of equality and racial progressivism, while in reality, solidifying an antiblack, racist system that preserved white male supremacy in Brazil’s past and present.

Lamonte Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 3

Politics beyond Black and White: Biracial Identity and Attitudes in America

Cambridge University Press
2018-03-29
251 pages
Online ISBN: 978-1108694605
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1108425988
Paperback ISBN: 978-1108444330
DOI: 10.1017/9781108694605

Lauren D. Davenport, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University, California

The US is transforming into a multiracial society: today one-in-six new marriages are interracial and the multiple-race population is the fastest-growing youth group in the country. In Politics Beyond Black and White, Lauren D. Davenport examines the ascendance of multiracial identities and their implications for American society and the political landscape. Amassing unprecedented evidence, this book systematically investigates how race is constructed and how it influences political behavior. Professor Davenport shows that biracials’ identities are the product of family, interpersonal interactions, environment, and, most compellingly, gender stereotypes and social class. These identities, in turn, shape attitudes across a range of political issues, from affirmative action to same-sex marriage, and multiracial identifiers are shown to be culturally and politically progressive. But the book also reveals lingering prejudices against race-mixing, and that intermarriage and identification are highly correlated with economic prosperity. Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others.

The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo

Corgi Childrens
2015-07-02
288 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 18mm
202g
Paperback ISBN: 9780552557634
eBook ISBN: 9781448197583

Catherine Johnson

Shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2016, this is a very curious tale indeed . . .

Out of the blue arrives an exotic young woman from a foreign land. Fearless and strong, ‘Princess’ Caraboo rises above the suspicions of the wealthy family who take her in.

But who is the real Caraboo?

In a world where it seems everyone is playing a role, could she be an ordinary girl with a tragic past? Is she a confidence trickster? Or is she the princess everyone wants her to be?

This the tale of the ultimate historical hustle, steeped in delectable romance. Whoever Caraboo turns out to be, she will steal your heart . . .

“My identity was questioned a lot when I was growing up. I never really felt like I fit in anywhere. My mom’s boyfriend, who’s basically my stepdad, is Black. My white friends’ parents wouldn’t have a problem with me, but when they saw my stepdad, they wouldn’t let their kids come over anymore. And in middle school, I was called Medusa, Oreo, and a mutt.

Today, I still get the whole “Oh, you’re not really Black” thing because I’m light-skinned… and probably because I pass as white. Because I grew up with my white mom and I’m light-skinned, people will invalidate the fact that I’m Black. But I think being multiracial is its own thing. I’m not white and I’m not Black. I’m both.” —Tasha Gear, 25, Photographer

Khalea Underwood, “What It Really Feels Like To Be Asked “What Are You?”,” Refinery29, February 28, 2018. https://www.refinery29.com/2018/02/191865/black-women-racial-ambiguity-interview-photos.

What It Really Feels Like To Be Asked “What Are You?”

Refinery29
2018-02-28

Khalea Underwood

Nali Henry, 19, Artist Photographed by Myles Loftin.

Where are you from?”

“Florida.”

“Where are your parents from?”

“My mom’s from Ohio and my dad’s from Florida.”

“But, you know what I mean: What are you?”

This is the way most conversations with Tasha Gear, a 25-year-old photographer based in New York City, start. Tasha, who’s half Black and half white, has been fielding questions about her background since she could talk. “People barely say two words to me and then ask what I am,” she says. And hers is not an isolated experience.

Since interracial marriage was legalized in 1967, the percentage of interracial couples in the U.S. has grown from three percent to 17 percent. As a result, a new generation of ethnically ambiguous young people has formed; nearly one in seven infants born is considered “multi-racial,” according to a recent Pew Research Center study…

These young men and women — and the love they were born out of — should be cause for celebration. But in more cases, their experience is fetishism (every rapper on the top 40 list talks about bagging a “foreign” chick), speculation (“but what are you, really?”), or even a dismissal of identity within their own cultures.

In their own words, five multi-ethnic young people — who all identify as Black in some way — explain why they’re rejecting the “what are you?” question to explain who they really are…

Read the entire article here.

In 2004, my mother and I were having an argument and she called me a “Black bastard.” And I’m like, even if you want to hurt my feelings, who says that? Call me stupid. call me whatever, but “Black bastard?” Where did that come from? So after a pregnant silence, she told me the story of how she met somebody just before she met the man I thought was my dad. She doesn’t really remember a whole lot about him; it was a short-lived relationship. But he was Black. African American. Of course, I was shocked. But I also had a sense of relief and affirmation. And while I was having a lot of questions—I wanted to know who this man was, I wanted some evidence—all these pieces just fell into place: why my lips were bigger, why my skin was darker, why I didn’t look like the rest of my family, and perhaps even why I gravitated to the people and things that I did. It just explained a lot of things that I had a hard time explaining to myself. And it made me feel like perhaps all the choices I had made were not necessarily mine to have made. Maybe in a strange way my biological father had been guiding me towards myself all along. —Zun Lee

Yaba Blay, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, (Philadelphia: BLACKprint Press, 2013). 92-93.

Research shows that white parents of multiracial children are often, for the first time, thrust into the realities of racism, are subject to an experience from which they had previously been immune. Where they had once had the privilege of invisibility, white mothers who were raised in homogeneously white families may now face racism from both the white communities who had once embraced them and from “communities of color.”

Tiffany McLain LMFT, “Becoming White: The Experience of Raising Biracial Children,” Psychology Today, February 23, 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-between-worlds/201802/becoming-white-the-experience-raising-biracial-children.

Last year, I predicted 2017 (and the era of Trump more generally) would be a time of renewed faith in the political efficacy of interracial romance and procreation. This prediction was informed by two recent books — one by UC Irvine professor Jared Sexton, the other by NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o — which probe the way racial hybridity is used to avoid reflection and recollection on how white supremacy works. NatGeo’s cover illustration, which codes one biracial twin as “white” and the other as “black,” transmits the idea that racism will be fixed with more lightly bronzed children. This future utopia is one in which children who can pass for white still exist among their tanner peers, but those with dark skin and tightly coiled hair do not. This hope, which imagines a past of white racial “purity,” is a form of anti-blackness itself. Racism and multiracialism can be allies.

Lauren Michele Jackson, “National Geographic Replaces Racist Fictions With Post-racial Fantasies,” New York Magazine, March 16, 2018. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/natl-geographics-racist-fictions-and-post-racial-fantasies.html.