Mixed Race Studies

“Having a black great-grandmother made me non-white”: Popular white DJ defined herself as brown to enter college through Brazil’s affirmative action program

Black Women of Brazil
2020-06-11

By Luana Benedito and Juca Guimarães

Larissa Busch defined herself as ‘brown’ in order to get into college through affirmative action

Young woman entered the university in the modality that contemplated “self-declared black, brown or indigenous candidates regardless of income”

24-year-old digital influence Larissa Busch admitted to cheating the racial quota system at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in a long post on her Instagram profile this Tuesday (2). The young woman, who is white, joined the educational institution in the Social Communication course, in the second half of 2014, in the modality that contemplated “self-declared black, brown or indigenous candidates regardless of income”.

“In 2014, six years ago, I made the worst choice of my life and I’m here to talk about it with all the guilt that I carry. I entered the university calling myself ‘parda’ (brown/mixed). Yes, this is horrible and there is not a day that I don’t think about it. I have kept this shame inside me for a long time and as much as I feel sad that the dirtiest episode of my life is becoming public, I always knew that this day would come”, said Larissa in an excerpt of the text…

Read the entire article here.

The Role of Black Women in the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Black Perspectives
2020-07-02

Christina Proenza Coles, Lecturer of American Studies
University of Virginia

Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2020)

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,” observed W.E.B. Du Bois, “a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”¹ The exposition of whiteness as a novel social construct and political tool masquerading as a natural category has been ably elaborated by several scholars in the last forty years. Erika Denise Edward’s new book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic, is both innovative as well as firmly grounded in the rich tradition of scholarship that illuminates the manifold processes, policies, sites, and situations in which notions of whiteness were negotiated, reified, and contested across the New World.

Hiding in Plain Sight counters conventional narratives about the demographic decline of Afro-Argentines as it centers the initiatives of African-descended women in capitalizing on the privileges of whiteness. Edwards, an Associate Professor of colonial Latin American History at UNC Charlotte, addresses broad questions regarding the complex relationships between race and class in Latin America, including “how the caste societies of the colonial and early national periods were gradually transformed into the class societies of the twentieth century.”²…

Read the entire review here.