Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-race Brazilians increasingly embrace blackness

France 24
2021-11-19

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – When Bianca Santana was little, her grandmother used to put her forearm alongside her mother’s and her own, proudly showing how the family’s skin had lightened across the generations.

Now 37, Santana, a Brazilian writer and activist, sees the long-loaded issue of race in her country through a different lens: she is proud to call herself black.

“When a child was born with lighter skin, that was cause for celebration,” says Santana, recalling the messages she received about race growing up.

She remembers how her black grandmother used to make her pull her hair into a tight bun, so she wouldn’t look like “‘those little blackies.'”

“She liked to talk about how my mother’s father had Italian blood, how his mother had blue eyes,” she says.

Today, Santana, author of the book “How I Discovered I Was Black,” proudly wears her hair in an afro, a style she only embraced at age 30.

Her shifting sense of identity is increasingly common in Brazil, the country with the largest black population outside Africa.

Brazil, which will celebrate Black Consciousness Day Saturday, struggles with structural racism and the legacy of slavery, which it only abolished in 1888 — the last country in the Americas to do so.

But for the large mixed-race population in this sprawling country of 213 million people, the stigma long attached to blackness is fading.

“Mixed-race people in Brazil increasingly identify as black,” Santana says.

“They’re straightening their hair less, they’re embracing black identity more and more.”…

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Alternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answersAlternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answers

France 24
2019-08-23

Seoul (AFP)

On a summer’s day in 1985 a seven-year-old boy sat alone at a crowded bus station in Seoul, sobbing as he waited desperately for his mother to return.

Jo Youn-hwan was wearing a baseball uniform that his mother had bought him a few days before — the only gift she had ever given him.

She told him to wait for her before leaving him at the terminal. So he did, increasingly terrified as day turned to dusk.

“I’ll be a really good kid if only she chooses to return,” he promised himself, over and over again. “I’ll be a really, really good kid.”

She never did…

…International adoption from South Korea began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to local mothers and American GI fathers, from a country that emphasized ethnic homogeneity.

More recently the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women, who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society, and according to historians, are often forced to give up their children.

Most children remain institutionalised till adulthood as many South Koreans are reluctant to adopt. The country has sent some 180,000 children overseas over the years, mostly to the US…

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Ukraine mixed-race wrestler tackles prejudice in run for parliament

France 24
2019-07-16

Boyarka (Ukraine) (AFP)

Zhan Beleniuk, an Olympic wrestler with Rwandan roots, is running to become the first mixed-race member of Ukraine’s parliament AFP

Zhan Beleniuk, an Olympic wrestler with Rwandan roots, is seeking to enter Ukraine’s parliament as the first mixed-race MP in a bid to overcome racist attitudes and support the country’s young new leader.

The Greco-Roman style wrestler, who won silver for Ukraine at the Rio Olympics, is standing for the party of the new Ukrainian president, comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky, in Sunday’s polls.

The 28-year-old is the son of a Ukrainian dressmaker and a Rwandan pilot killed in that country’s civil war in the 1990s. He grew up in a one-room flat in the capital Kiev.

“Volodymyr Zelensky invited me to join his party, we knew each other before,” Beleniuk told AFP in an interview as he campaigned in the small town of Boyarka just outside Kiev.

“It seems like he saw qualities in me that will help promote the development of Ukrainian sport,” said the athlete after holding a training session for children.

Describing himself as “100 percent Ukrainian”, Beleniuk said his election would prove “we’re really a country that’s modern and that treats all races, all ethnic groups the same.”…

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The limits of affirmative action in Brazil

Focus
France 24
2017-07-26

Brazil has the highest proportion of so-called “mixed race” people in the world. Yet only 13% of people aged 18 to 24 in that category are enrolled at university. Back in 2012, the government decided to introduce quotas for universities. But recently, the system appears to have stalled. Black student groups have denounced students they say are “too white” to benefit from this affirmative action policy, while universities have set up committees to examine skin color and ethnic background.

A programme prepared by Patrick Lovett and Aline Schmidt.

Watch the entire program here.

Katanga’s forgotten people

FRANCE 24
2010-03-16

Marlène Rabaud

Arnaud Zajtman

Like many mixed-race children in Congo, they were born of a Japanese father who came to work in the mines of Katanga in south-east of the country. Today, they accuse their fathers of wanting to kill them so as not to leave behind any traces when they returned to Japan. FRANCE 24 met these men and women seeking the recognition that has always been denied them.

Watch the video (00:10:51) here.

Obama sworn in for second term

France 24
2013-01-20

US President Barack Obama on Sunday was sworn in for a second four-year term at a small, private ceremony at the White House. He will take the oath again on Monday at the Capitol during a public swearing-in.

A still-popular Barack Obama took the presidential oath of office for a second term on Sunday, facing a troubled future but hoping to leave behind a battering four years at the helm of a government mired in ugly political division.
 
When Obama first took office as the 44th U.S. president, many Americans hoped the symbolism of the first black man in the White House was a turning point in the country’s deeply troubled racial history. Obama vowed to moderate the partisan anger engulfing the country, but the nation is only more divided four years later, perhaps as deeply as at any time since the U.S. Civil War 150 years ago.
 
Obama was sworn in by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during a brief ceremony with his family in the White House Blue Room, meeting the legal requirement that presidents officially take office on Jan. 20. Because that date fell on a Sunday this year, the traditional ceremonies surrounding the start of a president’s term were put off to Monday, which coincides this year with the birthday of revered civil rights leader Martin Luther King. He was assassinated in 1968…

Read the entire article here.