Mixed Race Studies

France Winddance Twine | Digging Up the Past: Race & Class in Brazil

Duke Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2019-02-11

The From Slavery to Freedom Lab welcomed France Winddance Twine on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of her book, “Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil.” Dr. Twine reflected on intersectionality and racial, gender, and class politics in Brazil and the future of Brazilian Studies.

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist, and a documentary filmmaker, whose research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Twine’s research provides case studies for a nuanced analysis of the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender inequality. Twine has conducted extensive field research on both sides of the Atlantic including: Brazil, Britain, and the United States. She is the author and editor of ten books including: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil; A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy; Geographies of Privilege; Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in the Global Market; and Girls with Guns: Firearms, Feminism and Militarism.

Drawing inspiration from John Hope Franklin’s path-breaking 1947 study, the “From Slavery to Freedom” Franklin Humanities Lab seeks to examine the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.

How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

BuzzFeed
2018-03-30

Micah Baldwin / Via Flickr: micahb37

Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

This open letter was produced by a group of 68 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below.

In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race.

He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.

As a group of 68 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed…

Read the entire letter here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Democratization of Beauty?: Skin Bleaching, Skin Bronzing and the Global Market in Color Enhancement”

University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-12-12, 10:30 PST (Local Time)

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

Feminist Race Theorist and Sociologist to Lecture

Hamilton College, Clinton New York
College News
2012-04-07

France Winddance Twine, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will present a lecture on Tuesday, April 10, at 4:15 p.m., in Dwight Lounge, Bristol Campus Center. Twine will discuss “The Future of Anti-Racism & Racial Literacy After The Trayvon Martin Murder.” The lecture is free and open to the public.
 
In addition to editing several collections on race, class and gender, she has authored Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market and Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil, as well as A White Side of Black Britain…

For more information, click here.

Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil

Rutgers University Press
1997-10-01
192 pages
20 b & w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2364-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8135-2365-1

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

This groundbreaking ethnographic study analyzes everyday practices that leave intact the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil’s “racial democracy” in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Vasalia: The Research Site
• 3. Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism: The Social, Sexual, Socioeconomic, and Semiotic Contours
• 4. Discourses in Defense of the Racial Democracy
• 5. Embranquecimento: Aesthetic Ideals and Resistance to Mestiçagem
• 6. Memory: White Inflation and Willful Forgetting
• 7. Strategic Responses to Racism: Preserving White Supremacy
• Appendix A: Interview Schedule
• Appendix B: Biographical Data on Interviewees
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

White Americans, The New Minority? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness

Jonathan W. Warren, Associate Professor of International and Latin American Studies
University of Washington

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 28, Number 2 (November 1997)
pages 200-218

Argues that in the United States the “white” racial category has expanded across time to include groups previously considered “non-white.” The role of blacks in this expansion is explored as well as whether white Americans are really becoming a numerical minority. An alternative racial future to the one frequently forecasted is suggested.

…But are Whites really becoming a minority? Does the escalation of non-European immigrants mean that minorities are becoming a majority? The logic of the argument appears sound enough: Immigration from Asia and Latin America is increasing, and because  these people are non-Whites, then eventually non-Whites will be in the numerical majority. Yet, this argument hinges on an unexamined premise—the essentialist premise that Whiteness is a fixed racial category. In other words, one can only draw the conclusion that Whites are becomin a minority if one assumes that racial categories are static across time and place. However, as the  following experience of Amy Pagnozzi suggests, such an assumption is dubious at best…

…In this article, we will argue that in the United States the “White” racial category has expanded across time to include groups previously considered “non-White.” The Irish will be used as an example of how groups, at one time considered to be neither White nor Black, have been racially repositioned as White. We will then explore the importance of the role of Blacks in the expansion of the White category. Finally, we will return to the question of whether White Americans are actually in danger of becoming a numerical minority, given the sharp increase in Latin American and Asian immigration, and suggest an alternative racial future to the one so often forecasted….

Read or purchase the article here.

White like who? The value of whiteness in British interracial families

Ethnicities
Volume 10, Number 3 (September 2010)
pages 292-312
DOI: 10.1177/1468796810372306

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The value of whiteness is not fixed, rather it has contradictory and competing meanings among members of Black British interracial families. Drawing upon racial consciousness interviews and participant observation conducted as part of a longitudinal study of Black-White interracial families in England, this article presents the analysis of five black members of interracial families to show the fluid value of whiteness. An analysis of interviews with sixteen black family members uncovered four discourses or analytical frames employed by blacks as they evaluated the impact of their white family member upon the family.  These four frames reveal that white family members are perceived as both a source of status and stigma. Black family members perceived their white spouses, partners and sisters-in-laws as: 1) an asset – a source of economic, social and symbolic capital, 2) a source of injury, 3) a cultural liability and 4) a source of sexual adventure that threatened the respectability of the family.

Read or purchase the article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6
November 2004
pages 878 – 907
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Read or purchase the article here.