Mixed Race Studies

Redefining Racial Categories: The Dynamics of Identity Among Brazilian-Americans

Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora
Volume 33, Issue 1, 2015
pages 45-65
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.2014.909732

Catarina Fritz
Department of Sociology and Corrections
Minnesota State University, Mankato

Research based on a sample of Brazilian youth living in Massachusetts reveals a variety of responses to racialisation of their phenotypes. Caught between the fluid patterns of colour categories found in Brazilian society and the more rigid racial stratification that characterises the USA, Brazilian-Americans have followed a variety of strategies to adapt to this situation. By exploring the reactions of these young adults of different appearance along the colour continuum to the constraints of the dominant society, questions concerning the future dynamics of race relations in the USA are raised against a background of the continuing post-racialism debate.

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Philanthropic racism in Britain: The Liverpool university settlement, the anti-slavery society and the issue of ‘half-caste’ children, 1919-51

Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 3, Issue 1 (1984)
Pages 69-88
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1984.9974570

Paul B. Rich

The history of racial ideology in Britain has focused mainly on extreme groups of the political right. Less attention has been paid to more ‘respectable’ forms of racism. This paper attempts to redress the balance. It concentrates upon two groups, the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement and, with particular reference to Liverpool and Cardiff between 1919 and 1951, examines their attitudes towards Britain’s ‘half-caste’ population.

The history of racial ideology in Britain has tended mostly to focus upongroups on the extreme right-wing fringe to the exclusion of what may be termed ‘middle opinion’. This rather narrow range of analysis, centred around the yardstick of fascism and its political variants, can lead to the downplaying in certain aspects of British racial attitudes which can be seen to represent a continuation, in a somewhat different guise, of Victorian racial ideas. It was Hugh Tinker who originally suggested this possible linkage between more modern British race attitudes and what he termed ‘neo-Victorianism’, though the thesis has been given no substantial institutional anchorage. This article, therefore, proposes to look at one particular set of institutional links between the Victorian era and the more modern arena of race relations in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at the role of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement in the debate on ‘half-castes’ in the seaport towns of Liverpool, and to a lesser degree Cardiff, between the wars.

This issue is of importance to students of race in Britain for a number of reasons. Both the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement had roots in the Victorian philanthropic concern with the lower social orders and the less privileged. Though the anti-slavery movement had its heyday during the middle of the nineteenth century before and after the American Civil War of 1861-5, it left a strong legacy in middle-class liberal thought in Britain which was to enjoy a renewed upsurge on the issue of ‘forced labour’ in the Belgian Congo during the Edwardian years through the campaign of E.D. Morel and the Congo Reform Association. Similarly, the university settlement movement was a product of middle-class concern with the lower class—especially in London—in the 1880s as rising class consciousness and residential separation between classes made older and more paternalistic methods of social control increasingly ineffective. Both these Victorian movements carried on in…

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Mapping race: Multiracial people and racial category construction in the United States and Britain

Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 15, Issue 2 (July 1996)
pages 107-119
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1996.9974883

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

The social construction of what are often called ‘racial’ categories has proceeded differently in different places. The bases of ascription and group identity, the placement of the boundaries between groups, and the power dynamics between groups have changed dramatically over time and social and political circumstance in each place. This article is a meditation and speculation on the ways that racial categories have been constructed and have changed in the United States and Britain over the course of the twentieth century.’ It uses the identity situations of people of multiple ancestries – Black and White, Asian and African and so on – as a tool to deconstruct the meanings assigned to racial categories and the power dynamics that underly those categories. The article lays out some things that the situation of multiracial people – people some of whose ancestors were Africans and some of whose ancestors came from somewhere else – tells us about the ways racial categories and meanings have evolved over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and in Britain. It finds, in sum, that White Americans have long had clearer ideas than White Britons about what they wanted to do with race; that those clear categories in the US are now breaking down, partly because of the rise of a multiracial consciousness on the part of some people of mixed parentage; and that a British innovation of the 1970s and the 1980s, a common Black identity for all non-White Britons, is no longer working very well, either.

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