Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007). Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology. (Volume 114, Number 3, 2008): 577–614.

The Fluidity

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2013-10-24 15:31Z by Steven

The Fluidity

Neither/Both: my mixed-race experience
2013-10-19

Lola Osunkoya

I went to the skating rink on a night I don’t usually go, and found myself to be the only female of color there. It was unusual to me because on my regularly night, it’s a predominantly Black crowd. In this stage of my identity development, I’m very conscious of my racial surroundings when I am one of the few.

Today I identify primarily as Mixed, but also as Black. That has changed over the years as Mixed identities are inherently fluid… if we choose that route – static is another choice. I have been militantly Mixed, not White enough, begrudgingly Black. All of them had a certain frantic energy on them because I felt like they were dependent on outside validation. Today I feel more at peace with my chosen identity. Will it remain this way now that it feels peaceful? Maybe. But the fluidity could push me in a new direction sometime in the future…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Lola Osunkoya, Neither/Both: my mixed-race experience

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The Fluidity

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