Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The extent to which elite universities like Columbia worked to keep black students outside their walls makes the accomplishments of Columbia’s hailed “first” black graduates even more impressive, as these students existed within institutions that found identity through racialized exclusivity. That being said, James Parker Barnett’s story highlights a problem with these narratives of “firsts”, not only within Columbia University, but at historically white institutions across the United States. As mentioned above, Columbia’s refusal to admit black students into the University created the conditions that encouraged black students to pass as white, and James Parker Barnett may be a case of just that. However, the only reason we know about James Parker Barnett was because he was caught. There were high levels of racial mixing occurring in the United States through the 1850s when Barnett was expelled from P&S [School of Physicians and Scientists], and estimates about the frequency of racial passing are contentious. Walter White, a famous fair-skinned black man who passed as white while doing investigative work for the NAACP, estimated that “approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear” into white society every year”.⁵² Roi Ottley, a famous African-American journalist in the early 1900s, claimed that there were approximately five million white-passing black people with forty to fifty thousand passing into whiteness every year.⁵³ While these men lived in the early to mid-1900’s, well past Barnett’s time, their research proves that racial passing had become increasingly common as African descendants continued to mix with those of white ancestry. I argue that this information lends itself to the idea that it was highly unlikely that Barnett, if indeed passing, was the first nor the last black individual to pass as white at Columbia University before it officially began accepting black students. How then, can the university endeavor to honor the “first black” students at Columbia if it has no way of knowing the identities of black passers who, by racial standards of the time, were the first graduating students of African “blood”?

Ciara Keane, “Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at Columbia University,” Columbia University and Slavery, 2018. https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/blurring-lines-james-parker-barnett-racial-passing-and-invisible-early-black-students.

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

Posted in Articles, Arts, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Interviews, Social Science on 2012-07-05 17:03Z by Steven

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

The Husslington Post
2011-12-04

Amil Cook, Correspondent

In this interview, Husslington Post correspondent, Amil Cook, goes in depth with journal/scholar/activist Daniela Gomes about her fight against racism in Brazil. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a series of interviews by Amil.

How influential is Hip-Hop and African American culture in Brazil?

For a long time Afro Brazilians didn’t have access to information about the black leaders in our history. The myth of the racial democracy created an important issue in our country, where a lighter skin person didn’t consider him/herself as black. So for many years for mixed people in Brazil to be black was a shame. In some cases this still happens. So after a long time we were without any understanding about black consciousness but during the 1970s some cultural and political movements started to be inspired by Afro American movements and heroes such as: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. And Hip Hop is a part of this because of its cultural influence.

What is racial democracy for those who may not be familiar with this term?

Racial democracy was a theory created in the early 1900s. The main creator was Gilberto Freyre, who used to affirm that Brazilian society was totally different from other countries because it was a racially mixed country and as a mixed country there wasn’t racism here. He taught that we should value our three races [indigenous (native), African and European] that formed our society because it made us better, made our slavery less painful and things like that. It is important to explain that before Freyre the theory that used to be adopted in Brazil, was the ‘whitening theory’, it was used to affirm that if we started to mix the country we could clean our race and it was believed that in little time black people would be extinct in Brazil. The main thinker of this theory was Nina Rodrigues, a doctor who used to see the black population as a shame. Gilberto Freyre was Rodrigues’ student, and “improved” Rodrigues’ racist theories when he decided to hide the racial issue in Brazil. These two theories are fundamental to understand racial thought in Brazil. The first one [Rodrigues], made Brazilians believe that if they are mixed they aren’t black and the second one [Freyre] made them believe that we are special because we are mixed; there isn’t racism in our country so we don’t need to fight against it. And although the black struggle in my country never stopped, ideas like that made our mission harder…

Read the entire interview here.

Tags: Amil Cook, Daniela Gomes, Hip Hop, Husslington Post, music, The Husslington Post

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Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

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