{"id":50585,"date":"2016-12-12T18:45:58","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T18:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50585"},"modified":"2017-04-10T01:44:47","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T01:44:47","slug":"black-or-white-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50585","title":{"rendered":"Black or white?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black or white?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Globe and Mail<\/a>
\n2016-12-12<\/p>\n

Stephanie Nolen<\/strong><\/a>, Latin America Bureau Chief
\nRio De Janiero, Brazil<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nJacqueline Suellen Chaves poses for a photo on Belm Docs. She\u2019s a black woman rejected as too white for a job as a social worker by a\u00a0panel.
\nDaniel Ramalho\/For The Globe and\u00a0Mail<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

It was a policy was born of good intentions but has stirred up perplexing, often painful, questions: What makes a person black, or white? Is it facial features? Hair? Family? Or an experience of racism? And who gets to decide?<\/em><\/p>\n

Jacqueline Chaves checked the Internet every day, waiting to see test results posted \u2013 a pass would be the last step in her long road to a job as a social\u00a0worker.<\/p>\n

Ms. Chaves, 23, had worked hard to get through a degree program at the competitive federal university in Belem do Para<\/a>, a port city on the Amazon forest\u2019s<\/a> Atlantic coast. There were many tough tests along the way but she wasn\u2019t a bit worried about this final one. It was an exam to assess whether she qualified for a position being reserved for an affirmative-action<\/a> candidate. Ms. Chaves knew she would sail through, because she is\u00a0black.<\/p>\n

Or thought she\u00a0was…<\/p>\n

…Commissions are vital to ensure that limited affirmative-action spaces are not used by cheating white students, said Iuri Nascimento, an activist with a racial-equality advocacy organization called Negrex<\/a>. Any argument that it\u2019s impossible to tell who is eligible in a country with a lot of mixed-raced people is simply aimed at undermining the system, he added.<\/p>\n

There is no \u201cpurely objective scale\u201d of blackness, he said, but it\u2019s also not that hard to tell who is black and who isn\u2019t: Police officers identify who is black just fine, argued Mr. Nascimento. (Black Brazilian men are killed by police three times more often than white.)…<\/p>\n

…Yet there are many Brazilians \u2013 including other black activists \u2013 who think that the tribunals are a terrible idea. Petronio Domingues, a historian with the Federal University of Sergipe who studies the fight for racial equality in Brazil<\/a>, said it\u2019s absurd to think that there are characteristics that can be evaluated objectively to determine race.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re looking only at a person\u2019s appearance, and that doesn\u2019t define race,\u201d he said. \u201cAny definition of what it is to be black cannot be external to the individual. \u2026 Race is a social construction, without scientific basis.\u201d Nor is there any evidence that proves that black people with very dark skin suffer more prejudice than those who are called pardo<\/em>, or brown, he added, so it makes no sense to give more \u201cpoints\u201d to someone whose skin is darker or hair\u00a0curlier…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a policy was born of good intentions but has stirred up perplexing, often painful, questions: What makes a person black, or white? Is it facial features? Hair? Family? Or an experience of racism? And who gets to decide?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,21,1467,8,26,23674,394],"tags":[22731,25709,25706,25711,20611,25708,25707,25702,25703,25704,25710,25705,20608,8908],"class_list":["post-50585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-social-justice","category-socialscience","tag-affirmative-action","tag-alexander-amaral","tag-eduardo-sobral","tag-elisangela-mendonca","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-igor-anatoli","tag-iuri-nascimento","tag-jacqueline-chaves","tag-jacqueline-suellen-chaves","tag-negrex","tag-petronio-domingues","tag-rodrigo-campos","tag-stephanie-nolen","tag-the-globe-and-mail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50585"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53375,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50585\/revisions\/53375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}