Mixed Race Studies

Who is Afro-Latin@? Examining the Social Construction of Race and Négritude in Latin America and the Caribbean

Social Education
Volume 81, January/February (2017)
pages 37-42

Christopher L. Busey, Associate Professor
School of Teaching and Learning
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

Bárbara C. Cruz, Professor of Social Education
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida

By the 1930s the négritude ideological movement, which fostered a pride and consciousness of African heritage, gained prominence and acceptance among black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. While embraced by many, some of African descent rejected the philosophy, despite evident historical and cultural markers. Such was the case of Rafael Trujillo, who had assumed power in the Dominican Republic in 1930. Trujillo, a dark-skinned Dominican whose grandmother was Haitian, used light-colored pancake make-up to appear whiter. He literally had his family history rewritten and “whitewashed,” once he took power of the island nation. Beyond efforts to alter his personal appearance and recast his own history, Trujillo also took extreme measures to erase blackness in Dominican society during his 31 years of dictatorial rule. On a national level, Trujillo promoted blanqueamiento (whitening), encouraging the immigration of single Europeans to the island and offering refuge to Jews during World War II because they were considered white—thus attempting to mejorar la raza or “improve [whiten] the race” of the Dominican Republic.

Read the entire article here.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio serves as a brown face of white supremacy

MSNBC
2022-03-15

Julio Ricardo Varela, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

White supremacy will always attract nonwhite believers.

It should come as no surprise that there are several Latino male white nationalists who have gotten disproportionate attention in recent years, but in a country that keeps misunderstanding why the U.S. Latino community is nowhere near close to being a monolith, it is critical to examine how this notion of Latino white nationalists still feels strange to some.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America. While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community…

Read the entire article here.

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War

New York University Press
January 2020
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781479872329
Ebook ISBN: 9781479815869

Kori A. Graves, Associate Professor of History
University at Albany, State University of New York

The origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black children

The Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions.

Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.

Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

Cornell University Press
2022-03-15
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

The Heaviest Drop of Blood: Black Exceptionalism Among Multiracials

Political Psychology
First published 2022-03-04
DOI: 10.1111/pops.12806

Gregory John Leslie, Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Los Angeles

David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

We leverage the emerging multiracial population to reexamine prominent theories of the American color line. A Black exceptionalism hypothesis suggests that Black heritage will be more restrictive of biracials’ social and political assimilation prospects than Asian or Latino heritage. Black exceptionalism better explains biracials’ sorting into the racial hierarchy than does classic assimilation theory or a people-of-color hypothesis. In the American Community Survey, Black heritage dominates subjective racial self-identification among biracial adults and identity assignments to children of interracial marriages. In the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracials, Black-White biracials’ social identity, social networks, perceptions and experiences of discrimination, and political attitudes relevant to race resemble those of monoracial Blacks, whereas Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites are more similar to monoracial Whites than to their minority-group counterparts. Results suggest that even in a more racially mixed future, Black Americans will continue to be uniquely situated behind a most impermeable color line.

Read or purchase the article here.

The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans

National Public Radio
2022-03-10

Hansi Lo Wang

The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier.

Among Native Americans living on reservations and Black people, the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates.

People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted. The bureau said based on its estimates, it’s unclear how well the 2020 tally counted Pacific Islanders…

Read or listen to the story here.

The Films of Branwen Okpako: CfP for a GSA Panel Series

DEFA Film Library

January 2022

We invite contributions for a series of panels on Branwen Okpako’s films, for the 2022 GSA conference, September 15-18, 2022. Co-sponsored by the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA) and the DEFA Film Library, these panels seek to explore the range of stories and rich imagery in the films of this groundbreaking director.

The deadline for submission is 2022-02-28.

Relevant topics might include:

• Afro-Germanness and Afro-German creativity and artistic production;
• Form, filmmaking, and aesthetics;
• Postcolonial and feminist consciousness at the intersections of multiple cultural and familial
• traditions, norms, values;
• Regimes of the body; femininity and gender;
• Engagement with disciplinary regimes, e.g. the police, political regimes, or language;
• German reunification and its repercussion on discourses of racialization, positionality and representation in Europe and Germany;
• Family his- and herstories;
• Affiliation and belonging;
• Political activism and self-empowerment; and
• The reception of Branwen Okpako’s films.

For more information, click here.

The U.S. census sees Middle Eastern and North African people as white. Many don’t

National Public Radio
2022-02-17

Hansi Lo Wang, Correspondent, National Desk

There’s a reality about race in the U.S. that has confounded many people of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

The federal government officially categorizes people with origins in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and other countries in the MENA region as white.

But that racial identity has not matched the discrimination in housing, at work and through other parts of daily life that many say they have faced.

Younger people of MENA descent have “had a plethora of different experiences that made them feel that some of their experiences were actually closer to communities of color in the U.S.,” says Neda Maghbouleh, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, who has conducted research on the topic.

The paradox has been hard to show through data…

Read the entire article here.

ASU professor takes leadership of NEA

ASU News
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
2022-02-08

Mary Beth Faller, Reporter

Jackson sees opportunity in re-imagining the role of arts in creating healthy communities

An Arizona State University professor is taking over the nation’s top arts agency just as arts organizations are working to re-emerge from the pandemic.

Maria Rosario Jackson is the first African American and Mexican American to lead the National Endowment for the Arts. She was confirmed by the Senate in December.

Jackson is an Institute Professor in ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and holds an appointment in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. She is on leave from ASU while she fulfills her term as the NEA’s 13th chair.

Read the entire news release here.

The persistence of myth: Brazil’s undead ‘racial democracy’

Contemporary Political Theory
Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2021
Pages 749–770
DOI: 10.1057/s41296-021-00477-x

Sharon Stanley, Professor of Political Science
University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

This article addresses a recurrent tension in the literature on race and racism in Brazil. On the one hand, we find the so-called myth of racial democracy presented as the dominant racial ideology in Brazil, obscuring enduring racial inequality and thwarting the development of a mass-movement for racial justice. On the other hand, we find periodic announcements that the myth of racial democracy has definitively died. Accordingly, I theorize the myth of racial democracy as a paradoxically undead myth and ask what it is about the form of this peculiar myth that allows it to survive its own repeated death. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth, I show how the celebration of racial mixture, or mestiçagem, functions as a mythological signifier of racial democracy that operates beneath and beyond the level of conscious thought, activating powerful affects and desires even in those who ostensibly know better.

Read or purchase the article here.