Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Social Science on 2014-06-30 21:48Z by Steven

Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey

Africa is a Country
2014-06-17

Achal Prabhala
Bangalore, India

By the time you read this, it’s possible that every single person on the planet will know who Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior is…

…You could come to any number of conclusions from Neymar’s remarkable transformation. For instance, you could conclude that race doesn’t exist in Brazil, which is the favourite line of a specific tribe of Brazilians – impeccable liberals all, who just happen to be upper-class, white and at the top of the heap.

Or you could conclude that everyone in Brazil is indeed mixed – which is, incidentally, the second-favourite line of the selfsame tribe.

Or you could wonder what happened to this boy.

***

It’s too easy to condemn Neymar for pretending to be white: judging by the images, he is partly white. It’s silly to accuse him of denying his mixed-race ancestry, because the simplest search throws up hundreds of images of him as a child, none of which he seems to be ashamed of. There is this: when asked if he had ever been a victim of racism, he said, “Never. Neither inside nor outside the field. Because I’m not black right?”

Actually, the word he used was preto, which is significant, since, in Brazil, when used as a colour ascribed to people – rather than things, like rice or beans – it is the equivalent of the n-word; negro and negra being the acceptable ways of describing someone who is truly black. (And moreno or morena being standard descriptors for someone dark-skinned, as well as, occasionally, euphemisms for blackness). Technically speaking, however, his logic was faultless – and even kind of interestingly honest: the Neymar who made that statement was an unworldly eighteen-year-old who had never lived outside Brazil. And in Brazil, Neymar is not black…

Read the entire article here.

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Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

Posted in Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Monographs, Social Science, United States on 2014-06-30 21:06Z by Steven

Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

University of North Carolina Press
May 2009
328 pages
36 illus., 5 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5934-6

Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Associate Professor of History; Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia University, New York

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions—black and white, public and private—responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society.

Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted “racial hygiene” and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease—as its victims or as family and neighbors—made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the “white plague.”

Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States’ health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

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Elsie Roxborough started out to shake the stigma of color; when that proved impossible, she joined step with the oppressor.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2014-06-29 22:11Z by Steven

Elsie Roxborough started out to shake the stigma of color; when that proved impossible, she joined step with the oppressor. Her life as a disguised alien in the middle reaches of the white social register did not satisfy her ambition or her pride. Perhaps no happy ending awaited her. The welcome thawings of racial prejudice after the war, and the first signs of a civil rights movement, would only have mocked and embittered her in the years of her deception. A happy child become desperate, she is a case study of the “dark sister” excluded by the American Dream.”

Kathleen A. Hauke, “The ‘Passing’ of Elsie Roxborough,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 23, Issue 2 (Spring 1984). 150. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0023.002:01.

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How Race-Studies Scholars Can Respond to Their Haters

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2014-06-29 19:39Z by Steven

How Race-Studies Scholars Can Respond to Their Haters

Vitae
A service of The Chronicle of Higher Education
2014-06-27

Stacey Patton, Senior Enterprise Reporter

Graduate school prepares students for a range of intellectual and professional endeavors. Unfortunately, responding to scholarly insults and academic shade-throwing isn’t one of them.

But for scholars in the fields of race and ethnic studies—including those who work outside the ivory tower—dealing with snide questions, nasty comments, and occasional name-calling is just part of the job description. Over the years, these academics have repeatedly told me that their work is uniquely misunderstood and dismissed by students, fellow faculty, and the general public. The election of Barack Obama, some say, has only made it tougher to defend ethnic studies: Amid declarations of a “post-racial” America, how do you explain why you study and write about racism?

Nearly every race-studies scholar—white professors included—can identify a phrase that drives them uniquely nuts: “Stop playing the race card.” “What about white studies?” “Racism is no longer an issue. Why are you beating a dead horse?”…

…“We were hoping for a black candidate.” —Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies,  Brown University

…“Ethnic studies isn’t a real discipline.” —David J. Leonard, Associate professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies, Washington State University at Pullman

…“Do you have a Ph.D.?”  —Kerry Ann Rockquemore, CEO and president, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity

Read the entire article here.

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‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-06-29 19:15Z by Steven

‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama
Wednesday, 2014-06-25

Chauncey DeVega, Editor and Founder

Am I the only person who found Slate.com’s photo essay “Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families” to be very problematic?

To my eyes, it contains and channels the echoes of race science and eugenics wrapped in a veneer of praise and curiosity for “unusual” and “fascinating” bodies.

Questions of race and representation were and remain central to the dynamics of the global color line. The ways in which certain types of people and bodies are visually represented through film, photographs, paintings, and other mediums reflect the dynamics of power.

Whose eyes are “we” seeing through? What assumptions are driving the Gaze? How are the bodies and people in visual images posed and positioned relative to one another? Who is included? What types of people and bodies are excluded?…

…The contemporary American fascination with “mixed race” and “biracial” identity is a reflection of changing demographics and globalization; it is also a surrender to and performance of a shallow type of faux cosmopolitanism.

Ironically, the race scientists of Nazi Germany and the United States, as well as the photographer Cyjo (whose work was featured in Slate’s essay) who fetishize and find something “stunning” or “interesting” about “mixed race” and/or “biracial” people (what are fictive identities, social constructs, as there is only one race, the human race) share some common assumptions.

One, that those types of “racial” identities are somehow new or novel. In fact, human history is a story of “miscegenation” and “interracial” intimacy. Two, that those types of bodies and individuals merit study and analysis because there is some connection, either implied or explicitly stated, between genes, color, culture, destiny, and personal, as well as national “character”…

Read the entire article here.

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UCLA Mixed Heritage Conference 2014 – Mixed Stories

Posted in Campus Life, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2014-06-29 19:02Z by Steven

UCLA Mixed Heritage Conference 2014 – Mixed Stories

Team Mixed Show
University of California, Los Angeles Mixed Heritage Conference 2014
2014-06-18

Recorded at the Mixed Student Union at UCLA’s Mixed Heritage Conference, April 2014. Participants at the conference share their stories.

*Our apologies to the people who we filmed but did not make it into the video. Our second data card malfunctioned and we lost quite a bit of footage, unfortunately this was the footage of the mixed Black participants.

Thank you to all who participated on and off camera and to the Mixed Student Union for inviting us.

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Bill de Blasio and the Art of Political Image at… the Mermaid Parade

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2014-06-29 18:09Z by Steven

Bill de Blasio and the Art of Political Image at… the Mermaid Parade

The New York Times
2014-06-23

Vanessa Friedman, Chief Fashion Critic


Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York with, from left, his son, Dante; his wife, Chirlane McCray; and his daughter, Chiara, at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade on Saturday. [Tina Fineberg/Associated Press]

Mayor Bill de Blasio and his family had kind of an interesting fashion moment over the weekend. In case you missed it, I offer the above photo of Mr. de Blasio in pirate kit; his wife, Chirlane McCray, in full Ariel getup and their two children both body-painted blue — all for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. In fact, Dante and Chiara were king and queen of the parade, a kitsch classic that takes place on the first official day of summer (i.e. Saturday).

Why does this matter beyond the obvious comedic value? Strategy and image spin, my dear Watson. Strategy and image spin…

Read the entire article here.

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An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Rosa Clemente

Posted in Anthropology, Latino Studies, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2014-06-29 17:28Z by Steven

An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Rosa Clemente

Yemaya Pictures
California State University, Los Angeles
2014-05-08, 20:00 PDT
5151 State University Drive
Annenberg Science Building 132 (Science Building Wing B, Lecture Hall)
Los Angeles, California 90032

From May 8, 2014. The Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles presents An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist Rosa Clemente. Rosa speaks about Afro-Latin@ Identity and Critical Approaches to Blackness.

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Stunning Portraits of Mixed-Race Families

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States on 2014-06-29 17:10Z by Steven

Stunning Portraits of Mixed-Race Families

Slate
2014-06-24

David Rosenberg, Editor of Slate’s Behold blog

Fascinated by the evolution of identity, the photographer Cyjo, who styles her name CYJO, has created a series of portraits that examines how race, ethnicity, and heritage contextualize a person as an individual, and how they coexist within the framework of a family.

Cyjo identifies herself as a Westerner of Korean ethnicity (she was born in South Korea and raised in the United States) and photographed the series “Mixed Blood” from 2010–13 in both New York and Beijing. She has explored the dynamic between individual and collective identities in her previous work via a more abstract approach, but, with “Mixed Blood,” she uses the more literal approach of portraiture.

Over time, as humans migrate and change environments, the definition of identity has evolved to adjust to a broader definition of race and ethnicity. Cyjo pointed out that, in 2000, the United States Census for the first time allowed people to choose more than one identifier when noting their race. Almost 7 million people chose to count themselves as mixed race, a number that has continued to grow over the past decade and a half…

Read the article and view the photo essay here.

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Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification

Posted in Articles, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism on 2014-06-23 02:53Z by Steven

Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification

Georgetown Law Journal
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Volume 102, Issue 5 (2014)
pages 1501-1572

Camille Gear Rich, Associate Professor of Law
University of Southern California, Gould School of Law

This Article posits that we are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription—how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations. Importantly, even if one concludes that most Americans still hold traditional, ascriptive-based understandings of race, there is evidence that elective race is steadily gaining influence in certain quarters, shaping government institutions’ formal procedures as well as certain Americans’ racial understandings.

To improve the clarity and precision of discussions about elective race, this Article outlines the key premises and norms associated with this ideological framework. My primary goal is to help courts and scholars understand the basic tenets and tensions that are likely to be present in plaintiffs’ elective-race claims. Although some scholars have trivialized racial self-identification interests or represented them as a threat to antidiscrimination law, my project is to show that racial self-identification decisions matter in concrete ways because they can trigger serious race-based social sanctions that are a core antidiscrimination law concern. Indeed, as we will see, voluntary racial-affiliation decisions can and do trigger race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when they do not match certain expected or established American understandings about the boundaries of racial categories. Moreover, I predict that, though the number of cases that sound in the nature of elective race may be small at present, we should expect to see more cases of this kind given both the increased focus Americans place on the interest in racial self-identification and the shift toward institutional protocols that are intended to accommodate this interest. The elective-race cases will challenge courts, forcing them to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) should recognize the autonomy claims of individuals who are injured in the workplace by the social and formal processes of involuntary racialization. Courts will be asked to rule on cases that suggest that an employee’s dignity interests are unjustly frustrated when other fail to respect the employee’s right to racial self-definition.

Read the entire article here.

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