Race in a Baby&#8217;s Face

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

One thing I really stressed throughout the dissertation was focusing not so much on the forms of Blackness that can be accepted but focusing on the forms that can’t be accepted. For me that was a highly gendered and sexualized thing. So for example, the mulata can be accepted because she fits particular sexualized scripts that make her accessible to white men. And so that’s a way in which race intersects with gender – this racially mixed woman who is not white, but is not Black. She becomes aesthetically more beautiful yet still retains that hypersexual script. And so that’s another way of saying that Brazil is more benign because there are many interracial relationships and marriages and also [mixed race] children. Many people thought through interracial mixture, that Brazil could actually whiten itself within a hundred years. And it’s not just about women. Black men are expected to be able to have bodily mastery either in culture, such as music or dance, or athletics, such as capoeira or football, that can be consumed for national cultures and portray Brazil as more benign. As far as desire and attraction goes, Black men kind of take a back seat in the racial democracy discourses of miscegenation to white men. You see far less representations of Black men with white women in popular culture. The emphasis on interracial mixture is how non-Black men have access to Black women’s bodies, often without considering what her own desires are. And these really serve a heteropatriarchal and white supremacist desire to sexually and culturally consume Black bodies in various ways. And what is outside of what serves those interests is relegated to the realm of subalternity and deemed less worthy in Brazil. And so I wanted to emphasize that as the forms of Blackness that can’t be accepted in Brazil and using that as a site of critical inquiry. —Dr. Bryce Henson

Morten Stinus Kristensen, “Disrupting Racialized Knowledges: Blackness in Salvador da Bahia,” Friktion Magasin for Køn, Krop and Kultur, October 2016. http://friktionmagasin.dk/index.php/2016/10/01/disrupting-racialized-knowledges-blackness-in-salvador-da-bahia/

Race in a Baby’s Face

Race in a Baby’s Face

Psychology Today
2014-07-28

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D, Psychologist and Co-founder
Stanford University LifeWorks program for Integrative Learning

Crawling the color line

Race is supposedly something objective, even biological, that we’re ascribed at birth and marks us through our whole lives, assigning us to a group that separates us from others. But for many people race is ambiguous, complex, and uncertain. I’ve never understood my race or that of my children. And for the newest babies in my extended family, it’s not clear at all what their race is supposed to be.

When my niece had a baby, a beautiful boy, everyone oohed and aahed when they saw the cute little guy. One of his cousins glowed, “Oh he’s so cute!” But suddenly a puzzled expression came over him and he looked at the baby’s father, then at the mother, and back at the baby and blurted out: “Wait…..they had a white baby?”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Psychology Today, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2014 at 16:39Z and is filed under Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Race in a Baby’s Face

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