Mixed Race Studies

Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil

Cambridge University Press
December 1997
412 pages
228 x 152 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521585903
Hardback ISBN: 9780521584555

Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO
New York Public Library

In this bold, original and persuasive book, Anthony W. Marx provocatively links the construction of nations to the construction of racial identity. Using a comparative historical approach, Marx analyzes the connection between race as a cultural and political category rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism, and the development of three nation states. He shows how each country’s differing efforts to establish national unity and other institutional impediments have served, through the nation-building process and into their present systems of state power, to shape and often crystallize categories and divisions of race. Focusing on South Africa, Brazil and the United States, Marx illustrates and elucidates the historical dynamics and institutional relationships by which the construction of race and the development of these nations have informed one another. Deftly combining comparative history, political science and sociological interpretation, sharpened by over three-hundred interviews with key informants from each country, he follows this dialogue into the present to discuss recent political mobilization, popular protest and the current salience of race issues.

Features

• A comprehensive historical comparative study of the major issues of race and nation
• Combines political, social and economic analysis to break barriers between country studies and issues of race, nation, state and social movement
• Draws upon archival material, literature, and more than 300 interviews

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Historical and Cultural Legacies:
  • 2. Trajectories from colonialism
  • 3. Lessons from slavery
  • 4. The uncertain legacy of miscegenation
    • Implications
• Part II. Racial Domination and the Nation-State:
  • 5. ‘Wee for thee, South Africa’: the racial state
  • 6. ‘To bind up the nation’s wounds’: the United States after the Civil War
  • 7. ‘Order and progress’: inclusive nation-state building in Brazil
  • Comparative racial domination: an overview
• Part III. Race Making from Below:
  • 8. ‘We are a rock’: Black racial identity, mobilization and the new South Africa
  • 9. Burying Jim Crow: Black racial identity, mobilization and reform in the United States
  • 10. Breaching Brazil’s pact of silence
• 11. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa

Indiana University Press
2013-03-18
296 pages
9 b&w illustrations, 5 maps
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-00674-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00673-8
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-0-253-00705-6

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of History
University of Maryland, College Park

The Métis of Senegal is a history of politics and society among an influential group of mixed-race people who settled in coastal Africa under French colonialism. Hilary Jones describes how the métis carved out a niche as middleman traders for European merchants. As the colonial presence spread, the métis entered into politics and began to assert their position as local elites and power brokers against French rule. Many of the descendants of these traders continue to wield influence in contemporary Senegal. Jones’s nuanced portrait of métis ascendency examines the influence of family connections, marriage negotiations, and inheritance laws from both male and female perspectives.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Urban Life, Politics, and French Colonialism
• 1. Signares, Habitants, and Grumets in the Making of Saint Louis
• 2. Métis Society and Transformations in the Colonial Economy (1820-1870)
• 3. Religion, Marriage, and Material Culture
• 4. Education, Association, and an Independent Press
• 5. From Outpost to Empire
• 6. Electoral Politics and the Métis (1870-1890)
• 7. Urban Politics and the Limits of Republicanism (1890-1920)
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Family Histories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Also by Mail

Edition Assemblage: Begleiterscheinungen emanzipatorischer Theorie und Praxis
2013-02-20
96 pages
Paperback, 142×205 mm
ISBN 978-3-942885-38-6
Series: Witnessed Edition 2

Olumide Popoola

Also by Mail is a modern family comedy-drama that follows the experiences of Nigerian German siblings Funke and Wale who fly to Nigeria to bury their suddenly deceased father. Their upbringing clashes with their uncle’s expectations and initial misunderstandings soon come to an éclat. When Wale returns to Germany, frustrated, he is bitterly reminded of how little his father acknowledged and prepared them for racist encounters there.

Loss and racism, sibling rivalry and cross-cultural etiquette, the play incorporates and subverses it’s urban, neo-African elements of story-telling to give a contemporary picture of a family that struggles not only with the legacy of its patriarch but with being racialized within the German context as well. Where does each stand in a circle of relations and needs? Where does each want to end up? And who is willing to help? It takes an inside-outside job to lighten the mood and the surprise startles them all.

A White Face With A Forgotten African Family

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-11-24

Jacki Lyden, Host

Growing up blond-haired and blue-eyed in Southern California, Joe Mozingo always thought his family name was Italian.

But as an adult, Mozingo became skeptical of that theory when friends and co-workers began to ask him about his unusual-sounding last name.

The journey to discover the truth about the Mozingo name took him from the libraries of Los Angeles to the courthouses and plantations of Virginia and, finally, to Africa.

Mozingo spoke with weekends on All Thing Considered guest host Jacki Lyden about his first book, The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family, which chronicles that journey…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo

The Rumpus
2013-03-04

Peter Orner

I recently finished a powerful book about a journey to find the origin of a name. It’s called the The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo. The book details Mozingo’s search for the origin of the name “Mozingo,” which, he comes to understand, is one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.

The book takes Mozingo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, on a great chase—from Los Angeles, to the American South, to Angola—as he traces the history of the first American Mozingo, Edward Mozingo, a former slave from West-Central Africa who eventually won his freedom by suing for it in a Virginia court. Some Mozingos fought for the Union; others for the Confederacy. Some were abolitionists; others were in the Ku Klux Klan. One thing they all have in common is Edward Mozingo, a man who—in spite of everything—held onto his royal name…

…The Rumpus: Your story is especially remarkable in that Mozingo is only one of two African names to survive slavery. Since you had no idea how significant your name actually was when you went into this, could you trace how the revelation came about?

Joe Mozingo: The understanding that I descended from this African man who kept his African name came in different waves. First there was puzzlement—how could this be?—then deep curiosity, then frustration, and eventually this exhilaration. The frustration was this: I needed to envision my ancestor, Edward, but subconsciously I harbored this white-black binary view that has been bestowed to us by American history. I was white. So it was hard to envision him as my ancestor at first. But that blockage gave way as I researched more, visited the places Edward lived, met more Mozingos—black, white, and in-between—and went to Africa. The exhilaration came then, when I felt that link to him, to this lineage spinning back to the beginning. In Angola, where he sailed off into the Atlantic for Jamestown, that connection to this eternal system just welled up inside. It was this great feeling of opening up…

Read the entire interview here.

Nigeria’s dangerous skin whitening obsession
 
Al Jazeera
2013-04-06

Mohammed Adow

Nigeria has the world’s highest percentage of women using skin lightening agents in the quest for “beauty”.

Lagos, Nigeria – After carefully washing her face, legs and arms, Taiwo Solomon vigorously rubs cream over her body. She is meticulous and makes sure she covers her entire face. Soloman, 32, is bleaching her skin. She believes fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.

This has been a daily routine for the past 15 years. Now several shades lighter she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.

“Bleaching just makes me feel special, like am walking around in a spotlight,” she told Al Jazeera. “I am not seeking to be totally white, I just want to look beautiful. I cannot stop using the lightening agents,” she adds.

Solomon is not alone. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 percent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products, the world’s highest percentage. That compares with 59 percent in Togo, and 27 percent in Senegal. The reasons for this are varied but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want “white skin”.

In many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and are believed to be more successful and likely to find marriage.

It’s not only women though who are obsessed with bleaching their skins. Some men too are involved in the practice…

…Dangerous consequences

Skin bleaching comes with hazardous health consequences. The dangers associated with the use of toxic compounds for skin bleaching include blood cancers such as leukemia and cancers of the liver and kidneys as well as severe skin conditions.

Hardcore bleachers use illegal ointments containing toxins like mercury, a metal that blocks production of melanin, which gives the skin its colour, but can also be toxic…

Read the entire article here.

Beginnings of Miscegenation of Whites and Blacks

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 3, Number 4 (October 1918)
pages 336-453

Carter G. Woodson, Founder

Although science has uprooted the theory, a number of writers are loath to give up the contention that the white race is superior to others, as it is still hoped that the Caucasian race may be preserved in its purity, especially so far as it means miscegenation with the blacks. But there are others who express doubt that the integrity of the dominant race has been maintained.[442] Scholars have for centuries differed as to the composition of the mixed breed stock constituting the Mediterranean race and especially about that in Egypt and the Barbary States. In that part of the dark continent many inhabitants have certain characteristics which are more Caucasian than negroid and have achieved more than investigators have been willing to consider the civilization of the Negro. It is clear, however, that although the people of northern Africa cannot be classed as Negroes, being bounded on the south by the masses of African blacks, they have so generally mixed their blood with that of the blacks that in many parts they are no nearer to any white stock than the Negroes of the United States.

This miscegenation, to be sure, increased toward the[Pg 336] south into central Africa, but it has extended also to the north and east into Asia and Europe. Traces of Negro blood have been found in the Malay States, India and Polynesia. In the Arabian Peninsula it has been so extensive as to constitute a large group there called the Arabised Negroes. But most significant of all has been the invasion of Europe by persons of African blood. Professor Sergi leads one to conclude that the ancient Pelasgii were of African origin or probably the descendants of the race which settled northern Africa and southern Europe, and are therefore due credit for the achievements of the early Greek and Italian civilizations.[443]

There is much evidence of a further extension of this infusion in the Mediterranean world.

“Recent discoveries made in the vicinity of the principality of Monaco and others in Italy and western France,” says MacDonald, “would seem to reveal … the actual fact that many thousand years ago a negroid race had penetrated through Italy into France, leaving traces at the present day in the physiognomy of the peoples of southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and western France, and even in the western parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. There are even at the present day some examples of the Keltiberian peoples of western Scotland, southern and western Wales, southern and western Ireland, of distinctly negroid aspect, and in whose ancestry there is no indication whatever of any connection with the West Indies or with Modern Africa. Still more marked is this feature in the peoples of southern and western France and of the other parts of the Mediterranean already mentioned.”[444]

Because of the temperament of the Portugese this infusion of African blood was still more striking in their country. As the Portugese are a good-natured people void of race hate they did not dread the miscegenation of the races. One finds in southern Portugal a “strong Moorish, North African element” and also an “old intermixture with those[Pg 337] Negroes who were imported thither from Northwest Africa to till the scantily populated southern provinces.”[445] This miscegenation among the Portugese easily extended to the New World. Then followed the story of the Caramarii, the descendants of the Portugese, who after being shipwrecked near Bahia arose to prominence among the Tupinambo Indians and produced a clan of half-castes by taking to himself numerous native women.[446] This admixture served as a stepping stone to the assimilation of the Negroes when they came…

Read the entire article here.

A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans

Miami Herald
2007-06-10 through 2007-06-24

In this series, the black experience is unveiled through a journey: to Nicaragua, where a quiet but powerful civil and cultural rights movement flickers while in neighboring Honduras, the black Garffuna community fights for cultural survival; to the Dominican Republic where African lineage is not always embraced; to Brazil, home to the world’s second largest population of African descent; to Cuba, where a revolution that promised equality has failed on its commitment to erase racism; and to Colombia, where the first black general serves as an example of Afro-Latin American achievements.

Part 1: Nicaragua and Honduras: Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice
Audra D.S. Burch
A close-up look at a simmering civil rights movement in a tiny port settlement along Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

…To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.

This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.

The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.

Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, “passing” for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.

“It’s hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black,” says [Juliet] Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman…

Part 2: Dominican Republic: Black denial
Frances Robles
An examination on the sensitive nature of racial definition in a nation with inextricable ties to Africa.

SANTO DOMINGO—Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.

Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo—bad hair.

But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. ”If you’re working in a bank, you don’t want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant,” the bank teller said. “It’s not that as a person of color I want to look white.   I want to look pretty.”

And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket.  The richer, the “whiter.” And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black…

Part 3: Brazil: A Great Divide
Jack Chang
Black Brazilians speak out and push for affirmative action laws in the hemisphere’s most Africanized nation.

…And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.

“The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you’ll see exclusion is endemic,” he said. “We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve…

…”I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there’s widespread racism in Brazil,” said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil…

…Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the “racial democracy” vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.

Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races…

Part 4: Cuba: A barrier for Cuba’s blacks
Miami Herald Staff Report
Economic and political apartheid are alive in Cuba, despite a revolution launched in 1959 that promised equality.

..DISPARITY IN NUMBERS

Cuba’s official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island’s 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.

The disparity between the census’ 11 percent and UM’s 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.

“You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba,” said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso…

Part 5: Achievers: Racism takes many hues
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
An overview on the achievement of black leaders in the region. And a personal essay by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

…Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?

A COMPLEX MATTER

The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but “afrodescendente” (Africa-descended) or negro (black)…

..Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that’s a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation’s most controversial journalists in the process.

When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she’s crazy. “I don’t know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,” she says

Multimedia

Read the entire series here.

Interview: Jackie Kay

The Journal
Newcastle upon Tyne
2013-03-30

Jackie Kay is about to be read in places most writers never reach. David Whetstone spoke to her.

YOU can imagine there are lots of things a writer dreams of – literary prizes, lucrative deals, maybe a film adaptation.

But a different accolade has come the way of Jackie Kay, professor of creative writing at Newcastle University.

Her acclaimed memoir, Red Dust Road, has been chosen as one of 20 books on the list for World Book Night (April 23).

On that night 20,000 volunteers will each distribute 20 copies of the chosen books in communities where reading is not commonplace.

“Obviously the books can be by writers living or dead so there were a lot to choose from,” says Jackie…

…Jackie was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a Scottish couple and grew up in Glasgow.

The book, sparked by Jackie’s decision to track down her birth parents, begins as she waits in a hotel in Nigeria to meet the father she has never seen.

“It’s a strange thing, looking at one black man after another wondering if he is your father,” she writes…

Read the entire interview here.

Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2000
186 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-312-23219-1
ISBN10: 0-312-23219-5

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Multiracial Identity provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data, four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa, and Jamaica. The author discusses how little attention has been traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice.

Table of Contents

• Foreword–Diedre L. Badejo
• Part I: Theorizing Multiracial Identity
  • Toward a Definition of Identity
  • Multiracial Identity as a Term in the 1990s
  • Historical Theories of ‘Mixed Race’ Persons
  • Contemporary US Theories in Multiracial Identity
  • Contemporary UK Theories in Multiracial Identity
• Part II: Speaking forThemselves (I)
  • How the Liverpool, UK Respondents Define Themselves in a Racial Sense
  • Parental Influence in the Construction of a Racialized Identity
• Part III: Speaking for Themselves (II) Shades of Blackness
  • Is Wanting to Change One’s Physical Appearance an Issue?
• Part IV: South Africa and Jamaica: “Other” Multiracial Case Studies
  • South Africa and the Social Construction of “Coloureds”
  • Jamaica in Context
• Part V: Assessing Multiracial Identity White Supremacy and Multiracial Identity
  • Social Status and Multiracial Identity
  • Nomenclature Default and Multiracial Terminology