Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusiveness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was forced onto them and used to hold them at the bottom of Brazil’s social hierarchies, and it left no doubt that Brazilian whites had no intention whatsoever to accept the moral and legal equality of blacks, which held true well into the twentieth century. The sense of black identity was indeed so strong during most of the colonial period and slavery, which lasted until 1888, that African and Brazilian blacks of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and of different degrees of biological mixture repeatedly united to contest white supremacy and attempted to overthrow the system that held them at the bottom. On several occasions, Brazil barely escaped its “Haitian moment.” As late as 1931, the radical Frente Negra Brasileira, the Brazilian Black Front, had a membership of about 200,000, mostly concentrated in the industrialized south (Davis 1999: 187). In 1936, however, the authoritarian government of Vargas outlawed the Black Front, together with all other oppositional political parties. The Vargas government sought to discourage any association that had the potential to endanger his project of national unity. The risk of factionalism and even secession was so great during the 1930s that the Vargas government undertook extraordinary measures to forge a sense of nationality, national pride, and even a sense of what it meant to be Brazilian.
Among the most successful in this cause was sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1986). Freyre’s writings on the Brazilian national character provided the ideological foundation upon which a unified nation could be constructed, and the Vargas regime left no means untouched to disseminate this ideology. Brazil would be a racial paradise, inhabited by one race, the Brazilian version of “cosmic race”—a tropical mulatto republic. Anybody daring to say differently was transformed into a naysayer and a reactionary. The concept of a racial paradise promised a solution to finally catch up to the developed world, even if—and especially because—Brazil had such a large mixed population.
To the black-power movement, this move proved devastating. Up until the 1930s, Brazilian blacks were forcefully united by the perverse power of racism and social Darwinism; after the 1930s, asserting one’s blackness was transformed into an act of civic upheaval and antipatriotism and little by little, as the Vargas regime made sure that its version of the truth was accepted, asserting ethnic difference became an act of political incorrectness not only aimed against the state, but against mainstream society. Under Vargas, race was removed from textbooks, censuses, and from the official discourse about Brazil. The state thus produced the main and only official way to represent the country, and any Brazilian—black or white, mixed or indigenous—had no other choice but to accept that reality and to find ways of social mobility that explicitly took it into account. The core of the doctrine disseminated under Vargas was that no matter what their ethnic background, Brazilians are all mixed and hence one. Nevertheless, this was not an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests. Rather, it was a designed community, designed by the state and forced onto its people. The only one imagining, dreaming, and sometimes hallucinating such a community was the father of the idea, Gilberto Freyre.
The Vargas years severely delegitimized any attempt to forge a sense of racial solidarity among excluded blacks. Just as black-power movements regrouped during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state stepped in again, this time to avoid a potentially explosive bonding between labor and racialized groups. During the military regime, black-power activism became subversive and was subject to prosecution in the best-case scenario, but also to state-sponsored persecution, imprisonment, torture, and even death. The military regime also ensured that the category race would disappear again from the census, and it thus sought to curtail even the prospects for an emerging racial solidarity that would embrace and represent all those affected by the forces of racism and racialized exclusion. Categories, after all, are the building blocks of group consciousness (Brubaker 2004). Without numbers, mobilization is greatly complicated, as there can be no sense of a shared destiny if it is not known with whom, and with how many, this destiny is shared. Political activism is all but rendered impossible if there are no data and no existing categories other than being Brazilian.
Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), “The New Politics of Race in Brazil” in Brazil’s New Racial Politics, edited by Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012): 3-5.
Magazine writers didn’t know what to make of Merle Oberon when she took Hollywood by storm in the 1930s. One writer described her as “bizarre, bewildering, and different”, while others marveled at her “delicate” oval face, “eloquent” emerald eyes, “bright red lips” and “alabaster” skin.
Though her 1936 best actress Oscar nomination for the coming-of-age drama The Dark Angel affirmed her place in a league with Katharine Hepburn and the eventual winner, Bette Davis, the glamor paragons of the day, it was only later that the world discovered Oberon was a south Asian woman passing for white…
With my father’s death I lost the link to my Jamaican lineage, and I needed to address that. It is vital to embrace all sides of yourself
Losing a parent is profoundly destabilising. It takes the world as you knew it – the certainties, the constants, the safety nets – and whips it out from under you. In addition, as I have discovered over the past two years, there is an extra layer of complexity that comes with being mixed-race and losing the person who connects you to half your heritage.
My dad, Tony, was Black. He was a quite well-known figure here from his work as a journalist with ITV and the BBC, particularly in northern England. And in the months after he died one sunny day in August 2020, I began to question everything about myself…
Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father. She was also raised by a “jazz fanatic” Bajan stepfather. “What’s it like in Leeds?” she asks me with wide eyes. Assuming she’s asking what it’s like to be Black in Leeds, I tell her that, surprisingly, I had a more Black experience up north than I ever did living in London. “I definitely understand what you’re saying,” she says. “As a teenager, I started getting the bus to Gloucester to be around people who were from the same culture as me. I’ve never experienced such an intense West Indian experience as I did in Gloucester.”
After a hellish couple of years, the pop visionary is back. She talks about beating illness, escaping abuse, and the joy of connecting with her Caribbean roots
FKA twigs isn’t special, she says, she just rehearses a lot. “I don’t think I was born with anything more than the rest of the world,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. It might be hard to believe that anybody could do the splits down a pole or wield a sword, Wushu-style, the way twigs has done without possessing some divine powers, but it’s all in the training. She can afford private lessons now, but when she started out as a fresh-faced back-up dancer, YouTube tutorials and group dance classes helped her to perfect her craft. “I practise and I practise and I practise. That’s who I am.”
Twigs has had a spellbinding career, exploding on to the pop scene a decade ago with operatic vocal arrangements, conceptual videos and futuristic instrumentals. In 2014 the New Yorker magazine said that she “dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy”. Since then, she’s released several acclaimed albums and is considered a trailblazer in pop, R&B and Afrofuturism…
After the murder of George Floyd, and a renewed energy around the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, [Adwoa] Aboah found her conversations on her Gurls Talk podcast getting “a lot deeper. Everyone had so much to say, and everyone was going through such personal experiences, growth and sadness.” It also led to a second Vogue cover, this time alongside Marcus Rashford, shot in the footballer’s garden in Manchester, for an issue spotlighting “faces of hope”. It was a huge moment – and one she almost turned down. At the time, Aboah says, she “didn’t think it was my place to be that person. I think it’s because I hadn’t really delved into race and my feelings around it, and what I had been through. My mum’s white, my dad’s Black, and there had been a lot of confusion personally as to how I felt about it all. And, actually, it was great.” There’s a sense of gratitude in her voice as she describes “championing the Black community … I’m really happy that I did take that opportunity, because I am very much part of that community. I am a Black woman. I have a lot of things to say, which I hadn’t had the confidence to speak about.”
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Hannah J. Davies, Deputy Editor, Newsletters, and a Culture Writer
She is one of the world’s most in-demand models, but it wasn’t always this way. As she gets her big acting break in Top Boy, she explains how she got through a tumultuous decade
A few weeks ago, Adwoa Aboah experienced what she describes as “a sombre moment”. “I was at my mum and dad’s, clearing out my childhood room,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “I was going through all these old Vogues I had kept, and I was like … ‘Why did I do that? What was I looking at … who was I looking at?’ Because no one in these magazines looks like me.” Despite signing with the giant modelling agency Storm at 16, Aboah’s self-esteem as a teenager and into her 20s was, she says, “so low. I was on this trajectory of really wanting to be someone else. I couldn’t count on my hands any models who looked like me who were killing it. Obviously there was Jourdan Dunn, and Naomi Campbell, but … ” she pauses, sighs. “I didn’t have the emotional intelligence, nor the language, to articulate why I wasn’t doing well, why I wasn’t in the places that I thought should have been an option for me. Why wasn’t I being supported by British publications? I was like: ‘Is it me? What’s wrong with me?’ Not in a kind of self-pitying way but … I just didn’t understand.”.
Now 29, Aboah is one of Britain’s most recognisable and successful models, as likely to be seen endorsing Dior or Burberry as H&M or Gap. She was named model of the year by the British Fashion Council in 2017 and, in the same year, memorably featured on the cover of Edward Enninful’sfirst issue of British Vogue, a vision of retro cool in a patterned headscarf and masses of blue eyeshadow. She’s also an activist, having founded the organisation Gurls Talk – which educates young women on topics including feminism, race, sex and body image – in 2015, and now she has her first regular acting role in the new series of Netflix’s Top Boy, one of the coolest shows on TV. It’s hard to believe that Aboah ever felt like a misfit and, worse still, thought that it was somehow her fault…
This debut novel is a surefooted, art-filled and wholly 21st-century take on bloodsucking
Claire Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate. Lydia struggles to accept the demon inside her and yearns to love, live and eat like a human. Her father, a successful Japanese artist, died before she was born. Lydia has committed her mother, a Malaysian-English vampire in declining health, to a home in Margate and accepted an internship with a contemporary London gallery known as the Otter.
Woman, Eating opens with Lydia renting an artist’s studio in a converted biscuit factory. She’s shown around by the kind and friendly Ben, to whom she is immediately attracted. At the gallery, Lydia is given banal jobs cleaning labels off bottles and adding velvet pads to coat hangers in preparation for the next opening. Largely ignored by the staff, Lydia receives the unwanted attention of the director – cold, predatory Gideon – who, she learns, had collected her father’s art. He stands in the shadows observing her, unaware that, as a vampire, Lydia can see him in the dark and the blood coursing through his veins. One day, passing on the stairs, he gropes her buttock. It’s an act he’ll later regret…
Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname
The British racing driver Lewis Hamilton is to change his name to incorporate his mother’s original surname – Larbalestier.
The seven-time world champion says he intends to incorporate his mother Carmen’s surname, Larbalestier, alongside Hamilton.
Hamilton’s father, Anthony, and his mother, Carmen, separated when Lewis was two; he lived with his mother until he was 12 before moving in with his father.
Speaking before the new Formula One season, which starts in Bahrain on Sunday, Hamilton, 37, said: “I am really proud of my family’s name. My mum’s name is Larbalestier and I am just about to put that in my name…
Historians argue Roper’s story could have helped end US slavery earlier but supporters turned on him
In his day, the 19th-century fugitive from slavery Moses Roper was a well-known public figure who toured Britain and Ireland telling gripped and shocked audiences about his horrific experiences in Florida.
Today he is largely overlooked but, two Newcastle University academics argue, the important story of this fascinating man represents a “lost opportunity” for the British abolition movement to have helped end slavery in the US earlier.
Bruce Baker, a reader in American history, said it was surprising how little attention had been paid to Roper, given he was a pioneer. “Historians haven’t really paid a lot of attention to Roper, even though he was the first fugitive slave to lecture in the cause of abolition in Britain and Ireland.”
Baker and his colleague Fionnghuala Sweeney, a reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures, have now published a paper in an academic journal and are working on a full biography of Roper. They aim to rescue him from obscurity, painting a picture of a radical, driven man ruined by the British abolition movement that turned against him.
Roper fled enslavement in Florida in 1834 and, fearing for his safety, made his way to Britain, where he was supported by churchmen and abolitionists. They helped fund his education and in 1837 he published the first edition of his Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery…
Nayara Justino thought her dreams had come true when she was selected as the Globeleza carnival queen in 2013 after a public vote on one of Brazil’s biggest TV shows. But some regarded her complexion to be too dark to be an acceptable queen. Nayara and her family wonder what this says about racial roles in modern Brazil.