Training educators in anti-racism and pluriculturalismo: recent experiences from Brazil

This article examines educator participation in training initiatives based on Brazilian federal education legislation (Law 10,639 from 2003) in one city in the state of São Paulo. Law 10,639/03 represents a significant moment in the institutionalization of ethno-racial policies in Brazil over the past 15 years. It makes obligatory the teaching of African and Black Brazilian history and culture in all school subjects, and requires in-depth study of black contributions in the social, economic, and political spheres. The article first contextualizes understandings of race and racism in Brazil, followed by an elaboration of the political and epistemological underpinnings of ethno-racial educational reforms focused on Afro-descendants. The article then analyzes the contradictory processes that emerge from teacher training initiatives where the perspectives of anti-racism, multiculturalism (pluriculturalismo), racial democracy, and miscegenation intermingle and get reconfigured into understandings that have the potential to advance as well as impede critical engagement with racism and racial inequality. Rather than view teacher training initiatives as default decolonization or inevitable co-optation, this article outlines a more complex and contradictory account of state-society collaborations on educational initiatives. The article reveals the practical challenges of decolonization to argue that anti-racist activism in the educational sphere must take seriously the variable and contingent results of such political efforts in order to meet teachers where they are at while also challenging them to go beyond these limitations.     

Family narratives and transforming identities: three generations of Japanese Brazilians living between Brazil,Japan and beyond

The identity formation of Japanese Brazilians migrating to Japan has attracted attention because of the different and dynamic ways these identities articulate representations of Brazilian and Japanese culture. However, one serious limitation in most studies is that they tend to assume a certain duality between Brazil and Japan. Once we consider their family backgrounds and life courses, we will see that Japanese Brazilians can frame their experiences in much more complex ways, positioning themselves not only between Brazil and Japan, but also against an unequal and hierarchical world context. This article focuses on the life stories of a Japanese Brazilian family encompassing three generations, examining how the elder generation develops different narratives which are later reproduced and reinvented by the younger generations. While family members live in Brazil and Japan, their constructed identities often point to a much broader horizon.     

‘I’m a different kind of biracial’: how black/white biracial Americans with immigrant parents negotiate race

Increasingly, multiracial families have garnered scholarly attention. However, the roles of ethnicity and immigrant ties are largely absent in bi/multiracial studies. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with black/white biracial Americans with at least one immigrant parent, this study analyzes the dynamic interplay of race, ethnicity, and immigrant roots in the bi/multiracial community. Our findings show that participants struggle to articulate the meaning of race, and they assert specific racial/ethnic identities to circumvent stereotypical connotations of whiteness and blackness. We highlight how biracial Americans with immigrant ties – those who we might assume would have a limited understanding of race – voice clear understandings of racial superiority and inferiority, racial relations, and racial stereotypes. Emphasizing their ethnic roots is not only an attempt to accurately describe their ancestry; it also allows them to avoid the social consequences (i.e. stereotypes, discrimination, etc.) of being (half) white or (half) black.     

Of Mongrels and Jews: The Deconstruction of Racialised Identities in White Supremacist Discourse

ABSTRACT

This research explores the construction of race and mixed race identities in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. In white supremacist discourse, interracial sexuality is defined as the ultimate abomination, and mixed race people pose a particularly strong threat. This paper explores the ways in which mixed race people, and Jews in particular, threaten the construction of a supposedly pure white racial identity. Drawing upon the insights of poststructuralism, this analysis will explore the role of boundary maintenance and the threat of border crossings in the process of constructing racial identities.     

Racial Imagery and Support for Voter ID Laws

Previous research suggests that calls for voter ID laws include racialized appeals and that racial attitudes influence support for such laws. This study uses an experiment to test whether exposure to racial imagery also affects support for voter ID laws. The data come from a survey experiment embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (N = 1,436) randomizing the race of a voter and poll worker shown to respondents (African American voter and poll worker, white voter and poll worker, or no image). The results show that white respondents who saw an image of an African American voter and poll worker expressed greater support for voter ID laws than those in the no image condition, even after controlling for the significant effects of racial resentment and political ideology. Exposure to an image of a white voter and poll worker did not produce a similar effect. The findings provide new evidence that public opinion about voter ID laws is racialized.     

Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality

Fear of police terror has long been a daily facet of the lives of economically dispossessed people of colour in the urban spaces of North America, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. This essay addresses the conditions of possibility of the form of race injustice manifested in racial profiling and police brutality. It challenges the centrality of the logic of exclusion - the view that race is only politically and socially significant when race identification is explicitly or implicitly used to justify discrimination - in the understanding of race injustice. It explores the political-symbolic processes that have produced the mechanisms of racial power of which police brutality is a most dramatic example. To elaborate this critique of the logic of exclusion, I discuss the newspaper account of an episode of police terror in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. What the examination of the newspaper coverage of the Chacina de Vigário Geral reveals, is that this form of race injustice indicated the operation of meanings produced in an analytic of raciality , encompassing the various instances of manufacturing the modern concept of the racial - the science of life , the science of man , and the sociology of race relations.     

An introduction: the predicament of Brazilian culture

‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth‐century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio‐historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.     

‘Official’ discourses of race and racism: inclusion,intent and inversion mediated within journalistic communiqués vis-à-vis the Australian indigenous athlete

In May 2008, I wrote to the editor of a Melbourne newspaper pointing out that an article discussing differences between two superstars of the Australian Football League (AFL), one white (team oriented) and the other black (self oriented), conformed to racial dualism of intellect and instinct. My inquiry regarding the rejection of my letter began a process of correspondence which was instructive for unearthing a philosophy of racism defined by ‘intent’ to be ‘racist’. This article presents a case study of editorial correspondence to argue the inverting of race and racism. Racial difference now marks equality not inequality. The author draws on critical race theory to claim that racial hierarchies embedded within celebratory discourses of inclusion, in response to journalistic defence of objectivity, mark the changing significance of race and racism.     

Racialisation and racial formation in urban spaces*

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I try to clarify the notions of racialisation and racial formation and how they operate in the framework of nation states like Brazil. My main argument is that these processes are always constrained by the formation of social classes and national cultural repertoires even if transnational forces are important in nurturing them. I conclude by making a preliminary effort to unravel mechanisms and institutions which allow these processes of racialisation and racial formation to form part of the daily lives of black Brazilians in the context of class-structured urban spaces.     

Race and Child Welfare Policy: State-Level Variations in Disproportionality

African American children are represented among those housed in foster care at more than twice the rate of their overall representation in the US population. This racial disproportionality is well known among child welfare researchers, who have been attempting to explain the phenomenon. Are African American families under more surveillance than white families because of involvement with TANF and other government aid programs, resulting in higher rates of foster care placements? Are investigators more likely to pursue allegations of abuse within African American families? Are African American children more likely to suffer from maltreatment? My research makes a unique contribution by investigating state-level variations in child welfare policy outcomes. Following the innovative work of Soss et al. (American Journal of Political Science 52(3):536–553, 2008) who find that states with larger African American populations have more stringent welfare regimes, it would be reasonable to expect that states with larger African American populations would have more aggressive child protection policies, resulting in higher numbers of children being housed in state protective custody. This work exposes a strikingly different pattern: States with larger African American populations are distinctly less likely to take children into protective custody. In addition, states with larger African American populations have dramatically lower levels of racial disproportionality among their children in foster care. States with larger white majorities place more children in foster care and place disproportionately higher percentages of African American children in foster care.     

The suburban paradox of conviviality and racism in postcolonial Britain

Taking my cue from work on relations of interethnic conviviality in super-diverse cities across the globe, this paper examines the ways in which conviviality co-exists with racism as found in a suburban British town. My argument is that ethnographic attention to the proximity of interethnic relations of conviviality to racism is necessary to guard against overly celebratory accounts of conviviality that downplay everyday manifestations of racism. By situating my study of conviviality in a suburban town, my account begins to unpack the characteristics of convivial relations formed in suburban neighbourhoods as opposed to super-diverse cities often studied by ethnographers in this area of inquiry. I examine manifestations of interethnic relations between British Asian Muslims and white British residents of this town. In contrast to the mainstream images that depict British Asian Muslims as a potential threat to neighbourhood stability and national security, some white and British Asian Muslim residents formed neighbourly relationships of trust, care and mutual recognition with each other across ethnic, racial, religious, gender, class and generational differences. Yet, my analysis of these convivial relations reveals some paradoxical ways in which individuals’ experiences of interethnic relations co-exist with their xenophobic, racist and Islamophobic attitudes.     

Institutions,inculcation, and black racial identity: pigmentocracy vs. the rule of hypodescent

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures – a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis-à-vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.     

Teaching Aids: Struggling with/through student resistances in psychology curricula in South African universities

African universities have been called to respond to the social issues of trauma, adversity, injustice and inequality that trouble their embedding communities, their staff and their students. The need for South African universities to respond to HIV/Aids (in particular) includes the opening up of new knowledge about and ways of managing the impacts of the epidemic; and shaping a young generation of socio-politically literate subjects and citizens, who would be equipped to respond appropriately and creatively to social problems and issues. This article reflects on my own feminist poststructuralist pedagogical practice in incorporating issues related to HIV/Aids into two developmental psychology courses – Childhood & Adversity and Youth Risk – I have taught at two ‘historically white’ South African universities. These courses drew on traditional (western) psychological theories of human development, and located critique by engaging these theories from South African social scientific research on lived realities in various at-risk communities in a time of HIV/Aids epidemic. Inclusion of HIV/Aids harnessed various categories of disempowerment and exclusion, particularly in the intersections between race, class, gender, locality and health-status. The article explicitly explores students’ resistances to this curriculum, by way of course evaluations, which were used to unpack discriminatory discourse in the classroom without simply seeing resistances as obstacles to learning. These racialized resistances included resistances to HIV/Aids in a ‘psychology’ course; resistances to the risk categories of the epidemic; and resistance to my authority as a white, feminist, woman professor.     

Recycling the idea of race: socio-political agenda,transnational business culture,and diversity management in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article intends to contribute to the line of studies that critically addresses diversity management, bringing the Brazilian experience into the discussion. It aims to demonstrate how large Brazilian companies and transnational corporations operating in the country have been recycling the idea of race in order to cope with the greatest politicisation of debates on the racial issue within the Brazilian public sphere since the late twentieth century. This phenomenon is related to changes in the political actions of the black movement in Brazil, which since the same period has been absorbing the new socio-political agenda existing within the global network of anti-racism advocacy. This is an agenda in which two purposes have a central importance: the battle against racial inequality and the demand for affirmative action policies. The data presented in this paper are part of broader research in which, by means of the biographical method and the ethnographic fieldwork, the social trajectories and career paths of two generations of Brazilian black executives were analysed.     

Effect of School Racial Composition on Trajectories of Depressive Symptoms from Adolescence Through Early Adulthood

We investigate the effect of high school racial composition, measured as percent of non-Hispanic white students, on trajectories of depressive symptoms from adolescence to early adulthood. We also explore whether the effect of school racial composition varies by respondent race/ethnicity and whether adult socioeconomic status mediates this relationship. We analyzed four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health using 3-level linear growth models. We restricted our sample to respondents enrolled in grades 9–12 in 1994/5 who were interviewed at a minimum in Waves I and IV. This resulted in 10,350 respondents enrolled in 80 high schools in 1994/5 (5,561 whites, 2,030 blacks, 1,834 Hispanics, 738 Asians, and 187 of other race). As the percentage of white students increased at the high school respondents attended in 1994/5, blacks reported more depressive symptoms. This effect did not vary by age. In comparison, Asian and Hispanic respondents who attended predominantly white high schools had lower levels of depressive symptoms than their counterparts who attended predominantly minority schools, but they also experienced a slower decline in depressive symptoms through early adulthood. Adult SES mediated the relationship between high school racial composition and depressive symptoms for black, but not for Asian or Hispanic respondents. Our results suggest that high school racial composition is associated with trajectories of depressive symptoms through early adulthood, but the effect differs by respondents’ race/ethnicity. Racial/ethnic disparities in depressive symptoms during early adulthood may have their origins in adolescence.     

Southern assumptions: normalizing racialized structures at a university in the Deep South

Informed by critical race theory (CRT), we examine how African-American and white college students, at a predominantly white, structurally diverse, Southern US university, understand their cross-racial experiences. Black–white interactions are understood within the context of the so-called ‘post-racial’ environment, against the backdrop of high-profile cases of racial injustice, and within the added context of the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the rural Southern United States. Our study suggests that many students, regardless of race, recognized the persistence of racial segregation, especially in nightlife and campus Greek letter organizations (GLOs). African-American students were the most vocal and troubled by this division. Unexpectedly, however, students appeared to take for granted that in the American South, racism is persistent and indestructible. Building on Bell’s (1991) notion of racial realism and Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) notion of naturalization, we expand the view that racism is inherent or related to individual preference, to place and time, with a construct we term southern assumptions. Southern assumptions are the mechanisms in which participants connect collective historical racism in the south to the race problems of today.     

The vicious circle: effects of race and class on university entrance in Brazil

Brazil has high levels of socio-economic inequality and an inequitable distribution of access to higher education. How much of this inequality is associated with race or class is an important question in light of the current debate over affirmative action and the suitability of race and social targeted policies. There are those who claim that racial disparities in the educational system are a result of students’ social status and not a result of racism, while others believe race is an important factor that superposes the effect of class. This study uses national survey data from Brazil’s Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (National Secondary Education Exam [ENEM]) to examine the relationship between race and access to higher education of high school students between 2004 and 2008. The results document a vicious circle which connects the schooling of the young with their race, socio-economic status, and university attendance.     

‘Race isn't what defines me’: exploring identity choices in transracial,biracial, and monoracial families

Transracial adoption [TRA], particularly the adoption of black children by white parents, has been a controversial issue in the United States for more than half a century. Much of the criticism surrounding transracial adoption has dealt with concerns that black children raised in white homes will fail to develop a positive black identity. Such critiques are often based on assumptions about the identity of black children raised by their biological parents, yet studies of transracial adoption rarely address identity development struggles experienced by black children raised in black homes. Moreover, while the race of parents in relation to children is at the center of the transracial adoption debate, TRA studies rarely delve into socialization practices of biracial families headed by one white and one black parent. This study addresses a void in the literature by examining the experiences of young black adults whose parents may or may not be of the same race. The impact of varying racialized family structures on black identity development is examined by comparing the experiences of young black adults raised in families with two black parents (monoracial), one white and one black parent (biracial), and two white parents (transracial). Drawing from 32 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with middle-class young black adults between the ages of 18 and 30 years old, findings indicate that all informants, regardless of racialized family structure, approach racial identity development similarly by de-emphasizing the ascribed status of race in favor of achieved statuses as part of the identity construction process.     

Goal-Striving Stress and Racial Differences in Mental Health

This study investigated the associations among goal-striving stress, racial related stressors, and mental health. Goal-striving stress was defined as the discrepancy between aspiration for and achievement of a better way of life, weighted by the subjective probability of success, and the level of disappointment experienced if those life goals were not realized. Data are from the National Survey of American Life’s African American (N = 3,570) and non-Hispanic white (N = 891) adult samples. Regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between goal-striving stress and five mental health outcomes: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological distress, and depressive symptoms. After controlling for socio-demographic factors, a personal problems checklist, and racial discrimination, goal-striving stress was significantly related to all mental health measures such that as goal-striving stress increased, mental health worsened. Additionally, the relationship of goal-striving stress to mental health was found to be conditional upon race. Specifically, goal-striving stress had a stronger effect among white Americans than African Americans. Goal-striving stress was associated differentially with lower levels of mental health for black and white Americans. Racial differences in the impact of goal-striving stress suggest a need for analyses exploring resilience and coping in relation to the impact of goal-striving stress on black–white differences in mental health.