Between Brown and Black


Book Description

With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.




Black and Brown in Los Angeles


Book Description

Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the book delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America. Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition. The book features essays by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.




Between Black and Brown


Book Description

"In Between Black and Brown, Rebecca Romo, G. Reginald Daniel, and J. Sterphone begin with by asking, How do individuals with one African American parent and one Chicana/o or Mexican parent racially and ethnically identify? Between Black and Brown challenges the commonly held belief that all individuals with any amount of African ancestry are Black. Rather, Blaxicans embrace and live a multiracial identity of both African American and Chicana/o ancestries, histories, physical appearances, social formation, and politics through their own self-definitions"--




Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes


Book Description

Race relations in twenty-first-century America will not be just a black-and-white issue. The 2000 census revealed that Hispanics already slightly outnumber African Americans as the largest ethnic group, while together Blacks and Hispanics constitute the majority population in the five largest U.S. cities. Given these facts, black-brown relations could be a more significant racial issue in the decades to come than relations between minority groups and Whites. Offering some of the first in-depth analyses of how African Americans and Hispanics perceive and interact with each other, this pathfinding study looks at black-brown relations in Houston, Texas, one of the largest U.S. cities with a majority ethnic population and one in which Hispanics outnumber African Americans. Drawing on the results of several sociological studies, the authors focus on four key issues: how each group forms and maintains stereotypes of the other, areas in which the two groups conflict and disagree, the crucial role of women in shaping their communities' racial attitudes, and areas in which Hispanics and African Americans agree and can cooperate to achieve greater political power and social justice.




Black and White Makes Brown


Book Description

We are all a shade of brown. Some are very light and some are very dark, but most of us are a shade in between. The love between Cornelia and her husband has never been gentle and quiet. No-it's been loud, opinionated, passionate, and at times cruel. However, it is part of something huge, something bigger than both of them. It is a love blessed by God. Black and White Makes Brown does not blame or hate; it educates and stimulates. What would you really say if someone of a different race married your child? There are far too many interracial children who have been rejected and then deserted. Let Black and White Makes Brown show you how to love blindly.




Brown Vs White


Book Description

Malcolm X once said that "So we won't solve the problem listening to that Uncle Tom Negro, and the problem won't be solved listening to the so-called white liberal. The only time the problem is going to be solved is when a Black man can sit down like a Black man and a white man can sit down like a white man. And make no excuses whatsoever with each other in discussing the problem. No offense will stem from factors that are brought up. But both of them have to sit down like men, on one side and on the other side, and look at it in terms of Black and white. And then take some kind of solution based upon the factors that we see, rather than upon that which we would like to believe.". This book takes that approach as it looks into all the factors that have created generations of strife of BROWN vs WHITE. Racial issues persist for many reasons, one of the main reasons is that we refuse to address why Africans have traditionally been used as laborers not only by white people but by all other cultures which encountered Africa pre-industrial era, including by other Africans. Historically, some researchers have tried to answer this issue by suggesting a genetic deficiency or lack of cognitive abilities by Africans but clearly, this is not the case. BROWN vs WHITE explores the reality that Egypt and Libya are NOT the same as "black Africa" so when black people point to Egyptian history and achievements to imply Africans were and are just as advanced as other cultures, they are actually appropriating another culture's history. Ancient Egyptians came from Phoenicia. Egyptians, are not black Africans. Lastly, until the black man can accept that the African slave trade was operating long before Europeans came to the shores of Africa; that the Ashanti and Yoruba tribes were capturing and selling their fellow Africans to Arabs for centuries before the first white ship pulled up to an African dock -- until that day, the racial strife will continue between BROWN vs WHITE.




Between Brown and Black


Book Description

With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.




The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity


Book Description

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was a watershed event in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. The recent fiftieth anniversary of Brown prompted a surge of tributes: books, television and radio specials, conferences, and speeches. At the same time, says James C. Cobb, it revealed a growing trend of dismissiveness and negativity toward Brown and other accomplishments of the civil rights movement. Writing as both a lauded historian and a white southerner from the last generation to grow up under southern apartheid, Cobb responds to what he sees as distortions of Brown’s legacy and their implied disservice to those whom it inspired and empowered. Cobb begins by looking at how our historical understanding of segregation has evolved since the Brown decision. In particular, he targets the tenacious misconception that racial discrimination was at odds with economic modernization--and so would have faded out, on its own, under market pressures. He then looks at the argument that Brown energized white resistance more than it fomented civil rights progress. This position overstates the pace and extent of racial change in the South prior to Brown, Cobb says, while it understates Brown’s role in catalyzing and legitimizing subsequent black protest. Finally, Cobb suggests that the Brown decree and the civil rights movement accomplished not only more than certain critics have acknowledged but also more than the hard statistics of black progress can reveal. The destruction of Jim Crow, with its “denial of belonging,” allowed African Americans to embrace their identity as southerners in ways that freed them to explore links between their southernness and their blackness. This is an important and timely reminder of “what the Brown court and the activists who took the spirit of its ruling into the streets were up against, both historically and contemporaneously.”




"Brown" in Baltimore


Book Description

Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Baltimore's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. The city's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, however, few whites chose to attend school with blacks. After a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy. The author finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies. The author examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality.




The Interracial Experience


Book Description

The number of black-white mixed marriages increased by 504% in the last 25 years. By offering relevant demographic, research, and sociocultural data as well as a series of intensely personal and revealing vignettes, Dr. Brown investigates how mixed race people cope in a world that has shoehorned them into a racial category that denies half of their physiological and psychological existence. She also addresses their struggle for acceptance in the black and white world and the racist abuses many of them have suffered. Brown interweaves research findings with interviews of children of black-white interracial unions to highlight certain psychosocial phenomenon or experiences. She looks at the history of interracial marriages in the United States and discusses the scientific and social theories that underlie the racial bigotry suffered by mixed people. Questions of racial identity, conflict, and self-esteem are treated as are issues of mental health. An important look at contemporary mixed race issues that will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers, students, and professionals dealing with race, family, and mental health concerns.