The Color Complex (Revised): The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium - Softcover

Russell, Kathy; Wilson Ph.D., Midge; Hall, Ronald

 
9780307744234: The Color Complex (Revised): The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium
Softcover
ISBN 10: 030774423X ISBN 13: 9780307744234
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A provocative exploration of how Western standards of beauty are influencing cultures across the globe and impacting personal, professional, romantic and familial relationships. Processes like skin lightening in India, hair smoothing in Black America, eyelid reconstruction in China, and plastic surgery worldwide continue to rise in popularity for men and women facing discrimination from both within and outside of their own increasingly fluid ethnic groups. Now including a wealth of new information since the first edition of The Color Complex over two decades ago, the authors, through a historical and sociological lens, have measured the impact of recent pop culture events effecting race relations to determine whether colorism has gotten better or worse over time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathy Russell is Vice President of Sales for Omar Supplies Inc and lives in Plainfield, Illinois with her husband, photographer James M. Cole. Midge Wilson is an associate dean and professor who holds a joint appointment in psychology and women’s and gender studies at DePaul University, also in Chicago. Ronald E. Hall is a social work professor at Michigan State University.

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— Chapter 1 —

The Emergence of Modern Colorism in the Americas

We begin in Europe in the late 1400s, when seafaring countries such as England, Spain, and Portugal were financing merchant voyages to find new trade routes to the Far East. The men returned instead with exciting tales of faraway places that were rich with gold, spices, and silks. The very notion that there existed unknown lands beyond the horizon set off a frenzy of empire building on the part of many European nations. This would later be known as the Age of Discovery, and it lasted well into the seventeenth century. After Christopher Columbus reached what he mistakenly believed were the Indies, and it was realized that vast new lands were available for plunder and colonization, European nations began financing more ship captains for even more expeditions with orders to stake claim to as many territories as they could find. It mattered little to the Europeans if indigenous peoples already were living in these “discovered” places. Europeans believed they were the superior race. As such, they saw it as their Christian duty to tame the “savage” natives and bring them civilization, a self-serving rationale that would persist for centuries—Rudyard Kipling would call it “the White man’s burden” as late as 1899.

During the early 1500s, the islands of the Caribbean—or “West Indies,” as they were mistakenly named by Columbus—were popular destinations for Portuguese and Spanish explorers, and other areas of Central and South America soon followed. While the hoped-for gold rarely materialized, it was recognized that the warm climates and rich soil in these new lands had the potential for growing cash crops like sugar and coffee. The crops were labor intensive, however, and for them to be profitable, a source of cheap labor was needed. At first, local indigenous people were captured and forced to work in the colonists’ fields, but there were not enough of them. Some White indentured servants from Europe ventured over, but again, not enough. The Portuguese, who already had explored the east coast of Africa, found the solution by bringing over the first slaves to the New World. This nation would continue to be the largest importer of slaves during the era of Atlantic slave trading.

African slaves poured in to work in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the Caribbean, the British, French, and Dutch had also claimed islands of their own, and they, too, needed slaves to work the sugar plantations. Conditions were ideal for race mixing to take place. Large numbers of individuals from different racial backgrounds were living and working side by side, and doing so under the rule of White plantation owners who were greatly outnumbered. In fact, it has been estimated that throughout the Caribbean, there was an average ratio of one White to ten Blacks and/or mulattoes, and in some of the most remote rural areas there could be as many as fifty slaves and/or mulattoes for every one White male. Finally, there was a significant gender imbalance. During the early years of slave trading, far more African males, with their greater upper-body strength (relative to that of females), were brought to the New World to clear the fields, but females were valued as well, and albeit in smaller numbers, they came too. Predictably, under the extreme conditions in many of these settlement outposts, the White men in charge raped the women who worked for them. But, to be fair, we should note that many romantic relationships and successful unions also came into existence during this time.

Racially mixed individuals, called “mulattoes” (a term considered derogatory by many today), began to make up significant segments of the population throughout Central and South America. They were people of every conceivable variety: those of mixed European and African blood, those of mixed European and indigenous blood, those of mixed African and indigenous blood, and subsequently every combination and permutation created by the mixed-race offspring of the first unions.

In Central and South America, many of the mulattoes lived free and enjoyed a certain status in the society, one that was certainly lower than that of Whites but also much above that of the darker-skinned slaves. Many mulattoes acquired their free legal status from being the direct descents of wealthy White plantation owners, some of whom openly accepted responsibility for their mulatto offspring and made provisions for their future, including an education and land of their own. And when the White owner had no other progeny, his mulatto offspring inherited the family wealth and were expected to continue the family line. These racially mixed islanders enjoyed what American historian Carl Neumann Degler has called “the mulatto escape-hatch.” Though not as fully privileged as Whites, most mulattoes were not subject to the restrictions of slavery. It is interesting to note that later, when revolution rocked many of the Caribbean islands, it was the more recently arriving slaves who tended to be the most rebellious; the better-situated mulattoes were often quite satisfied with the status quo. When it became clear to the rebel slaves that the old mulatto families were not joining in the fight for freedom, they too came under attack along with White owners. As a result, many Caribbean mulattoes fled for safety elsewhere, with a majority going to New Orleans, where they would generate their own brand of colorism, a topic that will be discussed later.

Today, the persistence of a mulatto-based color-caste hierarchy is perhaps most evident in Brazil, a country that prides itself on being free of racism. Brazilians proudly refer to themselves as “café con leche,” and they have close to forty different racial names and categories with which citizens may identify. But in reality, social stratification follows color: the lighter the skin, the wealthier one is likely to be, and conversely, the darker, the poorer. Lighter skin, and in some cases the socially constructed label of light skin, is preferred for what it signifies. Two commonly heard expressions in Brazil are “Anyone who escapes being an evident Negro is White” and “Money whitens,” meaning that the wealthier a Black man or woman becomes, the lighter his or her racial category becomes. Today, lighter skin is so preferred that there are those who fear Black features will eventually disappear altogether from the Brazilian population. In short, one might say that there is a consciousness about—even a preoccupation with—skin color in Brazil, but to the Brazilians’ credit, their country never developed the kinds of exclusionary laws and blatant racist practices that plagued and continue to influence race relations in the United States. According to social historian George Fredrickson, race in Brazil became more “biologized” than socially constructed, meaning that a difference between actual ancestry and observable phenotype came to be recognized. That is, a Brazilian child would never be automatically identified with the racial status of one or both parents, but instead how the child looked physically would become the determining marker of his or her racial identity. Interestingly, a plausible hypothesis regarding why Brazil and other South and Central American countries never adopted the rigid rules of racial classification that developed in the United States is that the somewhat darker skinned Portuguese and Spanish people who settled these areas were more comfortable with living among those of varying skin color, as a consequence of their homelands’ having been invaded by Moors from northern Africa centuries earlier. Those Moors who stayed behind mixed racially...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030774423X
ISBN 13 
9780307744234
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SC
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/

CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41
Madrid
Madrid
Spanien

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