Seeing whites: views of black Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses black Brazilians’ narratives about seeing whites, defining white privilege, and interacting with whites and white privilege. We find that black Brazilians identify whites in three interrelated ways: (i) as skin colour; (ii) as the privileged class; and (iii) as those who racially discriminate against them. Interviewees acknowledge that white privilege exists in Brazil, but middle-class and working-class respondents report different ways that white privilege is exercised. Working-class respondents relate white privilege to phenotype, such as whites benefiting from societal definitions of beauty. By contrast, middle-class respondents see white privilege in the widespread assumption that certain occupations and spaces are “naturally” white. Across social classes, however, interviewees largely disagree about the awareness of whites of their own privilege and the best ways to address and interact with it.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• whites in Latin America
• Brazil
• middle class
• white privilege
• working class

Acknowledgement

We are thankful to Chana Teeger, Veronica Toste, Sarah Sachs and the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive and thoughtful comments on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use the term racial democracy as a thesis along the lines of Guimarães (2006): a vague state ideology that reduced anti-racism to anti-racialism and was mobilized to underplay the continuing relevance of racial discrimination in Brazil.

2 We informally contacted human resource departments of large corporations and asked them to provide us with contacts of negro professionals in high positions (managers, doctors, directors). We established 10 contacts through this channel and 70 more through referrals. We limited two referrals per interviewee.

3 This strategy was approved by the Harvard Human Subject Committee.

4 For details on our approach to reflexivity and positionality please refer to the appendix of Lamont et al. 2016.

5 Throughout our empirical sections, the numbers in parentheses refer to how many times a code or a reference appeared in an interview in our sample (n = 160).

6 On this topic, see also Osuji 2013.