Whitening and racial ambiguity: racialization and ethnoracial citizenship in contemporary Brazil

ABSTRACT

Recent policies to redress racial inequality in Brazil, including affirmative action and the protection of Afro-Brazilian land rights, have generated fierce debates about the character of race and racism in Brazilian society. In this article, I critically examine an assumption structuring these debates: that Brazil is characterized by a special tolerance for ethnoracial ambiguity that is threatened by these initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic research on conflicts between Afro-Brazilian communities and Brazil’s spaceport, I argue that an everyday imperative to social whitening shows how this ethnoracial ambiguity has been skewed toward one racial pole. Affirmative action policies do not eliminate ethnoracial ambiguity, but have helped to change the force of the everyday whitening that structures it. In this critique, I aim to clarify the nature of ethnoracial changes in Brazil, as the ideology of ‘racial democracy’ has lost the hegemony it held during much of Brazil’s twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• race
• citizenship
• quilombos

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On the politics of this ‘quilombo clause’, see Arruti (2006), Bowen (2010), French (2009), Mattos (2003), Mitchell (2015), Montero (2012), Sullivan (2013), as well as in this issue, the articles by Bowen (2016), Gomes and Yabeta (2016), Silva (2016), and Sullivan (2016).

2 According to one 2002 study, the median monthly per family was just $100BRL (less than $50 USD) (Forum/DLIS Alcântara 2003, 32), although many families lived principally from fishing, gathering, and swidden horticulture, mitigating that low income to some extent.

3 The possible choices for race or color in the Brazilian censuses of 2000 and 2010 are preto (black), pardo (brown), indígena (indigenous), amarelo (yellow or Asian), and branco (white). Neither preto nor pardo is used much in people’s everyday discussions of race or color in Brazil. In keeping with a long-standing demand of many of Brazil’s black movements, numerous researchers today group the preto and pardo categories as black, or negro. Many allied to Brazil’s black movements also prefer to use terms such as negro or Afro-descendant, which are less linked to phenotype and thus group more people together than preto or pardo. I return to a discussion of this census at the end of this paper.

4 This and all other translations from the Portuguese, of ethnographic and scholarly material, are mine.

5 This was not true in the villages of Alcântara’s interior at the time. Until 2006, when they benefited from the Workers’ Party government’s massive rural electrification program, Luz para Todos, there was almost no electricity, and no television in rural areas of the peninsula.

6 On everyday whitening, see Telles (2006, 90–94).

7 There is a growing body of scholarship that examines the force of this everyday whitening in Brazil, but its implications for Brazilian debates about race have been little discussed (see Carone, Bento, and Piza 2002; Dávila 2003; Dennison 2013; Norvell 2001; Pinho 2009; Sovik 2009; Stam and Shohat 2012; Twine 1997).

8 Although I criticize Fry’s ideas here, in particular, the idea that the law is producing new kinds of racialized citizens (see especially, Fry et al. 2007), I do so because I highly respect his scholarship even when I don’t agree. Fry’s collection of essays, A Persistência da Raça (The Persistence of Race, 2005) is easily one of the best books on comparative race relations which I have ever read and it deserves to be taken very seriously. I write this here because Fry (and colleagues, such as the also excellent anthropologist Yvonne Maggie) has sometimes come under ad hominem attack in Brazil, particularly for opposition to ethnoracial citizenship. Although I argue against the racialization thesis here, I do not want to contribute to those attacks.

9 Famously, a 1976 national survey found more than 100 color terms in use when people were asked an open-ended question about their color. However, as Silva (1987) and Telles (2006) have both shown, the majority of Brazilians use very few terms to describe people’s color. People use many terms in Alcântara to describe their own and others’ color, but by far, the most common term is the hyper-ambiguous, moreno.

10 I have recently encountered another scholar making a similar point. Da Costa, in an ethnographic analysis of affective aspects of Brazil’s race politics, notes that ambiguous racial identifications ‘are situated within the myriad meanings of race/colour and hierarchical places denominated for certain peoples in society’ (2014, 5).

11 Gilberto Freyre famously argued that the ‘potential of Brazilian Culture lies in the wealth of antagonisms in equilibrium’ (1933, 415).

12 On the role that the USA plays in these debates, see Ferreira da Silva (2010; Mitchell forthcoming; Mitchell, Blanchette, and da Silva n.d.; Pinho 2005; Sansone 2003; Seigel 2009).

13 Although I consider DaMatta and Fry together here (and Fry cites DaMatta’s ideas approvingly in this context), they are very different thinkers and I do not intend to blur those differences.

14 Although a strong favorite to win the 2006 World Cup, Brazil lost to France in the semifinals, but Ronaldo went on to break the world record for career World Cup goals scored, with a career total of 15.

15 Similarly, in 2010, Brazil’s young star Neymar, who is clearly phenotypically Afro-descended, said in an interview with the Estado de São Paulo newspaper that because he is not black (preto) he had never suffered racism (Racy 2016).

16 The Dicionário Houaiss is today generally regarded as the most complete dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese.

17 The Portuguese language requires that the words ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ be gendered, but it is no surprise that the editors of the dictionary chose to gender ‘Indian’ as ‘female’ and white as male.

18 It is important to note that despite the general ethnic divisions in Alcântara, with people generally lighter skinned in the terras de caboclo and generally darker skinned in the terras de preto, throughout the region, there is mixture and intermarriage. Many of the people in the ‘white’ terras de caboclo looked ‘black’ to me.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from Fulbright-Hays, The National Science Foundation, and the Rutgers Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs, The University of Chicago Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.