Mixed Race Studies

All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil

National Black Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 3 (2009)
41 pages

Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society . . . ?” A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.

Introduction

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society… ?”1 A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.  This conclusion, in turn, would inform a judgment as to the relative necessity and efficacy of the administration of affirmative action in both nations. Instead of using the apparent differences between legal definitions of race and color in the two countries as a reference point for comparing the utility of affirmative action as a means of eradicating color-coded inequality, this article uses as its point of departure, the similar ways that racial and color-based inequality have been manufactured in the United States and Brazil.4 “Because they share the same battle against insidious systems of racial hierarchy, it is sensible for both Americas to… focus upon the commonality of the historical legacy of slavery and its outgrowth in the continuing societal efforts to maintain privilege…” “North and South America… share a societal use of segregation for the promotion of supremacy. The segregation of education has been a key to this agenda of privilege.” Within the context of education, this piece treats affirmative action as a crucible, revealing racialized narratives, polarities, hierarchies and constructs, which have created and maintained the color-coded inequality that characterizes both American and Brazilian social, political, and economic realities…

…A substantively different construction of affirmative action, called by the same name, is being implemented in Brazil. Brazil has historically been described as a Racial Democracy, a national ideology that shares with colorblindness a resistance to the legal relevance of race. As this ideology yields to a national narrative that recognizes color-coded realities,16 the Brazilian government is utilizing the most aggressive form of affirmative action, quotas, to both remedy significant racialized social, economic and political disparities and to achieve substantive economic, social and political equality for its citizens. Brazilians opposed to affirmative action practices and policies, echoing objections raised by affirmative action detractors in the United States, charge that racial assignment and classification for the purpose of including some and excluding others (i.e., the legalization of racial classifications) is divisive,17 destabilizing, and impossible in a nation that has existed without categorical racial identities. This article considers whether a diversity focused affirmative action policy would provide a more politically palatable framework for race-conscious governmental action, and offer a justification that is more concentric with the Brazilian orientation towards difference, than a remediation focused policy.

The growing awareness of racial disparities as a catalyst to and justification for efforts to achieve substantive equality in Brazil and the growing reticence in the United States to the use of race conscious means of facilitating substantive equality, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis of the ways in which racism and colorism construct social, economic and political inequality for Afro- Brazilians and Black Americans and the extent to which affirmative action can provide an effective vehicle for reform in both nations. Part I of this article begins with an examination of the history and evolution of the significance and uses of race and color that have informed the current climate of raceblindness in the face of racial inequality in both nations. This section explores the ways in which the legend of Racial Democracy continues to pervade perceptions of race and challenge efforts to remedy racial inequities in Brazil and the ways in which the ideology of colorblindness has provided a jurisprudential framework inherently hostile to race-conscious efforts to achieve substantive equality in America.

Part II of this article highlights racial disparities in both nations and identifies racial polarity, which expresses fixed and diametrically opposed valuations of whiteness and blackness, reflected in white-to-black color hierarchies that operate in both the United States and Brazil, as their chief article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil architect. In keeping with this theme, race and color are considered throughout this piece within a binary (black/white) framework, which underscores the central thesis that black-white racial polarities, in concert with normative whiteness, create substantive social, economic, and political inequality in both countries.

Part III of this article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil and addresses how racial and color-based inequality are both masked and manufactured at the intersection of racial polarity and resistance to an acknowledgement of the legal relevance of race in both nations. This section of the article then focuses on the prospects of a Brazilian affirmative action project based on educational diversity and its transformative possibilities for creating substantive equality. It highlights how Brazil’s Constitution and its affirmative action legislation accommodate and instigate responses to racial inequality that challenge normative whiteness. This article ends on an optimistic note, concluding that an educational diversity focused affirmative action project may be a more effective tool with which to disrupt racial polarity in Brazil and dismantle the consequent color hierarchy that creates and perpetuates substantive inequality.

…The prospect of freedom for the slaves inspired insecurity among white Brazilians, and created the need for structures and policies that would maintain their status as the ruling elite. Responding to this exigency, the Brazilian government engaged in large scale immigration of European whites and encouraged miscegenation in order to improve the racial balance between blacks and whites. The “whitening” of the Brazilian population, through miscegenation, was believed to have a civilizing effect on the Brazilian population of observable African ancestry and reinforced normative whiteness (i.e., whiteness as the value standard). A popular slogan of the day, “Marry White to Improve the Race,” captured the pervasive sentiment.

Gilberto Freyre, credited with popularizing the idea of Racial Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, studied at Baylor University in Texas in the early 1900s and reacted with horror to the Jim Crow institutions and practices he witnessed during his visit, including a lynching.

The shock of Freyre’s encounter with the racial hostility and segregation of the United States led him to construct a vision of Brazil’s past (and, by extension, its present and future) that proved deeply appealing to many Brazilians. Scientific racism and its Brazilian variant, the whitening thesis, had viewed Brazil’s history of slavery and miscegenation, and the racially mixed population which was its legacy, as shameful obstacles that had to be overcome if Brazil were to enter the community of civilized nations. Freyre… rehabilitated that past, recasting it as the basis of a new national identity independent, for the first time in Brazilian history, of European norms and models…. Freyre’s writings thus became the basis of a new, semi-official ideology propagated in public proclamations, schools, universities, and the national media…

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White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity [Review]

H-Net Reviews
February 2010

Lorenzo Veracini

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond. White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Cloth ISBN 978-1-4039-7595-9.

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond has published a persuasive outline and contextualization of Brazilian “Race Democracy” advocate Gilberto Freyre. In a forthcoming book, I argue that settler projects use a variety of “transfers” in order to manage indigenous and exogenous alterity in their respective population economies, and that “transfer” does not apply only to people pushed across borders. This review of White Negritude contends that Freyre was indeed a master (discursive) transferist.

Casa Grande e Senzala (1933) proposed a reading of Brazilian race relations that in many ways remains paradigmatic. The specific conditions afforded by a tropical environment and the encounter between Portuguese colonizers and African slaves had produced a uniquely Brazilian synthesis. The master/slave dialectic had been upturned; the inherent antagonism and violence that should have accompanied that relation had been defused. This synthesis, Freyre argued, demonstrated among other things Brazil’s superiority to the United States. While this stance contributed to Casa Grande e Senzala’s reception and career, Isfahani-Hammond suggests that it may also have prevented scrutiny—Brazilian race relations are still routinely construed—both in Brazil and in the US—as primarily an “antithesis” of something else. Freyre, the generally accepted reading goes, made the Afro-Brazilian a central character of the national narrative, recognized that the slaves were the true colonizers, framed senzala and Casa Grande in the same interpretative frame, and proposed a consistently non-eugenicist reading of Brazilian society and culture. Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond successfully problematises this interpretation.

The main point in Freyre’s argument is that Brazilian slave masters identify with their slaves and, having assimilated their cultural traits, can therefore genuinely and authentically represent them. This identification is acquired, for example, via sexual (non reproductive and noncoercive) intercourse with black women. Afro-Brazilian “atmospheric” influences are thus transferred to the white masters in the unique context of the northeastern Brazilian plantation complex (a self-contained social microcosm that is presented as the epicentre of the Brazilian cultural experience). Isfahani-Hammond insists on Freyre’s strategic disavowal of genetic hybridisation. Branquemento (“whitening”) was one available possibility, an approach that advocated the progressive elimination of black genes through miscegenation and immigration policies that favoured Europeans. Freyre, on the other hand, developed more effective discursive strategies. This is where Isfahani-Hammond’s argument is most convincing, and Freyre’s “celebration” of Afro-Brazilian cultural traits is shown as ultimately seeking to “replace sociohistorical blackness with a discourse about blackness” (p. 7). In this way, a potentially destabilising oppositional agency is expropriated and circumvented. Despite its ostensibly non-racial determinants, Freyre’s reasoning is shown to actually culminate in the “exclusionary resolution of Brazilian heterogeneity” (p. 14)…

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Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: “After the Conflict Came the History”

American Anthropologist
Volume 106, Issue 4 (December 2004)
pages 663–674
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2004.106.4.663

Jan Hoffman French, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Richmond

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes—law making and indigenous identity formation—is crucial to understanding how the notion of “mixed heritage” is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.

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Brief communication: Admixture analysis with forensic microsatellites in Minas Gerais, Brazil: The ongoing evolution of the capital and of an African-derived community

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 139, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 591–595
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21046

Marília O. Scliar
Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

Marco T. Vaintraub
GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

Patrícia M.V. Vaintraub
GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

Cleusa G. Fonseca
Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

We report the estimated allele frequencies for 13 and 14 microsatellite loci in two populations of Minas Gerais, Brazil as follows: Belo Horizonte (the capital) and Marinhos (an African-derived community). Analysis of the African, Amerindian, and European genetic contributions to both populations, together with historical information, revealed distinct differences between the two populations. Estimates for Belo Horizonte revealed a higher-European (66%) than African (32%) contribution, and a minimal Amerindian contribution. These results are consistent with the peopling of the city mainly by people from the Minas Gerais hinterland, a people highly admixed but with more European ancestry. Estimates for Marinhos confirmed the high-African component of the population. However, a temporal analysis of two datasets—CURRENT (representing the population living in Marinhos today) and ORIGINAL (representing families, who have lived in Marinhos since the onset of the 20th century),—identified a diminishing of the population’s African ancestry from 92% in the ORIGINAL group to 67% in the CURRENT group. This change is here interpreted as a consequence of the growing migration into the village of people with more European ancestry and subsequent admixture with the local population.

Description of the supporting document:

Supporting Table S1. Origin and size of parental sample populations used in admixture analyses. Supporting Table S2. Allele frequencies distribution of 13 STRs loci in Belo Horizonte population. Supporting Table S3. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (CURR) population. Supporting Table S4. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (ORIG) population. Supporting Table S5. Admixture proportions and 90% confidence intervals for each individual of Marinhos population obtained with the Structure 2.0 program.

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Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer, 2004)
pages 768-787
E-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0136

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash’s feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rights- era race and gender relations and identity formations. Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film. Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregiilora, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands. located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatto characters—“racially mixed” women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of “race mixing”—into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and racial normativity. Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-American literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance lllustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hopkins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and Jessie Fauset There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy American Style ( 1933). mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through “racial passing.”…

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Race Mixture among Northeastern Brazilian Populations

American Anthropologist
Volume 64, Issue 4 (August 1962)
pages 751–759
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1962.64.4.02a00050

P. H. Saldanha
Laboratória de Genética Humana
Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Northeastern Brazilian populations are extremely interesting for racial studies. These populations are derived from the intermixture of Negroes, Whites (Portuguese), and Indians and seem to be very stable ethnic groups of which representatives are promptly recognizable because of their unique physical appearances. The “Nordestino” populations inhabit a very hostile region, arid almost throughout the year. Because of the poor conditions there, they often emigrate to southern regions of the country. The emigration flow of “Nordestino” is fairly organized, and migrants stay some days at the State Hostelry in São Paulo before they are directed to job centers.

About one year ago an investigation of blood groups, simple genetical traits, physical measurements, and other anthropological characteristics of “Nordestino” immigrants was initiated by two laboratories in the State of São Paulo. A preliminary report of these investigations will be published elsewhere. The present paper is concerned with some general problems of race admixture.

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Blood groups of Whites, Negroes and Mulattoes from the State of Maranhão, Brazil

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 6, Issue 4 (December 1948)
pages 423–428
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330060412

E. M. da Silva
Department of Hematology
Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Within the Brazilian “melting pot” the intensity and variation of the racial mixture rises to a high point in the State of Maranhão. Of the three main races entering into this mixture, Indian, Negro and White, remnants are still to be found in more or less pure condition. As would be expected, however, all possible combinations of these primary groups are now abundantly present. Thus the population of this State presents unlimited opportunities for research in the problems of physical anthropology growing out of race mixture.

The present study deals with the classical blood groups in Whites and Negroes and in mixtures of these two races. The observations were made in the city of São Luiz and in the village of Santo Antonio dos Pretos (Municipe of Codó), a little over 300 km southeast of the former.

The Negroes were selected on the basis of their well-known physical characteristics. The series totals 198 and includes representatives of different African groups.

The Whites are mainly from Arabian (Syrian) stock, with some Portuguese and a few Spanish individuals. The series totals 196.

The individuals of mixed origin, which we will call Mulattoes in accordance with Brazilian custom, are mostly if not all first generation crosses. Selection was made by examining…

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Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

Mestizo Nations: Culture, Race, and Conformity in Latin American Literature

University of Arizona Press
May 2002
161 pages
9.6 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
ISBN-10: 0816521921
ISBN-13: 978-0816521920

Juan E. De Castro, Assistant Professor of Literature
The New School

Nationality in Latin America has long been entwined with questions of racial identity. Just as American-born colonial elites grounded their struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the history of Amerindian resistance, constructions of nationality were based on the notion of the fusion of populations heterogeneous in culture, race, and language. But this rhetorical celebration of difference was framed by a real-life pressure to assimilate into cultures always defined by Iberian American elites. In Mestizo Nations, Juan De Castro explores the construction of nationality in Latin American and Chicano literature and thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the discourse of mestizaje—which proposes the creation of a homogenous culture out of American Indian, black, and Iberian elements—he examines a selection of texts that represent the entire history and regional landscape of Latin American culture in its Western, indigenous, and neo-African traditions from Independence to the present. Through them, he delineates some of the ambiguities and contradictions that have beset this discourse. Among texts considered are the Indianist novel Iracema by the nineteenth-century Brazilian author José de Alencar; the Tradiciones peruanas, Peruvian Ricardo Palma’s fictionalizations of national difference; and historical and sociological essays by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui and the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre. And because questions raised by this discourse are equally relevant to postmodern concerns with national and transnational heterogeneity, De Castro also analyzes such recent examples as the Cuban dance band Los Van Van’s use of Afrocentric lyrics; Richard Rodriguez’s interpretations of North American reality; and points of contact and divergence between José María Arguedas’s novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below and writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Julia Kristeva. By updating the concept of mestizaje as a critical tool for analyzing literary text and cultural trends—incorporating not only race, culture, and nationality but also gender, language, and politics—De Castro shows the implications of this Latin American discursive tradition for current critical debates in cultural and area studies. Mestizo Nations contains important insights for all Latin Americanists as a tool for understanding racial relations and cultural hybridization, creating not only an important commentary on Latin America but also a critique of American life in the age of multiculturalism.

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“Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!”: Questioning the Concept of “Race” in Southern Bahia, Brazil

Ethos
Volume 35, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 383-409
DOI: 10.1525/eth.2007.35.3.383

Michael D. Baran, Preceptor in Expository Writing
Harvard University

In 2003, teachers at the municipal high school in Belmonte, Brazil, began presenting students with a radically different ideology about racial categorization: an essentialized ideology that defines anyone not “purely” branco (white) as negro (black). This system of categorization conflicts with popular belief in a mixed-race moreno identity based not only on ancestry but also on observable physical features. Through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods, I examine this apparent clash of ideologies in Belmonte with respect to academic theories on the cognition of race and ethnicity. I show how children and adults integrate certain aspects of essentialism but not others in their constructions of identity and in the way they reason about hypothetical scenarios. These nuanced solutions to the challenges posed by explicit conflicts over supposedly natural categories lead to my own questioning of race in anthropological theory.

During a March afternoon in 2003, in an eighth-grade science class in Belmonte, Brazil, racial ideologies collided. The lesson of the day dealt with human biology and basic genetics. One student in the class asked the teacher about the biology of race mixing. The teacher then tried to clarify the supposedly natural facts about racial classification for the class. She explained that there were only two races—blonde and blue-eyed brancos (whites) and everyone else, considered negros (blacks). Although a few heads nodded in approval, most of the class looked confused or upset. The teacher was presenting a particularly extreme form of the racial classification system that black movements have urged Brazilians to adopt, one in which those with any traceable African ancestry would self-identify as “negro” as a sign of positive self-image and political solidarity. While this conception of “negro” has been animating black movements for at least 25 years in Brazil’s urban centers, it has only now reached more rural areas like Belmonte. And it is not always well received.

“I’m morena, not negra!”2 cried 14-year old Paula. This claim of mixed-race “brown” identity echoes the more common ideology in Belmonte, academically labeled “racial democracy.” The roots of this ideology extend back to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s influential 1933 book, The Masters and the Slaves (1946). Freyre found strength in the biological and cultural mixing of Portuguese colonizers, native Brazilians, and slaves of African descent, whereas race scientists before him saw only physical and mental weakness (Freyre 1946; Nina Rodrigues 1938; Ramos 1939). Freyre’s foundational story, still framing Brazilian history in school texts, holds that historical mixing has created an ethnically unified population without stark racial divisions or resulting discriminations making Brazil a supposed “racial paradise.” Consistent with this ideology, most residents of Belmonte prefer to self-identify with the inclusive term morena, which can be used in various linguistic contexts to refer to almost any combination of physical features. To call someone a “negra” within this racial democracy ideology is to separate them out from the mixed Brazilian mainstream and denigrate them as a separate category of “pure” black, associated with slavery and Africa. That is just what caused a stir when Ana Maria yelled out to Paula, “Girl, you are not morena. We are negras!”

In the title of this article, the phrase “Questioning the Concept of Race” has two levels of significance. First, it refers to the questions of some students as teachers impose new identity categories that clash with previously held “common sense” beliefs about race. Second, the title of this article refers to my own questions regarding academic conceptions of race. In the literature on racial categorization in Brazil, I found two different arguments that parallel the debate in the class between Ana Maria and Paula. On the one hand, a more conventional wisdom holds that racial categories in Brazil are multiple (up to hundreds in some cases), they can change from day to day or person to person, and they are based on physical features rather than rules of descent (Harris 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983).5 On the other hand, recent critics, both anthropological and psychological, argue that racial categories in Brazil are essentialized: they are dichotomous, rigid, and defined by descent (Gil-White 2001b; Sheriff 2001). Observing the coexistence of both ideologies in Belmonte and the active construction of supposedly natural categories by local actors led me to question both sides of this scholarly debate and to question the academic concept of race more generally…

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