Mixed Race Studies

Cultural Imperialism and the Transformation of Race Relations in Brazil

Latin American Perspectives
Issue 178, Volume 38, Number 3 (May 2011)
pages 194-208
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X10390624

Bernadete Ramos Beserra, Professor
Federal University of Ceará

Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp.

G. Reginald Daniel, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 365 pp.

Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 460 pp.

No work in the field of race and race relations in Brazil has provoked as much controversy as Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1999) “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” In it the authors argued that cultural imperialism “rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such” (41). Although they used other examples to clarify their proposition, they focused on the debate on race and, taking the case of Brazil as an example of the “ethnocentric intrusion” of the U.S. tradition on studies of race in sharply different realities, denounced the historical U.S. solutions for the problem of racism that were being proposed and adopted by many Brazilian scholars and politicians at the time.

What made the article so important was, of course, the position of Pierre Bourdieu in the field of sociology. It was not just a Brazilian scholar, belonging to the so-called white elite, who was questioning the direction of recent studies of race and racism in Brazil but the most famous sociologist of the time. As might be expected, Bourdieu and Wacquant’s criticism created some turmoil among U.S. and Brazilian students of race relations, and it has since influenced the academic debate on the theme in both countries as well as in Europe itself, where the article was first published. The responses were diverse. Some scholars, such as French (2000) and Telles (2002), dismissed the critique altogether, arguing that Bourdieu and Wacquant were unfamiliar with recent scholarship in the area and therefore their intervention was authoritarian and inadequate. Others, such as Pinho and Figueiredo (2002), called attention to the fact that the colonized position of Brazil made it vulnerable to external influences in general, not just those coming from the United States. They exemplified their point by sketching the history of the field of social sciences in Brazil and showing that it had always been influenced by “foreign” scholarship. At the same time, they asked why these influences should be considered particularly problematic when they promoted a sort of enfranchisement of minorities. Should not minorities—in Brazil or elsewhere—borrow from the experiences of their counterparts in other parts of the globe? While most scholars agreed that Bourdieu and Wacquant’s critique overlooked important new scholarship in the field, they could not fail to consider the truth of their argument that Brazilian perceptions of race and racism had recently been transformed in the image of those of the United States. Therefore, the article also served to support those scholars who challenged the interpretations of the academic supporters of the black movement and its politics aimed at radically changing Brazilian perceptions of race and racism in order to impose solutions that made sense only in the context of U.S. racism in the 1960s.

Since the publication of this article, there has been an increasing “Americanization” of the solutions proposed for Brazil’s racial problem. The binary U.S. view of race that divides the world between whites and nonwhites has not only been adopted by the black movement and some scholars but also been promoted by the Brazilian government. Moreover, the debate, which used to be restricted to the academic sphere, has now gained the attention of the mass media and the general population.

Therefore, against the population’s general understanding of race, constructed under the hegemony of mestiçagem (mixing) policies, the Brazilian government today claims that we are no longer mestiços, as we used to believe we were, but either blacks or whites (Maggie, 2008; Theodoro, 2009). The new politics differs considerably from our fantasy of racial democracy, and, according to the new wisdom, what we have now is a racism even more insidious than U.S. racism because it is concealed and more difficult to resolve. Therefore, in spite of evident differences between the racism constructed in Brazil and in the United States (Burdick, 1998; Sheriff, 2001; Sansone, 2003; Fry, 2000), it is on a supposed need, far more mistaken than our fantasy of racial democracy, for similarity in the strategies of the black movements in the two countries that the post-Durban affirmative action policies are founded.2 These policies date back to the resurgence of the black movement in Brazil at the end of the 1970s in the context of the rise of the new social movements—political subjects whose demands were no longer connected to labor and class positions but based on other similarities and identifications, permanent or circumstantial, that are currently referred to as “identities,” such as neighborhood, ethnicity, color, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation…

…The studies of Telles and Daniel are important and complementary contributions to the field of race relations in Brazil from a U.S. perspective. They are complementary in that they ask different questions and rely on different sets of data. While Telles articulates a detailed literature review on race relations in Brazil with sophisticated statistics in order to demonstrate that racism produces increasing inequality, Daniel compares sociohistorical phenomena that produce what (following Omi and Winant, 1986) he calls distinct “racial projects”—a ternary one in Brazil and a binary one in the United States. His purpose is to understand what has led such different societies to converging paths. Although studying distinct subjects, both writers feed into the sociological tradition that considers race a determinant factor in the production of social inequality. Thus, although aware of the differences between Brazilian and U.S. societies, they apply to the study of Brazil the same framework developed to explain U.S. race relations and racism. Daniel’s study provides more opportunity to reflect on the specificities of the two cases and their approaches to social injustice based on racial discrimination.

Telles’s main aim is apparently to show that in Brazil as in the United States, race is a determinant factor in the production of social inequality. This is not exactly a new idea (see, e.g., Hasenbalg, 1979; Hasenbalg and Silva, 1988; Guimarães, 2002; Theodoro, 2009), but the particularity of his contribution resides in the fact that his arguments are largely based on statistical data. Comparing tables of income distribution and other socioeconomic markers in Brazil, the United States, and South Africa, he concludes that Brazilian society is racially structured. In Chapter 5, for instance, by way of discussing “racial inequality and development,” he states (107) that “as long as whites, browns, and blacks are unevenly distributed along the income structure, racial inequality exists.” As do other scholars, he conceives race as the irreducible constituent and determinant of social structure and relations. Yet, even if one were to accept the argument that social inequality is a by-product of racism (which is misleading), an essential question would still remain: what similarities between Brazilian and U.S. racism would justify adopting the same policies to deal with the problem?…

…Daniel’s Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? agrees with Telles that race is determinant in shaping Brazilian and U.S. societies. However, his “multiracial” background pushes him to understand this situation through other sources and evidence. Also inspired by Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, according to which race is not an “objective reality” but exists as a social construction, Daniel aims to explain the origins and development of Brazilian and U.S. “racial projects.” What clearly broadens his perspective is the connection he establishes between Brazilian and U.S. “racial formations” and the development and worldwide consequences of the Eurocentrism that is the basis of what he calls a “dichotomous racial hierarchy.” By reconstructing the steps by which Europe created the idea of race and provided scientific support for racist ideologies, Daniel shows how different expressions of racism sprang from the same source…

Read or purchase the entire review here.

The overlapping concepts of race and colour in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 7, (July 2012)
pages 1163-1168
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.657209

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

I thank Ethnic and Racial Studies for the opportunity to participate in this symposium and I am honoured to be in conversation with Michael Banton. an esteemed contributor to the Sociology of Race (and Colour), with whom I respectfully differ.

Banton argues that ‘U.S. scholars followed the ordinary language trend of using race instead of color’, as W. E. B. DuBois originally had, and that my use of the term ‘race’ erringly uses the experience of North American ‘black white relations as a paradigm case to offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of relations in Brazil.’ Banton objects to my use of race and colour as rough equivalents. For him, colour refers to a ‘first order abstraction’, which describes physical differences that are used in society as markers of social distinction, while race is a ‘second order abstraction’ that is neither visible nor measurable and that varies from place to place, ‘making it more difficult to identify what has to be explained’ (p. 4). Banton (p. 6) seems to find it odd that my book. Race in Another America, should bear the subtitle ”The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil’. But the title of my book simply reflects one of its central findings: that, in Brazil, conceptions of ‘race’ and conceptions of ‘color’ overlap.

Banton is right to separate folk and analytical concepts, but I think he goes about it in the wrong way. Race is clearly a folk concept, and it lacks analytical validity, but his race/colour distinction begs more questions than it resolves. Race and colour are both folk concepts but race and many references to colour are based on the social process of racialization, which classifies people according to race, privileging some while excluding others. Racial and colour inequality and discrimination in Brazil and the USA are rooted in a common western racial ideology, although one that has been interpreted in different ways in both countries. Whereas colour might be seen as merely descriptive, it also elicits a racial ideology where Brazilians are keenly aware of human colour variation, which they often place on a naturalized hierarchy of worth…

Read or purchase the article here.

Beyond Fixed or Fluid: Degrees of Fluidity in Racial Identification in Latin America

The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America
Princeton University
2012-05-23
60 pages

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

Tianna S. Paschel, Post Doctoral Fellow (Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science as of July 2012)
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago

Com­par­a­tive research on race and eth­nic­ity has often turned to Latin Amer­ica where racial iden­tity is seen as fluid. Using nation­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive data from the 2010 America’s Barom­e­ter, we exam­ined the extent to which skin color, nation, class and region shape who iden­ti­fies as black or mulato in Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, Colom­bia and the Domini­can Repub­lic. While racial cat­e­gories over­lap sig­nif­i­cantly, skin color largely deter­mines both black and mulatto self-identification in all five coun­tries although its effect varies con­sid­er­ably. We dis­cov­ered dis­tinc­tive pat­terns in racial flu­id­ity, in how color shapes racial clas­si­fi­ca­tion, in the fre­quency of black and mixed-race cat­e­gories, and in the influ­ence of sta­tus and region on racial clas­si­fi­ca­tion. We sug­gest that these pat­terns are related to nation­al­ist nar­ra­tives, state poli­cies and black move­ment orga­niz­ing. These find­ings chal­lenge widely held assump­tions about race rela­tions in Latin Amer­ica, sug­gest­ing rather that unique national his­to­ries have given way to dif­fer­ent sys­tems of race clas­si­fi­ca­tion in each coun­try. We advance the con­cept of racial schemas and vis­cos­ity to bet­ter under­stand these differences.

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Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil

Duke University Press
1999
232 pages
9 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2272-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2252-8

Edited by

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Bringing together U.S. and Brazilian scholars, as well as Afro-Brazilian political activists, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil represents a significant advance in understanding the complexities of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian society. While previous scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to quantitative and statistical research, editor Michael Hanchard presents a qualitative perspective from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and cultural theory.

The contributors to Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil examine such topics as the legacy of slavery and its abolition, the historical impact of social movements, race-related violence, and the role of Afro-Brazilian activists in negotiating the cultural politics surrounding the issue of Brazilian national identity. These essays also provide comparisons of racial discrimination in the United States and Brazil, as well as an analysis of residential segregation in urban centers and its affect on the mobilization of blacks and browns. With a focus on racialized constructions of class and gender and sexuality, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil reorients the direction of Brazilian studies, providing new insights into Brazilian culture, politics, and race relations.

This volume will be of importance to a wide cross section of scholars engaged with Brazil in particular, and Latin American studies in general. It will also appeal to those invested in the larger issues of political and social movements centered on the issue of race.

Table of Contents

• Introduction / Michael Hanchard
• Free African Brazilians and the State in Slavery Times / Richard Graham
• Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil / Michael Hanchard
• Ethnic Boundaries and Political Mobilization among African Brazilians: Comparisons with the U.S. Case / Edward E. Telles
• Racial Democracy and Racial Identity: Comparing the United States and Brazil / Howard Winant
• Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations / Michael Mitchell
• Women and Racial Inequality at Work in Brazil / Peggy A. Lovell
• Notes on Racial and Political Inequality in Brazil / Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva
• The Black Movement and Political Parties: A Challenging Alliance / Benedita da Silva
• My Conscience, My Struggle / Thereza Santos
• Blacks and Political Power / Ivanir dos Santos
• Contributors
• Index

We have noted important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related but separate social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. Whereas all these topics deal, on some level, with racial-boundary crossing, the implications for the boundaries themselves and the racialized social structure are not consistent. For example, intermarriage may be an indicator of healthy race relations, but this is certainly not the case with miscegenation, especially in a context of high racial inequality. Whereas intermarriage has the potential to directly challenge, shift, or loosen racial boundaries, the informal practices of miscegenation are less likely to do so.

Edward E. Telles and Christina A. Sue, “Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective,” Annual Revuew of Sociology, Volume 35 (2009): 129-146. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134657.

Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters

Stanford University Press
2009
312 pages
11 tables, 15 figures, 16 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804759984
Paper ISBN: 9780804759991
E-book ISBN: 9780804770996

Edited by:

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Professor of Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Shades of Difference addresses the widespread but little studied phenomenon of colorism—the preference for lighter skin and the ranking of individual worth according to skin tone. Examining the social and cultural significance of skin color in a broad range of societies and historical periods, this insightful collection looks at how skin color affects people’s opportunities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America.

Is skin color bias distinct from racial bias? How does skin color preference relate to gender, given the association of lightness with desirability and beauty in women? The authors of this volume explore these and other questions as they take a closer look at the role Western-dominated culture and media have played in disseminating the ideal of light skin globally. With its comparative, international focus, this enlightening book will provide innovative insights and expand the dialogue around race and gender in the social sciences, ethnic studies, African American studies, and gender and women’s studies.

Contents

Contributors
• Introduction: Economies of Color—Angela P. Harris
• Part I The Significance of Skin Color: Transnational Divergences and Convergences
  • 1. The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil—Edward Telles
  • 2. A Colorstruck World: Skin Tone, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among African American Women—Verna M. Keith
  • 3. The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich
• Part II Meanings of Skin Color: Race, Gender, Ethnic Class, and National Identity
  • 4. Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideal Asian Beauty—Joanne L. Rondilla
  • 5. The Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty Queen: Miss Bronze 1961-1968—Maxine Leeds Craig
  • 6. Caucasian, Coolie, Black, or White? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora—Aisha Khan
  • 7. Ihe Dynamics of Color: Mestizaje, Racism, and Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico—Christina A. Sue
• Part III Consuming Lightness: Modernity, Transnationalism, and Commodification
  • 8. Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race in Egg Donation for Assisted Reproduction—Charis Thompson
  • 9. Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials—Jyotsna Vaid
  • 10. Consuming Lightness: Segmented Markets and Global Capital in the Skin-Whitening Trade—Evelyn Nakano Glenn
  • 11. Skin Lighteners in South Africa: Transnational Entanglements and Technologies of the Self—Lynn M. Thomas
• Part IV Countering Colorism: Legal Approaches
  • 12. Multilayered Racism: Courts’ Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims—Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 13. The Case for Legal Recognition of Colorism Claims—Trina Jones
  • 14. Latinos at Work: When Color Discrimination Involves More Than Color—Tanya Katerí Hernandez
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Read the Introduction here.

Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective

Annual Review of Sociology
August 2009
Volume 35
pages 129-146
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134657
First published online as a Review in Advance on 2009-04-02

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

Christina A. Sue, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Colorado, Boulder

In this article, we examine a large, interdisciplinary, and somewhat scattered literature, all of which falls under the umbrella term race mixture. We highlight important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related, but separate, social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. In doing so, we stress a social constructivist approach to race mixture with a focus on boundary crossing. Finally, we also demonstrate how ideologies and practices of race mixture play out quite differently in contexts outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. Race-mixture ideologies and practices in Latin America have been used to maintain racial inequality in the region, thus challenging recent arguments by U.S. scholars that greater racial mixture leads to a decline in racism, discrimination, and inequality.

INTRODUCTION

We define race mixture as intimate social interaction across racial boundaries, a phenomenon that has generally been analyzed under the rubric of intermarriage or miscegenation. A sociology of race mixture also involves the racial categorization, identity, politics, and social movements surrounding the progeny of race mixture, much of which falls under the subject of multiracialism. A more comprehensive analysis of race mixture also includes an examination of the national ideologies related to the idea of race mixture and the putative consequences that race mixture will destabilize and eventually erase racial boundaries. These topics are often studied as separate processes, but in this article we seek to bring some unity to an area in which these distinct areas of research overlap.

Sociologists often focus on intermarriage, which has been classically seen as indicating a final stage in the assimilation of racial and ethnic groups in that it presumably represents deep erosion of social boundaries (MM Gordon 1964, Lieberson & Waters 1988, Park 1950). Relatedly, multiracialism has become a rapidly growing topic and refers to the children of parents who self-identify in separate racial categories or to individuals who self-identify as multiracial. Some sociological attention has also been paid to miscegenation, which we define as illegitimate or informal sexual unions, although the term has often been used more broadly to include intermarriage as well. Historically, miscegenation involved highly unequal or even forced relationships; thus they were of a nearly opposite character to those involving intermarriage. Anti-miscegenation laws were able to prevent intermarriage in the United States for 300 years, but they generally were unsuccessful in preventing informal black-white sexual unions and the consequent births that followed (Davis 1991, Sollors 2000). Such unions would merely evade the strict racial boundaries of the United States but did little to challenge or erode them and therefore represent a very different social phenomenon than intermarriage.

Informal sexual unions, like intermarriages, produced so-called mixed-race individuals, who themselves have more recently become subjects of much sociological research. Analysts have examined different paths the progeny of these interracial unions have attempted to take or successfully taken; the paths range from willingly or unwillingly accepting placement in their socially assigned category, seeking a particular status without contesting the boundaries themselves, individually skirting the boundaries, or collectively redefining them (Daniel 2002, Nakashima 1992). Scholarly work has also been done on the placement of these mixed-race individuals in the social structure (Davis 1991, Degler 1971, Mörner 1967, Telles 2004).

Before proceeding, we would like to make an important note regarding terminology used in this paper. The term race mixture implies that one is combining two or more substances with distinct and generally fixed properties. In regard to race, this may seem to be especially essentialistic and biological. The very idea of race mixture or multiracialism is premised on the idea that discrete (or even pure) races exist (Goldberg 1997, Nobles 2002). On the other hand, the sociological study of race mixture refers to behaviors that involve crossing racial boundaries (Bost 2003). Our interpretation is socially constructivist and assumes that there is no biological or essentialist basis for race, but rather, race is a concept involving perceptions of reality. Race is of sociological importance because humans are categorized by race, hierarchized according to these categories, and treated accordingly. As a result, humans often create racial boundaries as a form of social closure and erect obstacles to interaction across these boundaries. At other times, they seek to diminish or otherwise change them.We are interested in how race mixture may construct or reconstruct racial boundaries. Although we recognize the conceptual problems implicit in the term race mixture, for lack of a better term and to be consistent with the literature, we continue to use it, along with related terms such as multiracialism. The concept of ethnicity is related to and sometimes overlaps with the concept of race, but the distinctions are often unclear, context-specific, and highly debatable (Cornell & Hartman 2006, Jenkins 1997, Wimmer 2008). Therefore, the extent to which our discussion is applicable to ethnic as well as race mixture would depend on how one distinguishes race from ethnicity…

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Racial Discrimination and Miscegenation: The Experience in Brazil

UN Chronicle
2007 Issues: The Solidarity of Peoples

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

In 1888, Brazil, with a mostly black and mixed race or mulatto population, was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. During more than 300 years of slavery in the Americas, it was the largest importer of African slaves, bringing in seven times as many African slaves to the country, compared to the United States.

Another important difference was the extent of miscegenation or race mixture, resulting largely from a high sex ratio among its colonial settlers. In contrast to a family-based colonization in North America, Brazil’s Portuguese settlers were primarily male. As a result, they often sought out African, indigenous and mulatto females as mates, and thus miscegenation or race mixture was common. Today, Brazilians often pride themselves on their history of miscegenation and continue to have rates of intermarriage that are far greater than those of the United States.

Miscegenation and intermarriage suggest fluid race relations and, unlike the United States or South Africa, there were no racially-specific laws or policies, such as on segregation or apartheid, throughout the twentieth century. For these reasons, Brazilians thought of their country as a “racial democracy” from as early as the 1930s until recent years. They believed that racism and racial discrimination were minimal or non-existent in Brazilian society in contrast to the other multiracial societies in the world. A relatively narrow view of discrimination previously recognized only explicit manifestations of racism or race-based laws as discriminatory, thus only countries like South Africa and the United States were seen as truly racist. Moreover, there was little formal discussion of race in Brazilian society, while other societies were thought to be obsessed with race and racial difference…

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Multiracial versus Collective Black Categories: Examining Census Classification Debates in Brazil

Ethnicities
Volume 6, Number 1 (2006)
pages 74-101
DOI: 10.1177/1468796806061080

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

Current census debates in Brazil surrounding Brazilian race categories center on two contrasting proposals: the adoption of the multiracial moreno term vs. the use of the collective black classification negro. Those proposing the former base their argument on the right to self-classify according to one’s own sense of identity. Proponents of the negro category contend that it would be most efficient for redressing racial discrimination. We examine the meaning and saliency of these categories and explore the possible consequences of their adoption. Using national survey data, we demonstrate how education, age, color, sex and local racial composition structure the choices of moreno and negro over official census terms. Findings include a negative correlation between education and the choice of moreno, while the opposite is true for negro. In addition, an age effect on both categories suggests a popular shift in racial labeling away from official census terms. We note that similar issues structure current census debates in the USA.

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Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

Culture & Psychology
Volume 13, Number 4 (December 2007)
pages 461-473
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07082805

Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima
Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil

Telles, Edward Eric, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–12792–7 (pbk)

Edward Telles‘ book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2006) has contributed to the understanding of racial and skin color relations in Brazil. The main aspects of the past and present of racism in Brazil are discussed, such as whitening, mestizaje, and the ideology of racial democracy, and some additional data are presented. This work reflects on and brings to light the reflections of Telles and of other researchers of racism about a future of more equalitarian racial and social relations in Brazil.

Read or purchase the review here.