White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil Patricia de Santana Pinho But it does not exist in isolation; whiteness must be analyzed and comprehended as a purely relational construct. The primacy of whiteness is meaningful only in contrast with the qualities of other colors—not only black—and like the garments washed in different detergents in television advertisements, whiteness can be rendered in different shades, whiter even than white. —Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness The family is the most intimate and inescapable realm where one’s physical appearance is interpreted and classiied. It is also within the family that the values of a nation are constantly reproduced, and that is why belonging to a family and a nation requires that we know by heart the stories about our ancestors. We are expected to honor their heroic feats, express sadness when hearing about their tribulations, and laugh when listening to the tales about their playful or mischievous behavior. Growing up in Bahia, in the Northeast of Brazil, there was one anecdote that I heard over and over again from my older relatives. In spite of its constant repetition, it always generated a lot of laughter. The story describes the reaction of my mother’s aunt upon seeing my father for the irst time, way back in the late 1950s when he was beginning to court my mother (see igs. 1 and 2). My great-aunt examined my father thoroughly, scrutinizing his appearance from head to toe, and then, twisting her lips in disapproval, looked at my mother and delivered her verdict: “All right, minha ilha, color he does have, but hair . . . tsk, tsk, tsk!” Curiously enough, the “color” that my great-aunt described small axe 29 • July 2009 • DOI 10.1215/02705346-2009-005 © Small Axe, Inc. 40 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil as a feature that my father did possess, was actually white. The hair, however—tsk, tsk, tsk; my father’s kinky hair was his great deiciency. I begin my essay with this little story because a lot of history lies in it, and for the reason that it simultaneously reveals and conceals important information on blackness, whiteness, and mestiçagem in the context of Brazilian racial politics. The tale itself only makes sense if analyzed together with the frequency with which it was told, and the fact that it was always told as a joke. My great-aunt’s comment inverts the notion that black people are the ones who “have color” and that whites are supposedly colorless and therefore neutral. Furthermore, her observation highlights that whiteness is so important as to be possessed. White skin color is not merely a neutral standard, but something that stands out as a symbol of status in Brazilian society. On the other hand, this logic does not do away with the idea of whiteness as the norm: as a light-skinned mulatto, my father had the “right color” but the “wrong hair” to enter my mother’s family. Ironically, my mother’s relatives are also “racially mixed.” But their straight hair, proudly inherited from their indigenous ancestors, compensates for the light-colored skin that most of them do not own.1 One’s “measure of whiteness,” therefore, is not deined only by skin color; it requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the deinition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class afiliation. Although the Brazilian nation has long been narrated as a racial democracy, the cult of morenidade and its rejection of “pure” forms of whiteness do not mean that all “mestiço types” are valued in the country’s myths of mestiçagem. I argue that some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred to the detriment of others, and that while antiblack racism in Brazil is expressed mainly against dark-skinned individuals, it also operates in the devaluing of physical traits “deemed black” even in those who have lighter skin complexion, thus creating “degrees of whiteness.” My undertaking in this essay is thus to analyze the meanings of mestiço phenotypes in Brazil, particularly of those individuals who are considered “white but not quite,” that is, those women and men who, in spite of their light-colored skin, have “black features” that “taint” their whiteness. The ambiguity projected onto their faces, hair, and bodies places them in a mobile intermediary position, which sometimes moves up and sometimes moves down in the racial stratiication of Brazil’s pigmentocracy. 1 See Robin Sheriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); and Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (1971; repr., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 167. Sheriff found a similar trend regarding the different meanings attributed to black and indigenous ancestors in the discourse of her black-skinned interviewees in Rio de Janeiro. Degler makes a similar statement about Brazil more generally. 1. Author’s father, Fernando Pinho, 1952. Private family collection. Unknown photographer. 2. Author’s parents, Fernando and Bernadette Pinho, on a date in the town plaza of Santo Estêvão, Bahia, 1959. Private family collection. Photographer: Emmanuel de Souza Pinho. Making Whiteness In the introduction to Branquidade: Identidade branca e multiculturalismo,2 Vron Ware asks two crucial questions: Which historical and contemporary forces sustain Brazil’s particular formations of whiteness? And which antiracist strategies can be used to subvert them? In my effort to relect on the irst question I tried to elaborate two lists: one of forces that sustain whiteness in Brazil and the other of forces that fragment whiteness. After struggling with the ideas and dragging paragraphs around, I realized that my Cartesian theorization would not take me very far. The binary and static inventory that I had originally tried to draw could not contain the dynamism and contradictions of the meanings of whiteness. In effect, the forces that uphold and reproduce the superiority of whiteness in Brazil are the very same ones that destabilize whiteness and ill it with incoherencies and incongruities. These contradictory forces include, but are not limited to, the importation and local production of ideologies of whiteness; the country’s dominant national discourse grounded on myths of racial democracy and mestiçagem that have served not to homogenize but rather to emphasize gradations of skin tones and hair types; Brazil’s regional interpretations of blackness and whiteness; and standards of beauty and the ways in which they connect with 2 41 Photo courtesy of the author Photo courtesy of the author 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | Vron Ware, ed., Branquidade: Identidade branca e multiculturalismo (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond Universitária, 2004). 42 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil representations of both region and nation. Transversal to all these forces, gender is a fundamental realm where the meanings of whiteness, blackness, and mestiçagem are disputed and conirmed. According to Ware, whiteness in Brazil, as in any other country, must be analyzed both as an interconnected global system and by focusing on its local speciicities. Brazilian ideologies of whiteness are undeniably associated with European and North American theories of scientiic racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially eugenics and social Darwinism. Yet, as argued by Nancy Stepan, Latin American scientists not only imported these concepts that ranked humankind into inferior and superior races; they also produced their own raciological theories that then inluenced policy making regarding immigration as well as access to housing, sanitation, and education by blacks, whites, Indians, and mestiços. Latin American nationalist ideologies were signiicantly inspired by these racial theories.3 Among the 4.5 million immigrants who entered Brazil between 1882 and 1934, more than two-thirds were white.4 The Brazilian government openly expressed the preference for white Europeans over other potential migrants, associating whiteness with progress and modernity.5 There are many fascinating outcomes of the importation of immigrants to Brazil, including how they negotiated their identities and how their presence inluenced the production of ideologies of whiteness by Brazilian intellectuals during that time. The most signiicant and ongoing effects of such ideologies are probably the hypervaluing of whiteness in Brazilian common sense and the ability to transform previously deined mestiço individuals into whites, or into “whites but not quite.” Historian Jerry Dávila explains that, although Brazilian scientists had initially complied with European notions that equated racial mixture with corruption, by the second decade of the twentieth century they embraced the idea that degeneracy was acquired and was, therefore, solvable.6 The “solution” for racial mixture was then deined through the promotion of education and health as tools that would allow for one’s internal whitening. For Dávila, the “Brazilian race” of the 1930s was a work in progress, which in practice meant transforming the behavior of the vast amount of black and mixed-race Brazilians, instead of working on the biological surface of the body. “Behavioral whitening,” then, meant discarding African and indigenous cultural practices as well as establishing new habits of education, health, hygiene, and diet based on “ ‘soft’ eugenics.”7 In his thorough analysis of the investment of intellectuals in education as a means of promoting the behavioral whitening of the population, Dávila goes as far as stating that for 3 4 5 6 7 See Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Boris Fausto, “Imigração,” http://www2.mre.gov.br/cdbrasil/itamaraty/web/port/consnac/imigra/apresent/index.htm. See Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); and Giralda Seyferth, “Identidade étnica, assimilação e cidadania: A imigração alemã e o Estado brasileiro,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (São Paulo) 9, no. 26 (1994): 103–22. Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. Ibid., 27, 25. 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | these educators and politicians, “race was not a biological fact.”8 While I appreciate Dávila’s comprehensive study, and agree with his argument that whiteness could be “attained,” I diverge from the notion that this process detached “race” from its biological grounding. If white elites associated blackness, and therefore racial mixture, with unhealthiness, laziness, and criminality, these negative characteristics were undoubtedly understood as being as much based on nature as based on nurture. If education and health were tools that allowed for one’s internal whitening, they were not capable of erasing blackness from the surface of the body. This raises two interconnected epistemological problems for the study of whiteness. The irst is that although whiteness is more than just skin color, its analysis cannot afford to overlook the meanings of color and phenotype in a given society. Second, and equally dificult, is the question of what whiteness shares with and how it departs from blackness.9 Explaining whiteness in Brazil, Liv Sovik argues that although light skin and European features allow movement, lower barriers, and carry with them a certain authority, a dark-skinned individual of higher social class can also enjoy the same beneits. For Sovik, being white in Brazil does not require exclusively European ancestry. Moreover, Brazilian blacks and pardos of high economic and social status can take the same role as whites, as racial exclusion speaks in two voices: it values whiteness and says that color is not important.10 While I certainly agree that class afiliation plays a crucial role in deining one’s “entrance” into whiteness, I depart from the notion that mestiços and blacks can take the same role as whites. I argue that they can do so only to a certain extent, and that they will encounter barriers in some arenas more than in others. And what are these arenas where “not quite white” mestiços encounter greater resistance? They are, above all, those spheres where aesthetics occupy a central position. The realms of dating, marriage, and access to types of employment that require “good appearance” are not readily navigated by mestiços. John Burdick’s meticulous ethnography on religion and gender in Rio de Janeiro is one of the few analyses of “race” that pays closer attention to the effects of the meanings of different skin tones and hair textures on the lives of nonwhite Brazilians. Contrasting the discourses of black activists and nonactivists, Burdick emphasizes that there is a crucial distinction between public self-identity and everyday subjectivity. In other words, one can self-classify as black or white either for political reasons or for the reason of being depoliticized, but that choice will not necessarily correspond to how skin tone and hair texture shapes one’s subjectivity on a daily basis.11 By pointing to the gradations of blackness, whiteness, and mestiçagem, I do not intend to reify color categories or contribute to strengthening the trappings of raciology. Rather, my intention is to problematize the meanings attributed to color and phenotype by carrying 8 9 10 11 Ibid., 5. See Liv Sovik, “Aqui ninguém é branco: Hegemonia branca e media no Brasil,” in Ware, Branquidade, 363–86. Ibid., 372. John Burdick, Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 1998), 117. 43 44 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil out what Michel Foucault would call the “archaeology” of racial representations.12 As Sovik explains, whiteness is more a question to be asked and a problem to be solved than a concept to be operated.13 Vron Ware and Les Back also alert against the danger of “reproducing an unhealthy dualism that does little to challenge the fundamental principal of ‘race.’ ”14 By deconstructing discourses of mestiçagem, blackness, and whiteness, we can better understand its operations on human lives and, ultimately, think about ways of undoing race-thinking. From its very inception, whiteness in Brazil has never been constructed as “the oppositional” identity, a place that has been historically occupied by blackness. As a transnational force, whiteness has, throughout the Americas, been established as the “norm,” the “standard” against which the identities of “others” have been produced. Examining the context of the United States, Ruth Frankenberg explains that whiteness is a location of structural advantage and privilege, and refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.15 While this deinition of whiteness can partially be applied to Brazil, there is a major difference between those countries where whiteness has been explicitly built as the pillar of the national discourse (e.g., Manifest Destiny in the United States) and those countries in which whiteness has silently become hegemonic through discourses of mestiçagem/mestizaje. In Brazil, as in other Latin American countries, whiteness is less frequently explicitly marked than it is more commonly implicitly and carefully manipulated by individuals and groups in their ongoing microstruggles for power. Another major difference pertains to the understanding of purity. Not only is whiteness in Brazil an “impure” racial category (if compared, for instance, to the US notion that one drop of black blood makes impossible one’s whiteness), it is also an unstable one. In Brazil, one can be white in one realm but “not quite” in another. And one can be considered white while having black ancestry. This is certainly not to say, however, that Brazilians are untouched by the idea of “purity,” since an individual’s “black features” interfere directly in “how white” she or he will be considered. The instability and inconsistency of whiteness are not exclusive to the context of Brazil. Several scholars have shown to what degree lower-class afiliation challenges one’s belongingness to whiteness in developed countries.16 In Brazil, class certainly plays an important role in allowing, or not, entrance into whiteness, although the complex intersection of class and “race” can certainly not be captured by the simplistic adage that “money whitens.” The concept of whiteness becomes even more imprecise and amorphous because of Brazil’s myth See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970). Sovik, “Aqui ninguém é branco,” 364. Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. 16 For analyses of class and whiteness in the United Kingdom, see Ware and Back, Out of Whiteness; and Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Essex, UK: Pearson Education, 2000). For analyses of class and whiteness in the United States, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2007); and Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 12 13 14 15 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | of racial democracy and its subsequent racial ambiguity and celebration of racial mixture. Yet, whiteness is spread out all over the place in the shape of a thin, permeable layer, waiting for those opportunities in which it erupts to the surface. Amid the visible celebration of blackness and mestiçagem, whiteness is simultaneously lurking in every little corner of Brazilian society and culture. In spite of the vast spectrum of skin color categories in Brazil and its resulting impression of dilution of whiteness and blackness, in moments of conlict the extreme opposite poles black and white emerge and are recognized. Robin Sheriff explains that three distinct discourses of race and color terms exist in Brazil: a descriptive discourse of one’s appearance, a pragmatic register based on euphemisms, and a bipolar race discourse that classiies blacks versus whites. Sheriff deines the latter as the “bedrock reality of racialized polarization and opposition” and the one that “truly articulates a system of racial classiication.”17 Although I do not agree with the hierarchy and rigidity of Sheriff’s scheme, I ind it useful to understand her explanation that, according to the context of the interaction, whiteness and blackness can become very marked categories. Thus, the analysis of whiteness in Brazil should consider both phenomena: whiteness as a nonmarked yet ongoing and pervasive force, and whiteness as an element that at times is intentionally brought to the surface. Morenidade and Gradations of Whiteness The nonmarking of whiteness is one of the features that have been employed to characterize the Brazilian nation as brown. Brazil’s national discourse has, for over a century, been grounded on myths of racial harmony and racial democracy. These narratives are in fact previous to the inluential work of Gilberto Freyre. Historian Célia Marinho de Azevedo contends that the myth of Brazilian racial paradise was formulated by Brazilian abolitionists with the help of their US counterparts. Images of Brazil’s exceptionally paciic racial relations existed in US abolitionist circles as early as the mid-1800s, as part of their leaders’ efforts to emphasize the cruelty of US slavery.18 Yet, although Freyre is not the “inventor” of Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, his work was undeniably central to the dissemination of the idea of Brazil as a “brown country.”19 In his narrative of the nation, Brazil is populated by mestiços who, carrying in their bodies and souls the amalgamation of blackness and whiteness, are naturally free from racism. Morenidade would then explain the Brazilian capacity to harmonize conlicts and overcome differences. Among many contradictions, Freyre’s work simultaneously proposes the homogenization of 17 Sheriff, Dreaming Equality, 57. 18 Célia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, Abolicionismo: Estados Unidos e Brasil, uma história comparada (São Paulo: Annablume, 2003). 19 See especially Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1989), considered Freyre’s most famous book. 45 46 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil Brazilians into a moreno people while it emphasizes the heterogeneity of Brazil’s mestiço types. While Freyre argued that Brazilians were “metaracial” he was constantly emphasizing the distinctiveness of each kind of mestiço/a and his or her alleged characteristics. Elsewhere I have examined the meanings attributed by Freyre to black women vis-à-vis mulatas, and how his “ideal racial types” resonated in the work of Jorge Amado, and, more generally, in Brazilian common sense.20 At the same time analyzing and celebrating the concept of morenidade, Freyre explained that the word moreno was undergoing semantic transformation in Brazil being used to refer to an ever wider range of skin shades. The term moreno was originally employed by the Spanish to describe the wheat-color of the Moors. It is therefore not a coincidence that Freyre would encourage the use of this term among Brazilians, given his enthusiasm for the role of the Moor occupation in the Iberian Peninsula in shaping the “plasticity” of the soon-to-become Portuguese colonizers. He viewed the Moor inluence over the Portuguese as essential in creating an “open” and “lexible” people, marked by an urge toward cultural and racial mixture. While in most Latin American countries the term moreno became a synonym for black, in Brazil it stands for a great variety of skin colors, from the darkest black to light-skinned brunets. For Freyre, the increasingly loose meaning of moreno/a meant that more and more Brazilians were choosing to self-classify as brown, thus rejecting the extreme poles black and white. The act of tanning the skin to “become moreno” was for him one of the many proofs of the afirmation of metarace among Brazilians.21 While there is a dangerous romanticism in Freyre’s interpretation, there is indeed a lot to be analyzed in Brazil’s cult of morenidade, including the rejection of “pure” forms of whiteness, and the feeling of obligation by many white Brazilians to stress that they have black or indigenous ancestors. Conducting ethnographic research among middle-class cariocas, anthropologist John Norvell observed that there was a constant discomfort and even an avoidance of their self-classifying as whites.22 Norvell explains that this embarrassment is a result of the power of the discourse of mestiçagem, employed as a means to avoid racial conlict. The rejection of whiteness, albeit on a rhetorical level, is also, I would add, a means of afirming one’s belonging to the nation and an expression of the belief that being “too white” challenges one’s Brazilianness. Another symptom of the value of morenidade is that, while there are countless products available to straighten, smoothen, soften, manage, tame, and keep kinky hair under control, there are virtually no products for bleaching the skin in the Brazilian market. In India alone, products designed to lighten the skin generate US$320 million per year. The inluence of such 20 Patricia de Santana Pinho, “Gilberto Freyre e a baianidade,” in Malcolm McNee and Joshua Lund, eds., Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latinoamericanos (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006). 21 Gilberto Freyre, “Man Situated in the Tropics: Metarace and Brown Skins,” in The Gilberto Freyre Reader (New York: Knopf, 1974), 83–85. 22 John Norvell, “A brancura desconfortável das camadas médias brasileiras,” in Yvonne Maggie and Cláudia Barcellos Rezende, eds., Raça como retórica: A construção da diferença (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002). Carioca is the term for those born in Rio de Janeiro. 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | practice was recently epitomized in the launching of the product Fair and Handsome, aimed at male consumers and advertised by Bollywood pop star Shah Rukh Khan.23 The television advertisement was met with an angry reaction from a great part of the Indian public, raising the question of whether the controversy was due to the promotion of skin-bleaching as a value or if it was because of its appeal to men. After all, the association between fair skin and feminine beauty has existed in India for generations. While it was certainly strengthened by the experience of British colonization, the ideal of white beauty was already part of the caste system, and it can be seen in the light-skinned representations of many Hindu goddesses. Women are also the major targets of whitening procedures in Latin American countries. If in the early-twentieth-century female bodies were manipulated “from the inside,” through the eugenic techniques of sterilization and puericulture, they are now predominantly managed on the surface level. In Mexico, brown skin immediately associates one’s color to indigenous ancestry, consequently placing brown individuals in the lower ranks of society. Among other strategies, the fulillment of the whitening desire has been sought out in Mexico through White Secret, a cosmetic marketed to women in a thirty-minute, late-night infomercial peddling a skin-care solution that “can produce in two weeks a white skin tone which previously required generations of racial miscegenation.”24 In Ecuador, where the discourse of mestizaje is also dominant in the national imaginary, women and men respond differently when it comes to claiming a racialized self-identity. While men readily assume the condition of mestizo, thus associating with the heroic and mythic indigenous ancestors, women are expected to provide “better” (i.e., “whiter”) opportunities to their offspring and are thus compelled to assume a bodily image of whiteness.25 In Brazil too, white skin has been a cipher of beauty, virtue, and power, and has affected women and men in different ways. Former television show host Xuxa is probably the most iconic representative of the supremacy of whiteness in the Brazilian media. Endowed with the blue eyes and blond hair of her German ancestors, this female “role model” for children holds an “awe-inspiring” degree of whiteness inaccessible for most Brazilians. Yet, in spite of the dominance of white icons of beauty, brown skin is considered beautiful in Brazil. Actresses Sonia Braga and Camila Pitanga are some examples of the female embodiment of brown standards of Brazilianness. But one should not romanticize the beauty projected onto brownness. If brown skin is represented as beautiful it must not be too brown. In our tendency to buy into the myth of Brazil’s exceptionalism, we easily accuse the “rigid ways” in which blackness and whiteness are deined in other countries. But our muchcelebrated multiple color categories also establish quite stiff notions of beauty. An example 23 Jo Johnson, “Creme para pele de astro indiano causa indignação,” Folha de S. Paulo, São Paulo, 26 August 2007, trans. Paulo Migliacci, Financial Times. 24 Jamie Winders, John Paul Jones III, and Michael James Higgins, “Making Güeras: Selling White Identities on Late-Night Mexican Television,” in Gender, Place and Culture 12, no. 1 (2005): 72. 25 Sarah Radcliffe, “Embodying National Identities: Mestizo Men and White Women in Ecuadorian Racial-National Imaginaries,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 2 (1999): 213–25. 47 48 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil is that we select, among the many gradations of brown, speciically which ones are beautiful and consequently which ones are considered ugly. Television, cinema, publicity, novels, and lyrics of songs have contributed signiicantly to producing, circulating, and attaching speciic meanings to mestiço phenotypes. The representations of mestiço bodies, faces, and hair have created “regime[s] of truth”26 about mestiçagem in which some mestiço types have been preferred as “the most beautiful” (e.g., cinnamon-colored morenas), others as “the most sexualized” (e.g., samba-dancing mulatas), other mestiço types as “the most treacherous” (e.g., socially ascending mulatos), and yet others as “the most ugly” and undesirable (e.g., those with very dark skin or light-skinned mestiços with “black features”). The discourses surrounding each mestiço type are intimately connected to the meanings attributed to whiteness and blackness, but they are also deeply grounded on understandings of gender differentiation. An amusing illustration of how gender and skin color are intertwined in representations of mestiço bodies is an anecdote surrounding Lampião, a controversial igure of the Brazilian backlands of the early twentieth century. Deined by some as a “Robin Hood–style social bandit” and by others as an inconsequential murderer, what interests us here is that his image is always connected to hyper-masculinity. One evening, in a farmhouse, Lampião’s group was gathered around him, chatting, when in the middle of the conversation someone mentioned that Lampião was “cinnamon-colored.” Very angry with the comment, Lampião replied that “cor de canela é cor de mulher” (cinnamon color is a woman’s color) and that he was in fact a “moreno lusco-fusco,” which roughly translates as a “dusky-colored brown.”27 This conversation took place at least two decades before Jorge Amado released Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), one of his most famous novels, demonstrating that these gendered representations of mestiço phenotypes already circulated in commonsense imagination.28 The cinnamon-colored skin of Amado’s title character exhales the smell of cloves. Flavored by these spices brought to Brazil by the Portuguese colonizers, Gabriela literally embodies the national myth of Brazil’s peaceful and racial coexistence and amalgamation, enacting Freyre’s notion that mestiço types are “on the aesthetic level, plastic mediators between extremes.”29 Nevertheless, in spite of the ubiquitous images of gente morena as quintessential Brazilians, the prevalence of whiteness is an undeniable fact. The overwhelmingly white majority of icons of male and female beauty in Brazil are the ones that we are mostly accustomed to seeing on our television screens, billboards, and magazines, thus naturalizing the equation 26 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 131. 27 See Antonio Risério, “Dicotomia racial e riqueza cromática,” Ministério da Cultura, 8 September 2003, http://www.cultura .gov.br/site/2003/09/08/dicotomia-racial-e-riqueza-cromatica-por-antonio-riserio/. According to Risério, Optato Gueiros narrated this anecdote in the book Serrote Preto. 28 Jorge Amado, Gabriela, cravo e canela: Crônica de uma cidade do interior (São Paulo: Editora Martins, 1958). 29 Gilberto Freyre, “Toward a Mestizo Type,” in The Gilberto Freyre Reader, 111. 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | between whiteness and beauty, and whiteness and norm. Brazil’s myth of racial democracy is carried out through the celebration of mestiço types and the rejection of “pure” forms of whiteness, but it simultaneously ensures the hypervaluing of whiteness. Although this may seem a paradox, ideologies of mestiçagem/mestizaje have in effect been premised on whitening, or the expectation that European norms, physical or moral, will prevail as result of racial mixture.30 Regional Variations of Whiteness One reason for the ambiguous coexistence and overlapping of whiteness and morenidade is that both forces were once regionally grounded and race-based rival national ideologies. Barbara Weinstein explains that the myth of racial democracy became the hegemonic national discourse in a context of an intense ideological battle between São Paulo and the Northeast region of Brazil in the 1930s. Regional identity in the state of São Paulo “became associated in Brazilian culture not only with industry, modernity, and economic progress, but also with whiteness and a particular narrative of Brazilian history that marginalized the role of AfroBrazilians in the construction of the nation.”31 I would add that if paulista intellectuals were invested in establishing racialized assumptions about modernity as white, scholars in the Northeast of Brazil were conirming racialized assumptions of Brazilian tradition as embedded in mestiçagem. Again, the work of Freyre is fundamental in this debate. Brazil’s “impure” formation of whiteness is not a proof of our deinition of ourselves as being “beyond race.” On the contrary, it is part of the history of whiteness as a superior value. While the possibility of whitening mestiço bodies is connected to the fact that in Brazil racial categories are “more lexible” and “loose,” this malleability, however, is not a sign of our obliviousness toward “race” or of the legacy of our Portuguese colonizers and their “inclination to mixture,” as Gilberto Freyre would argue. Instead, the ability to transform mestiços into whites is due to the eagerness of the Brazilian elites to “overcome” the nation’s mestiço and therefore “backward” status. The project of whitening was a central pillar for the creation of a modern civilization in the tropics. If degrees of whiteness were employed to measure levels of modernity and progress among different countries, they have played a similar role in differentiating Brazilian regions. In his memoir Verdade tropical (Tropical Truth), singer and songwriter Caetano Veloso articulates how different interpretations of the bodies of mestiços are carried out according to regional understandings of blackness and whiteness. Comparing his phenotype to that of singer and composer Gilberto Gil, Caetano explains: “Gil is a mulato, dark enough to, even in 30 See Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto, 1997). 31 Barbara Weinstein,“Racializing Regional Difference: São Paulo versus Brazil, 1932,” in Nancy Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 238. 49 50 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil Bahia, be called black. I am a mulato, light enough to, even in São Paulo, be called white.”32 Caetano highlights that, in spite of their different skin shades, and of the different regional interpretations of their phenotypes, ultimately both he and Gil are mulatos. This is consistent with the singer’s frequent allusion to mestiçagem as one of Brazil’s most important national characteristics.33 Caetano’s statement emphasizes that there are different regional standards of whiteness and blackness in Brazil: São Paulo, not coincidently represented as “the most developed region,” is also deemed one of the “whitest” in Brazilian common sense. If São Paulo is among the whitest regions of the country, it is therefore “harder” to be considered white there. At the opposite pole of São Paulo’s whiteness is Bahia’s blackness. If Bahia has been represented as the blackest of all Brazilian states, it is thus more common there for a mestiço to be seen as white. Yet, while it may seem “easier” for a mestiço to be considered white in Bahia’s “ocean of blackness,” there is also the notion that being baiano alone is enough to unwhiten oneself, as is expressed in the pejorative label branco da Bahia (a white from Bahia), which is implicitly equated with branco sujo, or “dirty white.” Needless to say, the “dirt” stems from the black-identiied features that many baianos carry in their bodies, hair, and faces. Expressing a regional bias, the label branco da Bahia conirms, on a geographical basis, that there are several “degrees of whiteness” in Brazil: the more one heads south, the greater are the chances of inding more “purely European” forms of whiteness. This is far from suggesting, however, that relations between people of different colors are “the easiest” or less prejudiced in the Northeast, as Carl Degler strongly advocated in the early 1970s.34 I also diverge from Degler’s notion that “though everyone recognizes that they have some Negro blood, brancos da Bahia are always spoken of as white and receive from everyone the same treatment accorded to whites.”35 It seems more accurate to state that in Bahia, as in the Northeast more generally, there is a greater “range” of degrees of whiteness, which in turn deines the level of acceptance and the quality of the treatment afforded to “whites but not quite.” The “impure whites” are referred to as pouca tinta (low in ink) and sarará, epithets that emphasize a disjunction between their light skin and their “black features.” The term sarará originates in the indigenous Tupi languages, where it was used to describe individuals with yellowish or reddish hair. It is widely used in Brazilian colloquial vernacular, especially in the Northeast, to refer to mestiços who combine light skin with kinky light-colored hair. The term’s uncomplimentary meaning lies, not surprisingly, in the belief that 32 “Gil é um mulato escuro o suiciente para, mesmo na Bahia, ser chamado de preto. Eu sou um mulato claro o suiciente para, mesmo em São Paulo, ser chamado de branco.” Caetano Veloso, Verdade tropical (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 287 (translation mine). 33 For a fascinating analysis of the meanings of blackness and Africanness in Caetano Veloso’s work, see Pedro Meira Monteiro, “Beating the Leather of the First Conga: Afro-Brazilian Epiphanies in Literature and Music,” Luso-Brazilian Review 44, no. 2 (2007): 1–20. 34 Degler, Neither Black nor White, 98. 35 Ibid., 103. 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | kinky hair, even if blond, can only be ugly, and, consequently, make ugly those who carry it. Brazil’s most well-known sarará is footballer Ronaldo who has, not coincidently, spent most of his career sporting a shaved head. The Brazilian media has constantly attributed his dating one blonde top model after another to his wealth and celebrity status, thus implicitly underscoring the athlete’s unattractiveness. Only since 2007 has Ronaldo allowed his hair to grow. In a recent interview, he was asked by television host Ana Maria Braga: “Why did you let this hair grow?” Ronaldo’s response unmistakably validated the bigoted content of the question as he conirmed the notion that kinky hair is “bad hair”: “It was my girlfriend’s idea. We wanted to do a ‘black power’ [the term used for afros in Brazil], but it didn’t work because my hair is not really that bad.”36 Responding to the racist meaning of the term sarará and seeking its resigniication, Gilberto Gil wrote the song “Sarará Miolo” in 1976. Highly inluenced by the transnational black discourses of the 1970s, Gil found it necessary to adopt and adapt the then ground-breaking notion that “black is beautiful.” Gil’s lyrics propose that not only blacks but also those mestiços who are viewed as “tainted by blackness” should discover their beauty and not be ashamed of their black features. Playing with the words sara and cura, variations of the verb “to heal” in the imperative mode, the witty lyrics speak about the need to be cured from the soreness brought about by the overvaluing of white aesthetics. Sara, sara, sarará miolo Sara, sara, sara cura dessa doença de branco De querer cabelo liso já tendo cabelo louro Cabelo duro é preciso que é pra ser você, crioulo [Sara, sara, sarará miolo Heal, heal, heal, from this sickness of whites Of wanting straight hair when one already has blond hair Kinky hair is necessary for you to be black]37 Read together, “saracura” is the name of a famous quilombo, a community formed by runaway slaves, in the Northern State of Pará. The word saracura, thus, serves as a reminder that there are indeed distinctive black identities in Brazil in spite of widespread miscegenation. Another subtlety of the lyrics is the use of the word miolo, which means “content,” the internal substance of something or someone, but which is also a common term for brain, thus pointing to the need to connect external appearance to thought and consciousness. Anthropologist José Jorge de Carvalho identiies another important facet of the song: its suggestion that it is possible to join, in one person, two extreme color categories, blond and black. While associated with the ideals of the black movement, Gil is simultaneously employing the 36 Interview with Ana Maria Braga, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpuS_-603LU (accessed 10 April 2009), and described in “Cabeleira tem patrocínio de irma suíça,” Folha de São Paulo, 14 May 2008 (emphasis mine). 37 Translation mine. 51 52 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil symbolic strategies of inclusiveness and negotiation which have been central in Afro-Brazilian culture. He is expressing that black identity discourses do not need to stand in opposition to ideologies of mestiçagem.38 Blackness and whiteness make much more sense when analyzed both in terms of their regional speciicities and within wider transnational contexts since they operate locally and globally at the same time. Caetano Veloso argues that, on a global scale, we Brazilians cannot consider ourselves white, not only because we have internalized the myth of mestiçagem but because of the position that the United States occupies in the international racial hierarchy: “When you say ‘American’ you say prompt, eficient, and immediate international protection for that citizen, whether he is black, yellow, or white. It is a great advantage to be an American citizen, and it is an advantage that all of them exert, the whites, the blacks, all of them.”39 The process of being “unwhitened” is a frequent experience for many Brazilian immigrants in the United States, thus conirming Caetano’s assertion. On the other hand, these same individuals frequently “recover” their whiteness, and the authority that comes with it, upon reentering Brazilian borders, or simply by being among other Latin American immigrants. Whiteness, like blackness, is always relational, whether one is contrasting regions within Brazil or comparing how countries are differently positioned within global conigurations of power. Concern with the relational and therefore unstable character of whiteness, and of identities in general, explains the deliberate imprecision of the title of this essay. Only after I had decided on “White but Not Quite” did I realize that several scholarly works on whiteness carry either similar or related titles. Also emphasizing the ambivalence of identities, Homi Bhabha employed the phrase “not quite/not white” to describe the effects of mimicry among colonial subjects. Analyzing British colonial discourses, Bhabha argues that “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.”40 Although my focus here is not on the mimicry of whiteness but on the meanings of “not quite white” phenotypes, it shares Bhabha’s point about the necessarily split character of identities. Matt Wray’s Not Quite White analyzes how notions such as white trash and crackers destabilize whiteness in the United States. Akin to Alastair Bonnet’s White Identities, Wray’s book emphasizes the challenge posed to whiteness by class and gender differences.41 Although looking at the speciicities of the United States and the United Kingdom respectively, both authors examine how deeply one’s belonging to lower social classes affects one’s partaking in whiteness. The titles Out of Whiteness by Ware and Back and Displacing Whiteness by Ruth Frankenberg also share with the aforementioned a profound critique of the notion of 38 José Jorge de Carvalho, “Black Music of All Colors: The Construction of Black Ethnicity in Ritual and Popular Genres of Afro-Brazilian Music,” in Gérard Béhague, ed., Music and Black Ethnicity in the Caribbean and South America (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami North-South Center, 1993), 187–206. 39 Liv Sovik, “Joaquim Nabuco e a ontologia do Brasil: Uma entrevista comentada com Caetano Veloso,” Márgens/Margenes, no. 3 (July 2003): 25. 40 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 125. 41 See Matt Wray, Not Quite White; and Alastair Bonnet, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall, 1999). 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | whiteness as stable, neutral, normative or homogenous.42 These works all demonstrate the changeability and inconsistency of racial categories. To a greater or lesser extent, they also point to the need to, in the long run, work toward the abolition of whiteness. Conclusion: Abolishing Whiteness Abolishing whiteness is not about reconiguring whiteness as “positive.” Neither is it a project grounded on the celebration of the ethnic identities of disempowered nonwhites. The importance of studying whiteness is to overcome the power of whiteness but also to undo the power of “race.” Sharing one of the premises of cultural studies, I believe that theorization must go along with politics. Our academic analyses should shed light on the ongoing, and more often than not, unquestioned, attitudes we have toward the raciological readings of our own bodies, and the bodies of the “others” with whom we interact. By analyzing whiteness, blackness, and mestiçagem, we should be working toward understanding the role of raciology in the cultures we inhabit, and ultimately to render it null. This does not mean that we should deny the existence of the social construct of “race” and its powerful concrete consequences. This answers, at least partly, the second question aptly raised by Vron Ware: what are the anti-racist strategies that can be used to subvert whiteness? I argue that four main activities must be carried out in the pursuit of this goal. First, we must effectively study whiteness. There is still too little analysis of whiteness in Brazil, and most of it has been carried out in the ield of psychology.43 This is similar to what happened with the study of identity, which until the 1960s was also led by psychologists. While it is important to analyze how whiteness affects the individual and her or his mental processes, we also need to understand the social and cultural construction of whiteness, and for this it is necessary to resort to other disciplines. This is especially important in a country like Brazil where racist acts have frequently been explained as individual idiosyncrasies instead of inserted in collective norms and representations. Among the reasons why there are so few studies of whiteness in Brazil is the issue of the invisibility of whiteness: self-proclaimed whites have historically been subjects and not objects of the gaze that has racialized the world around us.44 Consequently, it is hard to even name whiteness. Even among academics, the terms branquidade and branquitude trigger reactions of weirdness precisely because the terms identify this comfortably unacknowledged force. While permanently concealed, the power of whiteness is lived by everyone in Brazil, and it is always operating either in opening or closing doors of opportunity and achievement. 42 See Ware and Back, Out of Whiteness; and Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 43 For a review of such works, see Sovik, “Aqui ninguém é branco.” 44 Ibid. 53 54 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil Second, the study of whiteness must recognize Brazil’s speciicities without buying into the idea of exceptionalism. It is necessary, therefore, to move beyond the Manichaean and binary understandings of mestiçagem. Peter Wade’s approach is very inspiring in that it neither seeks to celebrate nor to condemn mestizaje/mestiçagem, but rather to understand its workings and effects as processes linked to embodied identities and kinship relations.45 It is also important to develop a greater number of comparative studies among Latin American and Caribbean nations which share not the same but very related forms of racism, and comparable myths of exceptionalism. Third, researchers need to overcome the overwhelming US-centrism that permeates the studies of race and racism in Brazil and elsewhere in the black diaspora. Of course we can and should learn from the racial experiences of other countries, the United States included. Because critical studies of whiteness have had a longer history in the United States, its consequently larger body of academic work has served as an important reference for studies of whiteness in other countries. There is nothing wrong with that. So-called foreign ideas can be useful to provoke contemplation about local issues that we normally take for granted. But this should not mean that the United States should function as a “model” for other countries. Fourth, it is crucial to analyze and deconstruct racial representations, recognizing that they are always somehow also grounded on notions of gender difference and class inequality. If “race” and gender are intrinsically interconnected, antiracist strategies must be permeated by antisexist strategies. In order to deconstruct representations it is necessary, irst of all, to consider them important in the formations of whiteness, blackness, and mestiçagem. I ind it quite surprising that, in spite of the recognition achieved by cultural studies and postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, there is still certain contempt on the part of some social scientists regarding the power of discourse. In Race in Another America, sociologist Edward Telles dismisses as “schematic” and “anecdotal” the work of scholars who argue that myths are not mere falsities since they represent powerful popular ways of thought and practice. Believing that only statistical work can provide reliable data about race relations, Telles establishes a hierarchy between “anecdotal evidence” (which he implies qualitative work to be) and “strong evidence” (provided only by quantitative sociology grounded on statistical indicators).46 Rejecting such hierarchies, I contend that both quantitative and qualitative methods should be embraced in the study of racism. Contrary to what is argued by many Brazilianist scholars, Brazilian individuals are very aware of the existence of racism. However, racist manifestations and expressions of resistance to racism both have been articulated much less through direct verbal statements than through 45 Peter Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005): 239–57. 46 Edward Telles, Race in Another America: The Signiicance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 16. 29 • July 2009 • Patricia de Santana Pinho | jokes, anecdotes, teasing, and other forms of humor.47 While having very concrete effects on the lives of people, the subtlety of these veiled forms of communication is very dificult to capture, hence the importance of qualitative research. Anecdotes are as crucial as numbers to understand the workings of racism. We must, therefore, scrutinize the role of the media and education in shaping our subjectivities. We need also to carry out the archeology of the myths we believe in, and the jokes and anecdotes that we hear and tell.48 While in structuralist anthropology, jokes were deined as a mode of expression that must be interpreted in its relation to other modes of expression,49 in poststructuralist analyses, joking is understood as a discursive device employed in the process of constructing “truths.” The constant repetition of a joke helps to establish the “truth” that it conveys. One of the meanings of the term joke is “somebody or something that is laughably inadequate or absurd.”50 This possibly explains why, for my great-aunt, the inadequacy of my father’s hair could only be dealt with as a joke. Besides working as a means of releasing racial tension,51 joking has also been a form of tackling dificult social issues and situations. I remember that I never found funny the joke about my father’s kinky hair. In fact, I always thought of it as a painful event: to be received with that nasty comment by his soon-to-be in-laws! But my father never seemed to mind, and to this day he laughs along with the others whenever the tale is retold. I am sure that my sensitivity to this story stems not only from the fact that I am his spitting image but also due to how women are much more affected by the—frequently painful—operations of racialized aesthetics. Besides, differently from my father, who grew up having only Hollywood’s white, Marlon Brando–style references, I belong to a generation of Baianos who came of age during the period of the re-Africanization of the region’s black popular culture. My teenage years were spent dancing to the black rhythms of the blocos afro and listening to the antiracist lyrics of reggae and samba-reggae songs.52 This exposure to new notions of blackness in the streets made listening to racist anecdotes at home no longer tolerable. I am aware that the autobiographical aspect of my essay makes me run the risk of sounding like “just another light-skinned Brazilian claiming to have a black grandparent.” I may even be accused of bringing up my African ancestry only to afirm that I am deeply mestiça and therefore undeniably Brazilian. In reality, though, by digging into the embodied meanings of racial mixture within kinship relations, I am confronting the notion of mestiçagem as an antidote to racism. And, following Gail Lewis, I am disclosing my family memories in order 47 See Sheriff, Dreaming Equality; and Donna Goldstein, Laughter Out Of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 48 “The material and discursive dimensions of whiteness are always, in practice, interconnected. Discursive repertoires may reinforce, contradict, conceal, explain, or ‘explain away’ the materiality or the history of a given situation. Their interconnection, rather than material life alone, is in fact what generates ‘experience.’ ” Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 2. 49 Mary Douglas, “Jokes,” in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd. ed. (London: Routledge, 1999). 50 Encarta Dictionary online, http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/dictionaryhome.aspx. 51 I am grateful to Gail Lewis for bringing to my attention this aspect of joking. 52 For more information on the meanings of Africa for Bahia’s black culture, see Patricia de Santana Pinho, Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 55 56 | White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil to scrutinize the ordinariness of racist practices. Our ways and visions of being in the world are structured through racialized and gendered discourses and practices that require a feminist approach of highlighting what is political in accounts of personal experience. Through this process, the private, ordinary, and apparently insigniicant aspects of daily life can be understood as shared experience, worthy of being theorized.53 I agree with Ware that, although racialized thought is deeply engrained in the social, cultural, and psychological structures of our societies, whiteness and the sordid fantasy of “race” do not need be insurmountable factors of our lives. As beliefs, they require our devotion and faith in order to exist. We can, nonetheless, betray these impositions that have imprisoned us in our bodies for so long. We should not forget that what seems to be the undeniable reality of physical difference only makes sense within a shared cognitive map through which we learn to read the bodies. Thus, antiracist strategies will only succeed once representations lie at their core, and once these representations are deconstructed and reconstructed with the goal of moving beyond, instead of within, raciology. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleague Glyne Grifith for having invited me to contribute to the Small Axe symposium “Blackness Unbound: Constructions and Deconstructions of Transnational Blackness” at the University at Albany, State University of New York, in September 2007. I am also deeply grateful to Vron Ware for organizing the seminar “Meanings of Whiteness in Contemporary Brazil” at the Open University in February 2008, where I had the opportunity to sharpen my thoughts and improve my essay. Vron’s work and conversations have been to me sources of hope and inspiration. This essay is dedicated to my dearly loved parents, Fernando and Bernadette Pinho. 53 Gail Lewis, “Racialising Culture Is Ordinary,” in Elizabeth B. Silva and Tony Bennett, eds., Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life (Durham, UK: Sociology, 2004), 117.