Conclusion

The concluding chapter illustrates the concept of Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction” through a story of how 6-year-old children in an elite Rio de Janeiro private school learned about racial difference and appropriately “polite” racial terminology. More embedded forms of racial hierarchy and the racialized belief system that still posits the superiority of whiteness never come to the surface in these (still rare) discussions of how and when to notice racial difference. The author returns to the central point that within a context where racial cordiality is still preferred, a focus on cultural and linguistic practices helps explain the connections that Brazilians have been trained to make between race, bodies, and the ongoing inequitable distribution of resources in their society.

Making the Mano

Chapter 6 focuses on the intentional and defiant displays of blackness by politically conscious Brazilian rappers and rap fans and the challenges they pose to Brazil’s belief in racial tolerance. By the time politically conscious hip hop reached the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s, the nation was on the brink of engaging in a national debate surrounding sweeping legislative changes that would work towards addressing some of the country’s problems with structural racism, particularly through affirmative action quotas in higher education. But these changes would mark a dramatic shift in state policy and national reputation: Rather than continuing to celebrate race mixture and racial tolerance, the Brazilian state would publicly and officially admit to the visibility of blackness and to its racism. As reactions to politically conscious hip hop make apparent, this public recognition of racial difference and the challenges to ideas of racial tolerance provoked strong racial anxiety. This chapter explores rappers’ and rap fans’ embrace of “imported” cultural and linguistic practices that allowed them to wear blackness visibly, and defiantly, on their bodies in order to challenge their assigned place in Brazil’s racial hierarchy

“Good” Appearances

This chapter describes how poor dark-skinned male youth turn to language to talk their way out of potentially dangerous and always uncomfortable encounters with the military police in Rio de Janeiro. In order to “improve” their racial appearance to look and sound more like (white) upstanding citizens instead of (black) criminals, youth embrace cultural and linguistic practices that include the use of polite and civilized speech, demonstrations of their familiarity with standard Portuguese, and the avoidance of slang. They work to present “boa aparência” (literally a “good appearance”), a term that is used here to describe a continued social imperative to engage in “whitening.” They seek to achieve a racial status that is described as a “situational whiteness” which does not entail that youth “feel” or identify as white but does improve their chances of acquiring citizenship rights and diminishing the effects of racism.

Brazil’s “Comfortable Racial Contradiction”

The introduction to this book briefly summarizes Brazilian race relations through an analysis of historical events and Brazilian fairy tales as well as current day examples including political cartoons and the author’s own experiences living in Rio de Janeiro with a multi-racial family. It is argued that Brazilians live with a “comfortable racial contradiction” that includes obvious structural racism, a racial ideology that promotes the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness, but also a pride in racial mixture and racial tolerance that was enforced by Brazil’s 20th century dictatorships. While this contradiction is not “comfortable” for all, the author explains how it perseveres in a new political context where racial insult and racial exclusion can be legally challenged. The chapter ends with a description of the “compulsory closeness” of Rio de Janeiro, where city residents live in a dramatic situation of side-by-side race and class inequality. Within this context, it is argued that Rio residents engage in a continuous process of “reading” bodies for signs of blackness and whiteness, signs that include cultural and linguistic practices such as the use of slang (gíria).

Avoiding Blackness

Chapter 5 explores the “flip side” of boa aparência (or whitening), as middle-class youth and parents seek to secure the investment that they have made in their family’s whiteness by avoiding contact with black people and black spaces. Stronger than the fear of physically “black” bodies, however, is the fear of embodied practices associated with blackness, practices which circulate independent of dark-skinned people while threatening to steal the whiteness of middle-class youth. These fears, and the social imperative to avoid contact with blackness, are presented through the case study of Bola, a moreno (brown-skinned) middle-class youth who boldly disregards established social and racial borders. This chapter also expands on the struggle over prime urban spaces in Rio de Janeiro, showing how the presence of black youth in private, air-conditioned, and exclusive shopping malls inspires increased racial anxiety.

Fears of Racial Contact

Chapter 4 describes how Rio residents engage in an endless process of reading bodies for racialized signs of civility or disorder in an attempt to keep themselves safe in a context of heightened crime and violence and in daily struggles over urban space. Here one’s capacity for crime and lawlessness can be linked to something as simple as the “uncultured” act of eating a bologna sandwich at the beach, a site where privileged lighter-skinned South Zone residents now worry they will be swept up in an arrastão or beach theft/riot amidst the thousands of new darker-skinned beachgoers who arrive, by bus and metro, from the geographically distant and socially marginalized suburbs. The lack of confidence in the security offered by the Brazilian state, combined with the vast openness and lack of barriers restricting access to Rio’s kilometers of postcard-worthy coastline, produces an incredibly rich and complicated system of symbolic segregation, one that relies on the opposition between cultural and linguistic practices associated with whiteness vs. those associated with blackness.

Investing in Whiteness

The middle-class families who are the subject of Chapter 3 embrace language and linguistic discipline to gain and secure not only class status, but also racial privilege in a Brazilian context where neither ancestry nor skin color can guarantee one’s whiteness. These families seek to cultivate a sense of “personal whiteness,” for themselves and for their children, which entails a sense of ease and confidence that can only be achieved through careful training and constant effort. The concept of language ideologies, taken from linguistic anthropology, explains not only how their beliefs about their own linguistic refinement (or “verbal hygiene”) and intellectual capacity are tied to the superiority of whiteness, but also how a lack of “proper” grammar and the extensive use of slang (gíria) are linked to blackness and embraced to naturalize racial difference and social inequality in the dramatically unequal city of Rio de Janeiro.