Let us talk about a risky subject. What means “white”, “black” or “brown” in Brazil?
Sometimes I want to know a how our national stereotypes are going, if they have enough light or need to be watered. So I asked Google for “white Brazilians”. Being lucky not to land on Stormfront.org, I found curious discussions such as:
There’s enough written on the subject to fill more than one library, so I’m just telling you about my personal experience. I myself am considered white in Brazil, still I certainly have at least 12,5% of another ancestry, not sure if African, Indian or mixed. I would tell a census I’m white because that’s how other people perceive me, and it would sound unfair telling otherwise. Call me latino if you will but, for obvious reasons, this option would be meaningless in our census.
So what makes a “white”? My deceased mom was 100% northern Italian, brown hair, green eyes, with a blond sister with blue eyes. As for my dad, he’s from a typical “white Brazilian” background, which means mixed with dominant European features. My grandmother’s mom was black, her father was Spanish, and my grandfather’s parents were both Portuguese. My father is tawny-skinned, but with no discernible Indian or African features, so he looks like a dark Spaniard. I don’t know if I would, but surely my dad would never be considered white in U.S. He is the darkest-skinned in his family, all his brothers and sisters being pink-toned, also being darker than both his parents. So my father is considered not to be in the same “race” as his parents, siblings and even sons.
Confusing? The same situation happened to a female cousin of mine. Her mother and father are both considered “white” and both, actually, have pink skin and European features. But both are from mixed ancestry, so she has two “white” sisters and one “white” brother, while she is brown, with almond-shaped eyes and a rosebud nose. Her family lived in USA, in Cape Cod and some places in Florida. At high school, my cousin found herself being popular among Afro-American girls, who considered her to be black. It didn’t happened to her sisters or brother.
That’s not to say there are no non-mixed Europeans as well. Gisele Bundchen, for example, is just German. On the other hand, I had a friend of mine from Curitiba that was distinctly black and his surname was Mittelsdorf, from his German father. I had a girlfriend that was blond with blue eyes, her father being Polish and her mother mixed African-European. Some pure Greek, Italian or Arab people can be pretty much indiscernible from mixed Brazilians who would call themselves “brown”.
Thus it’s just impossible to tell a person ancestry by the look, and so the Brazilian census is based on self-identification. That’s why we have “49% whites” or “70% whites in São Paulo”, still you may think you’re seeing mostly brown people. Due racial consciousness being taught at school and being featured at the media, the number of people self-identifying as brown or black is on the rise in recent years.
Despite races having no distinctive borders, there’s surely racism in Brazil. The fact is that, as you can see by TV ads, for lots of Brazilians “white is better”. Still, most brown people will probably not feel Brazilian racism that much or even at all, because brown is the majority and traditional Brazilian nationalism, as La Raza, celebrates mixed people, somewhat leaving blacks aside. Also, the ancient and very controversial idea of mulatto makes people who look black but have a white ancestor, as my German-African friend, “less than black”. It’s the reverse one-drop rule, one drop white, you are not black anymore. Ask a Brazilian what Barack Obama is and they will almost certainly tell you he is a mulatto, not black.
“Mulattoes” aside - and a policeman will not ask a black guy if he has a white father - racism is targeted mainly at African-featured people. Worse than that, brown and even black people will discriminate against Afro-Brazilians too. As I said, my dad is brown and, I’m afraid to admit, he can act pretty much racist at times.
On the bright side, we had a self-identifying brown president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and black president Nilo Peçanha in 1906 - Nilo assumed as a vice-president and he was labelled mulatto at the time. The only non-white candidate with victory possibilities in this year’s election is Marina Silva, but she is in third place, after José Serra (Italian-Brazilian) and Dilma Roussef (Bulgarian-Brazilian).
