Not everyone is black in Brazil – and that’s okay

It is a fact that this beginning of the year was marked by racial discussions on the subject of Cultural Appropriation🇧🇷 Unfortunately, many people are acting without knowing and understanding cultural appropriation in a very distorted and impoverished way – that is, less as a structural criticism and much (or only) as a personal criticism.

It is through this personification that many respond aggressively to the fact, or understand that any criticism made by black activists is “appropriation”. When the news about Daniela Mercury and her carnival costume – and the aesthetics adopted by fellow singer Anitta during the party – surfaced, what we read in the media was that it was about cultural appropriation.

Although, we are not discussing appropriation: after all, the problem is not that Daniela Mercury (and so many others) are axé singers. We are debating the so-calledblackface” (in free translation, “black face”) and how people don’t necessarily need to “dress” in “black” to honor a black person. Daniela, when using makeup of a darker tone and a wig that referred to curly hair, dressed up as a black woman to honor Elza Soares.

We can honor black singers and other black people by singing their songs or even wearing a costume that the person has already worn. Although, curly hair and dark skin are not part of our wardrobe – it’s us🇧🇷 Our aesthetic. Our beauty. The point of Carnival is exactly this: people wear wigs and paint that refer to black people, as if being black were an object/fantasy.

The issue that unites Daniela and her fantasy and Anitta and her new aesthetic is that both, when questioned about “Cultural Appropriation”, responded using miscegenation as an excuse. Anitta said that in Brazil nobody is white, while Daniela said:

I’m black with white skin, because my city’s culture is Afro-Brazilian and that’s what I love. I’m Michael Jackson in reverse, I love being black, my music is black, my empowerment is black.

Daniela Mercury

Only that’s not true. Being black is not a feeling, much less a will. No one wakes up wanting and feeling black and becomes black. Today we need to understand that race, not in the biological aspect, but in the social aspect, still impacts black individuals.

So it is possible to honor, like and live with black people unintentionally or thinking that it makes you black🇧🇷 Since racial identity has an absurd materiality, which determines social places, possibilities, incomes, territories, etc., it is not empathetic to say black when it suits you – even more so after knowing that blacks earn up to 80% less than whites with the same qualification.

It is a fact that the entire miscegenation policy designed to whiten the Brazilian population created a giant racial mess. Many people do not act in bad faith when they really believe that “we are all mestizos” is the best answer when questioning racism. In fact, we are mestizos – the result of a sometimes genuine, sometimes forced, racial interaction. However, miscegenation did not end the black population as it was intended to, much less those who still carry the tonality and traits understood as black stopped suffering racism and being placed in a place of subalternity.

And, incidentally, having real difficulties with social mobility because of this, including the darker your skin. That’s what we mean by colorism, when the darker the color pigmentation determines the lower possibilities of inclusion and access for an individual🇧🇷 Oracy Nogueira in his book “Preconceito de Marca” concludes that black subjects who have family relationships with whites (that is, lighter-skinned) have a greater possibility of mobility than black subjects with darker skin:

It can be seen that the contingent of pardos becomes increasingly rarefied, as one goes from the less favored class to the middle and upper classes, while blacks are concentrated almost exclusively in the first of the mentioned classes (lower classes), with a faint representation in the middle layer.

Oracy Nogueira

Therefore, it is a fact that even among blacks there is a disparity in the places we occupy. And this is measured not by how close we are to black people, but by how close white people perceive us to be to them visually. Oracy also wrote about it as early as the 50’s:

In social life, negroid characters, in general, imply the rejection of their bearer, when in competition on equal terms with white individuals or individuals of less negroid appearance.

Oracy Nogueira

And why am I saying this?

Because with white people it is no different. These traits of miscegenation, which determines different places for blacks, also influence the reading made in relation to white subjects. Many people do not understand that white is also a definition and, even if they are read as white by society as a whole, they seek in mestizo traits the attempt to place themselves as black.

And the difficulty for many is to understand that whiteness itself is not homogeneous – and even those who are considered mestizo whites continue to be read as whites. Researcher and doctor Lia Schucman in her doctoral thesis Between the “grimy”, the “white” and the “very white”: Race, hierarchy and power in the construction of whiteness in São Paulo collected in one of his interviews the following statement when asking if there is and was it possible to determine a scale of whites:

“I can. It has white that the skin is white, the hair is dark and curly. There is the white one who has dark hair, but straight, light eyes. There’s a white guy who has light brown but curly hair. I think curly hair is always worse, straight hair is a consumer dream.”

It is a fact that many people make mistakes even when defining what curly hair is – and whenever hair is not straight, they already understand it as curly. Not being able to talk about wavy, curly and understand that whites, even those who have not gone through miscegenation, have this type of aesthetic.

What happens is that white Brazilians categorize themselves in the following pattern: the further you are from what you consider black, the whiter you consider yourself. The point is that these people are NOT necessarily black. First, there is not only white or black; second, having mestizo traits being black or white does not directly make you into the other ethnic group. Going back to the testimonies that Schucman recognized, we have:

“(…) there’s that kind of dirty white, right? A white Brazilian who, sometimes, even has a lighter eye, but is a bit grimy. A kind of dirty color, different from the real white… The rabble white is the mestizo, is the sarará, is the one with white skin and very pixaim hair.”

What we understand is that whites guide a European standard as the core of what it means to be “pure white” and every white that carries one or more traits of mestizaje is understood as not pure white, grimy and will even heal. Miscegenation, therefore, is more complex than we imagine. So I really imagine that Anitta and Mercury can be mestizos, as many are in Brazil. However, theBefore saying that there are no “whites” or that there are “white-skinned blacks”, we must delve into the many studies that deal with miscegenation, whiteness, blackness and racism🇧🇷

Some blacks cannot, in a way, “flirt” with whiteness. And blacks, unlike some mestizos read as white, cannot use all the privileges that being identified as white brings in Brazil. We are talking about financial gains, as the research I cited at the beginning points out. Gains that, with regard to Daniela Mercury and Anitta, are visibility and becoming a reference in both axé and funk, which are rhythms that are born in black spaces.

I, even though I am not a dark-skinned black woman, have a skin tone added to traits that do not make people read me differently than I am: black. And as much as they call me morena and mulata, these adjectives, especially the second one, only prove that I am and have always been seen as black, no matter how terrible those terms are.

Really there is a lack of empathy, as well as knowledge, from people who use the excuse of miscegenation, even though they are read as white, as a shield against their own racism and lack of knowledge about the racial issue🇧🇷