Color Prejudice and São Paulo Fashion Week
After reading Douglas Massey’s Categorically Unequal — I book I found both tendentious and extremely insightful on the way stratification works in the United States — I stumbled on this video São Paulo Fashion Week from Cool Hunting, one of my favorite webzines.
I was shocked by the utter absence of black faces. I’m sure that this doesn’t reflect São Paulo Fashion Week as whole. Perhaps there were Afro-Brazilian designers and models featured somewhere in the course of the event. But overall, I was left with an impression of what scholars call hegemonic blanqueamiento, or whitening. In an essay on four modes of ethno-somatic stratification in the Americas and Europe, Orlando Patterson briefly surveys the staggering challenges faced by Afro-Brazilians, who constitute the majority of Brazil’s population — poverty levels that approach 50 percent, an illiteracy rate of 40 percent, chronic unemployment, intense segregation, extremely high incarceration rates, and, most depressingly, a population of abandoned children that is in the neighborhood of 7 million. In Patterson’s account, these children are regarded as “human vermin,” and have been literally targeted by death squads. Amazingly enough, there is reason to believe that anti-black discrimination has grown more intense over time.
Also interesting is the fact that, as the sociologists Edward Telles and Ronald Soong have found, Brazilians of mixed ancestry fare little better than Afro-Brazilians with regards to family income.
One of the core conclusions of Patterson’s essay is that black diaspora populations throughout the Atlantic rim suffer from a number of shared burdens, the most significant of which is a shattered family structure. You’ll note that many of the challenges faced by Afro-Brazilians are also faced, though not to the same degree, by black Americans. As Massey argues, it is pretty clear that the increasing concentration of poverty and affluence plays a big — perhaps even the central — role in the persistence of racial segregation in the United States. Yet when one considers the segregation experienced by highly-educated and affluent African Americans, it is hard not to conclude that cultural and psychological barriers to what Randall Kennedy referred to as “interracial intimacies” deserve much of the blame.
A few years ago, there was a somewhat odd debate over whether Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s treacly French fairy-tale, was racist — as I understand it, the argument was the film represented a highly dishonest somatic “cleansing” of the modern French landscape. At the time I found this ridiculous, and I still do — but that video of São Paulo Fashion Week made me think of this idea of somatic cleansing as something real and awful. These highly cultivated, stylish Brazilians — who, one suspects, think of the United States as worthy of contempt, and who implicitly embrace and delight in the long-discredited notion of Brazil as a “racial democracy” — have constructed for themselves a Europeanized Brazilian fantasia, in which black faces are almost completely absent, and fine-boned, Nordic-but-tan Giseles are the norm. One journalist featured in the video briefly references Brazil’s “mixture of racism,” and judging by the video I have to assume she is referring to the mixture of equally lithe hollow-cheeked Swedes and almond-eyed Finns.
Yet at the same time this somatically cleansed environment has the advantage of honesty: representational diversity, in which stylish black faces are represented as part and parcel of Brazil’s cosmopolitan elite, would be even more of a sham. Leaving aside the fraught political question, you’d think Brazil’s fashion industry would capitalize on the frisson of interracial intimacy, which is of course parasitic on racism itself.
There is something a little strange about an American criticizing another country for its color prejudice. But that’s not what I’m shooting for. A few months ago, The Economist quoted Lant Pritchett something utterly brilliant:
Some economists see India’s malfunctioning public sector as its biggest obstacle to growth. Lant Pritchett, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, calls it “one of the world’s top ten biggest problems—of the order of AIDS and climate change”.
If climate change is a problem (and it is), and if we thus have reason to demand or cajole or induce Brazil to preserve its rainforests, surely citizens of all countries can make similar claims about the destruction of human lives.
Okay, this is all very high-flown. I do wonder, though, if color prejudice is this persistent, deep problem that underlies a lot of the poverty and misery that scars the world — the survival of caste in India is totally entangled with the persistence of poverty; the difference in life chances between light-skinned and dark-skinned Latinos in the USA is highly suggestive. You probably remember the DuBois line about the problem of the 20th century being the problem of the Color-Line — perhaps it is best understood as the problem of the millennium.
“who constitute the majority of Brazil’s population”
this is using an american definition of afro, implicitly accepting hypodescent. some brazilians are coming over to this anglo-norm, but obviously it isn’t unchallenged. so whether afro-brazilians are, or not, a majority, is contingent upon whether you accept someone who is 1/3 of african ancestry is afro-brazilian, but NOT, euro-brazilian.
secondly, there is a point that somatic appearance is somewhat decoupled from ancestry in brazil. a substantial number of bazilians who look white have a non-trivial load of african genes, and vice versa for black brazilians. please see the second image on this post:
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2007/12/why_phenotypic_races_may_not_d.php
of course, your point about somatic racism in brazil is totally spot on. but i think the confounding of ancestry & appearance in brazil, as well as the emphasis on graded racial classifications, means that an american-style analysis is highly problematic.
— razib · Feb 22, 10:57 PM · #
i think another point that isn’t unimportant is the type of body-type which are in demand for modern fashion models are probably underrepresented among both peoples of african and asian ancesrys; tall ectomorphs. OTOH, they are well represented among northeast africans, ethiopians and somalis.
— razib · Feb 22, 11:01 PM · #
> I stumbled on this video […] I was shocked by the utter absence of black faces.
I take it the brown face at 0:55 isn’t black enough? Hmph.
— Mike the Knife · Feb 22, 11:02 PM · #
re: color line, etc., i think perhaps the best short term alternative is to invest in cosmetic technologies which can turn colored people white.
— razib · Feb 22, 11:05 PM · #
ok…did a quick literature review. i think it is fair to say that self-identified whites in brazil (around 50% of the population), are white like black americans are africans. that is, 70-80% of the ancestry of brazilian whites is in europe (for black americans, 20-25% of the ancestry is in europe). the number for self-identified white americans is closer to 95% or more ancestry in europe (most of the 5% or less is going to be among self-identified white hispanics, who often have non-trivial amerindian ancestry and groups like middle easterners who are classified as white by the census and identify as such in the USA).
google “Historical Genetics: Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Formation
of the Brazilian Population” for a place to start in the literature.
— razib · Feb 22, 11:23 PM · #
It’s certainly always been the claim of both the Brazilian ex-pats I know (which is a significant number, for certain reasons) and my friends who lived abroad in Brazil (also significant and for the same reasons) that many Brazilians prize Anglo characteristics in the opposite sex— pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes.
— Freddie · Feb 22, 11:47 PM · #
Reihan,
One quick note that sort of runs counter to the experience of watching that video. In the movie “City of God”, I always found it amusing that the lead character (who is clearly Afro-Brazilian) hooks up with a couple of really hot Euro-Brazilians and no one in the film comments on their racial differences.
— Jeff Singer · Feb 23, 01:11 AM · #
“If climate change is a problem (and it is), and if we thus have reason to demand or cajole or induce Brazil to preserve its rainforests, surely citizens of all countries can make similar claims about the destruction of human lives.”
Again, what kind of conservative are you?
And…. maybe if africans ruled the world then we’d all be more down with brown. It’s not a color line, (or a genentics line) it’s a power line. Isn’t that the name of a very white conservative blog dedicated to preserving and expanding the power of the white man (aka western civilization)? I rest my case.
— cw · Feb 23, 02:57 AM · #