Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804759995 ISBN 13: 9780804759991

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Shades of Difference addresses the widespread but little studied phenomenon of colorism―the preference for lighter skin and the ranking of individual worth according to skin tone. Examining the social and cultural significance of skin color in a broad range of societies and historical periods, this insightful collection looks at how skin color affects people's opportunities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America.

Is skin color bias distinct from racial bias? How does skin color preference relate to gender, given the association of lightness with desirability and beauty in women? The authors of this volume explore these and other questions as they take a closer look at the role Western-dominated culture and media have played in disseminating the ideal of light skin globally. With its comparative, international focus, this enlightening book will provide innovative insights and expand the dialogue around race and gender in the social sciences, ethnic studies, African American studies, and gender and women's studies.

About this title

About the Author

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women's Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently holds the position of president-elect of the American Sociological Association and will assume the presidency of the association in 2009.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Shades of Difference

Why Skin Color Matters

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5999-1

Contents

Contributors.............................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Economies of Color Angela P. Harris.......................................................................................11 The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil Edward Telles.........................................................................92 A Colorstruck World: Skin Tone, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among African American Women Verna M. Keith..............................253 The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich.....................404 Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideal Asian Beauty Joanne L. Rondilla................................................................635 The Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty Queen: Miss Bronze 1961-1968 Maxine Leeds Craig....................................................816 Caucasian, Coolie, Black, or White? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora Aisha Khan..........................................957 The Dynamics of Color: Mestizaje, Racism, and Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico Christina A. Sue..........................................1148 Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race in Egg Donation for Assisted Reproduction Charis Thompson............................1319 Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials Jyotsna Vaid................................................14810 Consuming Lightness: Segmented Markets and Global Capital in the Skin-Whitening Trade Evelyn Nakano Glenn............................16611 Skin Lighteners in South Africa: Transnational Entanglements and Technologies of the Self Lynn M. Thomas.............................188Part IV Countering Colorism: Legal Approaches............................................................................................21112 Multilayered Racism: Courts' Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims Taunya Lovell Banks.............................................21313 The Case for Legal Recognition of Colorism Claims Trina Jones........................................................................22314 Latinos at Work: When Color Discrimination Involves More Than Color Tanya Kater Hernndez...........................................236Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................247Notes....................................................................................................................................249Index....................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil Edward Telles

IN 1968, THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT SPONSORED A GROUP of about eighty young Brazilian college students to visit various American institutions. As part of their agenda, the Brazilian contingent met with two African American student leaders at Harvard University who spoke to them about recent U.S. Civil Rights gains for blacks. In the ensuing discussion, some of the Brazilian students opined that the U.S. reforms on race did not affect capitalism, the central problem plaguing most modern societies. Radically distinct conceptions of fundamental social problems emerged but, at one point, realizing their ideological impasse, the two North Americans noted that among the roughly eighty Brazilians, only seven or eight were black. Where was their racial democracy if blacks were so underrepresented in their group? After the meeting, the Brazilians began to self-reflect but, rather than raising concerns about black underrepresentation, they were mostly bewildered about how more than one or two persons in their delegation could be considered black. Given Brazilian connotations of blackness, the individuals they referred to must have felt insulted and embarrassed.

Above all, the incident demonstrated how blackness is distinctly understood in Brazil and the United States. A person who is black in the United States is often not so in Brazil. Indeed, some U.S. blacks may be considered white in Brazil. After all, only very dark skin color defines blackness in Brazil. Although the value given to blackness is similarly low everywhere, who gets classified as black is not. Also, the notion of who is black, mixed, or white in Brazil may change greatly within Brazil depending on the classifier, the situation, or the region. The black category is much more elusive in Brazil. Brazilians generally seek to escape from it if they can, but occasionally, for reasons of political expediency, as in the case of the new affirmative action policies, they may seek to be included in it. Stuart Hall's idea of race as the "floating signifier" is thus particularly appropriate, where meanings about race are not fixed, but are relational and subject to redefinition in different cultures.

Another difference between the two countries is in the use of the term race. In Brazil, the term cr, or literally color, is more commonly used than race. Color is often preferred because it captures the continuous aspects of Brazilian racial concepts in which groups shade into one another whereas race in Brazilian Portuguese (raa) is mostly understood, until recently, to mean willpower or desire or even nationality. Relatedly, the idea that each individual belongs to a racial group is less common in Brazil than in the United States. However, color/ cor captures the Brazilian equivalent of the English language term race and is based on a combination of physical characteristics, including skin color, hair type, nose shape, and lip shape.

Comparatively, Brazilians often refer to color differences within the entire Brazilian population whereas in the United States, color differences generally refer to skin tone differences only within the black or Latino populations. Whites in the United States are considered uniformly pale, or at least any color differences among them have no significant meaning. More important, like race, one's color in Brazil commonly carries connotations about one's value in accordance with general Western racial ideology that valorizes lightness and denigrates darkness.

Whether one uses color or race, persons are typically categorized racially and their perceived status depends on their racial or color categorization. Racial distinctions greatly affect Brazilians' life chances, regardless of their own self-identity or the fuzziness of the categories themselves. External definitions of race and color are especially important because they often impart power and privilege in social interactions to lighter skinned persons. According to the general Brazilian societal norm, bodily appearance, influenced somewhat by gender, status, and the social situation, determines who is black, mulatto, or white. Indeed, the Brazilian system allows many persons with African ancestry to self-identify in intermediate categories, including mulatto, as well as white. On the other hand, although some persons may be able to escape being black or nonwhite, others cannot. Some remain black (negro) no matter how wealthy or educated they become.

In Brazil, the existence of a mulatto category is both the cause and consequence of an ideology of miscegenation and not an automatic result of the actual biological process of race mixture. Miscegenation does not create "mixed-race persons" as the U.S. case shows. Here, mixed-race persons are simply black. In the Brazilian ideology, mulattos are valued as the quintessential Brazilians in national beliefs, although they are often marginalized in reality and are much more similar to blacks than to whites in the Brazilian class structure. Racialization occurs on a color gradient, where the meanings attached to different skin colors account for different levels of discrimination. Blacks (pretos or negros) in popular conceptions of the term are those at the darkest end of the color continuum, but in an increasingly used sense of the term (negro), it includes mulattos or browns as well. Thus, black may refer to a small proportion of the national population or to half of the population, depending on whose definition is used.

These differences in racial classification between Brazil and the United States derive from distinct histories, particularly their decisions about how to classify mixed-race persons and whether to institute legal segregation. Although the so-called races could be easily delimited when Europeans, Africans, and Indians first met, the strategies for classifying the progeny of race mixture varied widely. In the United States, both before and after slavery, mulattos were often recognized as a distinct category, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census used a mulatto category from 1850 to 1910. However, with the legalization of segregation, the more common one-drop or hypodescent rule became law, thus largely overriding local traditions of recognizing mulattos. Depending on the state, blacks were legally defined as those who had at least 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32 of African ancestry. Not surprisingly, Brazilians have trouble understanding the mathematics of this-that 1/32 determines your race despite the other 31/32. Although those laws were abolished in the 1960s, such racial ancestry rules continue to influence the classification of U.S. blacks.

South Africans adopted yet other racial classification rules for apartheid, which combined descent and appearance criteria, although their laws also created a separate classification for the intermediate colored category. Nonetheless, race-based laws in both the United States and South Africa required highly specified classification systems to eliminate or reduce uncertainty about who belonged in which category. Despite the end of legal segregation and apartheid, a tradition of following these rules keeps racial classification fairly rigid in both countries. These traditions have been so internalized that many Americans and South Africans often still believe that those classification systems represent an essential or natural division of the human species, even though their definitions were constructed according to particular social, political, and cultural contexts.

Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil has never had laws that define racial group membership, at least during the postabolition period. The decision by Brazil's elites to promote whitening through miscegenation, rather than to establish segregation by category, precluded the need for formal rules of classification. Thus, classification was based on appearance and was left to individual perception. As a result, racial classification in Brazil became more complex, ambiguous, and fluid than in those countries with segregatory legal traditions. Now that forty years having passed since the end of segregation in the United States, there are signs of growing ambiguity here, too, as in the biracial movement.

The ambiguity of Brazilian racial classification is apparent both in how particular persons are classified and in the racial categories themselves. There are at least three major systems of classification. These systems use different conceptions of race, each implying different levels of ambiguity and, when they use the same terms, their conceptions vary depending on the system. Currently, three major systems of racial classification are used to characterize the vast majority of Brazilians along the white-to-black color continuum; each system consists of a distinct set of categories that vary in number and degree of ambiguity. The first two systems have been around for many decades. These are (1) the census system with its three major categories along the continuum; (2) the popular system, which uses an indeterminate number of categories, including the popular but especially ambiguous term Moreno; and (3) the newer classification system that is most like that of the United States and uses only two terms, negro and branco, or black and white, and which I call the Black Movement system, because that is where it originated. Each of these are described in the following sections.

Race in the Brazilian Census

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is the governmental agency responsible for designing and collecting the decennial population census. Since 1950, the IBGE has used the categories white (branco), brown (pardo), black (preto), and Asian/yellow (amarelo), and it added Indigenous (Indgena) in 1991. Because Asians and indigenous peoples comprise less than 1 percent of the national population, the three categories along the black-to-white continuum account for more than 99 percent of Brazilians. Although white and black refer to the ends of the continuum, the census brown category (pardo) serves as an umbrella category for the various mixed-race terms used in popular discourse. Pardo, usually translated as brown, actually refers to an arid grayish brown color (the pardo envelope). Although often used as a proxy for mulattos or persons with white and black admixture, it may also include other categories, including caboclos (i.e., civilized Indians or persons of mostly indigenous ancestry).

These terms, although not as ambiguous as the popular classification system, are nonetheless ambiguously used. Presumably, the census is based on self-classification; but, in reality, others, including household members and the interviewers themselves, usually do the classifying. In one sense, who does the classifying does not really matter because one can name advantages to using either other or self-classification. However, racial identification, even in the census, is not exact because of the inconsistency between how people classify themselves and how they are classified by others. In a survey in which I analyzed both self and other classification, 89 percent of respondents who self-identified as white were similarly classified by the interviewer, compared with only 71 percent of self-identified browns and 59 percent of self-identified blacks being similarly classified by interviewers. Thus, interviewers and respondents are more able to agree more on who is white than who is brown or black, demonstrating that the white-nonwhite distinction is the conceptually clearest racial divide in the minds of Brazilians.

Race in Popular Discourse

The second classification system refers to racial classification in popular Brazilian discourse. It is characterized by a plethora of race or color terms, although there is evidence that the number of popular terms and the ambiguity of their use may be declining. A commonly cited finding is that a national survey in 1976 revealed the use of more than 100 terms in an open-ended question about color. These included such terms as purple, dark chocolate, or Pel colored. However, the fact that fully 95 percent of those respondents used only six terms is often ignored. In my reanalysis of the 1976 data, I found that 135 terms were used in the sample of 82,577 Brazilians. Most (or, specifically, 86) of those terms were used by only 279 of the respondents (0.3% of the population). Thus, it is true that Brazilians can be found to use a large number of racial terms, but the vast majority of them use only a few terms.

Analysis of a 1995 national survey yielded similar results. In that survey, the interviewers asked respondents their color, using an open-ended format as they did in the 1976 survey. Results are shown in Table 1.1. The top row shows that branco (or white) was the most common category chosen, at 42 percent. However, the second most popular category was the unofficial moreno category, chosen by 32 percent of all Brazilians. Moreno also translates as brown, like the census term pardo, but is much more commonly used in everyday discourse. The term pardo was used by only 7 percent of the population. Moreno claro (light moreno) was used by another 6 percent of the population. Five percent of the population classified themselves as preto, the census term for black, whereas only 3 percent of the sample classified themselves as negro, which also translates as black. Last, the remaining 5 percent used many terms, including 2 percent who classified themselves as claro (light); no other term was used by a full 1 percent of the population. Thus, fully 97 percent of the non-Asian and non-Indian population used only seven color terms in 1995, but only 54 percent chose the three official census terms.

The term moreno is particularly noteworthy for the high frequency of its use and for its extreme ambiguity. Moreno and its variant moreno claro were used by fully 38 percent of the population. Ethnographers have found the term ambiguous enough to substitute for almost any other color category. Its connotations include (1) light-skinned persons with dark hair, (2) a person of mixed "race" or parentage who generally has brunette hair, and (3) a black person. The widespread use of moreno is remarkable when one considers that it has never once been officially used in the more than 100-year existence of Brazilian censuses. Its centrality in the popular Brazilian classification may be the result of its ambiguity and its propensity to downplay racial differences and emphasize a common "Brazilianness." Gilberto Freyre, the master architect of Brazilian national identity, proclaimed that moreno represented the fusion of blacks, Indians, and Europeans into a single Brazilian metarace. Moreno, some have suggested, is the Brazilian race category par excellence, because it permits discussion of race through inclusion by subverting clear distinctions and thus masking racial hierarchy.

The Black Movement System of Racial Classification

The Black Movement has long used a third classification system, which has only recently become widely accepted by the government, media, and academia. This system of classification uses only two terms: black (negro) and white (branco). This newly emergent system most approximates the U.S. system in that it eliminates the intermediate categories. Some claim that it reveals a convergence in classification by the two countries and a growing acceptance of hypodescent in Brazil. This system is distinguished from the other two systems because of the importance of the term negro, just as moreno is important in the popular system. The term negro, like moreno, has never been used in the census. Although the term was considered highly offensive in the past, and in some situations may continue to be so, negro has now largely become a term of ethnic pride and affirmation, because Black Movement activists have made the term negro into a political category since at least the 1930s. In contrast to moreno, which represents a Brazilian tradition of universalism through racial ambiguity, the term negro, by making race explicit, represents the complete opposite. Negro, in the modern sense, is used by those who seek to diminish ambiguity and destigmatize blackness. Black Movement activists maintain that, unlike the United States, the official and popular Brazilian use of multiple "color" categories and the unofficial hierarchy in which brown is superior to black has inhibited the formation of a collective black identity around which African Brazilians can mobilize in response to shared discrimination and exclusion. (Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804759995
• ISBN 13: 9780804759991
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Glenn Evelyn Nakano