Abstract
Where ethnoracial boundaries are treated as rigid and real, their consequences are also rigid and real. But if Rachel Dolezal had lived in Brazil, she would have been just another negra frustrada.
In the United States, people often discuss how the burgeoning multi-racial population and immigrants from Asia and Latin America are forcing us to call into question what we know about racial and ethnic categories. This argument, however, takes for granted that being Black or White, categories at the poles, are unproblematic distinctions. This perspective essentializes Blackness and Whiteness as commonsense phenomena. They are anything but. The meanings of who is White and who is Black in the United States have shifted over centuries, and who gets slotted into what category changes across societies.
A couple of years ago, the media became fascinated with Rachel Dolezal, a woman born naturally to White parents, who identified as a Black woman. At a time when transgender issues were becoming salient, news media posed what seemed to them an obvious question: is it possible to be born White and become Black the same way it was possible to be born with male sex organs and become female? Although Dolezal never used the term “transracial” to identify herself, she reminded us that race is a social construction, something many people understand as fake and baseless. On these grounds, Dolezal decided that she would wear Black hairstyles, spend time in Black communities, date and marry Black men, lead a chapter of a historically Black organization, and supposedly leave Whiteness behind. This infuriated many people, especially African Americans.
When Rachel Dolezal made international news, my friends in Brazil did not understand the commotion. “What’s going on? Who is this woman?” they asked.
I understood some of their confusion.
Finding Interracial Couples in Brazil and the United States
For several years, I have compared ethnoracial boundaries in Brazil and the United States by analyzing contemporary approaches to race mixture. From 2008 to 2012, I conducted 103 in-depth qualitative interviews with spouses in Black-White couples in Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. Drawing on Fredrik Barth’s “constructionist approach,” which emphasizes boundaries between ethnic peoples, I looked at the ways spouses in these two sites gave meaning to who is an “us” versus who is a “them” along dimensions of Whiteness and Blackness. I understood these meanings as the bricks, racial schema, or cultural repertoires that people used to create distinction. Going further, I adopted a more intersectional approach to examine how gender and race—and, to some extent, class—mutually constituted, reinforced, and naturalized one another as spouses blurred, shifted, bridged over, or erased ethnoracial boundaries in their relationship. This “critical constructionism” provided a more dynamic, nuanced approach to understanding ethnoracial boundaries. It also allowed for one of the first studies comparing how Brazilians and Americans, both Black and White, understand race and ethnicity.
In both countries, racial identification can overlap. For example, Gisele Bundchen, the supermodel, is seen as White in the United States and branca—White—in Brazil. Yet racial identifications can also diverge, resulting in many Brazilians deeming Adriana Lima, another supermodel, branca, but Americans seeing her as non-White. In my research, I knew I had to avoid using my North American eyes to find interracial couples in Brazil, so I asked a variety of native Brazilians—including friends, professors, street vendors, and housekeepers—if they knew any Carioca couples (that is, couples in Rio) involving a negro married to a branca or a negra married to a branco. I used those exact phrases to capture gender variation in these mixed heterosexual marital unions. In all, I interviewed 21 people who were in couples involving a negra with a branco and 34 in couples involving a negro married to a branca. (I also interviewed several couples together.) Similar to national studies of racial or color categorization, these outsider-identifications largely overlapped with self-identification; only three Brazilian respondents self-identified differently than how outsiders had labeled them. These people referred to themselves using intermediate terms like mestiço/a (mixed), moreno/a (brown or brunette), or pardo/a (brown) while the Brazilian informant had called them negro/a or branco/a. Nevertheless, none of my respondents saw themselves as belonging to the same category as their spouse.
In Los Angeles, I relied on referrals from friends and colleagues and scouted for couples in public spaces, including grocery stores and shopping malls. Unlike Brazil, the majority of U.S. Blacks and Whites do not see themselves as multiracial, despite actual different-race ancestry. For this reason, in Los Angeles, I excluded people who self-identified as biracial or multiracial from this analysis. In both sites, I also used snowball sampling, a technique that is ideal for finding hard-to-reach individuals like couples of different colors, since color and racial homogamy are dominant in both societies. In the United States, I interviewed 20 people in couples involving a Black husband and a White wife and another 18 in couples with Black wives and White husbands.
Some of the Afro-Brazilians called their spouses negra frustrada or negro frustrado: their spouses were frustrated because they wanted to be negros but were not.
Brazilian White Women as Frustrated Black Women
In Rio de Janeiro, I encountered several brancas married to negros who were known to everyone as brancas and had some of the physical characteristics often associated with Europeans. Many of these wives had a physical combination of thin, straight, light-colored hair; light-colored eyes; and a lighter skin tone. However, these women found their branca identity problematic; they did not identify with other brancos. Several talked about the vibrancy of Afro-descendant cultural expressions and denigrated society’s discrimination against people with darker hues. White wives in Rio de Janeiro professed their love for Africa and for Afro-centric hairdos (including my own “baby” dreadlocks).
Perhaps obviously, many also loved Afro-Brazilian men. Over and over again, I was told by everyday Brazilians that “toda loirinha gosta de um negão” (“every [little] white woman loves a [big] Black man”). (In Portuguese, loira literally translates as blonde, but is used as a generic term for White people, especially those with light-colored hair.) This phrase was not solely a sexual reference to the supposedly larger penis size of the negão (although it certainly was for some women). It also reflected stereotypes among many Brazilians that their fellow brancos are short because of their Italian and Portuguese ancestry, while negros are tall and muscular as descendants of Africa. Since this was a common phrase and Afro-Brazilian men were so prevalent, gostar de negão was almost the Brazilian equivalent of these women saying that they liked men who were “tall, dark, and handsome.” However, women experienced stigmatization for these preferences, especially from their parents. One branca, Juliana, told me that, years ago, her mother had nicknamed her “Slaveship,” because she was always bringing home Afro-Brazilian friends. As a consequence, like other highly educated brancas, she waited until her parents had passed away to pursue romantic relationships with negros.
Some of the Afro-Brazilian spouses, both husbands and wives, called their spouses negra frustrada or negro frustrado: their spouses were frustrated because they wanted to be negros but were not. Some husbands found their own branco identity problematic, too. Still, none fetishized Blackness the way their branca counterparts did.
I found many more women who were negras frustradas than men who were negros frustrados in Rio de Janeiro. In interviews with Afro-Brazilian and Black husbands in both Rio and Los Angeles, they bridged over their spouses’ Whiteness by linking their identification of their wives’ race or color to how they categorized themselves. Afro-Brazilian husbands did not see their branca wives as very different or distant from them in terms of color. This was because patriarchal gender roles allowed Afro-Brazilian men who were favored by negra frustradas to provide a “covering” over their partner’s race.
None of the Los Angeles women I interviewed expressed a similar adoration of all things Black. Even the few Angelino White women who described appreciating Black history and culture did not espouse a similar attachment to Blackness. In fact, several White Angelino women described avoiding Black communities and social settings to avoid the antagonism they had experienced toward their relationships in those settings (often identifying Black women as the perpetrators of this disdain). While there may certainly be White women in Los Angeles with romantic preferences for Black men, this was not the case among my respondents. However, as I’d found in Rio de Janeiro, none of the White Angelino spouses embraced White identities. Instead, they expressed pride in particular quanta of European nation-based ethnic identities. As a consequence, ethnoracial boundaries were more flexible for these spouses than their Black or Afro-Brazilian partners. Notably, none completely denied their Whiteness in favor of other racial categories. In this respect, if she had been part of the study in the United States, Rachel Dolezal would have been an outlier.
Race Mixture and Fluidity
There was no Brazilian equivalent of a Rachel Dolezal for several reasons. First, race mixture is a part of how Brazilians understand themselves as a people. While European families originally migrated to the United States to pursue religious liberty, European men migrated to Brazil to exploit its natural resources. They left their wives and families—if they had any—in Portugal and did what single men away from their families have a long history of doing: they had sex and formed families with the women available to them. In Brazil, these were native Indigenous and enslaved African women and, later, the descendants of these encounters. Brazil received more than ten times more slaves than the United States, yet most interracial intimacies were unequal relations between European-origin slave owners and the women they owned or concubinage between poor brancos and women of color. Despite their attempts to stigmatize interracial sexual relations and marital unions with their concerns over “purity of blood,” the Portuguese Crown and the Catholic Church were ineffective against the small number of European women, the large populations of slaves, and growing numbers of free people of color in Brazil. Nevertheless, these offspring would be “whitening” their darker parent’s lineage. Through in-breeding over generations and continued mixture with Europeans, these descendants, both men and women, became brancos themselves, reaping the benefits so often accrued at the top of the racial hierarchy.
Brazil today is also well known for its racial fluidity and how it is possible for people to move across ethnoracial boundaries. Since physical appearance weighs more heavily than ancestry in the racial or color categorization of an individual, it was possible for the child of a negro father and a branca mother to be classified as branca. The popular Brazilian phrase “money whitens” neatly summarizes the empirical reality: upward class mobility can make a person appear lighter in appearance. More privileged people can avoid the sun, straighten their hair, have plastic surgery, or wear cropped hairstyles, all of which might make them seem Whiter. This is different from the United States, where racial categorization rarely shifts with socioeconomic status or a change in appearance, especially for African Americans.
To my knowledge, Brazilian journalists haven’t been writing newspaper articles about negras frustradas. They were not the subjects of media interviews or documentaries. They wrote no tell-all books about how they came to their identity. Rather than gaining fame, becoming a spectacle, or becoming infamous, Brazilians largely spoke of negras frustradas with a smirk. Nevertheless, this greater porosity of ethnoracial boundaries does have its complications. Over the last two decades, the implementation of affirmative action quotas for poor, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-Brazilians has led to a surge in afroconvenientes—Whites who conveniently adopt a negro identity to take advantage of these policies. A play on the word afrodescendentes or Afro-descendants, these afroconvenientes indeed regularly made the news. Some universities have now implemented panels that examine applicants’ photographs to adjudicate their Blackness. However, none of the negros/as frustrados/as whom I interviewed shared any efforts to take advantage of benefits designated for Afro-Brazilians. Instead, many saw these policies as viable options for addressing past and present discrimination against Afro-Brazilians.
If Dolezal had lived in Brazil, its flexible colorline would have allowed her more breathing room. She would have been just another negra frustrada.
Fertility
Despite the famous racial fluidity of Brazilian society, most Brazilian parents in my study assumed that their children would be Black. In fact, in Rio de Janeiro, negão were supposed to help many brancas meet their fertility goal: having Afro-Brazilian children. This was very different from the Angelino White mothers I interviewed. As Kim Williams’ work has shown, White mothers in the United States were at the forefront of multiracial activism, advocating for their children to use multiple categories in official designations such as the U.S. Census. The White Angelino mothers, like the overwhelming majority of the Angelino parents, labeled their children as biracial. Ironically, the Black-White couple who categorized their children as Black had arguably the “least” amount of Blackness: the husband identified as Black, the son of a White mother and a Black father. More than other Angelinos, both parents emphasized the need to preserve their children’s African American heritage. On the other hand, the majority of Carioca parents applied a binary framework to their children, labeling them either negro or branco. Only a small minority used the mixed-race mestiço category to identify their children.
When children did not meet their parents’ expectations of being negro, it was to the surprise and even chagrin of negras frustradas. Like her negro husband, Donato, branca Angela had a high school education and lived in a racially-mixed suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Donato had dark brown skin, which may explain why Angela expected her daughter to be negra. But, she told me, “When my daughter was born, she came out branca… I said, ‘Geez, God punished me…. When I held her in my arms, I said [to her], ‘Why did you come out branca? God doesn’t listen to me, does He?’” By Brazilian standards, her daughter’s light skin and hair made her a branca, like her mother. In Los Angeles, the parents I interviewed never thought of their child as White and certainly did not refer to having any desire for darkening themselves through their offspring. For Angela, race mixture was a way to achieve the Afro-Brazilian family she had always desired. Her child’s Whiteness was proof that Angela had failed.
If ethnoracial boundaries were made of concrete, in Brazil, race mixture kept that concrete from fully stiffening. The United States is different. Segregation is in the air we breathe.
In another case, Tatiana, a proud negra, considered her husband Gaspar a negro frustrado. When little Zeus was born, Tatiana was shocked by the baby’s pale skin. While Gaspar did not mention this to me in his interview, Tatiana confided that Gaspar wished their six-year-old son, Zeus, could be darker. She said that, despite the child’s sensitive skin, her husband often tried to expose him to the sun for long periods to tan. None of the Angelino couples divulged similar practices to make their children appear more Black.
White Privilege in Negotiating Boundaries
In my individual interviews with spouses, I asked, “What is your color?” (the Brazilian equivalent of asking “What is your race?”) Almost all of the branco spouses initially said they were branco or branca. However, they often referenced grandmothers who were Indigenous or Afro-Brazilian (despite their many other European ancestors) as reasons why they were branco but not exactly. Both they and their negro spouses referenced how this racially mixed ancestry placed qualifications on their Whiteness, with some respondents referring to themselves as branco, but not branco-branco: “White but not really White.” Still others vacillated between branco and pardo, a term largely used on the Brazilian Census to refer to a tannish-grey. For these respondents, Brazilian Whiteness was “loosey goosey” in comparison to the United States. If ethnoracial boundaries were made of concrete, in Brazil, race mixture kept that concrete from fully stiffening. As branca and branco spouses pushed against ethnoracial boundaries, they found the borders pliable but not fully yielding.
Afro-Brazilian spouses in Brazil did not experience this same flexibility; several revealed the racial discrimination they experienced in predominantly White spaces, including shopping malls and touristy areas of the city. Afro-Brazilian wives shared how they could be confused for being prostitutes with their husband as their john in the wealthy neighborhoods that brancos lived in or frequented, like Copacabana and Ipanema. That is, for Afro-Brazilians, the colorline was not silly putty. Branco spouses had more freedom to delve into all things Afro-Brazilian than their spouses had in doing the reverse. So, as most things in a racially unequal society, the colorline was more flexible if you were White.
The United States is different. After slavery, decades of Jim Crow and federally created residential segregation left the country more segregated in 2017 than in 1917. Segregation is in the air we breathe, and our ethnoracial boundaries are far more rigid than in Brazil. Dolezal is experiencing the rigidity of the colorline in the United States. Like a brick wall, as she pushes against it, it does not budge.
Nevertheless, the United States has puzzlingly rewarded Dolezal’s challenging of ethnoracial boundaries. Apart from creating a media sensation, Dolezal has gained financial advantages by giving talks and selling books about her personal decision to “side with Blacks.” She is even the subject of a Netflix documentary. This is far removed from the thousands of Blacks who quietly dissolved into the White population a century ago—a media stir would have cost them their lives. Even Anatole Broyard, the New York Times film critic who passed away in 1990, took his hidden Blackness to the grave in order to be taken seriously as a writer whose opinions were widely valued.
In addition, unlike the tolerance many Afro-Brazilians have for negras frustradas, many African Americans call Dolezal problematic at best, a racial charlatan at worst. Accusations against her, including committing welfare fraud (ironically, an accusation usually leveled against Black women with the incendiary political phrase “Welfare Queens”), have only heightened this sentiment. Black relatives and ancestors who passed as White did not receive the same rewards as Dolezal—their passing had to be quiet, without any fuss. Their passing was dangerous and the rewards of Whiteness were precarious. Even today, people who identify as Black but appear White can experience hostility and stigmatization, as if their very existence upsets the social norm of supposedly unambiguous, bright and firmly set U.S. ethnoracial boundaries.
Going It Alone
In her interview with Black sociologist Ann Morning in 2017 (Contexts), Dolezal said that she had received many letters of support from people who, like her, do not fit neatly into the ethnoracial or gender categories prescribed by U.S. society. Dolezal argued that Americans cannot understand transracial and multiple identities in which a person could shift from one category to another throughout the life course. This runs contrary to what many scholars have shown for multiracials, among whom changing racial categorization is common. Strikingly, despite her previous work with the NAACP, Dolezal’s comments suggested a serious disconnect from (real) Black women activists. For decades, their work has been grounded in understandings of “double jeopardy,” intersectionality, or contemporary hashtag activism like #SayHerName or the original #MeToo campaign.
In addition, Dolezal has not openly linked arms with other frustrated Black women in a social movement to challenge U.S. racial categorization. She would not have been the first White woman to confront our racial logic. In the multiracial movement of the 1990s, White mothers of biracial children pushed the U.S. Census Bureau to allow for the multiple “mark one or more” ethnoracial categorization option. The terms “biracial” and “multiracial” are now common parlance, thanks to their collective work drilling through U.S. ethnoracial boundaries.
Instead, it is just Dolezal, alone, pushing against the color-line. She has no “one-drop” to stand on. Her individual choices and Black identity are no match for a stalwart societal phenomenon. As a consequence, she experiences the scrapes and bruises of the U.S. construction of race. She faces stigma and people speculate on her mental health. This is because race is a social construction, not just a feeling or an individual construction. As W.I. Thomas’s famous dictum states, “If [people] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Likewise, since U.S. society continues to treat ethnoracial boundaries as rigid and real, their consequences are also rigid and real. If Dolezal had lived in Brazil, its flexible colorline would have allowed her more breathing room. She would have been just another negra frustrada.