Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Brazilian Jewish Women: Female centaurs transgressing the borderlands

San Diego State University
Spring 2008
148 pages

Abby Suzanne Gondek

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Women’s Studies

Once I began my research in the synagogue in Salvador, Brazil, I met men and women of color who considered themselves Jewish, even when the rabbi and other congregants did not. I was especially interested in the stories of the Jewish women of color I met. Their passion for Judaism, desire to raise their children Jewish, and their insistence on claiming both identities – Black and Jewish – in the face of rejection from “white” Jewish communities and non-Jewish Afro-Brazilian communities, as well as their families, spoke to me deeply and I felt compelled to shift the focus of my thesis. I began to ask the question Aurora Levins Morales poses in “The Historian as Curandera,” “‘If women are assumed to be the most important people in the story, how will that change the questions we ask?’”

Because Brazil has consistently made efforts to make Jews into symbols of otherness and at the same time rhetorically valued the “mulatto” identity as a symbol of brasilidade (“Brazilianness”), Jews are seen as foreign parasites, light-skinned Blacks are portrayed as symbols of “authentic” Brazilian identity, dark-skinned Blacks are invisible, and Jews and Blacks are irreparably separated from each other. In addition, the rhetorical valuation of the “mulata” and the devaluation of the Jew, places the Black Jewish women I interviewed, who fit into the “ mulata” category because they are lighter-skinned black women, in between what is symbolically valued and devalued in Brazil, literally in the border between “us” and “them.”

Moacyr Scliar’s use of the centaur to describe Brazilian Jews’ position in the borderlands and Gloria Anzaldua’s use of the image of women “caught in the crossfire” are both transformed by the inclusion of Misty Anderson’s exploration of the transgressive meanings of the woman centaur. The Afro-Brazilian Jewish women I interviewed are spiritual, religious, sexual, and racial transgressors. They are “caught in the crossfire” between multiple communities and identities, but they assert their agency to break the barriers that surround them, to live how they want to live.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean
University of South Florida
IBL Conference Room (FAO 296)
4202 E. Fowler Avenue
Tampa, Florida
Thursday, 2018-03-01, 14:00 EDT

Presenter

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Profess Mitchell-Walthour is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil.

For more information, click here.

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Cambridge University Press
December 2017
260 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781107186101
Paperback ISBN: 9781316637043

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This book uses an intersectional approach to analyze the impact of the experience of race on Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Using a theoretical framework that takes into account racial group attachment and the experience of racial discrimination, it seeks to explain Afro-Brazilian political behavior with a focus on affirmative action policy and Law 10.639 (requiring that African and Afro-Brazilian history be taught in schools). It fills an important gap in studies of Afro-Brazilian underrepresentation by using an intersectional framework to examine the perspectives of everyday citizens. The book will be an important reference for scholars and students interested in the issue of racial politics in Latin America and beyond.

• Uses an intersectional approach that allows readers to understand how race, class, gender, and aesthetics shape Afro-Brazilian political behavior
• Appeals to social scientists using quantitative and qualitative methods to study race, gender, group behavior, and politics
• Develops a theory of racial spatiality that gives readers a bottom-up understanding of political representation and its reliance on everyday Afro-Brazilian citizens

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Afro-Brazilian political underrepresentation
• 2. Blackness and racial identification in contemporary Brazil
• 3. Negro group attachment in Brazil
• 4. Negro linked fate and racial policies
• 5. Afro-descendant perceptions of discrimination and support for affirmative action

Brazil’s Ongoing Race Problem: Recent Study Uncovers Shocking Treatment of Darker-Skinned Children in Interracial Families

Atlanta Black Star
2017-07-01

D. Amari Jackson

SALVADOR, BRAZIL -Social psychologist finds Black Brazilian children in interracial families face shocking racism. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

“The most shocking story I heard was told by a young woman, a university student who came to see me… she was phenotypically ‘Black’ but her mother was ‘white.’ She told me that when she was little, her mother would sing a lullaby with these words: ‘Plantei uma cenoura no meu quintal / Nasceu uma negrinha de avental / Dança negrinha / Não sei dançar / Pega no chicote, ela dança já’ [I planted a carrot in my backyard. / It sprouted a nigger girl in an apron. / Dance, little nigger girl! / I can’t dance. / Show her the whip, she’ll dance alright.] Her mother’s lullaby wasn’t just racist, it was a slave owner’s song.” — Social psychologist Lia Vainer Schucman from a June 2017 interview with Agência FAPESP in Brazil

Perhaps you’ve heard of the ‘bleach bath,’ a popular process designed to significantly lighten one’s skin. Or maybe the clothespin, the laundry drying device that doubles as a nighttime nasal clamp to narrow the width of what is regarded as a phenotypically Black nose. Here in the 21st century, such tragic racialized practices and psychoses are, unfortunately, still alive and well in countries across the globe.

This acknowledged, there is a common perception that the more racially diverse and interracial a society and its relationships become, the less racism it will endure. It is a questionable line of reasoning particularly prevalent in Brazil where racially mixed societies and families are the norm. It fuels the popular national narrative that racial prejudice cannot exist in South America’s largest country since “somos todos iguais” (“we are all equal”).

A recent study by social psychologist and researcher Lia Vainer Schucman says otherwise. In it, Schucman interviewed interracial families from regions across Brazil willing to discuss the manifestations and impact of racism within their units as part of her postdoctoral work at the University of São Paulo. Sponsored by Agência FAPESP, a media service of the São Paulo Research Foundation, Schucman’s research is the subject of her upcoming book, “Famílias Inter-Raciais: Tensões entre Cor e Amor” (Inter-Racial Families: Tensions Between Color and Love)…

Read the entire article here.

Brazilians of African descent demand equality

Al Jazeera English
2013-07-02

Rachel Levin

“Brazil is one of the most socially unequal countries in the world, we’re selling the image that everything is good and we’ll host the World Cup but it’s a country that denies opportunity to its own people.” —Lais Nascimento, student

Eighty percent of Brazilians are originally from Africa and they say they suffer discrimination

Tens of thousands of Brazilians are renewing the decades-old struggle for racial equality, and are staging protests to draw attention to their grievances.

Eighty percent of Brazilians are of African descent and they say they suffer discrimination.

Al Jazeera’s Rachel Levin has this report from Salvador.