We Want You. . . To Think Just Like Us

by Racialicious special correspondent Wendi Muse

When most people think of American imperialism, they think of planting the stars and stripes deep into the soil of foreign lands. They think of economic dominance, the forced removal of government leaders, the exploitation of labor and resources.

But what causes less protest is often a form of Ameri-centric thought that stirs in the minds of many who fight its more tangible effects: Identity Imperialism.

A few weeks ago, friend and fellow blogger Malena (of Racewire) and I had a heavy-duty e-mail conversation about the politics of race in Brazil. She had written a short response to an article musing about how identity works within a nation of such vast diversity. While many view Brazil as a racial and ethnic utopia, Malena points out, this myth often clouds what she proposed was de facto apartheid.

Considering my having been to several major cities in Brazil and my continued interest in studying the country and its many cultures, I slightly disagreed with her assertion of apartheid insofar as race was concerned, especially considering that apartheid is explicitly linked to institutions and may be too strong of a word to apply to socially dictated segregation, but our discussion made me think about issues that went beyond the article she had deconstructed.

I wondered if by making external judgments of a society’s handling of race, were many professed anti-racists and supporters of national sovereignty free from colonial influence engaging in a dangerous process no different from that which they rejected?

The answer, for me, was a solid yes.

My response wasn’t always so firm. During my senior year of college, I dated a Brazilian guy who was convinced that I wasn’t black, and I just didn’t get it. In my exchange with Malena, I explained:

a brazilian guy I dated would always be like…wendi you are not black…and i’d be like, dude, wtf? of course i am…but he always said that where he was from, i wouldn’t be…and indeed that was the case…blackness there is like…100% african…and even then, they refer to themselves in colors…like dark brown…

Indeed, in Brazil there are many many more terms for racial classifications than there are in the United States:

The concept of race is very flexible in Brazil. People who would be considered black in Europe or in the United States in Brazil get a variety of designations, some euphemistic, including pardo (the official designation for mixed race), mulato, mulato escuro (dark mulatto), mulato claro (light mulatto), and moreno. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso whom no one would call black, says that he has a foot in the kitchen, meaning that he has black ancestors.

While the “one-drop-rule” makes the whitest American a black as long as there is a black ancestor somewhere, a lack of precision in the Brazilian race classification makes the color question a personal choice, seemingly with infinite possibilities.

Somehow, I had failed to remember this, as if suffering from a total mental lapse, when Paulo challenged my idea of blackness. Having been raised in the United States, especially considering my hometown was in the South, being black was really clear to me, and had been for a long time until the aforementioned (and a few other prior) interruptions that made me seriously question what race meant beyond my self-centered American perspective.

Race is to Paulo as snow is to Inuits. And while I had heard of terms like “high yellow,” “red boned,” and the infamous paper bag test while growing up in the South, there were far more racial categories than I could imagine and that I had ever learned because of the meaning of race in my country of origin. Race in the United States was ultimately determined by Puritanical thoughts on miscegenation, the antebellum one drop rule to increase the slave population, and the polarizing aftermath of the melting pot theories espoused by pseudo-scientists involved in phrenology and eugenics. Even though euphemistic, color-coded, race-specific categories were thrown around as terms of endearment within different racial and ethnic communities, our American history seemed to do little beyond encouraging simplistic divisions in the most explicit ways.

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