In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be "high yellow" (i.e., of very light skin); one can be "red" (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was "Detroit Red"); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, "Smokey." In fact, the famous (and "high yellow") Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends - sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny. The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes "pass," i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country "passing is a national institution." So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on "passing," she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be." "It was a rough time," she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color."
An analysis of the experience of African Caribbeans in the postwar period in Great Britain. Explores both the relationship between migration and racism and the formation of ethnic identity of these migrants. Also confronts the political implications of the new identities being forged by Black people in the country.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
176 p, "Based on examination of housing patterns in San Juan and demographic data from four of its 19th-century barrios, work provides a much-needed exploration of racial prejudice in Puerto Rico. Challenges commonplace denial of racial discrimination up to the present by showing that free people of color had limited economic, social, and political opportunities to advance their status"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
410 p, Contents: Erotic autonomy as a politics of decolonization : feminism, tourism, and the state in the Bahamas -- Imperial desire/sexual utopia : white gay capital and transnational tourism -- Whose new world order? : teaching for justice -- Anatomy of a mobilization -- Transnationalism, sexuality, and the state : modernity's traditions at the height of empire -- Remembering This bridge called my back, remembering ourselves -- Pedagogies of the sacred : making the invisible tangible
Vieira,Vinícius Guilherme Rodrigues (Editor) and Johnson,Jacquelyn (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Sao Paulo: FEAUSP
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
406 p., Includes Luciana da Cruz Brito's "South Atlantic "freedom" : the American media's view of Brazil's abolition of slavery process," Flávio Thales Ribeiro Francisco's "Black Aurora : Afro-Paulistas and Afro-Americans in modernity," Jacquelyn Johnson's "Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic : an incomplete paradigm," Túlio Custódio's "Roads and paths : the intellectual trajectory of Abdias do Nascimento during his exile in the United States (1968-1981)," Sarah Birdwell's "Double discrimination in a racial democracy : struggles of Black feminists in Brazil," Jackeline Romio's "The murder of black women in the city of São Paulo in 1998," Sarah Birdwell's "Negation and misrepresentation : "Black TV" in the United States and Brazil," etc.
