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End of 2016 I moved to Germany and throughout these almost 4 years of my life, I met many different people. Locals and internationals from all around the world.
These experiences have always been enriching for me. Getting in contact with different cultures not only expands your views of life but also helps you understand a bit more about yourself.
In some of these multicultural encounters, we dared to touch the subject of race/skin color. Uuuhhh. That’s always a nice one, isn’t it? And in some of these occasions, I have been described as “brown.”
I remember the first time that it happened because I was shocked. It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard the term to describe race/color. But it was the first time I’ve heard it being used to describe me.
I grew up in Brazil, where the population is pretty diverse. Our history involves miscegenation from different groups of people. Indigenous populations, European invaders, Africans brought to the territory by the slave trade and further immigration from Europe and Asia.
Yet, I would say that I am considered white by other Brazilians. Whenever I talk about the subject with my friends that are also from there, this is not up for discussion. It is clear.
And I was always fine with it. I always filled up forms as white. I identified myself as so, and I recognize I enjoyed all the privileges that come with it.
And there I was, 26 years old, in a foreign country, realizing I was being read as non-white for the first time.
It isn’t a tragic story, I know. Don’t wanna sound like I am overreacting. It was just an innocent conversation between friends.
But this incident lighted up a spark that motivated me to try to understand more about my ancestry. I wanted to understand why I am seen both as white and brown and if this would have an effect on how I see myself.
Racial incongruence
The term describes when a person is seen as a different race as they see themselves. Normally, people that experience it are mixed-race. They may have a white father and a black mother, for example.
Sometimes people will read them as black if they are out together with their black mother. Other times they’ll read them as white if they had straightened their hair. Crazy, I know. But this is exactly what mixed-race people report.
These are just some random explanations. It’s not always the case that these reasons will infer on a racial reading. But sometimes, people will pull something from the depths of their stereotypes and do one.
Of course, this exposes how bullshit racial reading is. The basis behind it is phenotypical. People use some physical traits such as facial features, skin color, and hair to infer racial belonging.
These parameters are far from being objective and each person ends up creating their own concepts and limits. There’s no scientific evidence that these traits infer any genetic pattern or racial division.
Actually, the evidence shows quite the opposite, namely that
genetic differences within any designated racial group are often greater than differences between racial groups
This means that the spectrum of genetic differences is so great that it prevails even among individuals of the same racial group.
In the 18th century, race was created by naturalists and anthropologists as a form of understanding variances in species. It was an attempt to categorize (as they do) people according to a geographical location or phenotypic traits.
But now we know these groups have no biological basis. They remain today only as a social construct. So whichever assertion you make based on physical traits will likely only make sense for yourself and your context.
You might get an illusion that it works when you get individuals that are on the extremes of the variation spectrums. But the further you get from these extremes, the higher will be the racial incongruences among reads.
The context factor of racial incongruence
What happens if you put people that grew up in different contexts together? The bigger gap between their life experiences will catalyze their different stereotypes.
This is what happened to me and my international friends. Our life paths are so different. Our different upbringings, the people that are around us, the places we’ve been. All this has influenced our racial perceptions.
I had never experienced racial incongruence in Brazil. I always passed as white, which was also what I saw in me. But this changed once I left the country.
Here, other factors play a role in racial readings. It might be my hair, it might be my skin. It’s not as white as it should be, sorry. It might be because I am from Latin America. Latinos are not white, are they?
For some people, I will not make the cut. And again, there’s no objective reasoning behind it. But there is something that changes the rules of the game. The different context does change the racial concepts and limits.
The imaginary barriers among the races are shaped differently. Influenced by their particular expectations and experiences.
And at that first time, back in 2016, I was still not prepared to hear it. It still came to me as a shock although I never felt embarrassed by it. But time has passed. I read about it. I learned more about myself. And you know what?
They do have a point. I am not white!
Who’s white in Brazil?
A study on Brazillian ancestry used genetic markers to answer this question. They showed that the overwhelming majority of Brazilians have European, African, and Amerindian ancestry regardless of their skin color.
The data is the result of the whitening policies employed in the country since colonization. The Portuguese reacted against the number of indigenous people in the land and the increasing enslaved population.
The ideals of white supremacy over the blacks and natives were just as strong in the country as in other American colonies, like the US. But, differently from the United States, race-mixing was encouraged in Brazil.
During slavery, there was a high number of children being born from a Portuguese father and an enslaved black mother. Children of enslaved women were still slaves and their fathers profited from their sons.
Marriages among Portuguese and indigenous women were stimulated and used for their acculturation. This resulted in a steady decrease in the non-mixed native population.
The same ancestry study above shows evidence for this with analyses of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. They found a strong directional mating between European males and Amerindian and African females.
Diversity in Brazil has its foundations on the rape of enslaved black and indigenous women. As well as on the encouraged marriages between races for whitening the population.
Even after the end of slavery, the federal government continued implementing whitening policies. Their incentives attracted around six million European immigrants to Brazil.
All this history has formed a highly miscegenated population. Both in ancestry and phenotypical traits.
Genetically, we all have triple roots. Phenotypically, the variance is spread out in a spectrum. You cannot read it without being subjective. It will probably only make sense for the person doing the read.
Still, many see themselves as whites
According to the Census from 2010, 47,7% of the Brazillian population see themselves as white, 7,6% as black, 43,1% as pardos, 1,1% as yellow, and 0,4% as indigenous.
The huge gap between self-declared whites and the rest is still a result of the white superiority notions. These continue to be present in people’s subconscious. When in doubt, be white.
The pardo category is defined by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) as:
a classification that encompasses Multiracial Brazilians. People that identified themselves as having some kind of miscegination: mulata, cabocla, cafuza, mameluca or mestiça.
I must admit, I am not a big fan of the term pardo. It works as a broad umbrella term to describe those who are non-white, non-black, non-yellow, non-indigenous. It’s kinda the Brazillian equivalent of “brown.”
And as an umbrella term, it ends up hiding particularities inside it that matter. Like a fellow Brazillian, Carolina Panizzi, well said: The census not only describes the racial diversity, but it also forms it.
It creates and extinguishes racial categories and influences how the population identifies itself.
These 5 categories are not enough to represent all the diversity in Brazil. If I had to choose between them, I would choose pardo, since it is the closest to my feeling of belonging.
But I would rather write a whole medium article to explain my real answer. 😅
Soooo finally, am I white or brown?
I will have to say neither. I don’t see a point in trying to fit in one of these categories when they do not fully represent me. Especially when their meaning will depend on who I am speaking with.
In situations that I am among friends as I mentioned in the beginning, I can be free to express the whole picture. However, some other times, I have to take into consideration the context to decide how to address the subject.
I try to recognize my place in the eyes of other people. I am conscious of my privileges in some places but also aware that I might face incongruence elsewhere. At the same time, I don’t want to let others define my identity.
I will keep asserting who I am. The full picture. I have a genetically mixed ancestry resulted from the whole history of what my ancestors have gone through. And I want to make sure to highlight them for what they are.
I don’t want to be a type of Brazilian who tries to inflate their European origins and hide the others. In fact, why should I be proud of this part of my ancestry that oppressed the other parts?
A history built on invading, sacking, destroying, raping, and appropriating other cultures. All in the (false) names of democracy, Christianity, and whiteness. No thanks.
But I will also not turn into one of those that tries to run away from it, just because it has become a bit cooler to do so. I am not gonna pay 100 euros for a DNA test to proudly prove how non-white I am.
It is written on my face. Well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But in many contexts, I will still pass as white and enjoy the privileges that come from it. Even when the truth is not as clear as this.
I will keep recognizing all the parts of my ancestry as relevant in forming who I am. And most importantly, exposing the bullshit that happened in our history. Not ignoring and not forgetting.
It is part of my history. That’s what runs in my blood. And I live with it. I have to drag this whiteness in me. Nobody is perfect, right?
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Previously published on Medium.com and is republished here under permission.
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Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash