Abstract
In The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman offers a theoretically engaging and empirically rich account of contemporary race relations in Brazil. The book analyzes the complex ways that racial hierarchies and categorization permeate the most intimate sphere of social relations: the family. The book draws on sixteen months of deep ethnographic work in the neighborhood she calls Lua Cheia in Brazil’s northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia. The book expertly crafts an analytically sophisticated and empirically textured account of how racial socialization pervades the intimate life of this community in ways that have profound emotional and material consequences. At the same time, in adopting an intersectional approach, Hordge-Freeman shows how racial hierarchies in Brazil are also deeply imbricated with patriarchy and classism.
Through the narratives of ten families in Salvador, The Color of Love paints a vivid picture of the highs and lows of Lua Cheia, from their celebrations of special moments to their daily struggles with poverty, institutionalized racism, and the racialized and gendered hierarchies that permeate their family life. While we learn a great deal from the interviews that Hordge-Freeman conducts, it is her ethnographic work that brilliantly wraps these interviews in an entire social fabric. What is more, Hordge-Freeman shows us how the neat narratives that emerged from her interviews sometimes unraveled as she learned more about the complex lives and everyday negotiations of the people in the study. For example, we meet eight-year old Dania who in an interview says she loves her hair and would never change; it is only later that it is revealed she had actually begged her mother for months to straighten it. Through following the gossip that circulates around alleged affairs and the paternity of children in Lua Cheia, Hordge-Freeman also captures the pervasive moral panic and policing that is at once racialized and gendered.
The Color of Love is beautifully written, well-argued, and expertly translated. Hordge-Freeman not only transports us to Salvador with her descriptive acumen, but she also is particularly skilled at translating the layered meanings of words like “clean” and “dirty” as well as the many forms of nonverbal communication, from sucks of the teeth to uncomfortable gestures, that are so important to Bahian Portuguese. These rich details are purposeful and help us understand the analytic framework and empirical findings of the book. No detail seems gratuitous, no story out of place. The Color of Love builds on a generation of research on race in Brazil to offer an unprecedented account of the system of racial meanings and hierarchies that underlie “tender and tense” family relationships.
She also reminds us what is at stake in all of this. Rather than benign or purely symbolic differentiations, Hordge-Freeman unveils an unequal distribution of love that not only sets up people with darker skin color and “blacker” or “African” features to have a lower sense of self-worth but sometimes also results in unequal investments in education and mobility. The author builds on the idea of “affective capital” to help us make sense of these racialized inequalities.
While this book aptly centers on the family as a key site of race-making, it also powerfully underscores how the family can act as a window into broader racial ideologies and patterns of racial stratification in education, public space, and the labor market. Indeed, in taking us into the inner workings of family relationships and conflicts, the emotional struggles of children and adults, individuals’ major life decisions, and the racial anxieties that envelop them, we begin to understand how racial hierarchy, and specifically anti-blackness, is lived and powerfully reproduced in Brazil.
But this is far from a story of blind reproduction. Hordge-Freeman also convincingly shows that the family can be a key site in the contestation over and undermining of racial hierarchies. We meet, for example, a man who is self-named “Black Panther” as well as Dona Lara, a “negra assumida” who embraces her blackness. There are also vivid cases of people like Lilza, a white Brazilian married to a black man, who has already begun to craft a narrative of positive racial self-esteem for her future children. There are also examples of what Hordge-Freeman calls “critical accommodation,” in which Afro-Brazilians conform to racial hierarchies temporarily, with the ultimate goal of undermining them.
More provocatively, though, Hordge-Freeman’s work challenges us to see agency in more complex ways than simply overt resistance to anti-blackness. The book introduces the concepts of “racial bargains” and “racial rituals” to help us better understand how Brazilian families navigate the racial order. Racial bargains are “attempts to exert agency in the face of racial stigmatization” (p. 26) and are most acute when it comes to decisions about marriage and reproduction. The Color of Love documents a number of social practices or “racial rituals” aimed at bringing about a kind of racial mobility, including attempts to mold babies’ noses into a more European shape. Ultimately, this myriad of practices of reproduction, accommodation, and resistance offers a much more robust picture of the way ordinary Brazilians navigate racialized, classed, and gendered societies. This call to think about agency in more complex ways than the false consciousness or overt resistance dichotomy reminds me of a similar provocation made by anthropologist Saba Mahmood in her work on piety movements among Muslim women in Egypt.
The only potential shortcoming of this excellent book may be in parsing out the relationship between socialization in the home and broader processes of racialization. As Hordge-Freeman aptly notes, there are many continuities between anti-blackness under slavery and in the contemporary period. At the same time, she offers many glimpses into the role that popular culture (i.e., telenovelas), public institutions (i.e., schools, the police), and even the tourist economy play in the racial socialization of these families. I was hoping that the theoretical framework would do more in making sense of the relationship between these different spheres. Instead, what we see in The Color of Love is the intimate life of racism in Brazilian homes where the TV seems to literally and analytically be in the background.
Nevertheless, this book undoubtedly offers both theoretical and empirical gems to the sociology of race and inequality as well as to the study of the African diaspora in Latin America and beyond. The Color of Love is a call to take more seriously the affective dimensions of the reproduction of racial inequality. What is more, it is a call to unpack racial differentiation in intersectional ways.Just as the availability of unprecedented data has shown convincingly that LatinAmerican countries have developed pigmentocracies, The Color of Love reminds us that skin color is not the only phenotypic marker of race; in fact, for women it does not even seem to be the most important one.
Another important contribution is about where we are to situate Brazil in broader analyses of the African diaspora. Hordge-Freeman tells the story of Regane, who fears that her newborn sister will suck up all of her mother’s love because of her lighter complexion. Such stories are painful to hear. At the same time, she is particularly careful not to pathologize Afro-Brazilians as having a unique brand of internalized racism. Instead, she uses the rich secondary literature on race about places like the United States, the Francophone Caribbean, and other countries in Latin America to analyze the commonalities in processes of racialization, as well as the complex practices of rupture and accommodation of racial hierarchy. Ultimately, she shows that while the dynamics of racism and racial socialization may vary across these contexts, they also bear a striking resemblance. The Color of Love is an excellent piece of scholarship that should be read by scholars and students of a number of subfields in sociology (stratification, ethnographic methods, gender, social psychology, sociology of the family, race and ethnicity) as well as scholars of the African diaspora.