Abstract
The Color of Love was a very fascinating, but emotionally difficult, read. It outlines the enduring significance of skin color and hyperstigmatization of blackness in Salvador, Brazil, which has the country’s largest black population. A primary point of entry for enslaved Africans brought to Brazil during slavery, Salvador has been regarded as the cradle of Afro-Brazilian history, culture, and religion. Yet, the city is more structurally disadvantaged and underresourced relative to other Brazilian cities of similar size. Salvador is literally and metaphorically “the black sheep of the national family” (p. 14) as Hordge-Freeman refers to it. In recent decades, the city has become a global tourist destination for individuals interested in learning about Afro-Brazilian culture and Salvador’s larger ties to the global African diaspora. Thus, Hordge-Freeman’s investigation of how Afro-Brazilian families reconcile their own color and racial identities and experiences of marginalization against the backdrop of Salvador’s pro-blackness tourism commodification is striking.
The book is based on extensive ethnographic research that Hordge-Freeman conducted in the Salvadoran neighborhood of “Lua Cheia,” where she interviewed 116 Afro-Brazilians from 10 poor and working-class families. She also conducted informal interviews with Brazilian activists and other residents of Salvador to provide more insight into the relevance of black phenotype in Salvador. Relying on her meticulous analysis, Hordge-Freeman argues that the family should be examined as a relevant institution for where race making occurs: “racial socialization in the family is one of the most effective tools-indeed the linchpin-of racial domination. Home is where the hurt is, precisely because of our strong belief that home is where the heart should be … Racial hegemony and gender oppression depend heavily on families to guide the head of domination” (p. 246). Relatedly, given the importance of phenotype in Brazil, Hordge-Freeman also argues that love and affection within families can be differentially distributed based on phenotype, where lighter relatives are provided with more affection than darker relatives. She calls this “affective capital,” where lighter phenotype results in higher emotional and psychological efficacy for functioning in the broader racialized society (p. 5).
Hordge-Freeman does a phenomenal job of drawing in readers with detailed descriptions of her respondents’ understandings of the centrality of phenotype throughout the life course. Many feel that the black body (i.e., nose shape, hair texture, and skin color) is societally observed and critiqued from birth (p. 230). Respondents learn about this centrality and how to cope with it from family members. Prior to birth, this creates anxiety for some pregnant women (in relationships where one person is lighter skinned) who fear having a “barriga suja” (dirty womb) that produces dark-skinned babies (p. 39). After birth, concerns about black physical features (i.e., wide nose) lead some mothers to engage in rituals like nose clamping (pinching the baby’s nostrils a few seconds every day) to make the wide nose thinner (p. 44). Racial phenotype concerns also extend to hair texture, particularly for girls and women, with many desiring to have straight long (“good”) hair instead of very curly (“bad”) hair.
With regard to adolescence and adulthood, Hordge-Freeman introduces the “racial fluency” concept to assess how families socialized respondents about variations in skin color, their relation to blackness, and negotiating racial spaces. One’s racial fluency is important for developing strategies for either accepting or resisting the Brazilian racial hierarchy. One strategy of acceptance is “respecting one’s blackness [which] includes avoiding public humiliation by respecting rather than transgressing racial boundaries” (p. 169). Conversely, a resistance strategy is transgressing racial boundaries by sometimes using “embodied capital” (manipulating body to gain access to resources reserved for dominant group, i.e., dress, speech). Another resistance strategy is respondents acquiring knowledge of structural racism for the purpose of disrupting it in their micro-level interactions and communities.
Certainly a page turner, Hordge-Freeman makes various scholarly contributions, the biggest being her exploration of how phenotype-based affection can reproduce racial inequality in racialized societies, which hardly any studies of race in the United States and Brazil have done. Relatedly, her notion of racial fluency examines how individuals respond to perceptions of racism and uncovers how racial strategies unintentionally reproduce racist ideologies. Finally, her embodied racial capital concept draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital theory to illustrate how some respondents manipulated their bodies to accept or resist the racial hierarchy. This book should be read by anyone with an interest in the African Diaspora, race and racism in Brazil, and family socialization practices.