Abstract
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman’s The Color of Love (2015), a recent addition to the Louann Atkins Temple Women and Culture Series, describes the perpetuation of racial awareness within black Brazilian families through ideas of ‘racial fluency,’ the subjective understandings of the efficacies of racial knowledge and racial resistance. The work summarizes the failures and successes of forms of racial resistance, and the effectiveness of applying the cultural forces of the African diaspora to deconstruct structural racism within Brazil. In particular, Hordge-Freeman’s work offers an analysis of the socialization processes that educate Brazilians about race and phenotype. She shows how families socialize and perpetuate racial and phenotypical ideals through transmitting beliefs about melanin and beauty through humor, gossip, and religious ritual. Though much of her work in this book has been published in numerous articles in recent years, many scholars will find Hordge-Freeman’s analysis engaging. Akin to Edward Telles’s Race in Another America (2006), Hordge-Freeman applies quantitative data to analyze race construction within black Brazilian families. Like Telles, she continues a long tradition of scholars arguing against the assertions of historian Gilberto Freyre about the racelessness of Brazilian society, which Freyre portrayed within The Masters and the Slaves (1987 [1933]).
To analyze forms of racial perpetuation and effective resistance, the author follows the lifespan of her Brazilian subjects; from pregnancy, through birth, and into childhood and adult negotiations within the capitalist market. Hordge-Freeman begins her thought-provoking work by deconstructing love, especially love considered inherent, that of the mother. She summarizes how Brazilian mothers are held responsible for producing desirable offspring, and when they do not produce phenotypically white children are forced to occasionally use corporeal adjustments to make their children appear whiter. These manipulations include pinching of the nose to straighten, and crimping of the hair to flatten. Salons, like the Instituto Beleza Natural (Natural Beauty Institute), propagate these ideals into adulthood, creating paradigms of proper phenotypes for women to follow in order to become more desirable within the marriage market. The desire to meet such forms is often damaging to the self-esteem of those who do not meet these standards, leading to suicide and social disengagement. Many women fall victim to these hegemonic concerns in more nuanced ways, buying padded underwear and using popular African hair care products that accentuate what they understand as sexually desirable. Often, asserting African forms of beauty and culture work to both perpetuate and resist the racial hegemony of whiteness. To struggle against these overbearing forms of racial and phenotypic intricacy, many Brazilians apply capoeira and alternative racial educations that arise from specific choices made by families to resist racial hegemony.
Hordge-Freeman’s sociological field work was performed in Bahia between 2009 and 2014. She completed 116 interviews with members of 15 families, in both formal and informal settings. Her methodological tactics represent a more empathetic form of sociological research within the black feminist tradition. Hordge-Freeman lived with these families, often entering the most intimate moments of Brazilian life and regularly engaging in the use of monikers of affection. Because of this closeness, much of the author’s summary of methodology in her introduction and her appendix can conceivably be read as an apologia rather than a justification. There is fear here, an anxiety from the author that she may have become too close to her project, and that subjects knew of that proximity and performed their race and phenotype for the visiting American scholar. The reader is left questioning how much of the racialized and phenotypical opinions that Brazilians described were performed as quid pro quo to be near the extraordinary American scholar in the working-class neighborhood.
Even though Hordge-Freeman offers a wonderful synopsis of her methodological use of axial coding, readers may also feel some apprehension that 116 interviews with members of 15 families might not tell the entire story of racial complexity within black Brazilian families. Hordge-Freeman often uses long single quotes from her surveys to demonstrate her conclusions. For example, she cites a solitary pregnant mother’s concerns with her child’s phenotypes to justify that Brazilian mothers feel specific racial concerns as a central aspect of their pregnancies. There is doubt that every Brazilian mother is as obsessed with the particular concerns of this single mother within the racial or phenotypic ‘lottery.’ The interview process often involved Hordge-Freeman having to remind her subjects of their racial and phenotypic place within the Brazilian system. She describes this lack of racial knowing among some of her interviewees as racial confusion, as a way hegemony perpetuates through its very ambiguity and can be resisted through a similar form of semantic ambiguousness. However, this application of ‘semantic racial ambiguity’ as resistance might exemplify lacking racial consciousness rather than a form of radicalism, and it may be the interviewer reminding subjects of their race and phenotype that creates this romantic belief in agency. Without the space to expand this evaluation, this critic must simply argue that a larger discussion of processes of racial reification would have helped to clarify how the author understands pigment confusion, phenotypic consciousness, and possible racial transcendence.
The author coins many new terms. She defines ‘affective capital’ as how love and affection are disproportionately provided to racially and phenotypically appropriate children. She asserts the ‘family gaze’ as that panoptic force that perpetuates these phenotypic and racial ideals. Her analysis of the preservation of ‘racial rituals’ places the important moments of Brazilian childhood within these powerful terms of socialization. However, there is a lack of theoretical attribution throughout the work. In essence, what is being described by Hordge-Freeman is a form of neoliberal biopolitics whereby hegemony is cultivated not from above but from within. Nevertheless, within the text there are only a few references to Foucault, Gramsci, or Freud. The reader is provided a psychoanalysis of race, family, dehumanization, femininity, crises of masculinity, and the Brazilian mother without substantial psychoanalytical or critical race theory beyond Fanon and bell hooks. What remains is a study of social consciousness and the material choices of ‘racial bargaining’ without a theoretical background concerning the author’s explicit understanding of racial ontology in the present neoliberal moment.
Regardless of these critiques, Hordge-Freeman’s book is intellectually engaging. She places herself in an academic tradition that includes Pierre Bourdieu, Frantz Fanon, Ann Laura Stoler, and France Twine. She deviates from these scholars’ understandings of space, power, colonialism, and racialization by introducing the concept of ‘racial fluency.’ She defines this concept as how effectively one responds to perceptions of racism. The importance of racial awareness is not simply about understanding racism that oppresses, but how strategies to resist persecution develop, and the efficacy of those policies to transcend the hegemony of whiteness. Rather than analyze ‘pigmentocracy’ (i.e., too focused on skin color) or ‘racial knowing’ (i.e., too focused on knowledge rather than the effectiveness of applying that information), Hordge-Freeman hopes to take the next step to analyze how fluent a population can become to resist racism and the phenotypic ideals that uphold racial beliefs within the socialization process.
The Color of Love may have sacrificed theoretical development in favor of an elegant and accessible writing style. This will likely lessen the text’s academic lifespan. In summary, the reader is delivered a cynical though decidedly interesting summary of how racial and phenotypic ideals perpetuate within Brazilian families. As Hordge-Freeman shows, racism is inherently malleable, it survives by out-maneuvering patterns of resistance. She describes how this is structurally apparent in the coded superiority of whiteness within everyday banter, telenovelas, and the deracialization of historical narratives of abolition. This part of Hordge-Freeman’s story is intellectually stimulating and the families analyzed are important topics, but some may find that the apparent lack of quantitative support, reliance on single anecdotes to exemplify categorical ideas, dependence on subjective beliefs about phenotypes, willingness to coin new terms without significant theoretical clarification, and the nearness of scholar to subject make this work more academically benign than pioneering.