Abstract
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman’s The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families is an important and exquisitely written contribution to our understanding of race, skin color, the body and embodiment, and sociology of the family in Brazil. Hordge-Freeman draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil and 116 in-depth interviews (formal and informal) conducted among ten core families (and extended family members) to finely detail how Afro-Brazilians are both resistant to and reproducers of ethnoracial domination in their own families.
Over the course of six chapters, The Color of Love covers considerable ground, from ethnoracial socialization processes to sibling rivalries and families attempting to police relationships to maintain or accrue phenotypic “advantages” to the hopes and fears of childbirth with respect to the “embodied racial capital” of newborn babies. Where existing work on race in Brazil, particularly in sociology, has focused on ethnoracial classification in the Census and debates over best practices for estimating ethnoracial stratification (see Bailey, Loveman, and Muniz 2013; Banton 2012; Dixon and Telles 2017; Monk 2016; Telles 2014). Hordge-Freeman shifts our focus to the micro-level in order to attend to the everyday lived experience of ethnoracial and phenotypic difference as it plays out in family life—a potentially critical corrective.
This shift of focus is rooted in a host of concepts—such as various forms of capital, for example, affective and embodied racial—that serve as the basis of The Color of Love’s theoretical framework. Part I (Chapters 1–3), the real core of the book, hones in on the micro-politics of race, color, the body, and interpersonal relationships in Afro-Brazilian families. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 3 focus on the unequal distribution of affective capital in families, which refers to “the emotional and psychological resources that a person gains from being positively evaluated and supported, and from receiving frequent and meaningful displays of affection” (p. 4). These chapters illustrate how intense scrutiny of “racial features” such as skin tone, hair texture, noses, eye color, and more relate to processes of ethnoracial socialization that often create internecine hierarchies within families that limit life chances, reproduce ethnoracial positions, and significantly affect subjective well-being and mental health.
Chapter 4 is one of the strongest and most important chapters in the book. Its focus on what Hordge-Freeman calls ‘racial fluency,’ and its findings serve as a powerful corrective to existing research on race and color categorization in Brazil. Specifically, Hordge-Freeman expertly details how race and color are understood as distinct concepts. Color categorization operates as an often informal but regularized system of phenotypic distinctions nested within, but spanning across more conventional race categories (e.g. negro, preto, white, pardo). She also details how contradictory and inconsistent race and color categorization can be in Brazil with respect to self-identification, perceived outsider ascription, and actual outsider ascription.
Chapters 5 connects embodied racial capital to spatial mobility and ethnoracial socialization processes. Hordge-Freeman notes that these socialization processes combine skepticism for the validity of “white spaces” with the acceptance of their reality by promoting self-vigilance to “mind one’s blackness” and craft one’s appearance to maintain respectability and avoid violence and stigmatization. Chapter 6 delves deeper into how Afro-Brazilian families craft strategies to resist stigmatization and ethnoracial domination, though to varying degrees of success. Hordge-Freeman consistently reveals herself to be a talented and sophisticated observer of the human condition, and ultimately, it is quite difficult to come away from this book unconvinced that
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. . . . [Yet], at the same time, the destruction of racial domination might be linked to that same institution: family. (p. 246)
Nevertheless, as with any book, there are some weaknesses (likely related to the usual compromises faced in reaching a final cut). For example, the author leans so heavily on rich description that sometimes opportunities are lost to connect her important qualitative findings back to existing qualitative and quantitative research on race and color in Brazil in constructive yet critical ways. And perhaps more could have been done throughout the text to mobilize the findings to engage with existing theories of capital, with the aim of challenging and extending those theories (i.e., theory construction). For instance, one of the key features of capital is its relationality, and although some of the findings speak to this, more detailed and explicit discussions of the relationality of capital in The Color of Love would have added even more value to this unquestionably significant book.
None of these weaknesses, however, should dissuade readers from engaging with this important and lovingly crafted book that is full of valuable findings and insights. Again, Chapter 4 alone makes this book essential reading for anyone interested in understanding ethnoracial classification in Brazil or Latin America, as it is one of the most sophisticated (and accurate) accounts of ethnoracial and color categorization in Brazil I have ever read. The Color of Love is a powerful rendering of the complex and sophisticated nature of ethnoracial domination (as it plays out in Afro-Brazilian families)—the often contradictory negotiation of self-identification, outsider ascription, ethnoracial biases, warring standards of beauty, capitulation, and resistance that indelibly shapes so many public and private lives.