Mixed-race Brazilians increasingly embrace blacknessPosted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2021-12-14 03:04Z by Steven |
Mixed-race Brazilians increasingly embrace blackness
France 24
2021-11-19
Rio de Janeiro (AFP) – When Bianca Santana was little, her grandmother used to put her forearm alongside her mother’s and her own, proudly showing how the family’s skin had lightened across the generations.
Now 37, Santana, a Brazilian writer and activist, sees the long-loaded issue of race in her country through a different lens: she is proud to call herself black.
“When a child was born with lighter skin, that was cause for celebration,” says Santana, recalling the messages she received about race growing up.
She remembers how her black grandmother used to make her pull her hair into a tight bun, so she wouldn’t look like “‘those little blackies.'”
“She liked to talk about how my mother’s father had Italian blood, how his mother had blue eyes,” she says.
Today, Santana, author of the book “How I Discovered I Was Black,” proudly wears her hair in an afro, a style she only embraced at age 30.
Her shifting sense of identity is increasingly common in Brazil, the country with the largest black population outside Africa.
Brazil, which will celebrate Black Consciousness Day Saturday, struggles with structural racism and the legacy of slavery, which it only abolished in 1888 — the last country in the Americas to do so.
But for the large mixed-race population in this sprawling country of 213 million people, the stigma long attached to blackness is fading.
“Mixed-race people in Brazil increasingly identify as black,” Santana says.
“They’re straightening their hair less, they’re embracing black identity more and more.”…
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