{"id":15802,"date":"2011-08-23T00:52:35","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T00:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15802"},"modified":"2015-11-24T17:16:35","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T17:16:35","slug":"blonde-beauties-and-black-booties-racial-hierarchies-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15802","title":{"rendered":"Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ms. Magazine Blog<\/a>
\n2010-06-11<\/p>\n

Erica Williams<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
\nSpelman College, Atlanta, Georgia<\/em><\/p>\n

Model scouts strategically target towns in Southern Brazil<\/a> to \u201cfind the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in,\u201d explains Alexei Barrionuevo in a recentNew York Times<\/em> article, \u201cOff Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blonde.<\/a> The fact that a European standard of beauty still dominates the modeling industry should come as no surprise.<\/em> But why go to Brazil<\/a> in search of models with European features instead of going directly to Europe? This racial preference is deeply connected to Brazil\u2019s complex history of race relations.<\/p>\n

In the early 20th century, Brazil embarked on a national project of embranquecimento<\/em>\u2013whitening. Influenced by European scientific racism, state officials wanted to \u201cbreed the [black] blood out<\/a>\u201d of the national population. To do so, they encouraged Europeans to settle and hopefully, intermarry with the descendants of enslaved Africans. Despite this attempt to \u201cdilute\u201d the black population, many have upheld Brazil as a \u201cracial democracy\u201d where harmonious race relations and intermixing reined supreme, and where racism is not an issue…<\/p>\n

…Walk to any newsstand in Salvador da Bahia<\/a> and you will find dozens of postcards that use images of black women scantily clad in bikinis to \u201csell\u201d the area to the rest of the world. This is nothing new. The figure of the mulata<\/a>,<\/em> or mixed-race woman of African descent, has long been represented in Brazilian popular culture as the epitome of sexiness. Exported abroad as early as the 1970s in Oswaldo Sargentelli\u2019s world tour of samba<\/a> shows featuring mulata<\/em> women, now the term has become synonymous with \u201cprostitute\u201d for many European men who travel to Brazil for sex…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil Ms. Magazine Blog 2010-06-11 Erica Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia Model scouts strategically target towns in Southern Brazil to \u201cfind the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in,\u201d explains Alexei Barrionuevo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,83,21,8,394,25],"tags":[7302,7301,7300,7303],"class_list":["post-15802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-women","tag-erica-l-williams","tag-erica-lorraine-williams","tag-erica-williams","tag-ms-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44182,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15802\/revisions\/44182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}