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Brazil’s “Comfortable Racial Contradiction”

Jennifer Roth-Gordon

in Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

The introduction to this book briefly summarizes Brazilian race relations through an analysis of historical events and Brazilian fairy tales as well as current day examples including political ... More

The introduction to this book briefly summarizes Brazilian race relations through an analysis of historical events and Brazilian fairy tales as well as current day examples including political cartoons and the author’s own experiences living in Rio de Janeiro with a multi-racial family. It is argued that Brazilians live with a “comfortable racial contradiction” that includes obvious structural racism, a racial ideology that promotes the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness, but also a pride in racial mixture and racial tolerance that was enforced by Brazil’s 20th century dictatorships. While this contradiction is not “comfortable” for all, the author explains how it perseveres in a new political context where racial insult and racial exclusion can be legally challenged. The chapter ends with a description of the “compulsory closeness” of Rio de Janeiro, where city residents live in a dramatic situation of side-by-side race and class inequality. Within this context, it is argued that Rio residents engage in a continuous process of “reading” bodies for signs of blackness and whiteness, signs that include cultural and linguistic practices such as the use of slang (gíria).Less

Between Ossian Sweet and the Great Depression: Tolerance and Northern Racial Liberal Discourse in the Late 1920s

Karen R. Miller

in Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit

This chapter examines how northern racial liberals' commitment to the language of tolerance obscured their unself-conscious embrace of aspects of the racially unequal status quo that they understood ... More

This chapter examines how northern racial liberals' commitment to the language of tolerance obscured their unself-conscious embrace of aspects of the racially unequal status quo that they understood to be the products of sociological and cultural truths rather than political choices. White liberals instead turned that language to their own ends, using it as an electoral strategy and as a way to signal their inherent commitment to fair-mindedness. They embraced the idea that their promotion of racially tolerant discourse, alongside the gradual integration of African Americans into city institutions, could do the work of producing a more racially egalitarian urban terrain. However, they did not reshape the stark racial imbalances that characterized either the local government or city space, even when they controlled the state.Less

Anti-Integrationist Violence and the Tolerance-Violence Paradox

Jeannine Bell

in Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing

This chapter discusses the tolerance–violence paradox: how systematic, violent expressions of racism persist in a society marked by increasing tolerance and racial diversity. Violent crimes directed ... More

This chapter discusses the tolerance–violence paradox: how systematic, violent expressions of racism persist in a society marked by increasing tolerance and racial diversity. Violent crimes directed at minorities moving into white neighborhoods seem paradoxical in light of survey data that show increasing racial tolerance on issues such as interracial marriage and even in the area of housing itself. Research on whites' housing choices reveals that while they support housing integration in theory, many reject integrated neighborhoods. Perpetrators of anti-integrationist violence are the most extreme example of Americans who veto integrated neighborhoods. The study shows that these perpetrators and white residents have similar reasons for rejecting housing integration: the protection of their property values.Less

Making the Mano: The Uncomfortable Visibility of Blackness in Politically Conscious Brazilian Hip-Hop

Jennifer Roth-Gordon

in Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

Chapter 6 focuses on the intentional and defiant displays of blackness by politically conscious Brazilian rappers and rap fans and the challenges they pose to Brazil’s belief in racial tolerance. By ... More

Chapter 6 focuses on the intentional and defiant displays of blackness by politically conscious Brazilian rappers and rap fans and the challenges they pose to Brazil’s belief in racial tolerance. By the time politically conscious hip hop reached the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s, the nation was on the brink of engaging in a national debate surrounding sweeping legislative changes that would work towards addressing some of the country’s problems with structural racism, particularly through affirmative action quotas in higher education. But these changes would mark a dramatic shift in state policy and national reputation: Rather than continuing to celebrate race mixture and racial tolerance, the Brazilian state would publicly and officially admit to the visibility of blackness and to its racism. As reactions to politically conscious hip hop make apparent, this public recognition of racial difference and the challenges to ideas of racial tolerance provoked strong racial anxiety. This chapter explores rappers’ and rap fans’ embrace of “imported” cultural and linguistic practices that allowed them to wear blackness visibly, and defiantly, on their bodies in order to challenge their assigned place in Brazil’s racial hierarchyLess

3 Anti-Integrationist Violence and the Tolerance-Violence Paradox

Jeannine Bell

in Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing

This chapter discusses the tolerance–violence paradox: how systematic, violent expressions of racism persist in a society marked by increasing tolerance and racial diversity. Violent crimes directed ... More

This chapter discusses the tolerance–violence paradox: how systematic, violent expressions of racism persist in a society marked by increasing tolerance and racial diversity. Violent crimes directed at minorities moving into white neighborhoods seem paradoxical in light of survey data that show increasing racial tolerance on issues such as interracial marriage and even in the area of housing itself. Research on whites' housing choices reveals that while they support housing integration in theory, many reject integrated neighborhoods. Perpetrators of anti-integrationist violence are the most extreme example of Americans who veto integrated neighborhoods. The study shows that these perpetrators and white residents have similar reasons for rejecting housing integration: the protection of their property values. Less

Selling the “Golden People”: Hawai‘i Tourism and the Commodification of Racial Tolerance

Sarah Miller-Davenport

in Gateway State: Hawai'i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire

This chapter studies the Hawaiʻi tourism industry's efforts to market Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. Although Hawaiʻi had long been a ... More

This chapter studies the Hawaiʻi tourism industry's efforts to market Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. Although Hawaiʻi had long been a draw for wealthy tourists, jet travel, which arrived the same year as statehood, allowed a larger and broader cohort of mainland Americans to vacation in the islands, which the tourism industry portrayed as a quasi-foreign space where mainlanders could experience social amity and forge multicultural self-identities in the comfort of a safe, American milieu. In the process, the chapter argues that tourism helped turn race and racial tolerance into saleable—if intangible—commodities. Meanwhile, a massive military rest and recreation (RR) program in Hawaiʻi for combat soldiers during the Vietnam War exposed the limits of global mutual understanding and racial tolerance. Instead of encouraging its consumers to learn from Hawaiʻi's mixed multicultural society, RR in Hawaiʻi upheld the nuclear family and sought to insulate servicemen from the wider world. The tourism industry epitomized the ways in which much of the liberal racial discourse in the post-civil rights era conflated race, culture, and ethnicity, and in the process, depoliticized all three.Less

Community and Interracial Activities “To break down the banter of race prejudice”

Linda O. McMurry

in To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells

This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city ... More

This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city services and threatened racial tolerance. Housing and job competition created hostility that was beginning to erode black rights. Nevertheless, white reformers offered her new experiences of integration, and black protests frequently brought tangible results. Wells-Barnett began to spend more time in Chicago in 1896. At that time, she had two major outlets for her activism: the Conservator and the Ida B. Wells Club.Less

Places

Charles B. Hersch

in Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, New Orleans overflowed with music. Sometime around the 1890s, however, a new music had begun to emerge in New Orleans, called “ratty music,” which ... More

As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, New Orleans overflowed with music. Sometime around the 1890s, however, a new music had begun to emerge in New Orleans, called “ratty music,” which was a kind of embryonic jazz. New Orleans's relative racial tolerance laid the groundwork for a music that would catapult African Americans into the center of American culture. The emergence of a music that crossed racial boundaries also required a group that itself blurred such borders—mixed-race Creoles of Color. The existence of Creoles challenged the binary racial system, and indeed the concept of race itself, in a number of ways. In the period during which the music later called “jazz” first emerged, New Orleans's tradition of relative racial tolerance was largely being destroyed by Jim Crow, with a dramatic overturning of the vestiges of equality in the city. This chapter focuses on the emergence of jazz in New Orleans. It describes urban villages, black church and counterinstitutions, and the link between jazz and gender.Less

Epilogue: West Mount Airy and the Legacy of Integration

Abigail Perkiss

in Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

This concluding chapter argues that Mount Airy neighbors' efforts toward intentional integration were a part of a small movement around the country to create stable interracial communities. But ... More

This concluding chapter argues that Mount Airy neighbors' efforts toward intentional integration were a part of a small movement around the country to create stable interracial communities. But scholars noted that even if these interracial communities serve as little more than a footnote in the larger narrative of racial struggle in the United States, they offer unique insight into the historic process of community-making in postwar American cities. On that note, West Mount Airy neighbors developed and honed a model of neighborhood that, when deployed effectively, fostered both racial tolerance and economic viability. The innovation of grassroots liberalism, the recognition of the bilateral need for structural accountability and the like allowed residents to sustain a stable, open community in the midst of vast political, economic, and cultural change.Less

The South’s Gonna Do It Again: The Racial Politics of the New Southern Music of the 1970s

Charles L. Hughes

in Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South

This chapter examines the emergence of three insurgent music genres during the 1970s—swamp music, outlaw country, and southern rock. These genres asserted their racial tolerance and cultural ... More

This chapter examines the emergence of three insurgent music genres during the 1970s—swamp music, outlaw country, and southern rock. These genres asserted their racial tolerance and cultural progressivism as an explicit alternative to country music's conservatism and racial exclusivity. Additionally, all three genres took creative inspiration (and sometimes had literal origins) in the studios of the country-soul triangle and their artists foregrounded their love of soul music as part of their larger critique of the restrictions of country. The chapter discusses how the artists of these genres became symbols of a musical “New South” renaissance that accompanied an economic boom and political resurgence. This resurgence however had dual effects on African American music: it resulted in a further loss of employment opportunities and framed their work as the nostalgic voice of the past.Less

Borderline Cases: Gender, Race, and the “Disabled” Superhero

Alaniz José

in Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

This chapter describes the “borderline” case, in which the deformity or disability presents as the superpower itself. Stan Lee/Jack Kirby's The Thing of the Marvel super-team the Fantastic Four, ... More

This chapter describes the “borderline” case, in which the deformity or disability presents as the superpower itself. Stan Lee/Jack Kirby's The Thing of the Marvel super-team the Fantastic Four, inaugurates the borderline case, representing the most consistently problematic of these figures since from the series' inception, his frequent “bodily instability” and poor self-image continuously disrupts the team's family dynamics. The disabled “borderline” journeys of Ben Grimm/The Thing, Sharon Ventura/She-Thing/Ms. Marvel, and Victor Stone/Cyborg show the reinvention of superhero identity through their “different cultural elaborations of women's and men's bodies, bodies of color and white bodies, as these cultural elaborations intersect in narratives of illness and disability.” Their stories represent a new hybrid model of disability politics, transgender triumphalism, and racial tolerance, increasingly seen in mainstream American culture since the 1960s.Less

Living with the Huxtables in a State of Emergency

in Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid

This chapter considers the role of television in further breaking down the absence of Black South Africans under the States of Emergency in the mid-and late 1980s, paying particular attention to the ... More

This chapter considers the role of television in further breaking down the absence of Black South Africans under the States of Emergency in the mid-and late 1980s, paying particular attention to the third fence post: the overwhelming popularity of The Cosby Show among White South Africans. Ethnographic research shows that the SABC's version of current events during the States of Emergency was widely viewed as untrustworthy by Black and White South Africans alike. While Black South Africans lived the States of Emergency in an immediate and visceral way, White South Africans turned away from television news to make sense of their world. One of the places they turned, in extremely large numbers, was The Cosby Show. Through transnational media flows in general and particularly The Cosby Show, White South Africans were able to appropriate the language and attitude of “racial tolerance” in the United States while simultaneously conceptualizing a profound difference between Black Americans and Black South Africans. While this often led to apartheid apologetics, the shift from a biological to a cultural foundation for racial domination made formal apartheid increasingly difficult to maintain.Less

Constucting Banality: The Trivialization of the Jackie Robinson Legacy

Joel Nathan Rosen

in Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations

This chapter explores Jackie Robinson’s early twenty-first-century reputation. It argues that while Robinson is enjoying a remarkable as well as posthumous admiration, the cost is often obscured by ... More

This chapter explores Jackie Robinson’s early twenty-first-century reputation. It argues that while Robinson is enjoying a remarkable as well as posthumous admiration, the cost is often obscured by the false and often disingenuous promotion of racial tolerance and acceptance through the Robinson saga. Rather than viewing the ubiquitous characterizations of Robinson as indicative of the triumph of democracy and progress, the Robinson mystique should be viewed as being trivialized by virtue of its continued trumpeting of duty and comportment that belie the range of complex premises that lay beneath the unabashed cheerleading.Less