Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

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

Roth-Gordon, Jennifer

Paperback

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesPoverty & Social Work

ISBN10: 0520293800
ISBN13: 9780520293809
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Dec 20 2016
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro's residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what the author calls Brazil's comfortable racial contradiction, where embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country's history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) read the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features--including skin color, hair texture, and facial features--but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech commonly described as gíria (slang).

Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a good appearance), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and be cordial (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.

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