The Color of Sound: Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil

Conclusion: Evangelicalism, Blackness, and Music in Brazil

>> 175 Conclusion Evangelicalism, Blackness, and Music in Brazil My aim in this study has been to tease out from the bundle of forces that form racial identity the specific strand of music-making. How, I asked, do the practices of music shape the racial identities of their practitioners? To investigate this question, I compared musicians from three different São Paulo music scenes, holding constant their color (all called themselves negro) and religion (all were evangelicals). Here is what I found. First, being a gospel rapper means learning to identify with the periferia, absorbing chronologically recent musical history, and deploying vocal skills that rappers claim to be available to everyone, irrespective of race. These experiences, in turn, nurture a black identity that downplays essentialism and is filled with ideas of non-racially-based community with poor people everywhere. Second, being a gospel sambista means identifying with the Brazilian nation, internalizing the narrative of national hybridity, and becoming trained in a vocal style that 176 > 177 296; Contins 2008; Dawson 2008, 269; Motta 2009, 178), there is evidence that their participation in such struggles is growing. The number of projects and organizations of Brazilian evangelicals articulating an agenda of black identity now number at least sixty-five (cf. Burdick 2005). Consider the following examples. The Pastoral da Negritude, founded in 2005 in Macéio, Alagoas, currently involves about two dozen evangelicals in an effort it describes this way: “to awaken the evangelical community to a greater black consciousness, to rediscover among ourselves the African presence and culture in biblical history, to work toward the social inclusion of Afro-descendants , and to struggle against racial discrimination.”3 In 2010, the group partnered with other, nonevangelical black movement groups to educate negros about the census, sent a delegation to the census bureau to petition for more outreach to the black population, and assisted UNICEF at the local level to raise awareness about the impact of racism on children. Consider too the Fórum Permanente de Mulheres Cristãs Negras of Rio de Janeiro, which brings together two dozen women from a variety of Christian churches to organize seminars and workshops on black women’s health. The group collaborated with other black movement groups in mid-2010 to defend the federal Ministry of Education when it instituted a new policy of editing children ’s literature by adding footnotes to provide historical context to racist language,4 and it works regularly to place pressure on the public media to cover black issues. At the national level, meanwhile, the Aliança de Negras e Negros Evangélicos do Brasil is dedicated to promoting and strengthening the black evangelical movement. To realize this goal, it coordinates regional and national conferences such as the “Third Afro-Christian Meeting,” held at the Methodist University in São Paulo in May 2011. At that conference, the theme was to develop strategies for combating racism within evangelical churches, including promoting courses on negros in the Bible, organizing public forums in churches about racism in Brazilian society, and supporting educational events that teach congregations about affirmative action. Clearly all such projects cry out for close examination: to what extent and how do these initiatives reflect and effect ideological shifts inside Brazil’s evangelical churches? More generally, there is some evidence that even evangelicals not involved in such groups have begun to develop stronger antiracist views. Anthropologist Steve Selka found in questionnaires administered in the early 2000s that evangelicals in Bahia were as critical of racism as were nonevangelicals.5 178 > 179 These questions are as timely now as ever for Brazil, a continental society of nearly two hundred million people, with enormous internal variety. What are all the different ways of being negro in Brazil? In this book, I posed this question to a small group of Protestant evangelical musicians; to pursue these questions for evangelicals throughout Brazil will require taking into account factors about which I have only scratched the surface: region, denomination, generation, gender, class, and phenotype. Without going into great detail, let me comment on how each of these might make a difference in the construction of blackness. It has long been recognized that in a country as vast and diverse as Brazil , it is hard to develop reliable national-level claims about ethnic identity (Lesser 1999; Nava and Lauerhass 2006). While nationalizing forces such as media soften the edges of Brazil’s regions, Brazil remains a society of regions, in which variations in the demographic balance between negros...