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  • Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil
  • Anani Dzidzienyo
Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. By Edward E. Telles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. ix, 324. Tables. Map. Notes. References. Index. $19.95 paper.

Edward Telles has written a book distinguished by careful research and attention to the existing literature in Brazilian race relations and society, supplemented by astute personal observations and reflectivity. He has succeeded in disentangling some of the fog surrounding both academic and popular discussions of Brazilian race relations, by themselves or in comparison with other race relations "situations," notably the United States. Precisely because of a confusion or conflation between "racial" origins and color "appearance," dissecting race relations disputations in Brazil has had the appearance of a moving target with multiple heads: slipping and sliding from the existence or non-existence of "problems"; affirming the national and societal commitment to race mixture while negating the salience of races; underscoring Brazilian exceptionalism; surging from the relative paucity of "hard" data to a surfeit of such data; underplaying the relationships between formally and legalized "normalized" practices of racism; lauding the emergence of recent legislation to redress issues which, in the absence of legalisms, had ostensibly not been there in the first place. The latter becomes an example of the supposed importation of "foreign" models likely to destabilize hallowed beliefs and practices about cross-color conviviality: Brazil had to be "protected" from foreign contagion, especially of the U.S. variety. [End Page 128]

Telles takes readers inside all of the above disputations and, through careful examination of the record, points out critical points of convergence and divergence between Brazil and other race relations orders within the international system. In a certain sense, what Telles has succeeded in demonstrating is that notwithstanding different national histories, discourses, and practices, there are troubling constants of a sort which cannot be willed away by merely appealing to the force of histories and national specificities. Short of showing that there is some as yet undiscovered place in the Americas where "whiteness" or imagined "whiteness" is automatically consigned to a position of extreme and negative prejudice and blackness or indigenousness tops the ranking order in material and political terms, all the raging discussions about the contingent nature of labels in racial color discourses have to be viewed as equally contingent.

What then is the way out of this labyrinth? Telles' titles his chapters with fitting subtitles; the copious provision of graphs and other pieces of empirical evidence from his own work and those of others constitute an example of clarity. This is a fitting book for use by both seasoned Brazilianists and those who are just beginning to engage Brazilian and comparative race-relations studies. Telles shows that no meaningful test of a race relations order can be confined to relations among individuals; institutional dimensions, have to be factored into the assessment. Thus, the presence or absence of a body of laws anchored in racist and legally sanctioned and or customarily accepted practices of exclusion have to be duly noted.

Yet one of the unintended consequences this reviewer wishes Telles had pursued a little more is that if, in fact, the law has been activist in the United States (legalizing racism but also the possibilities for contesting racism), what might be the real comparison with Brazil where, absent such legal "realities," informalized racism is extinct? How can the law become activist in an environment with no such history and practice of using the law to resolve race relations disputes? The peaceful coexistence among miscegenation, racial/color discrimination, the privileging of whiteness, the demonization of blackness, and the normalization of openly offensive verbal expressions directed at Blacks/Non-whites all come through in Telles.

Has racial democracy been completely knocked out of the ring? Has Brazil really become the country with the second largest black population in the world after Nigeria? If in fact there has been no unanimity about the meaning of blackness, how did this situation suddenly materialize? Telles' book should help provide some important advances in the unraveling of these Brazilian conundrums.

Anani Dzidzienyo
Brown UniversityProvidence, Rhode Island

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