Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro by Jennifer Roth-Gordon (review)

In a new book, Jennifer Roth-Gordon takes up a perennial puzzle: how is it that many Brazilians eschew the open acknowledgment of race and racism even while their nation maintains deeply embedded forms of structural racism? For Brazilianist anthropologists, this has always been a pressing question, but it is especially so now, as Brazil continues to wrangle with public controversy about the merits, fairness, and practical logistics of affirmative action policies that are still less than a generation old. A veteran researcher on the topic of race and racism in Brazil, Roth-Gordon's argument is that Brazilians routinely engage in a host of practices by which they "read" race on one another's bodies, identifying whiteness or blackness not simply via phenotypical signs but also via other, more subtle ones. These largely invisible practices allow Brazilians to closely attend to and perpetuate a complex racial order, even as the very existence of such an order is routinely denied in everyday discourse.

Race and the Brazilian Body is based on two separate stints of fieldwork—both in Rio de Janeiro—and both directed to sociolinguistic behavior. In 1997–1998, Roth-Gordon did participant-observation on a South-Zone city block on which poor people of color predominated, and in 2014, she conducted research among middle- and upper-middle class white people in the storied neighborhood of Ipanema. Although the projects associated with the research were quite different, Roth-Gordon brings them together to make an argument about how racial boundaries—a kind of subterranean preoccupation of all cariocas (residents of Rio)—are simultaneously policed and denied. Roth-Gordon avoids the much-used term "racial democracy" as a descriptor of Brazil's ideology of racial exceptionalism, preferring instead "comfortable racial contradiction" in order to highlight her emphasis on the peculiar mixture of ideas and practices that allow Brazilians to "smoothly juggle opposing ideals and realities" (5).

The book's organization is standard in that a first chapter introduces the theoretical notion of "comfortable contradiction" and its considerable historical depth in Brazil, and a final chapter, besides bringing together theoretical themes, recounts a story involving Roth-Gordon's adopted dark-skinned daughter as a means of discussing how "talk about racial difference" (188) has shifted somewhat in the new millennium. Interior chapters are unusual in that they take up material from two different field sites: the second chapter zeros in on how black youth manage what is, in essence, a stigmatized identity, while the following chapter switches to middle-class white families and their "investment" in producing the identities that afford them privilege. The fourth and fifth chapters examine how racialized notions of identity and belonging play out in the use of social space in the "marvelous city" and show how middle-class fears of blackness drive struggles for control of Rio's beaches and shopping malls. A sixth chapter considers how politically conscious Brazilian hip-hop "traffics" in racial meanings (166) and offers a commentary on the reading of race in Brazil. Throughout the work, Roth-Gordon quotes liberally from her informants, from the news media, and from hip-hop lyrics; given her interest in gíria, or slang, as a marker of identity, speakers of Portuguese will be pleased to find the original Portuguese along with well-considered English translations. Discussion of the voluminous literature on race and racism in Brazil is neither exhaustive, nor, thankfully, exhausting, yet it is sufficiently comprehensive to offer an introduction to the topic.

Brazilianist anthropologists will likely find much in this pleasantly accessible book to be familiar, even well-trodden ground, but several novel observations make it an important work for those studying racism in Latin America. As a sociolinguist, Roth-Gordon examines how linguistic behavior—and the judgements brought to such behavior—come into play in the production of racial meanings. Although Brazilians do not speak distinctive, identifiable dialects as such...