Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Preface

On December 2, 1955, my first-grade teacher began class by saying, “Yesterday, in Montgomery, Alabama, a colored women, Mrs. Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to let a white passenger have her seat on the bus. It’s time we colored people stood up for our rights!” The question of “rights” went over my head, and I was especially confused by the phrase “we colored people.” I knew that everyone was “colored.” Some people were brown. Others were pink (which I knew to be a blend of red and white) or beige or tan (which were blends of varying degrees of brown and white). I remember how excited I was that year when Crayola came out with a box of crayons that included pink, beige, tan, and so on, although I was somewhat perplexed by the flesh crayon. It was similar to tan, but I knew that everyone was not “flesh”-colored. Nevertheless, I was happy to see my own tan color among the crayons. Up to that time, crayon boxes included only the basic colors. Consequently, I could not get pink, beige, or tan, except when I did watercolors and had access to white paint to blend with red or brown. Just to get a clarification, I raised my hand and asked who “colored” people were. “Everyone in this school!” she said quite startled. “What color are they?” I asked. “We’re brown! We’re Negroes!” I had seen brown people. (In fact, there were many at my school.) I also knew that my own tan-colored skin tone was part brown. However, I had never heard of the color “Negro” before, much less come across it among my crayons or paints. Consequently, this whole discussion left me quite confused. At the end of class, my teacher gave me a note to take home to my mother instructing her to have a long talk with me about being Negro and about segregation . (Many years later, my mother told me that she had avoided this topic because she did not want me to develop a sense of inferiority.) She now tried to explain the absurdity of segregated schools, water fountains, public parks, preface theaters, restaurants, hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries, and so on. She agreed that our family was “tan,” rather than “brown.” (There were some pink and beige family members, however, who I later discovered were not pink or beige at all but looked “white.” I had never seen anyone the color of the white crayon, or blackboard chalk.) My mother went on to explain how we came to be “tan” Negroes, throwing in details about African slavery, about our Irish, English, French, American Indian, Asian Indian, and possibly German-Jewish ancestry. She concluded by saying that although we were a blend of many things and, thus, only part-Negro, we were still members of the Negro race, which was another word for colored people. This struck me as being somewhat illogical, so I said, “But Mommy, when you mix brown and white, you don’t get brown or white, you get tan.” She told me it was not the same with people. Outwardly I acquiesced but could not understand how I could have East Indian and African and Native American and several European backgrounds and be Negro. How could you take one part of my whole background, the African part, and then get rid of all the rest? “That’s stupid,” I thought. “That doesn’t make any sense. One plus one equals two, not one.” I shelved the entire issue until 1965 when I stumbled upon Era Bell Thompson’s Ebony magazine article “Does Amalgamation Work in Brazil?” which discussed Brazilian race relations. As I browsed through the article, my eyes fell upon a passage that spoke of these mysterious creatures called “mulattoes.” They were the products of racial blending between Africans, Europeans—primarily Portuguese— and Native Americans and were intermediate to these groups. “Just like me! . . . Just Like Tabitha on Bewitched; like Mr. Spock on Star Trek! . . . Like twilight, that zone between day and night that we all pass through at dusk and dawn.” From that point on the classroom became not merely an academic arena but also a platform for self-discovery, transformation, and personal liberation, albeit most often under the mocking and disapproving scrutiny of my peers and superiors. I wanted to gain insight into why multiracial individuals of partial African American descent were prevented from embracing their other racial backgrounds in the United...