The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families

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Winner, Section on the Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution (Book) Award, American Sociological Association, 2016 Charles Horton Cooley Award for Recent Book, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction , 2017 Best Publication Award, Section on Body and Embodiment, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2018 The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families. Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvador’s inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the “blackest” in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity. Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction. The Face of a Slave......Page 18 Part I. Socialization and Stigma......Page 48 1. What's Love Got to Do with It? Racial Stigma and Embodied Capital......Page 50 2. Black Bodies, White Casts: Racializing and Gendering Bodies......Page 89 3. Home Is Where the Hurt Is: Affective Capital, Stigma, and Racialization......Page 119 Part II. Racial Socialization and Negotiations in Public Culture......Page 150 4. Racial Fluency: Reading between and beyond the Color Lines......Page 152 5. Mind Your Blackness: Embodied Capital and Spatial Mobility......Page 185 6. Antiracism in Transgressive Families......Page 220 Conclusion. The Ties That Bind......Page 246 Appendix A: Research Methods and Positionality......Page 264 Appendix B: Major Interview Topics......Page 274 Notes......Page 276 Bibliography......Page 302 Index......Page 318