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Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Confronting whitening in an
era of black consciousness:
racial ideology and black-white
interracial marriages in Rio de
Janeiro
Chinyere Osuji
Published online: 29 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Chinyere Osuji (2013) Confronting whitening in an era of black
consciousness: racial ideology and black-white interracial marriages in Rio de Janeiro,
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:10, 1490-1506, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.783926

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 Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013
Vol. 36, No. 10, 14901506, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783926

Confronting whitening in an era of black

consciousness: racial ideology and black-
white interracial marriages in Rio de
Janeiro
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Chinyere Osuji

(First submission January 2012; First published April 2013)

Abstract
In Latin America, whitening is understood as a goal of darker-skinned
individuals who marry whites to gain access to white social circles,
increase their social status, and produce lighter offspring. However, in
Brazil, increasing black consciousness and race-based policies are
seemingly at odds with contemporary attempts to whiten. Drawing on
qualitative interviews with forty-nine individuals in blackwhite couples,
I examine how they make sense of whitening in their lives. I find that
unlike in the past, respondents do not describe themselves engaged
in whitening and either find it offensive or recognize admissions of
whitening as stigmatized. Nevertheless, whitening is how friends, families
and other outsiders give meaning to their relationships, depending on the
gender of the respondent. In addition, I find evidence of some white
women understanding their relationships as a way of darkening them-
selves. This study reveals a transformation in the meanings associated
with whitening ideology in contemporary Brazil.

Keywords: race; whitening; interracial marriage; Brazil; Latin America; qualitative.

Introduction
In the early twentieth century, scientific racism advocated improving
the human race through maintaining the genetic purity of the races,
particularly Anglo-Saxons. However, Brazilian elites, like other Latin
American intellectuals, were influenced by Lamarckian eugenics in
which white genes were ‘stronger’ than their black or indigenous

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1491
counterparts (Skidmore 1974; Stepan 1991; de la Cadena 2000). For
this reason, they encouraged interracial marriage with whites to
‘bleach out’ non-white populations. Classic Brazilian race scholars
found that darker Brazilians strategized to marry white or lighter
partners to gain social status through accessing white social circles
and producing offspring with more European physical features
(de Azevedo 1955; Ianni 1960). More recently, Twine and Sheriff
showed that whitening remains a part of the ‘common sense’ of
Brazilians with Afro-Brazilians marrying individuals with a more
European phenotype, in part, to produce more attractive-looking
offspring (Twine 1998; Sheriff 2001).
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However, there are reasons to believe that understandings of

whitening have shifted. At the end of the twenty-first century, the black
movement became more visible, valuing blackness and calling for policy
measures to address racial inequality (Htun 2004; Daniel 2006; Silva
2006; Paschel and Sawyer 2008). Its attempts to include a negro category
on the census (Nobles 2000), an overall increase in Brazilians identifying
as pardo (‘brown’) or preto (‘black’) (Telles 2004; Bailey 2009; Schwartz-
man 2009), and more people of African descent embracing a negro1
(‘black’) identity (Silva and Reis 2011) suggest an increased valorization
of blackness that is seemingly at odds with whitening ideology.
In this study, I examine forty-nine qualitative interviews with
individuals in blackwhite couples in Rio de Janeiro to illuminate
how they understand and negotiate whitening in a context of
increasing black consciousness. I find that unlike the past, respondents
do not espouse whitening as a desired aspect of their relationships,
with some understanding it as stigmatizing and others as disparaging
the black partner. Nevertheless, friends, families and other outsiders
continue to understand these couples as engaged in the whitening
process. Furthermore, this study exposes a new valorization of
darkening among some respondents in these relationships. Overall,
I find evidence for a transformation in the meanings associated with
whitening ideology in contemporary Brazil.

Whitening and interracial marriage

Ideologies surrounding race mixture, particularly interracial marriage,
have had a profound impact on the Americas. In Brazil, there is a long
history of race mixture as both a symbol and a means of upward
mobility for darker-skinned individuals and their offspring. During
slavery, masters sometimes manumitted slaves who were their offspring
as well as female slaves with whom they were romantically involved
(Freyre 1980; Ferreira Furtado 2009). After slavery, a mulato elite
emerged that drew on their white parent’s connections and sought out
marriage with whites to help cultivate their elite status (de Azevedo
 1492 Chinyere Osuji
1955; Freyre 1980; Daniel 2006). Over generations, this process resulted
in a physical lightening of individuals vis-à-vis their darker ancestors
and increased social status for themselves and their offspring.
In the late nineteenth century, elites  influenced by Lamarckian
eugenics  challenged European and North American ideas that
blackwhite race mixture produced racial degenerates (Skidmore
1974; Stepan 1991; Viana 2005; Daniel 2006). Instead, due to their
supposedly stronger genes, whites were already in the process of
bleaching out black and indigenous populations through race mixture,
thus solving the ‘race problem’. Demographic evidence of Afro-
Brazilians’ lower fertility levels and higher rates of disease, malnutri-
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tion and infant mortality suggested that they were dying out and that
over several generations, whites would outnumber them (Viana 2005;
Daniel 2006). Elites also viewed non-white descendants of former
slaves as a hindrance to Brazilian development and evolution into a
First-World nation. Whitening ideology influenced public policy, with
the Brazilian government subsidizing thousands of European immi-
grants to migrate to Brazil, while simultaneously prohibiting black
immigration (Stepan 1991). Immigration would help to whiten the
population while meeting economic development goals.
In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre ([1933] 1986) praised the large amount
of interracial mating that occurred among Brazilians, popularizing the
notion of Brazil as a racial democracy (see Joseph, this issue).
Contrary to his contemporaries, Freyre saw interracial mating as
evidence of an absence of prejudice and conflict in Brazilian race
relations. However, rather than replacing whitening as an ideology,
racial democracy continued to encourage race mixture as an ideal. In
his qualitative study of ‘elites of colour’, de Azevedo (1955, p. 79, my
translation) found that ‘marriage between dark-skinned people and
whites bestows prestige to the former and offers the expectation of
children closer to’ whites.2 In a different study, Ianni (1960, p. 103)
found that whitening was ‘a ‘‘universal’’ aspiration’ of all non-whites
as well as a way of increasing social status. No longer solely an elite
ideology, these authors described whitening as a strategy that everyday
non-whites engaged in to move up the status and racial hierarchy
through lightening themselves intra- and intergenerationally.
However, understandings of whitening may have recently shifted.
The end of the twentieth century ushered in an increased prominence
of black consciousness-raising. Black movement activists mobilized,
however unsuccessfully, for a negro category on the Brazilian census
(Nobles 2000). In 2000, over 40,000 people participated in the historic
march in Brasilia emphasizing the continuing existence of racial
inequality (Htun 2004; Paschel and Sawyer 2008). Activists attended
the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South
Africa, publicly challenging the notion of Brazil as a racial democracy.
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1493
Since then, over fifty state and federal universities have created racial
quotas for the poor and for Afro-Brazilian students (Silva 2006;
Racusen 2010) and former president Luı́z Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’)
created the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR).
More Brazilians have embraced a negro identity (Silva and Reis 2011)
and are using pardo or preto categories on the census to identify
themselves (Telles 2004; Bailey 2009; Schwartzman 2009). These
changes in Brazilian society may have made aspirations for whitening
undesirable and show an increasing appreciation for blackness
challenging the racial hierarchy.
Although marriages across colour have increased in recent decades
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and now comprise a third of all marriages in Brazil (Petruccelli 2001;

Telles 2004; Ribeiro and Do Valle Silva 2009), this is a small
percentage given popular understandings of interracial marriage being
highly prevalent. In addition, marriages between whites and non-
whites are often characterized by status exchange in which non-whites
have higher levels of education than their white partners; in addition,
their likelihood of marrying whites increases with higher levels of
education (Schwartzman 2007). These characteristics of the marriage
market call into question the notion of whitening as a strategy or
symbol of upward mobility for non-white individuals today.
In the current era of increasing black consciousness, blackwhite
couples may not view their relationships as a whitening exercise. In the
current climate, they may see whitening as highly stigmatized or racist.
In addition, many scholars have failed to recognize that through
interracial marriage, the darker family may be whitening while the
lighter family is darkening (Telles 2004). Given the current context,
there may also be a burgeoning number of white Brazilians who value
‘darkening’ in their relationships, suggesting a reversal in whitening
ideology. Furthermore, there may be a disjuncture between how
couples understand their own relationships versus how outsiders see
them.

Methodology
The data that I use is from fieldwork that I conducted in the city of Rio
de Janeiro for eight months between August 2008 and February 2010.
Rio de Janeiro was an ideal research site because it has large white and
non-white populations, providing opportunity for interracial mar-
riages. In addition, since interracial couples are more likely to live in
urban areas in Brazil (Telles 2004), it would be easier to find them
there. In sum, I conducted forty-nine qualitative interviews with
individuals in twenty-five blackwhite couples.
Racial categorization varies according to time and place, including
people in my sample who appear black or white to me may not reflect
 1494 Chinyere Osuji
what these categories mean in Brazil. While Brazil is characterized by
a colour continuum, there are three main census colour categories:
branca (47.7 per cent), parda (43.1 per cent) and preto (7.6 per cent)
(IBGE 2011). The Brazilian government and black movement often
collapse the preto and pardo categories into one large negro category,
often used by Afro-descendants outside of the black movement (Silva
and Reis 2011). Unlike the USA, multiracialism is part of the national
myth of origin with pretos, pardos and brancos all openly acknowl-
edging race mixture in their ancestry (Degler 1986; Guimarães 2005).
Similar to recent, qualitative studies of blackwhite couples in
Brazil (Moutinho 2004), I recruited couples involving a negro married
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to a branco, relying solely on the nominations of native Brazilians.

Contrary to exaggerations in the fluidity of racial categories in Brazil
(Harris 1964, 1970), the overwhelming majority of my respondents
(forty-six out of forty-nine) identified as either negro or branco, with
self-identification corresponding to outsider-identification. This was
similar to nationally representative studies showing that self-identifi-
cation corresponds to outsider racial identification 80 per cent of the
time in Brazil (Telles 2002, 2004).
Given their small proportion of all marriages, I used ‘snowball’
sampling to find couples  a method that is useful for finding hard-
to-reach populations (Weiss 1995). In addition, I used purposive
sampling to capture variation in the experiences of blackwhite
couples by race, gender and level of education. There are fourteen
couples involving black men with white women and eleven involving
black women with white men. I sampled for three different educational
attainment groupings: both couples with some college experience
(eleven); neither partner having some college (six); and only one
partner having some college (seven). My over-sample of the highly
educated likely reflects a variety of factors, such as the likelihood of
non-whites marrying whites increasing with higher levels of education
(Schwartzman 2007). In addition, although interracial marriage in
general is more common among those with lower levels of education,
status exchange (Davis 1941; Merton 1941; Gordon 1964) is prevalent
in marriages between whites and non-whites specifically. Namely, in
interracial marriage in Brazil, non-whites have higher levels of
education than their white partners, compensating for their lower
racial status (Silva 1987; Petruccelli 2001; Telles 2004; Ribeiro and Do
Valle Silva 2009). Furthermore, homophily in my own social networks
(McPherson et al. 2001) likely produced more highly educated couples
than is reflective of the population. While my study is not nationally
representative, it illuminates the variation in meanings that these
couples give to their relationships.
Conducting individual qualitative interviews with blackwhite
couples illuminates the meaning of whitening in their lives.
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1495
This method can have limitations in terms of people giving socially
desirable responses, especially given the silence around issues of race
and colour in Brazil (Sheriff 2001). However, I minimized these
issues by spending the first part of the interview building rapport
with respondents as well as asking both direct and indirect
questions.
All interviews were conducted, transcribed and coded in Portuguese.
I examined the data to find and code instances of whitening, darkening
and marrying up/down in the lives of the respondents. I then
compared and contrasted coded transcript segments associated with
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different race and gender categories to examine variation in under-

standings of whitening. (More information on sampling and research
procedures are available upon request.)

Couples’ understandings of whitening

Unlike previous studies in which scholars found that whitening was
part of the way in which interracial couples understood their
relationships, whitening was not an aspiration that any of the
respondents openly revealed to me. This was true for both black and
white respondents. When I spoke to black partners about what initially
attracted them to their partners, many of them cited their white
partner’s intelligence, conversational skills or compassion. When I
asked them to describe physical aspects that were initially attractive to
them, respondents mentioned traits as varied as their partners’ rear
end (bunda), lips, their smile, their eyes (across colours), legs and
height. None of the black respondents discussed seeing their partners
as increasing their status in society nor expressed a desire for their
white partners to help them produce children with more ‘attractive’
characteristics. This is strikingly different from prior scholarship in
which non-whites overtly expressed whitening as part of their
motivation for relationships with whites.
For example, Ofélia is a forty-six-year-old white woman who
recently obtained her high school diploma. When I asked Ofélia if
she was lightening her husband’s family, she said:

Ofélia: No.
Chinyere: Why?
Ofélia: Because I think that in a relationship, the two of them,
the concern is not lightening or darkening. The concern is if the
two people like each other and want to be together. The skin
color doesn’t matter. It’s just being together.
 1496 Chinyere Osuji
Ofélia’s comments reveal that making the family whiter would imply
that a couple is together because of colour and not because of their
emotional attachment. Ofélia’s comments were typical in the sense that
none of the respondents saw themselves as whitening or helping their
partner to whiten.
I also interviewed Ofélia’s husband, Konrad, a forty-five-year-old
with a college degree. When asked about anyone thinking he had
lightened the family he explained that it had never happened because
his family of origin was more financially secure than his wife’s family.
Later, he explained why the notion of whitening does not make sense:
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The same way that the preto, that the negro thinks that ‘‘If I
marry a white woman, I am whitening,’’ the white person can
think that if he, she marries negro, that she is darkening. Right?
So then, am I going to say, ‘‘Hey, you’re darkening our race?’’ . . .
If [my son] later marries a negra, is he going to darken all over
again? It’s his problem. If he is going to marry a white woman to
lighten [the family] even more, I’m not going there, you know?
That’s not my problem.

Konrad’s interview reveals that his class privilege has shielded him from
others understanding his relationship with his wife as a way of engaging
in upward mobility. This is also likely due to his wife’s lower educational
status, making their marriage an example of status exchange. Konrad
also illuminates how the notion of whitening or darkening the family
does not make sense in that one partner is always darkening one side of
the family while the other is lightening the other side. His later
comments about his son marrying a black or white woman show that
for Konrad, what happens in future generations is outside of his control
and therefore not his concern. Nevertheless, it illustrates that he does
not entirely dismiss the idea of colouring the family through marriage.
Although whitening is not a concern for him personally, it still remains
a framework for understanding cross-colour relationships.
In my interviews with black men, the tone of the conversation
changed when I asked about whitening. For example, Edvaldo is a
twenty-four-year-old black man with a high school diploma. He
became a little angry when I asked about others thinking that he had
married up through his relationship with his wife Verônica, who also
has a high school diploma. He took issue with my use of the term
‘bettering the family’, a commonly understood phrase in which
whitening the family supposedly ‘improves’ it:

Chinyere: What are your experiences with people thinking that

you are lightening the family? Bettering the family?
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1497
Edvaldo: Why bettering?
Chinyere: Due to her skin color.
Edvaldo: Oh, and her skin color is better than mine or yours?
Chinyere: I don’t know. I am asking if other people talked to you
about that.
Edvaldo: No, but bettering, why bettering?
Chinyere: Lightening.
Edvaldo: Oh, lightening. But why bettering? Is our skin bad? Is it
spoiled?
Chinyere: I wouldn’t say that.
Edvaldo: Look . . . they even say that we age slower than they do.
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I think that it would be the contrary, but whatever.

Chinyere: But, so, have there been people that said that you are
lightening the family?
Edvaldo: No . . . we haven’t had a single problem. We never had a
problem regarding prejudice in any way.

Contrary to earlier studies showing whitening in a positive light,

Edvaldo saw whitening negatively and as a sign of prejudice. Similar
to arguments by black movement scholars (Do Nascimento 1989;
Munanga [1999] 2008), Edvaldo’s remarks reveal that the notion of
‘bettering the family’ through interracial mixing is a way of devaluing
blackness. He contests traditional notions of whitening, arguing that
lighter skin is not better than darker skin. His angry tone revealed
that he took offence to the idea that anyone would feel this way
about him and his wife. Whitening was not a part of how he
understood his relationship and, in fact, was offensive to suggest. His
comments show a challenging of a racial hierarchy favouring
whiteness.
Leandro is a twenty-eight-year-old negro who grew up poor, but
managed to go to college. He is married to Nádia, thirty-three, who is
also college-educated but grew up more middle class. Her mother owns
the condo where they live in the centre of town. Despite differences in
their family of origin, Leandro explained why he never received
comments about whitening from family or friends:

Leandro: My family at least, never said that to me. Probably

because people know me and know that if they were to say this, it
would not be very well received.
Chinyere: Why?
Leandro: It’s because the relationship that I have with people 
this I make very clear  it’s not because of color, it’s not because
of . . . the financial resources that they have nor the amount of
money, it’s not because of status, whatever it is, or the job they
 1498 Chinyere Osuji
have, it’s simply because of the person. And people knowing that
I’m like that, I’ve always made it very clear, if they think that, don’t
say it.

Leandro’s remarks reveal that he does not understand his relationship

with Nádia in terms of whitening. Like Ofélia suggested earlier, to do
so would negate the romantic nature of the relationship, reducing it to
a status-seeking exercise. Nevertheless, his comments also suggest that
he acknowledges that others may see his relationship in those terms
and may have told him so in the past. Like several respondents whom I
interviewed, he ‘makes it clear’ that such perceptions of his relation-
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ship are best left unsaid.

The notion of whitening the family implies that people have ulterior
motives for their relationships with their partners  that of ‘improving’
the quality of their stock and engaging in social mobility. Several
respondents mentioned that this was not how they saw their marriages
and that to suggest otherwise was inappropriate. This was very different
from studies by Ianni (1960) and de Azevedo (1955), in which many
Brazilians valued and aspired to whitening. Given Edvaldo’s angry
reaction to my questions, it is possible that those who know black
partners married to whites, as Leandro pointed out, know better than
to talk about such things with them.

Outsider perspectives
Most of the men did not discuss actual incidents in which they had
been accused of whitening or darkening their families. Only four men 
one black and three white  recalled such an incident. However, twelve
different women across colours mentioned that they had experienced
outsiders telling them that they were colouring their or their husband’s
families. For example, Verônica is a twenty-four-year-old white woman
with a high school diploma. She is married to Edvaldo, who became
angry during our discussion of whitening. Verônica discussed how she
has experienced discomfort from her neighbours in the form of jokes
about her ‘darkening’ her family:

Verônica: There have been jokes that I had to put an end to.
Jokes like ‘‘Oh, you’re trying to darken your family.’’ ‘‘You want
to give your mother a black grandson.’’ ‘‘Your daughter is going
to be mad at you because she’s going to grow up with hard hair
and your hair is good,’’ you know?
Chinyere: Who said this?
Verônica: Neighbors, some neighbors . . .
Chinyere: When was the last time that somebody said this?
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1499
Verônica: Oh, it was as soon as I was staying . . . when I went to
live with Edvaldo. You know? So then I told them ‘‘Children who
say that are children who were brought up poorly by their
parents,’’ because if my daughter were born with good hair or
bad hair, Edvaldo and I would work a lot to maintain her hair as
the most beautiful in the world and she’s going to know from an
early age to respect the race . . . and, or . . . the family that she
comes from, so she would never say ‘‘Mom, my hair is bad and
yours is good.’’ So I ended it, you know. Today, we no longer
have these problems.
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Unlike her husband, Edvaldo, Verônica describes receiving comments

about her darkening her family through her marriage to Edvaldo.
While accusations of whitening or darkening were the minority of
experiences, they were more common among female respondents.
Their childbearing capacity was a key component of how they were
seen as engaged in whitening. Despite maintaining racial hierarchies in
terms of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ hair, similar to Edvaldo, she understood
these comments as offensive and slight aggressions against her and her
family. This incident illustrates how outsiders draw attention to the
colour difference between her and her husband and demonstrate that
they think she has higher status due to her ‘good hair’. It also shows
how outsiders understand her relationship in terms of colouring her
family, even if she does not and even challenges this racial hierarchy.
Flávia is a twenty-five-year-old black woman with some college
education. She and her husband Ulises do not have children yet.
Smiling smugly, she said:

. . . my cousins say that because I married a white man, there’s

going to be a little white baby in the family, you know? ‘‘Enough
blacks, already!’’ But, I don’t see it like that. . . And my cousins
they say, ‘‘Flávia is going to lighten the family, right?’’ ‘‘That’s
why you married a white man, huh, Flávia? You’re lightening the
family. You’re not going to have a little black baby . . .’’ But I say,
‘‘What can I do, people?’’

Flávia’s comments reflect that outsiders see black wives as using their
marriage with white husbands to intentionally lighten the family.
There is the explicit notion that by engaging in race mixture, she is
deciding against having a black baby. Implicitly, the assumption is that
because of her white husband, she will have children that are lighter
than her and her family of origin. Their comments suggest that her
major motivations for marrying Ulises were to whiten her family and
 1500 Chinyere Osuji
diminish blackness in future generations more than the value she
placed on the relationship itself.
Otávio is a forty-four-year-old white man married to Katarina, both
with less than a grammar school education. During his interview, he
referenced her black family as the source of talk on whitening:

Otávio: . . . when she was alive, her own mother would say that  I
don’t know if it’s true, but it’s what she said  [Katarina] never
liked to go out with dark people. It’s not because of racism. It’s
because of the kids, so that they aren’t born all . . .
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Chinyere: It’s because of the children?

Otávio: Right.
Chinyere: In what sense?
Otávio: Marrying a white man so that the kids will be born
lighter with good hair.
Chinyere: And who thought this?
Otávio: She did. [Katarina] herself . . . She herself never went out
with a dark person. All of her boyfriends were white.
Chinyere: And what did you think about that?
Otávio: Everyone has their preference, right? If she’s always liked
white men, I’m not going to be opposed to it, right? It’s the same
thing as people of color that go, ‘‘Oh, I only go out with escuro.’’3
This can be a [form of] racism too. ‘‘What am I going to go out
with a white person for? I’m going to go out with a person of my
color . . . .’’ There are a lot of dark people that do not like to go
out with white people. I think she only has this thing . . . because
of the children. ‘‘If you marry with preto, the kids will be born
with hard hair’’ and I don’t know what. On this point, she was
always like that . . . she has prejudice due to living or marrying
with escuros, you know. She thinks that, ‘‘Oh, my daughter will
be born with hair like this.’’ I think it has nothing to do with
anything. So she herself is discriminating against her own color,
correct? That’s what I think.

Otávio’s comments reveal a tension in his understanding of

Katarina’s aspirations for whitening. On the one hand, he sees her
racial preference as problematic and as a form of racial discrimination.
On the other, it is a form of discrimination that he has benefitted from
as her white husband. His discussion of race relations is informed by
an understanding of internal racism among Afro-Brazilians, an issue
that the black movement has addressed in its negritude campaigns.
Nonetheless, he understands her racial preferences as being similar to
blacks who favour other blacks, while being silent about white racial
preferences. In addition, he does not challenge the assumption that
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1501
race mixture produces children with predictable skin and hair
characteristics. Otávio’s remarks show how he confronts, yet does
not completely challenge, whitening in his own relationship.
In her interview, Katarina, thirty-seven years old, revealed that her
husband is one of many white men whom she dated. When I asked her
if anyone thought that she was whitening, she said:

My aunt. The last time, she said to me, ‘‘Katarina, because you
have married a white man . . . you’ve lightened the family.’’ She
thinks that I lightened the family. But I don’t think so. That’s her
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thing . . . I told her ‘‘No. I don’t think so.’’ I said, ‘‘That’s not how
it was, Tı́a [Aunt], my lightening the family.’’ She said, ‘‘It’s
because our family only has blacks.’’ All of my family, all of my
cousins, they only married blacks, so she thinks that only I
lightened the family. Until now, because . . . my youngest sister . . .
she married a white man too.

Although Katarina argues that she did not marry a white man with the
goal of lightening her offspring, her friends and family saw her as
engaging in whitening, showing that it is still how they understand
blackwhite marriages. She negates the notion of her marital choice
having anything to do with improving her social status or producing
lighter children. Her comments show that whitening accusations are
something she confronts and challenges in her everyday life.
Katarina’s remarks are at odds with what her husband Otávio said
about her aspirations for lightening her family. There are two
possibilities for why this may be the case. One explanation is change
over time in how Katarina values her husband. According to Otávio’s
interview, Katarina dated white men to produce children with a more
European appearance. However, when I asked her to describe the
things she likes about her husband, she mentioned how affectionate he
is and how they have a really good relationship, not his whiteness.
These interviews together suggest that whitening may have been a part
of dating and initiating a relationship with Otávio, but is not how she
understands their relationship today.
Another possibility is that Katarina provided a socially desirable
response by refusing to admit her attempts at lightening the family. If
Katarina claims not to understand her relationship in terms of
whitening, yet really does, this illustrates a change in attitudes towards
whitening. Unlike past scholarship showing whitening as a ‘universal
aspiration’, whitening is no longer seen as a legitimate aspiration or
source of pride for non-white Brazilians. Telling her husband one thing
while telling me another, suggests that Katarina recognizes the
 1502 Chinyere Osuji
contemporary stigma of seeing her relationship through the lens of
whitening.
In both of these interpretations, Katarina has attempted to whiten
her family through her relationship with Otávio at one time or another.
However, both explanations point to a decline in whitening ideology for
people in interracial marriages, either over the course of their relation-
ships or in these couples overall. Nevertheless, both situations
illuminate how outsiders continue to understand blackwhite mar-
riages in whitening terms, regardless of how the couples themselves
understand their marriages. These couples continue to confront the
racial hierarchy that whitening implies, whether they challenge it openly
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like Katarina said or merely confront it, like Otávio.

Darkening
The practice of whitening ignores that over generations, only one of
the spouses is lightened while the lighter spouse is actually darkened
(Telles 2004; Daniel 2006). While interracial marriage as a process of
darkening the lighter spouse is often ignored in literature discussing
whitening, it emerged in interviews with white female respondents.
Unlike whitening which no one admitted engaging in, several white
women saw themselves engaged in ‘blackness by association’ through
their black husbands and their offspring. About half of white women
respondents discussed this valorization of blackness. Many remarked
that they had always identified with elements of Afro-Brazilian culture
and participated in black religious practices or wore Afrocentric
hairstyles. Across a variety of ages, largely lower-educated women
admitted to darkening, although none of them described upward
mobility as part of their motivation, despite possible status exchange.
None of the white men whom I interviewed expressed darkening
intentions, even those with connections to Afro-Brazilian culture, and
no black respondents openly expressed desires for whitening.
For example, Ana Marı́a is a fifty-year-old white woman who did not
finish high school. She articulated a lifelong racial preference for black
men, yet said that only in recent decades has she dated them. Making
sense of her current relationship with Cândido, her black husband, she
said that she ‘always [had] that attraction for the negro: knowing his life,
his culture. I also wanted to get involved [with Cândido] for this reason.’
She understood her romantic involvement with black men as a way of
culminating her desire to become closer to blackness. This desire has
also led her to become increasingly involved in Rio’s black movement
cultural events with her husband. Her interest in Afro-Brazilian culture
was linked to a romantic interest in black men.
In another example, Acemira is a twenty-one-year-old white woman
with a high school education married to Donato, a black man. In her
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1503
interview, she said: ‘Since I was little, I always told my mother that
I always had a wish to marry a preto and have preto kids. Only that she
wasn’t born preto, she came out branco.’
Acemira’s interview revealed how she understood the family-
formation process as a way of achieving darkening. Rather than
seeing herself as an agent of whitening in black families, she sees
herself as darkening herself and her white family of origin. However,
her relationship with a black man did not produce the desired result
since she understood her child as coming out white instead of black.
Nevertheless, her comments illustrate how she understands reproduc-
tion as a way of achieving blackness in her life.
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Unlike black partners who did not openly acknowledge engagement

in whitening, many white women demonstrate candour in their
admissions of understanding their relationships with their husbands
as a way of achieving blackness. Their comments show a contestation
with racial hierarchies prioritizing whiteness. However, rather than
challenging the idea of whitening, they simply invert it to apply to their
own racial status. In addition, the concentration of these experiences
among lower-educated white women suggests a status exchange system
devaluing black partners. Nevertheless, their comments suggest an
increasing valorization of blackness due to the black movement. More
than just influencing how Afro-Brazilians identify themselves, the black
movement has also resulted in increased white validation and apprecia-
tion for blackness that has led to open aspirations for darkening.

Conclusion
With the impact of the black movement and shifting racial identities,
changes in Brazilian society over the last fifteen years have ushered in
an overall appreciation for blackness that is incompatible with
whitening ideology. Interviews with people who are supposedly
involved in whitening processes, blackwhite couples, illuminate the
unravelling of whitening ideology today. My research shows that the
blackwhite couples I spoke to did not discuss their relationships as an
attempt at whitening. In fact, as seen in some responses, accusations of
whitening can be offensive and seen as a denigration of black partners.
Even when the possibility emerged that respondents may have been
engaged in whitening, they did not admit it due to the contemporary
stigma associated with it.
Although most couples did not describe themselves as whitening,
women of reproductive age were targets of jokes and accusations that
they were engaged in whitening. While changes in the social landscape
have resulted in whitening not being a part of how people understand
their own relationships, it is still a viable way of giving meaning to
these relationships for outsiders, forcing some couples to confront and
 1504 Chinyere Osuji
even challenge racial hierarchies. On the other hand, several white
women saw themselves engaged in darkening and openly admitted to
seeing their relationships as an extension of their desires for blackness.
Although respondents confronted accusations of whitening, they did
not dismiss the implicit notion of colouring themselves or their
offspring through interracial marriage. In addition, the status of these
women called into question their ability to contest racial hierarchies
privileging whiteness.
Future research can illuminate the extent to which whitening
ideology remains alive and well in Brazilian society. My respondents
lived and worked in the greater metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro,
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possibly allowing them to be more in touch with black consciousness

efforts, whether at home and abroad, and thus more critical of
whitening in their own lives. My findings may reflect the fact that more
Brazilians (including blackwhite couples) live in urban areas, which
may be more receptive to new ideas like black movement ideologies.
Comparisons of race relations in rural and other urban areas can
demonstrate whether these findings are specific to Rio de Janeiro or
are dispersed throughout the Brazilian population.
Previous studies of race mixture in Brazil have largely focused on
the experiences of mixed-race (usually male) offspring of white males
and their darker female partners. More analyses of white women in
interracial relationships as well as their female offspring could
illuminate the origins of darkening as well as potential changes in its
meaning over time. In addition, female perspectives of darkening and
race mixture more broadly can illuminate its untapped meanings
among different populations.
Since whitening ideology has been popular all over Latin America,
comparison with other countries can illuminate the extent to which
Brazil may follow general patterns of contemporary understandings of
race mixture. Future research can also illuminate the ways in which
families and race-mixing inform understandings of contemporary
racial formation, both in Latin America as well as across multiracial
societies. Since whitening or lightening never gained traction outside
of US black communities, it would be useful to examine the extent to
which similar notions of race mixture have emerged alongside
climbing rates of intermarriage. In addition, as race-based social
movements have emerged across Latin America, comparative research
can illustrate differences and similarities in the impact of these
movements on racial ideologies writ large.

Notes
1. In Portuguese, preto (‘black’) refers to the colour and negro (also ‘black’) refers to both
having dark skin and having primarily African ancestry, although these terms often overlap
 Confronting whitening in an era of black consciousness 1505
in meaning. Pardo translates as a brownish-grey colour and is an intermediate category
between preta and branco.
2. Francisca da Silva de Oliveira (‘Chica da Silva’), who lived in the eighteenth century, is
the most famous case of this. She was a slave of Diamantina’s most powerful man, became
his lover, and then the city’s most powerful woman. Known as ‘the slave who became queen’,
numerous films and soap operas have been made about her.
3. People with dark skin, often synonymous with pretos and a euphemism for blacks.

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CHINYERE OSUJI is the Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for

Africana Studies at University of Pennsylvania. She will be Assistant
Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University in Fall 2013.
ADDRESS: Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania,
3401 Walnut St., Suite 331A, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Email: chinyereosuji@gmail.com