'Intergalactic' Resistance Studies Conference

Everyday Resistance to Brazilian Gray Racism

Seth Racusen
Anna Maria College
Resistance can only be understood in the context of domination which seeks to preempt and control resistance. This paper examines the ongoing exchanges between Brazilian racial domination and Afro-Brazilian resistance to racism and argues that Brazilian racism as an everyday behavioral racism is fully embedded in daily convivial relations, that resistance to Brazilian racism is also fully embedded in convivial relations, and that the juxtaposition of the three, domination, resistance, and conviviality, have contributed to the misinterpretation of both racial domination and resistance. Brazilian everyday racism leans heavily into humor, authoritatively characterized as "recreative racism" by Adilson Moreira, which enhances the appeal of racist performance to its audience. While all systems of oppression seek to insert the oppressed into agents of oppression, what distinguishes Brazil is that its national narrative of racial democracy legitimizes racist practices by Afro-Brazilians who can claim to be behaving on behalf of the nation. This symbolic incentive to use racist technologies against other Afro-Brazilians offers a language to justify racism: to have some trace of Blackness or mixedness and therefore to inherently not be racist. These dynamics constituted by Brazilian racial democracy resemble Primo Levi's "gray zone" which deconstructed and compromised all within. This paper argues that this structural grayness shapes everyday resistance and constitutes a collective action problem for victims seeking to contest racism, as portrayed by Neuza Santos Souza, whose paradigmatic work illuminated the deconstruction and reconstruction of being Afro Brazilian. The response of others to a public act of discrimination, which is undertheorized in the everyday resistance literature, shapes the possible responses for individuals targeted by an aggressor. Third parties tend to conduct themselves in covert fashion because of the trauma of the spectacle, to avoid the wrath of the aggressor, and/or their internalization of dominant values. The uncertainty about their responses shapes the responses of a victim who deploys certain forms of everyday resistance to surveil her audience while contemplating her options. Drawing from multiple literatures , this paper proposes five broad heuristic categories of repertoires of responses to Brazilian everyday racism: (1) performing convivial behaviors, (2) exits, internal and external, from the aggressions, (3) negotiating directly with the aggressor, (4) invoking third parties, and (5) collective voicing; and examines the utility of each repertoire from an empirical study of Afro Brazilian resistance. This study shows how the relations between victim, her audience and her aggressor evolved through and shaped her repertoires of resistance to racial domination.
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