Tão longe, tão perto: pretos e pardos e o enigma racial brasileiro

• Autor(a) principal: Daflon, Verônica Toste
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/15494
• topic: Racial inequalities; Racial discrimination; Ethnic and racial classification; Stereotypes; Perception of prejudice; Desigualdade racial; Discriminação racial; Classificação étnico-racial; Estereótipos; Percepção das discriminações; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::SOCIOLOGIA::OUTRAS SOCIOLOGIAS ESPECIFICAS

Until de mid-1970s academic studies strived to decipher the social standing of browns (pardos) in Brazil. However, more recent investigations, with few exceptions, remain silent on the specificities of this group. Blacks and browns have been grouped into the same category in analyses of inequality and racial discrimination. Whereas browns are extremely similar to blacks regarding socioeconomic indicators, chances of social mobility and racial discriminations, they are far apart from blacks in terms of their perception of prejudice and of the discrimination they are victims of. The nexus between color and discrimination is not evident in the purview of this group. This dissertation returns to browns as an object of reflection and investigates why they seem to suffer a similar degree of discrimination to blacks, yet they do not report it in the same way. Building upon the production of original analyses of quantitative data and surveys on racism, I find evidence capable of grounding a set of non-mutually exclusive explanations (1): the binary nature of the language of racism and anti-racism in Brazil, which exclude browns from the public debate, (2) methodological problems in the surveys on racial discrimination, (3) the idealized presence of morenidade in the identity and self-image of brown Brazilians, (4) the peculiarity of the sociability among blacks, browns and whites, (5) the ambivalence of stereotypes that apply to browns, and lastly (6) the higher porosity of white elites in relation to browns. Based on the elaboration of an alternative method for the measurement of the perception of discrimination, based on the Everyday Discrimination Scale, I demonstrate that blacks and browns from lower income groups have more similar perceptions of discriminatory behaviors while those who rise to the middle classes and elites diverge: blacks start reporting greater discrimination, while browns all but cease feeling it. I argue that Brazilian ambivalent racism operates so as to thwart social mobility of blacks and also browns, but that the stereotypes and attitudes to which it is related penalize more severely blacks who ascend socially than browns.