The Racialization of Light Skinned Black People in Episodes of Everyday Racism

Abstract

Analyze the process of racialization and racial belonging of light-skinned black people based on scenes of everyday racism. We used interviews with light-skinned black people to understand how their process of subjective constitution and racial belonging takes place. We chose to enunciate occurrences of racism from their daily lives to analyze the meanings socially attributed to their bodies and what are the subjective effects that these produce in their racialization. It became possible to affirm the existence of a specific social place for the light-skinned black person, marked by the denial of their blackness and by the creation of a symbolic position of miscegenation supported by hegemonic Brazilian racial ideologies, which form racialized subjectivities under the precepts of whiteness, in which it produces strategies to keep them in a structural position of racial alienation, in addition to fixating them in a social position of inferiority. Such phenomenon creates barriers to the constitution of a positive black identity.