- [Announcer] On this episode of "Roots, Race & Culture."

- Is someone's race the same everywhere you go?

- In short, not exactly.

- Each country has a unique take on race and culture, so there's both commonalities and differences.

- Explore the different cultural customs that influenced this very fundamental question.

- For us in Brazilian people, Neymar, it's brown, no black.

- Oh wait, there's a difference?

(laughing) - Yes, very difference.

- Join us on "Roots, Race & Culture."

- [Announcer] Funding for "Roots, Race & Culture" is provided in part by the Norman C. and Barbara L. Tanner Charitable Support Trust and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Hey everyone, and welcome to "Roots, Race & Culture" where we bring you into candid conversations about shared cultural experiences.

I'm Lonzo Liggins.

- And I'm Danor Gerald.

Thanks for joining us.

Imagine growing up in a country like Spain and being told your entire life you were a white European.

Then as an adult, you immigrate to the United States where you're told you aren't considered white, but rather non-white or Hispanic.

- The construct of race varies from country to country, but where do these categories come from and why do they differ?

Today, we have two guests in studio to help us understand.

Welcome.

- Thank you.

- How are you guys doing today?

- Thank you for joining us.

- Wonderful.

Introduce yourself, Jackie.

- Sure, I'm Jackie Chen.

I'm an associate professor of psychology at the University of Utah, and I study how race and culture affect how we think about others and how we interact with each other.

- Nice.

- Wonderful.

And then, of course, we have Jomens.

- Yes, I'm from Brazil.

I was born in Amazon, Porto Velho, Rondonia.

I have two graduation, food engineer and production engineer.

- Oh, food and production engineer, okay.

- Yes, and my language is Portuguese.

- Oh, excellent, so great.

So thank you for joining us.

- Thank you.

- How long have you been in the United States?

- Close for nine years.

- Oh, so you've been here a while.

And so you feel comfortable here, Utah's home, or are you ready to go back to Brazil?

- For now, I'm very comfortable, but before, no.

- We're gonna get into that.

- Yeah, we'll talk about that.

So, Jackie, you're not originally from Utah.

Where are you from originally?

- I'm originally from California, and I was a professor at UC Irvine when I received an exciting opportunity to join the University of Utah in 2016, and I moved here because of that job.

- So what got you into this topic?

'Cause I originally met you, you were giving a lecture up at the University of Utah about Brazil and race.

What interested you in that topic?

- So I was really interested in the ideas of race and culture, sort of going back to my early childhood.

So growing up in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area, I was one of very few Asian American kids in my elementary school, which was predominantly white.

And I noticed at the time I was easily drawn to befriending the one or two other Asian American girls in my class.

But then when I was in middle school, my family moved to Brussels, Belgium, where I was attending an international school with people all over the world, and actually was surprised to learn that I felt like the most commonality with the other American girls in the school who happened to be predominantly white, and that the girls who looked more like me, the Asian girls from Asia, and I had very little in common at that time.

So these experiences sort of highlighted for me how race and culture differently impact how we relate to each other.

- Wow.

- Nice.

- Yeah, that's an interesting experience.

I bet you walk away from that really questioning how you perceive other people.

I'd like to know from you, Jomens, what was life for you like growing up in Brazil?

You have dark skin.

Were you considered black?

Did you get along well with other people?

What's that like?

- Brazil, it's amazing.

You have diversity people, mixed color, mixed people.

So for me, it's normal staying there.

White people, black people.

But if you go to a privacy school, only white people.

- Only white folks at the private school, okay.

And so did you attend a private school?

- Yes.

- Oh.

- All my life, privacy school, federal university.

I am only black people in my class.

Always white people.

- Yeah, I know that feeling.

- Was it a big class?

- Big class.

- Yeah.

- Only me, black people.

- Yeah.

We're interested to find out, we're gonna talk about race in Brazil and how it's sort of, it's kind of equal to what we deal with here, but not exactly equal.

And Jackie, you've done some research on that topic.

Tell us a little bit about your research.

- Yeah, over the past 10 years, we've conducted a number of studies comparing how Americans and Brazilians think about race and perceive the race of other people.

While we do see some similarities, both Americans and Brazilians agree that race is usually determined by your ancestry, as well as how you look.

And for Brazilians, predominantly your skin color.

The differences emerge when we ask people, well, what happens if those two things don't agree?

If you have black ancestry, but you don't look black, or if you look black, but you don't actually have black ancestry, which of the two should win out, per se?

And Americans believe strongly that ancestry determines race, whereas Brazilians are more likely to say, no, it's appearance that determines race rather than ancestry, if the two conflict.

- Yeah, so when I was up at the University of Utah, she was giving this lecture, and she used an example.

And the example that you gave, could you describe for us the example that you gave?

- Sure, it was comparing the classifications of, or self-identifications of President Barack Obama and Brazilian soccer star Neymar.

I think both of them, they look sort of medium brown, and sort of a mixture of Eurocentric and Afrocentric features.

- Basically biracial.

- Yeah, yeah.

And then, but Barack Obama very proudly self-identifies as black, whereas Neymar, when he was asked by a reporter, how do you identify if you have faced racism?

He was like, oh no, I haven't faced racism 'cause I'm not black.

And so just a very stark discrepancy between two people who look similar, but just are from different cultures and have very different racial identities.

- Is that a product, do you think, of the location of being in Brazil?

Or is that just like culturally, you get to decide for yourself?

I mean, how do you know if he's black or white?

What do you think?

- For us in Brazilian people, Neymar, it's brown.

No black.

- Oh wait, there's a difference?

- It's very different.

- Okay, talk to me about that.

What's the difference between being brown and black?

- Brown, for me, you are brown.

You are black, you are brown.

It's different.

My mom, she was ginger.

My daddy, she was black.

- So when you say ginger, that's usually, that's like white.

- Yes.

- Ginger, we think of redheads in America.

- Yes, exactly.

- In Portuguese, well, in Brazilian Portuguese, you say ginger.

- In Portuguese, (speaking in foreign language) - But ginger is actually just the way you describe it.

- Is that just white?

Is that what that means?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- But you have a big pop star for Pele.

Pele, he was black, 100% black.

- Okay.

- You have Newton Nascimento, black.

You have Monteiro Lobato, he's amazing scriptures in the world, but Paulo Coelho, he was white people.

- Oh, Paulo Coelho.

- And that's the thing, that both America and Brazil, they both had slavery.

- Yes.

- Both countries, like you have Spain, you have Portugal, you have the United States, you have Brazil, they all had slavery.

But Brazil somehow evolved differently with the idea of slavery.

Tell us a little bit more about your research with that.

- Yeah, so that relates back to the historical context.

If you wanna compare the U.S.

and Brazil, I think it's important to note the major differences in the size of the enslaved populations.

In the U.S., it was, at the end, about 400,000 enslaved people, compared to Brazil, which practiced slavery for longer and much more recent.

So they, in the end, had about 4.9 million enslaved people.

So there's a big difference in the enslaved populations there.

And if you think about, in the U.S., a lot of policies around the enslaved people had to do with the preservation of wealth, because slaves were considered property.

So if you're trying to maintain the population, you're not going to allow people to become free, and you're not going to allow enslaved people to mix with other people.

And anyone who is multiracial should be considered enslaved to kind of keep that population size healthy.

In contrast, in Brazil, there was much larger enslaved populations spread over a larger geographic region.

And so people, some slaves were allowed to work for their freedom, to seek relief from a cruel master, and even had the right to marry.

And the Brazilian, sorry, the Portuguese colonists were more in favor of intermixing, in part because of a shortage of European women.

So there was already some more support for mixing of enslaved people and free people.

- Wow, that is a very different dynamic than what we experienced, or historically what happened here in the United States.

So then you having, you said your father was considered black and your mom considered white.

How did that impact the way people treated you when you went to these private schools that were predominantly white?

You're the only person.

- But you're not considered black, you're considered brown, right?

- I am black.

- Okay.

(laughs) So it's just basically how your appearance is, not necessarily.

- Yes, that's right.

But I wasn't remember when I have the party, but this day, my mom go to my party.

My mom, she's white.

She's very fancy.

My teacher, "Where is your mother?"

"Ah, I saw your mother."

She saw one black woman.

I thought, "No, my mom is beside."

"What, your mom, she's white?"

"What?"

"Yes, this is my mom."

- Wow, and did she treat you differently when she found out your mom was white?

- Yes, yes.

- The teacher, wow.

- Yes.

- And in Brazil, there's certain traditions that you've been allowed to hold on to.

With African slaves, we did hold on to some traditions.

With African American slaves, we held on to some traditions, but in Brazil, there's a lot of open traditions that we held on to, such as capoeira.

- Yes, capoeira, it's amazing.

- Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about capoeira?

- Capoeira, it's origin, my ancestors.

Because before, capoeira, it's typical and dense, but protect you from fire and other people.

But basically, black people can do it, but for now, everything can do it, capoeira.

In Salt Lake, you have an amazing teacher for capoeira.

I think so, 200% the classic white peoples.

- Yeah, and it's traditions that have been held on to.

When we talk about racial categories when it comes to Brazilians, what racial categories are we talking about?

- Well, I think, so there are a lot more racial categories to describe the different shades that people can be in Brazil, compared to the U.S., where it's very, if you ask some people to generate racial categories, you get a high level of agreement across people.

So I think what I've learned is that in Brazil, the main categories are white, brown, black, and yellow, or indigenous.

I'm not sure.

- Indigenous.

- Yeah, yeah, so those are the main ones.

But there are also like Moreno and other categories that are more nuanced than black, brown, and white.

Is that right?

- Yeah, in Brazilian, when you was born, your paper is discrimination, white, or brown, or Indian, or black people.

But sometimes was born brown.

When you grow up, change for white peoples.

But in the paper, it stay brown.

- How does that compare to the United States?

- Well, I think it's very interesting that race can change on your forms in Brazil, or on your forms, it might not say the race that you actually identify as in Brazil.

That's much less common in the US, where race is really thought to be an inherited characteristic that you have from birth and remains stable throughout your life.

- So it's more fluid in Brazil?

Like you can change your racial identity over time?

Is that what you're saying?

- I think the idea, if your appearance changes, your race can change.

- In America, we have to pretty much stay within our racial categories, 'cause it's not like, 'cause I'm half black, half white.

I couldn't put on, there's no way I could put on like one of those racial categories that I'm white without people saying, "No, no, no, no, no, "you're not, that's just not the case."

I mean, but in Brazil, it's potentially, if I looked more white, 'cause like one of my sons, he's way lighter skin, you could barely tell he's a quarter black.

He could put white on something in America and be okay, but, or in Brazil, I guess it'd be okay, but in America, if they found out that he had even a quarter black, that wouldn't be correct, that wouldn't be- - I think both, yeah, according to the research, both white and black Americans would consider your son to be black, even though, so because of his black ancestry, even though he could technically pass as white, according to your description.

- And that's the one-drop law that we've dealt with because of slavery.

- Exactly.

- Why doesn't Brazil have the one-drop law, is the question.

- Well, that's a really good question, and again, kind of goes back to the different way that they dealt with anti-black sentiment.

So having such a large black population, the government actually wanted to encourage the dilution of blackness through interracial marriage, through racial mixing, the idea, they promoted the idea that you can, your family line can become more white with a social upward mobility by marrying people of fairer and fairer skin.

And so as a result, there's more multiracial people in Brazil, and there's more gradations, and more people who would consider themselves white than we would consider in the US.

- That's really interesting, 'cause we had the opposite policy here.

It's like, we wanted you guys stay amongst yourselves, and there was a lot of negative stigma around that.

In fact, it was illegal to marry someone interracially when, till pretty recently, honestly.

So I feel like that is an interesting way to solve the problem compared to how America has tried to solve it.

So what do you think that did in terms of how people are treated?

Like you said, I would be considered black, you would be considered brown.

If we were in Brazil, and we were stopped by the police, would we be treated the same?

- No.

- Okay, talk about that.

How different do you get treated based upon all these colors that are possible?

- You are yellow.

Oh, nice to meet you, man.

I am police for you.

Stand up, black.

Get out.

Yes, it's very rude for black people.

- You know, there's different treatments of black people in different countries.

Different countries handle race differently.

Back in the 1940s to the 1960s and '70s, a lot of black artists were going to France because they were being treated differently, they didn't have the same segregation laws.

Actors, writers such as James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, as you can see right here, they went to France because of that different treatment of race.

There's also places such as Belize, where there's a lot of different racial mixing that goes on there.

And you can see different people that are the natives, that are the Mayans, that are from Africa.

You'll see some Europeans there as well.

So they did have an evolution of race in their countries as well.

Do you wanna speak a little bit about your thoughts on that with other countries and race?

- I think that every country has a unique history of immigration, colonization, and sort of Native American often displacement or what the relations were between the groups that arrived versus who were there.

The US, I think, is a little bit unique compared to other American nations because there was such stringent laws against mixing and so I think other countries compared to us have a lot more mixing and sort of fluidity and intermediate categories than we have or that we permit ourselves to believe.

Because I do wanna point out, ever since there were enslaved people in the United States, there were multiracial people, of course.

They were just not acknowledged as such.

- Right, right.

- Well, that's why I don't look as African as my ancestors.

(laughing) And it's definitely why I don't.

(laughing) - Well, there's an interesting thing you're talking about here in these other countries.

We have artists who actually come to the United States and are treated differently as well, like those who went to France and other things.

Trevor Noah is a perfect example.

- From South Africa.

Yeah, South Africa's racial laws, they are quite different from the United States.

They dealt with apartheid.

Trevor Noah, who's biracial in South Africa, he'd be considered colored.

- Wow.

- And colored is a step below whites, but a step above blacks.

Whereas in the United States, he's considered to be black.

Much like Barack Obama or me, I would be considered to be black.

But among black people, of course, I'm considered to be biracial.

So there's definitely a lot of- (laughing) - Don't look at me like you got a chip on your shoulder.

- Among other black people, I'm considered biracial.

But I wanna just give you guys a definition real quick.

And I found this out, I was reading this, doing the research for the show, that in the United States, a white person is defined as having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

So even in the United States, the government views race actually differently from the citizens.

Because a lot of people, when they think of the Middle East or North Africa, 'cause that's like, you know, G-Egypt.

So someone like Osama Bin Laden or an Egyptian person would technically be considered white in the United States.

- Yes.

- So that's actually a legacy of some court cases from over 100 years ago.

So basically, there's the 1870 Naturalization Act and the 1882 Asian Exclusion Act.

Both of these prohibited Asian people from pathways to immigration and citizenship.

And so in the 1900s, individuals who are from North Africa and the Middle East actually sued the government to be considered white so that they would have a pathway to immigration and citizenship, like getting around the idea that they might be Asian or even black, right?

And so these people wanted to be in the white category so that they could potentially pursue privileges and advantages.

But actually in 2030, the U.S.

Census is going to add a Middle Eastern North African category.

- Wow.

So this reminds me of a crazy thing that happened in the United States.

Rachel Dolezal, who was raised in a black community and everything like that.

She pretended to be black and here's an image of her.

She even fooled the black community, became head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington.

And once it was revealed, as you can see, that she actually was white, she had a little bit of support from the black community, but then also a lot of backlash.

And so I think it's interesting when you see this image, people want to be white for various reasons.

And to see somebody who's white and saying, "No, I'm black because that's just the way she grew up."

How do you guys feel about that?

When someone says, "I identify as Asian per se, "because I grew up in Japan or China."

Is that something that's really acceptable?

Can you say that that person is something or does it really go back to their ancestry?

- I think that there's a difference between saying, "I identify as" and "I identify with."

So I can understand Rachel Dolezal got a lot of backlash for claiming a black identity when she had no black ancestry.

But I can also understand the support that she got from the black community because she devoted many aspects of her life to black social justice and black scholarship.

But it was also pointed out to me, she could have still devoted her life to those things without claiming to be black.

- Right, yes.

- Yeah, and the thing about it too is that race wasn't that big of a deal prior to the slave trade.

'Cause there's not a lot of documents out there prior to, let's say 1619, I think, is when they started really making race a big deal.

Could you speak a little bit on when race started to become a real powerful motivator of people in the United States and in the world, really?

- I think in the world, we see race mattering more when there's more contact.

So when technology advanced enough that people of different races had the transportation and the means to actually see and interact with people of different races.

And unfortunately, you do see highlighting of racial differences and the dehumanization of racial outgroups.

And I think that's because when you dehumanize a group that's different from your own race, it helps to legitimize or justifies the atrocities committed against them.

So if you can convince yourself, oh, these other races are less than us or even subhuman, it can justify to yourself or others those atrocities.

- Hmm, I know, and that's like a common theme that happened after a certain point in history where people started saying, because this person is black, that that makes us feel a little bit more comfortable treating them as cattle or as like subhuman.

Jomens, do you feel that you're treated better in the United States or in Brazil?

- United States.

- Why?

- Because in United States, everybody speak with my name, Jomens, come here.

In Brazil, hey, black people, come here.

I have a name.

I mean, I know I'm black, but I have identity.

I have names.

But in USA, the people, it's more polite.

It's friendly.

- I won't say that happens always though, because I had a situation where my son was playing in a soccer game and he was told to defend the one kid who kept scoring on the other side.

And he did his job, stopped the kid from scoring.

And the kid just got so upset.

He pushed him down on the ground and then he ran off the field crying.

And the coach was like, "What's going on?"

And he was like, "That black boy, that black boy."

Everybody knew my son's name because the whole side of our side of the field was cheering, "Go, good job, Isaac."

My wife got so upset, so disappointed that no one told, "Hey, this child has a name."

Don't just say that black boy, his name is Isaiah.

Everybody out here knows it.

So if you don't teach them at an early age, then that kind of can happen in the United States and be very problematic.

You people, right?

- But there's this thing that happened, which like a lot of people assume that, "Oh, you know what?

You live in the United States, black people are complaining about issues."

And they think that only in the United States are black people complaining about the treatment that they've received post-slavery, but that's not the case.

So even in Brazil, you're saying, in Brazil, where you also had slavery, in Brazil, if I'm correct, was the last country to banish slavery, abolish slavery, correct?

So in Brazil, you feel like black people are treated worse and they still have some of the same problems that they do in the United States among the black population.

- Well, every day I'll be back in my home after my school, crying because people, "Ah, he, in my class, he's black.

He's the same actor black in USA, the same team, he's black."

- Oh, so they act the same as black people in the USA, so there's that comparison.

- Exactly.

- Wow, so our reputation preceded us, apparently.

All the time, my daddy, we need to go to the school for talk with my teacher about this, "Oh, everybody need to respect my son, not just because he's black."

- Right, and very quickly, 'cause I wanna ask you a question again.

When you look at the United States in comparison to Brazil, when it comes to, especially economics and the way that blacks have been treated in comparison, what types of things did you find in your studies that made it so that we turned out different, other than Brazil, other than the ancestral stuff?

- I think, so one, I think that in the US, so not my studies, but other research has shown that the wealth disparities and other disparities between black and white people in Brazil are very stark and have not recovered very much since the abolition of slavery.

I think I resist, kind of resist the, like trying to directly compare to the US because so many things are different, and so we're talking about different timeframes as well.

Sorry, I forgot your original question.

- Oh, yeah, no, it was just more like, why is it that Brazil and the United States turned out so differently, other than the ancestral ways?

Because we do have, like in Brazil, they have favelas, you know, ghettos, but the favelas also have other races, not just blacks in it, right?

- Right.

- Right, okay.

- Well, yeah, I think Brazil likes to present itself as a racial utopia where people are mixing all the time, but unfortunately, as we discussed, part of the encouragement of the racial mixing was to dilute the blackness.

So it's still about being anti, it's still fed in anti-blackness feeds into this, it's just in a different way.

And so the encouragement of mixing is sort of a symbolic idea of a racial paradise where everyone gets along, but it's masking, you know, very, a lot of inequality.

- It's like hidden racism.

- Yeah.

- And the LDS Church has a big, it's bringing it back locally, the LDS Church has a big presence in Brazil, correct?

- Yes.

- You're LDS?

- Yes.

- Is that what brought you here, was the LDS Church?

- Yes, I was serving my mission in Brazil, but I grew up the church, basically.

But I never have a problem with the member of the church, especially when I move out for Salt Lake.

Everybody, my order, it's very friendly.

My bishop shop support me 100%.

Doesn't matter my color, if yellow, blue, equal, equal.

But some peoples in Brazil, let's go to the church.

No, because this church only for white people.

No, I'm a black, I'm a good about the church.

No, only black people, American people.

- Yeah, that perception is in the United States around the church as well.

You know, race has been very tough topic.

In fact, we're going to talk about that.

- Don't know when in our other show.

- What does the word pardo mean?

- Pardo?

- Pardo.

- Pardo, it's no white, no yellow, in the middle, maybe Japan color.

- Japan.

- Japan.

- There's a lot of Japanese people in Brazil.

- Yes, Sao Paulo.

You have a big community, Japan people.

- Yeah, and one of your friends, she's one of your students, she's Japanese, right?

- Yeah, her ancestors immigrated to Brazil, but she definitely identifies as Brazilian.

- Yeah, and she said that she was having issues because she would go places and people would say, "Oh, you're Japanese."

She's like, "No, I'm Brazilian."

- Yeah, in the U.S., people definitely see her.

Her name is sort of Japanese, her last name, and so people are like, "You are Asian."

But she's like, "No, I'm Brazilian."

- Yeah, and you see that in the film industry sometimes.

You'll see people who are from, like you can tell they have Asian descent, but they're actually from Brazil.

What would you like people to know about race and choice, Brazil and the United States?

- I think that it's important to realize each country has a unique take on race and culture, so there's both commonalities and differences.

But if we can keep having these conversations and approaching them with curiosity, that's just the most important part, in my opinion.

- So I'm gonna ask you to give a little bit more.

So you have some statistics or some data you were interested in possibly sharing.

But because you study this, you're a professor, what have you learned that has been enlightening or surprising or something that you think is clearly there but people can't see it, but because you've researched and studied, you can enlighten us?

Is there anything about this idea of how race causes people to intersect and interact that you think is profound?

- I think one point that is useful for me is that we are cognitive misers.

We like to take mental shortcuts and rely on sort of rules of thumb.

So because we interact with so many people all the time, we can't form distinct impressions of individuals, particular to their exact personalities.

So race, age, gender, these social categories are useful because they provide a shortcut.

However, they are imprecise.

So just because I know my colleague is a man or a woman, I might think that helps me to decide what I'm going to give them for their birthday.

Even though that's actually probably a very imprecise piece of information.

So going through all of this research, I would say the usefulness of social categories is in part because we are cognitively always trying to take shortcuts.

- Well, thank you for joining us and for your expertise.

And from all of us at PBS Utah, thanks for joining this conversation.

As always, other episodes can be found on our website, pbsutah.org/roots.

So check that out and get more enlightenment, or you can check out the PBS Utah YouTube channel.

- And if you have feedback or ideas for other episodes, be sure to give us a shout out on social media.

Until next time for "Roots, Race & Culture," y'all, we are out.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Roots, Race & Culture" is provided in part by the Norman C. and Barbara L. Tanner Charitable Support Trust and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)