The first time he noticed something strange happening there was when he was a child, at school.
The typical Brazilian private school where the majority are white.
His colleagues called flesh color a pinkish beige paint.
For him, however, the flesh-colored pen was another.
“I would grab the burnt yellow pencil, a kind of mustard, and put it on the inside of my forearm to show them what I was talking about,” says Gleyson Borges.
When he turned 31, he defined himself as black, but it wasn't always like that.
This graphic designer who signs his urban art as A Coisa Ficou Preta (the thing has turned black) draws attention to the fact that he himself chose, precisely, the point where the skin is lightest.
“I wanted to get as close as I could to the standard [of beauty].”
A woman, in front of a work of urban art in the Pinheiros neighborhood, in São Paulo.Lela Beltrão
Like hundreds of thousands, millions of Brazilians, Borges discovered himself black through a long process that is simultaneously personal and collective.
A social transformation that accelerated as the myth that Brazil is, after slavery, a paradise of racial harmony without discrimination, was demolished.
“I was always black, but knowing it is something that happened in adult life,” explains the artist in an interview by video call from his house, in Maceio (Alagoas).
Data from the latest census confirmed, at the end of December, a relevant change that will likely shape Brazilian society in the coming decades.
For the first time in a century and a half, those who define themselves as mestizos (45%, 92 million people) have surpassed whites (43%, 88 million) as the largest racial group.
It represents a
surprise
that culminates a profound transformation in the way Brazilians define themselves in ethnic-racial terms.
Here everyone chooses from the official boxes: mestizo (in Portuguese, pardo), white, black (preto), indigenous and yellow (of Asian descent).
The anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz, 66 years old, who defines herself as white, is one of the great Brazilian historians and has studied the racial issue for decades.
“The truth is that mestizos were always the majority.
I believe that the current classification reveals self-conceited policies of a society that has long been under the influence of whitewashing policies.
“She defined herself as whiter and now she defines herself as mestizo,” she explains.
For decades, those who were in limbo marked white, historically associated with the beautiful, with the positive, as opposed to everything negative that is still associated with black, from blacklists to denigration.
On record, they tended to lighten the baby.
Eliazete de Souza, 65 years old.
“Parda, I never considered myself any other color, neither white nor mixed race”
Eliazete de Souza.Lela Beltrão
This specialist attributes this change in social perception to the struggle of black activism, the policies of positive affirmation, those of quotas, Afro-Brazilian studies,... "All of this generated a different understanding on the part of the population," says Schwarcz in an exchange of messages.
She emphasizes that “the authorities are going to have to react and organize themselves based on this mestizo majority in terms of health, social, even institutional representation.”
The change has accelerated in the last two decades thanks to multiple policies promoted by the Workers' Party governments.
And the black movement became somewhat crucial when the State adopted its definition of a black person as descendant of African, that is, it includes blacks and mestizos, who in Brazil are the majority (56%), not like in the United States, where They are around 14%.
The implementation of quotas, a decade ago, touched a nerve.
Numerous white families cried out when many more poor, mixed-race and black students entered university;
They felt that their children were being discriminated against.
On purpose or not, outraged parents ignored the story.
Five million slaves brought from Africa over 350 years laid the foundations of what would become Brazil, in sugar cane plantations or gold mines.
In no other country in America was slavery so long-lasting.
Abolished in 1888, authorities recruited 3.5 million European immigrants to replace labor—not least for them—whitewash the race.
The dream of the eugenicists who wanted to perfect the human species with their racist theories, so that no trace of African blood would remain, has not been fulfilled.
Carlos Magno Pires, 60 years old.
“I always considered myself mestizo, my birth certificate says so”
Carlos Magno Pires.Lela Beltrão
At the beginning of the 20th century, local elites calculated that, with those Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Syrians... in ten generations Brazil would be a white country.
However, few have a larger palette of skin tones, as the cosmetics multinational L'Oréal knows well, always attentive to its clientele.
Brazil is “an open-air laboratory.
From the point of view of the cosmetics industry, we have eight types of hair and 55 skin tones, among the 60 cataloged by our scientists around the world,” explained the head of its Brazilian subsidiary, Marcelo Zimet, to Veja
magazine
.
There are so many that it is not uncommon for doubt to arise when filling in the color/race box.
To Brazilians who complain that they were never educated on this issue, anti-racist activists respond: “You don't know if you are black or white?
Ask the police, they are clear.”
And, upon suspicion of abuse of racial quotas, the candidate in question is submitted to a commission that decides whether he meets the requirements.
Already the first census, in 1872, asked Brazilians about their color/race;
the majority declared themselves mestizo, but then there were always more whites.
Marta Antunes, from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), details that she defines herself as white, that the institution cannot affirm to what extent the current advantage of mestizos is due to demographic or anthropological reasons.
She points to three factors: demographic issues, such as interracial couples or fertility;
the change in the way in which society thinks about its ethnicity and which is now frequently asked.
Until a decade ago, “many had not stopped to think about it,” she recalls.
In the 1940s, the yellow category was created—in the wake of Japanese immigration.
In the nineties, the indigenous community was resurrected.
She adds that the IBGE has perfected its methods with explanatory videos or by approaching indigenous people who live outside their lands, a group in which “there was a lot of confusion between ethnicity and race.”
Thanks to these innovations, the native population has doubled (from 0.4% to 0.8%) in a decade.
Jucelia da Silva, 32 years old.
“I was always black, but in the registry it says mestiza, I don't know why.
The same thing happens with my brothers and my children.”
Jucelia da Silva.Lela Beltrão
It is also not uncommon to change categories throughout life, as demonstrated by the thousands of politicians who whiten or darken between one election and another.
Both the singer Caetano Veloso and his colleague Gilberto Gil considered themselves mestizo in the seventies.
And Neymar told the newspaper
Estadão
in 2010 that he had never suffered racism “on or off the field.
Because I'm not black, you know?
He also revealed that every 20 days he straightened his hair.
Scourer hair is a racist insult that knows no boundaries.
Brazil turned miscegenation into a sign of national identity.
And he took advantage of the fact that there were no racial segregation laws here, like in the US, to present himself to the world as a tropical paradise without discrimination or racial tensions.
It is the so-called myth of racial democracy.
The philosopher Suely Carneiro, 73, one of the great black intellectuals of contemporary Brazil, defined it in an interview published in 2022 as “a sophisticated and perverse form of racism because it produces a distorted consciousness for all those involved in racial relations.”
The idea that there was no racism permeated society although statistics denied it time and again.
Black and mixed-race Brazilians live less, earn less, are poorer, and get sick more than their white compatriots.
In 1900, 1920, and 1970, the census did not ask about race or color.
But in 1976, the authorities raised it openly, without boxes.
The answer was 136 skin tones that anthropologist Schwarcz lists in her book
De ella Nem Preto nem Branco, muito pelo Contrario
(Companhia, das Letras, 2013).
It includes definitions such as very white, very dark, tanned brunette, cinnamon-colored brunette, bordering on white, almost black or with terms already banished for being discriminatory such as mulata (which derives from mule).
Borges, known as A Coisa Ficou Preta, does not remember exactly the first time he was asked about his color/race.
He believes he was in some census.
“It was a shock.”
He was assailed by doubt: “I knew it wasn't white, but I didn't know if it was black, which is a reddish color.
And he had no notion of being a mestizo.
The truth is, I don't remember what I scored."
Luciano Donizete, 52 years old.
“I consider myself black, but my document says mestizo.
I think because my mother and father are clearer."
Luciano Donizete.Lela Beltrão
And, as art, especially Emicida's rap rhymes, helped him rediscover his blackness, the posters he puts up in the streets seek to extend that same awareness to others with slogans such as: “If the book doesn't say it, does it say so?” What color do you give the characters?”
The artist and photographer Angélica Dass, 44, defines herself as black, grew up in “a very colorful family” in Rio de Janeiro and has lived in Spain for many years.
Her most famous project is
Humanae
, a collection of 4,000 portraits taken in 20 countries.
Each one, matched to her exact skin tone on the Pantone scale.
She says that living outside of Brazil gave her the distance to shed light on this complaint: “There are people who are treated as less human because of the color of their skin, who have fewer rights because of their amount of melanin.”
She considers that both she and Humanae “are the fruit of ancestors who were oppressed and oppressors.”
A mural about music on a street in São Paulo.Lela Beltrão
Among his projects, Dass chooses
280 chibatadas
(280 lashes) as the one that best reflects his native country.
He combines images of a happy childhood in a multicolored family with racist tweets.
And it includes a survey carried out in 1988 by the University of São Paulo that concluded: “96% affirm that there are no racial prejudices;
99% know someone who does have them.”
Excellent raw material for reflection and debate.
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