Voicing Race and Antiracism

Abstract

Brazil has recently engaged in a wide-ranging policy shift to confront racial inequality. In this context, an unprecedented number of Afro-Brazilians have embraced antiracist activism. Based on ethnographic investigations of three black organizations in the city of Salvador (Bahia, Brazil), this article explores Afro-Brazilians’ understandings of black consciousness and its place in contemporary black mobilization in Brazil. As they tell stories of their involvement in black activism, Afro-Brazilians use language to creatively juxtapose national narratives animated by Brazil’s ideology of racial mixture with race-conscious discourse set forth by recent antiracist legislation and policies. In the process, they engage in a dialogic revision and re-editing of the dominant discursive notions of blackness in Brazil. Black consciousness emerges in Afro-Brazilians’ narratives as an ideological critique in and through language that crosses racial identifications and articulates competing ideological positions about race and racism.