You don’t look like a Brazilian

giuliakollmann

by giuliakollmann

Story

There is a colorfulness to Brazilian people, an abundance of shades of white and brown and black skins, of shapes of eyes and bones and of textures of hair that I miss when walking the streets of Berlin, but only truly notice when I am back in Rio de Janeiro, my hometown of better bikinis and polar winters of about eighteen degrees Celsius. We come in many forms: descendants of indigenous peoples who were not decimated by the first European invaders and their diseases, of the black Africans dragged as slaves to those lands, of the Portuguese and Dutch colonizers and of the waves of Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Syrian and Lebanese workers that migrated to Brazil throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking to escape from famine, poverty or wars in their own original homes.

The less knowledgeable gringo believes Brazil is a land of idyllic diversity, buying a melting pot narrative that is true, but only in a perverse way. Our shades are deeply rooted in the systemic colonial rape of indigenous and black women by white men, its intertwinement with poverty a consequence of the violence of four centuries of commercial slavery of people of color. It is a country where economic, social and racial oppression overlap almost fully, where white-passing is seen not only as a status tool, but in crucial times, a literal survival asset.

However, nothing but an innate assumption of Brazilianness is offered to anyone in Brazil based on the color of their skin, shape of their eyes or the bushiness of their eyebrows. Whether one is a MĂĽller, a Yiu, an Ibrahim or a Katsuragi, no surname invites English into a conversation.

The Vietnamese and Turkish migrations into Germany are already decades old, and Germans don’t seem to be able to understand these faces as local. A German Wikipedia article cannot escape the need to refer to an artist born and raised in Munich as “a German actor with Turkish heritage.” A black person must surely come from somewhere else. Even in open, international Berlin, there is a mesmerizing resistance to letting go of the disconcerting connection between ethnicity and identity.

The German language creeps up as a tool of microagression: “do you speak German?” asks a white man to a person of color who has been speaking German the entire time. When I give it a go, however, my accent and grammar mistakes come as a surprise. As a white woman with a German-sounding surname, I am expected to be German, while black or brown born-and-raised Germans are not.

What is the worst violence: that against one’s right to live, or that against one’s right to their own identity? I never thought it would be possible that black Europeans would crave the sense of belonging, of recognition of their cultural contribution that exists in places such as Brazil or the United States, countries where the very lives of black people are at stake daily. As it turns out, systematic othering is extremely painful.

© giuliakollmann 2023-01-19

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