Affirmation of self — Resenha de Wellington de Jesus Bomfim’s review of “Tornar-se negro: Ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social”, by Neuza Santos Souza
Abstract: The book Tornar-se negro: ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social, by Neusa Santos Souza, based on her master’s research, examines the psychological and social impacts of racism on black people seeking social ascension. Innovative study, points to overcoming supposed racial inferiority and the denial of black identity.
Keywords: Racism, Black People, Social Ascension.
Tornar-se Negro: Ou as Vicissitudes da Identidade do Negro Brasileiro em Ascenção Social is the result of Neusa Santos Souza’s master’s research, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPUB/UFRJ). Published in 1983, with a preface by Jurandir Freire, it was republished in 2021 (Zahar) with a preface by Maria Lúcia da Silva. The work aims to explain the psychic and social effects of racism on black people who seek to fit into the social sphere through social mobility. The author promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue that moves between Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology, forming a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between race and class in capitalist society.
Neuza Souza was born in Cachoeira, in Recôncavo Baiano, in 1948, and studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, in Salvador. In Rio de Janeiro, she worked in Psychiatry, following the work she developed at the Sanatório Bahia clinic, while still an undergraduate. She played an important role in the field of mental health, as a professional and academic, with some other works highlighted: A ciência e a verdade: um comentário (1996), A Psicose: um estudo lacaniano (1999) e O objeto da angústia (2005). Tornar-se negro
s structured into eight chapters, with an introduction, methodology and conclusion. In the first four chapters, the author develops the argumentative basis, using references from experts and excerpts from interviews with black men and women of different ages in social descent. This material is used in the analysis of the assimilation of the feeling of inferiority of black people in the hierarchical scale of racism in Brazil, which is based on the gradual approximation of black people to white people. In the following chapters, the data produced in his interviews prevail, used to demarcate the field and methodological options and to prepare conclusions.
The book begins with an understanding of the “emotional character” of her work. The author suggests that the perception of black people involves two aspects: the experience of discrimination and the position attributed to them. Thus, she argues that self-recognition presupposes the commitment to “rescue your history and recreate yourself in your potential” (p.28).
The second chapter relates social ascension and the construction of a black person’s “emotionality”. For the author, this emotionality is forged in patterns of interaction with white people, which creates a parallel between black color and inferior social position. Race is “an ideological notion engendered as a social criterion for distributing position in the class structure” (p.30) and whiteness was already a criterion in the post-abolition era, used to define the position of black people: the closer they get to the white standard, the more prestige and position he gains. The author states that maintaining a place of inferiority in the transition from the slave system to the competitive capitalist system did not prevent black people from realizing possible social mobility, through social ascension. It is in this transit, she warns, that black people start to “become people”, paying the price of assimilating the whitening ideology. On the scale of extremes (“color continuum”), the black person follows this project as an individual, moving away from their group of origin. Their social ascension is the representation of individual qualification. However, this is where the act of denying their identity occurs, considering that their success occurs through identification with values and models of the white personality.
The idea of the “black myth” is the object of the third chapter, understood as a psychic, political and ideological phenomenon. She uses excerpts from field reports, illustrating the ideological force of supposed black inferiority. She states that the process of assimilating this feeling begins in the family. In some reports, the intention to whiten the family through union with white people is evident. White is the other, the valued one who becomes the reference for black people in the dimensions of aesthetics, rationality, and social refinement. The author uses F. Fanon (1970) when she highlights that a black person, having a white person as a reference, establishes different ways of acting towards the white person and another black person. After all, black people have pejorative qualifications, being valued based on physical attributes (strength and sexual potency) or musical sensibilities. According to the author, “when we talk about the emotionality of black people, it is almost always to contrast it with the reasoning capacity of white people” (p.40).
The decoding this mental phenomenon is based on Freudian foundations. Thus, in the fourth chapter, the author deals with “Narcissism and Ego Ideal” as manipulated currency in capitalist society that establishes class and color oppression, since wealth and whiteness are evaluative standards. She presents a differentiation between the “Ideal Ego” and the “Ideal of the Ego” to demonstrate that the condition sought by black people, in this search, is doomed to frustration, since there is no possibility of being the other: “The black person who chooses the white person as the Ego Ideal engenders within himself a narcissistic, serious and lacerating wound, which, as a condition for healing, demands from the black person the construction of another Ego Ideal” (p.53). Having diagnosed the situation, the author defends the rejection of the White Ego Ideal, reaffirming the need to strengthen black identity, and suggests that the privileged space for this is political activism. This political experience is present in reports that understand the black movement as an awakening of self, of “Becoming black”. It is the formulation of a “new consciousness”, continues the author, which enables self-esteem, self-affirmation and autonomy for black people.
In the fifth and sixth chapters, Souza illustrates the above reflections. She dedicates the entire fifth chapter to an interlocutor (“Luisa’s story”), exploring the steps described in the process of assimilation and emancipation from the ideological bonds of whitening. In the following chapter, she explores three “Privileged Themes”, condensing excerpts from her interlocutors’ statements into a thematic “tripod” that homogenizes life stories: “Representation of self”; “Ascension Strategies”; and “Price of Ascension.” They offer direct contact with narratives that draw the session titles on facts, feelings, thoughts, anxieties and understandings of those who live and feel the psychosocial effects of the racist system.
This scientific work is also the resumption of a voice among black Brazilian women intellectuals who have in their theoretical reflections a form of denunciation and resistance. It is the voice of Neusa Santos Souza in the context of the military dictatorship in Brazil, amid the strengthening and concealment of racism. His mission at the time was to demystify the ideology of “racial democracy” and the effect of “veiled racism” that plague the psychosocial universe of black people, generating “the desire to be white”. The consequences, however, are felt differently between black men and women. After all, they do not occupy the same place in the social hierarchy. In this way, the issue of gender, even if it appears between the lines, and underlying the reports, dissipates in the categorical set adopted by the author.
The author develops a fortuitous articulation between Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Ideologies, linking her “conceptual apparatus” around the “Oedipus Complex”, conjecturing “that black people have difficulty achieving an ego-syntonic identity that integrates them into their group of origin and that equips it to achieve social ascension” (p.83). Thus, it reaches psychosocial dilemmas that accompany black people throughout time. His interpretation of subjectivity that affects the conscious and unconscious, makes it possible to analyze a social historical phenomenon and its ideological implications in the formation of subjects. This, therefore, is what distinguishes the work: bringing the black issue to the field of subjectivities and the psychic dimension. It is a trait inspired by Franz Fanon (2008), when he studied the consequences of colonialism and racism on the psychosocial spheres of black people. The author opted for the Case Study method in conjunction with the Life Story. She recognizes that the level of understanding of the cases (10) does not allow us to find general laws, but can shed light on new investigations on the topic.
It is possible that this book emerges from the author’s experience with innovative research in the production of knowledge about the racial issue in Brazil. One example is a study by Virginia Bicudo, carried out in 1945, which focuses on the relations between race and class in the city of São Paulo, facing a phenomenon that is part of her own subjectivity.
Could the interpretative dimension present in this work be achieved by a white researcher? Probably not. Therefore, we can affirm that the author’s intention with this study, defending the need to construct a “black discourse about black people” (p.28), was achieved. This mission affects us and afflicts black researchers who come across the predominantly white academic field. In this way, talking about black “emotionality” is even more of our task, despite the demands of scientific impartiality. Neusa Souza shows us the profound developments in the psyche of black people, not only due to their intellectual capacity, but also (and, why not, mainly) because they are part of the phenomenon studied. Her jump didn’t just launch her into Orum… allowed him immortality.
Summary of Tornar-se negro: ou as vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social
Prefácio — Da Cor ao Corpo: A Violência do Racismo
1. Introdução
2. Antecedentes Históricos da Ascensão Social do Negro Brasileiro — A Construção da Emocionalidade
3. O Mito Negro
4. Narcisismo e Ideal do Ego
5. A História de Luísa
6. Temas Privilegiados
Representações de si
Das estratégias de ascenção
Do preço da ascensão: a contínua prova
8. Conclusão
Posfácio — Digressões Metodológicas de um Colaborador
SANTOS, Neuza. Tornar-se negro: ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social. São Paulo: Zahar, 2021. 176p. Review by: BOMFIM, Wellington de Jesus. Affirmation of yourself. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.4, n.15, jan./feb., 2024. Available at <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/affirmation-of-self-resenha-de-wellington-de-jesus-bomfims-review-of-tornar-se-negro-ou-as-vicissitudes-da-identidade-do-negro-brasileiro-em-ascensao-social-by-neuza-santos-souza/>.
Affirmation of self — Resenha de Wellington de Jesus Bomfim’s review of “Tornar-se negro: Ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social”, by Neuza Santos Souza
Abstract: The book Tornar-se negro: ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social, by Neusa Santos Souza, based on her master’s research, examines the psychological and social impacts of racism on black people seeking social ascension. Innovative study, points to overcoming supposed racial inferiority and the denial of black identity.
Keywords: Racism, Black People, Social Ascension.
Tornar-se Negro: Ou as Vicissitudes da Identidade do Negro Brasileiro em Ascenção Social is the result of Neusa Santos Souza’s master’s research, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPUB/UFRJ). Published in 1983, with a preface by Jurandir Freire, it was republished in 2021 (Zahar) with a preface by Maria Lúcia da Silva. The work aims to explain the psychic and social effects of racism on black people who seek to fit into the social sphere through social mobility. The author promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue that moves between Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology, forming a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between race and class in capitalist society.
Neuza Souza was born in Cachoeira, in Recôncavo Baiano, in 1948, and studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, in Salvador. In Rio de Janeiro, she worked in Psychiatry, following the work she developed at the Sanatório Bahia clinic, while still an undergraduate. She played an important role in the field of mental health, as a professional and academic, with some other works highlighted: A ciência e a verdade: um comentário (1996), A Psicose: um estudo lacaniano (1999) e O objeto da angústia (2005). Tornar-se negro
s structured into eight chapters, with an introduction, methodology and conclusion. In the first four chapters, the author develops the argumentative basis, using references from experts and excerpts from interviews with black men and women of different ages in social descent. This material is used in the analysis of the assimilation of the feeling of inferiority of black people in the hierarchical scale of racism in Brazil, which is based on the gradual approximation of black people to white people. In the following chapters, the data produced in his interviews prevail, used to demarcate the field and methodological options and to prepare conclusions.
The book begins with an understanding of the “emotional character” of her work. The author suggests that the perception of black people involves two aspects: the experience of discrimination and the position attributed to them. Thus, she argues that self-recognition presupposes the commitment to “rescue your history and recreate yourself in your potential” (p.28).
The second chapter relates social ascension and the construction of a black person’s “emotionality”. For the author, this emotionality is forged in patterns of interaction with white people, which creates a parallel between black color and inferior social position. Race is “an ideological notion engendered as a social criterion for distributing position in the class structure” (p.30) and whiteness was already a criterion in the post-abolition era, used to define the position of black people: the closer they get to the white standard, the more prestige and position he gains. The author states that maintaining a place of inferiority in the transition from the slave system to the competitive capitalist system did not prevent black people from realizing possible social mobility, through social ascension. It is in this transit, she warns, that black people start to “become people”, paying the price of assimilating the whitening ideology. On the scale of extremes (“color continuum”), the black person follows this project as an individual, moving away from their group of origin. Their social ascension is the representation of individual qualification. However, this is where the act of denying their identity occurs, considering that their success occurs through identification with values and models of the white personality.
The idea of the “black myth” is the object of the third chapter, understood as a psychic, political and ideological phenomenon. She uses excerpts from field reports, illustrating the ideological force of supposed black inferiority. She states that the process of assimilating this feeling begins in the family. In some reports, the intention to whiten the family through union with white people is evident. White is the other, the valued one who becomes the reference for black people in the dimensions of aesthetics, rationality, and social refinement. The author uses F. Fanon (1970) when she highlights that a black person, having a white person as a reference, establishes different ways of acting towards the white person and another black person. After all, black people have pejorative qualifications, being valued based on physical attributes (strength and sexual potency) or musical sensibilities. According to the author, “when we talk about the emotionality of black people, it is almost always to contrast it with the reasoning capacity of white people” (p.40).
The decoding this mental phenomenon is based on Freudian foundations. Thus, in the fourth chapter, the author deals with “Narcissism and Ego Ideal” as manipulated currency in capitalist society that establishes class and color oppression, since wealth and whiteness are evaluative standards. She presents a differentiation between the “Ideal Ego” and the “Ideal of the Ego” to demonstrate that the condition sought by black people, in this search, is doomed to frustration, since there is no possibility of being the other: “The black person who chooses the white person as the Ego Ideal engenders within himself a narcissistic, serious and lacerating wound, which, as a condition for healing, demands from the black person the construction of another Ego Ideal” (p.53). Having diagnosed the situation, the author defends the rejection of the White Ego Ideal, reaffirming the need to strengthen black identity, and suggests that the privileged space for this is political activism. This political experience is present in reports that understand the black movement as an awakening of self, of “Becoming black”. It is the formulation of a “new consciousness”, continues the author, which enables self-esteem, self-affirmation and autonomy for black people.
In the fifth and sixth chapters, Souza illustrates the above reflections. She dedicates the entire fifth chapter to an interlocutor (“Luisa’s story”), exploring the steps described in the process of assimilation and emancipation from the ideological bonds of whitening. In the following chapter, she explores three “Privileged Themes”, condensing excerpts from her interlocutors’ statements into a thematic “tripod” that homogenizes life stories: “Representation of self”; “Ascension Strategies”; and “Price of Ascension.” They offer direct contact with narratives that draw the session titles on facts, feelings, thoughts, anxieties and understandings of those who live and feel the psychosocial effects of the racist system.
This scientific work is also the resumption of a voice among black Brazilian women intellectuals who have in their theoretical reflections a form of denunciation and resistance. It is the voice of Neusa Santos Souza in the context of the military dictatorship in Brazil, amid the strengthening and concealment of racism. His mission at the time was to demystify the ideology of “racial democracy” and the effect of “veiled racism” that plague the psychosocial universe of black people, generating “the desire to be white”. The consequences, however, are felt differently between black men and women. After all, they do not occupy the same place in the social hierarchy. In this way, the issue of gender, even if it appears between the lines, and underlying the reports, dissipates in the categorical set adopted by the author.
The author develops a fortuitous articulation between Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Ideologies, linking her “conceptual apparatus” around the “Oedipus Complex”, conjecturing “that black people have difficulty achieving an ego-syntonic identity that integrates them into their group of origin and that equips it to achieve social ascension” (p.83). Thus, it reaches psychosocial dilemmas that accompany black people throughout time. His interpretation of subjectivity that affects the conscious and unconscious, makes it possible to analyze a social historical phenomenon and its ideological implications in the formation of subjects. This, therefore, is what distinguishes the work: bringing the black issue to the field of subjectivities and the psychic dimension. It is a trait inspired by Franz Fanon (2008), when he studied the consequences of colonialism and racism on the psychosocial spheres of black people. The author opted for the Case Study method in conjunction with the Life Story. She recognizes that the level of understanding of the cases (10) does not allow us to find general laws, but can shed light on new investigations on the topic.
It is possible that this book emerges from the author’s experience with innovative research in the production of knowledge about the racial issue in Brazil. One example is a study by Virginia Bicudo, carried out in 1945, which focuses on the relations between race and class in the city of São Paulo, facing a phenomenon that is part of her own subjectivity.
Could the interpretative dimension present in this work be achieved by a white researcher? Probably not. Therefore, we can affirm that the author’s intention with this study, defending the need to construct a “black discourse about black people” (p.28), was achieved. This mission affects us and afflicts black researchers who come across the predominantly white academic field. In this way, talking about black “emotionality” is even more of our task, despite the demands of scientific impartiality. Neusa Souza shows us the profound developments in the psyche of black people, not only due to their intellectual capacity, but also (and, why not, mainly) because they are part of the phenomenon studied. Her jump didn’t just launch her into Orum… allowed him immortality.
Summary of Tornar-se negro: ou as vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social
Prefácio — Da Cor ao Corpo: A Violência do Racismo
1. Introdução
2. Antecedentes Históricos da Ascensão Social do Negro Brasileiro — A Construção da Emocionalidade
3. O Mito Negro
4. Narcisismo e Ideal do Ego
5. A História de Luísa
6. Temas Privilegiados
Representações de si
Das estratégias de ascenção
Do preço da ascensão: a contínua prova
8. Conclusão
Posfácio — Digressões Metodológicas de um Colaborador
SANTOS, Neuza. Tornar-se negro: ou As vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social. São Paulo: Zahar, 2021. 176p. Review by: BOMFIM, Wellington de Jesus. Affirmation of yourself. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.4, n.15, jan./feb., 2024. Available at <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/affirmation-of-self-resenha-de-wellington-de-jesus-bomfims-review-of-tornar-se-negro-ou-as-vicissitudes-da-identidade-do-negro-brasileiro-em-ascensao-social-by-neuza-santos-souza/>.
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Neuza Souza was born in Cachoeira, in Recôncavo Baiano, in 1948, and studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, in Salvador. In Rio de Janeiro, she worked in Psychiatry, following the work she developed at the Sanatório Bahia clinic, while still an undergraduate. She played an important role in the field of mental health, as a professional and academic, with some other works highlighted: A ciência e a verdade: um comentário (1996), A Psicose: um estudo lacaniano (1999) e O objeto da angústia (2005). Tornar-se negro
Wellington de Jesus Bomfim has a PhD in Sociologia from the Universidade Federal de Sergipe (2017), a master’s degree in Antropologia Social from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (2007) and a degree in Educação Física from the Universidade Federal de Sergipe (2001). He wrote and published, among other works, A “luta pela terra” no processo de regularização fundiária de território quilombola: o caso da comunidade Brejão dos Negros (SE) Identidade, memória e narrativas na Dança de São Gonçalo do povoado Mussuca. ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/5080346049459326; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5039-8191; E-mail: wdobugio@gmail.com.
