Description
Book SynopsisWinner, Section on the Sociology of Emotions Outstanding Recent Contribution (Book) Award, American Sociological Association, 2016
Charles Horton Cooley Award for Recent Book, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Best Publication Award, Section on Body and Embodiment, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2018
The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with “blacker” fe
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"The Color of Love is an insightful treatment of the social psychology of race and the family, ostensibly in Brazil but with observations that have more general applicability." * Social Forces *
"Certainly a page turner, Hordge-Freeman makes various scholarly contributions, the biggest being her exploration of how phenotype-based affection can reproduce racial inequality in racialized societies, which hardly any studies of race in the United States and Brazil have done. . . . This book should be read by anyone with an interest in the African Diaspora, race and racism in Brazil, and family socialization practices." * Humanity & Society *
"...an important contribution to the growing academic literature on race and color in Brazil. The Color of Love, firmly rooted in the discipline of sociology, is interdisciplinary in the best possible way." * American Journal of Sociology *
"The Color of Love provides a necessary narrative that must be included in family research dis-course...I urge family researchers to read [it] to help them in understanding the family unit as a complex societal agent that is capable of resisting and reproducing dominant ideologies and also love." * Journal of Family Theory and Review *
"[Hodge-Freeman's] work with an understudied group allows her to add a significant contribution to the field of race. . . . The Color of Love is an excellent ethnographic project." * Symbolic Interaction *
"This book makes a great contribution to understanding racial relations in Brazil by considering family and close neighbor relationships, the socialization process, and negotiations of gendered and racialized bodies, from a perspective that dialogues with theories of social stratification, feminist theory while triangulating race, class, and gender." * Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População *
"This book undoubtedly offers both theoretical and empirical gems to the sociology of race and inequality as well as to the study of the African diaspora in Latin America and beyond." * Contemporary Sociology *
"The ethnographic data on families show that ideas about racial hierarchy operate across a wide range of phenotypes and self-identifications. Hordge-Freeman shows this exceptionally well for Brazil . . . Hordge-Freeman's excellent ethnography interrogates families and bodies as sites of race-making in Brazil." * Latin American Research Review *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. The Face of a Slave
- Part I. Socialization and Stigma
- Chapter 1. What's Love Got to Do with It? Racial Stigma and Embodied Capital
- Chapter 2. Black Bodies, White Casts: Racializing and Gendering Bodies
- Chapter 3. Home Is Where the Hurt Is: Affective Capital, Stigma, and Racialization
- Part II. Racial Socialization and Negotiations in Public Culture
- Chapter 4. Racial Fluency: Reading between and beyond the Color Lines
- Chapter 5. Mind Your Blackness: Embodied Capital and Spatial Mobility
- Chapter 6. Antiracism in Transgressive Families
- Conclusion. The Ties That Bind
- Appendix A: Research Methods and Positionality
- Appendix B: Major Interview Topics
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
