By Kaio Soares Lacet, Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz
I was born and raised in Recife, the capital city of Pernambuco in Brazil’s Northeast (NE), a region frequently depicted as “less modern” or “less developed” compared to the country’s more industrialized southern states. These stereotypes—often accompanied by portrayals of Northeasterners as politically unsophisticated or reliant on government assistance—have influenced how many Brazilians perceive the NE and its people, effectively relegating them to “second-class status” in the national imagination. Yet these same narratives also shaped my personal experiences and laid the groundwork for my current research on whiteness and racial privilege in contemporary Brazil.
With generous support from the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, I presented part of this research at the XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) in San Diego in April 2024. This post reflects on how that experience, and conversations with other scholars of whiteness, heightened my understanding of shifting racial dynamics in the Brazilian Northeast—and, ultimately, the question that drives my project: “Who is white in this ‘alterity’?” (Here, I use “alterity” to describe how Northeasterners are seen as fundamentally “other” within national discourses that frame them as not fully belonging to the mainstream.)
Why Study Whiteness in the Brazilian Northeast?
My research focuses on how whiteness functions as a form of racial privilege that requires ongoing cultivation and “investment.” In Brazil, racial formations have long been shaped by the myth of “racial democracy”—the idea that centuries of racial mixing (mestiçagem) made racism and color hierarchies obsolete. Although Black activists and scholars have exposed this as a myth, the last decade (2013–2024) has marked a turning point in how whiteness and privilege operate. I hone in on Brazil’s Northeast because it is stereotyped as “non-white” and backward, making Northeasterners easy targets of discrimination and derision outside the region. Yet within the NE, those who appear or identify as white are often able to wield social and economic power—even as they might still be seen nationally as “not quite white” due to negative stereotypes about the region.
This duality reveals a critical tension: in national discourses, Northeasterners (Nordestinos) are frequently dismissed as second-class citizens, but in their home region, certain individuals still enjoy the advantages of whiteness. How do they perceive their racial identity, and how do they navigate a context where they may be privileged at home yet “othered” elsewhere? By engaging these questions, my work challenges the oversimplification of the Northeast as uniformly “non-white” or solely disadvantaged. Instead, I consider the region a complex arena where whiteness, class, gender, and regional identity converge—shaping forms of racial privilege that deserve deeper investigation.
A Politically Intense Period (2013–2024)
My study focuses on the major transformations that have reshaped Brazilian society over the past decade:
1. Progressive Social Changes: From 2003 to 2016, the Workers’ Party (PT) governments implemented policies aimed at reducing social and racial inequalities, including affirmative action in universities and increased public investment in education. These measures challenged the comfort and status quo of privileged white classes.
2. Mounting Political Tensions: By the early 2010s, nationwide demonstrations fueled political polarization. The 2014 presidential elections further revealed deep fissures in how Brazilians view race, class, and region, with pejorative discourses about the Northeast gaining traction among certain segments of society.
3. A Reactionary Turn: The impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 ushered in a brand of right-wing populism that legitimized openly racist narratives in politics and the media. Under this reactionary wave fueled by middle- and upper-class social anxieties, whiteness came to the fore as a political project to preserve and expand racial hierarchies.
4. White Middle- and Upper-Class Pushback: These events contextualize what Professor Patrícia Pinho calls “injured whiteness,” a concept that explores how segments of the white middle and upper classes overtly expressed anxiety and resentment against perceived threats to their racial and social dominance. I believe this “injury” often found a regional scapegoat: the Northeast, supposedly viewed as a hotbed of political opposition and “uneducated” voting patterns.
Within this broader picture, my research emphasizes how these four historical and political elements collide in the realm of race, region, and nation. The Northeast stands out as a telling case of how “othering” operates within a country with its own deep racial stratifications. I argue that anti-Northeastern rhetoric has intensified in the last ten years. This rhetorical hostility includes describing the region as backward, blaming it for electoral losses of right-wing candidates, and depicting its people as politically immature, naive, illiterate, and dependent on government support.
Mapping My Research
Historicizing Anti-Northeast Discourses
The first part of my project examines how the NE is portrayed in some major Brazilian newspapers, such as Folha de S. Paulo (São Paulo), O Estado de S. Paulo (São Paulo), Diário de Pernambuco (Recife), and Jornal do Commércio (Recife). By analyzing coverage from 2010 onward, I map out narratives that reinforce national stereotypes of Nordestinos as backward and undeserving of political power. These portrayals, I argue, fit into a broader reactionary project—spearheaded by white elites and supported by influential media outlets—that calls the validity of Northeast voters and leadership into question. In so doing, these discourses effectively “whiten” the South-Southeast as modern, entrepreneurial, and politically more able, reinforcing a national ideal of whiteness that depends on the racialization and marginalization of other regions.
Ethnography of White Northeasterners
The second stage of my research zooms in on a set of white Brazilians from the Northeast—particularly those who graduated from a Catholic private school in Recife in the early 2010s. This generational cohort, born between 1990 and 1995, reached adulthood right as the major political transformations discussed above were exploding onto the public stage. Through semi-structured interviews, I explore how they interpret their own racial identities and how they either resist or reinforce a culture of whiteness that grants them structural advantages. Inspired by Critical Whiteness Studies in Latin America, my goal is to uncover the generational and regional nuances that fuel racial privilege, even in a region often dismissed as racially “mixed” or “non-white.”
Why “Generation” Matters
To understand how whiteness reproduces itself over time, I employ a political generations approach. In this framework, generation is not simply a matter of age but of socialization under specific historical and political conditions. For young Northeasterners coming of age around the early 2010s, the intense mobilizations, economic shifts, and rising racial tensions formed their outlook on national identity, class, and race. Drawing on Maria Aparecida Bento’s concept of the “narcissistic pacts of whiteness,” I investigate how silent agreements—tacit deals that maintain racial privileges while downplaying the violence and expropriation that built them—are handed down from one generation to the next.
Given the broader context of injured whiteness, these generational pacts take on a heightened sense of urgency. White Brazilians often reproduce privileges through denial or sanitized versions of issues of racial inequalities. Consequently, my work asks: How did this generation’s socialization under overt racist national rhetoric influence their sense of responsibility for ongoing racial inequities, and how do they reinforce or challenge the norms of whiteness they inherited?
Reflections from BRASA 2024
Presenting the preliminary stages of this research at BRASA 2024 in San Diego was an incredibly enriching experience. Thanks to the support of the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Américas, I was able to connect with leading scholars on whiteness in Brazil, such as Jen Roth-Gordon and Mauro Porto, who offered feedback on the complexities of white identity and racial privilege. These dialogues affirmed the importance of the region as a lens for dissecting national structures of race, particularly in a moment when reactionary forces are targeting entire swaths of the Brazilian population.
I was also struck by the parallels I saw in discussions around whiteness in other parts of Latin America and the United States, where racialized affects can become a rallying cry for political movements. The conversations and constructive critiques I received helped sharpen my analytical framework, reminding me to keep a keen eye on how class, political ideology, and gender further shape these racial dynamics in Brazil.
Personal Motivations and Next Steps
As I move forward, my project will continue to incorporate a blend of archival research, media analysis, and interviews to reveal how whiteness continues to adapt and reassert itself in the 21st century. Ultimately, studying whiteness in the Brazilian Northeast is about grappling with the shape of racial privilege in a country that has long prided itself on being a “racial democracy.” My aim is to show that whiteness is neither monolithic nor self-evident but a dynamic, historically contingent project that must be continuously renewed—sometimes through explicit, violent means and other times through subtler forms of exclusion and denial.
Suggested Citation (if referencing this post):
Lacet, Kaio. 2024. “Who Is White Within This Alterity? Analyzing Racial Privilege in the Brazilian Northeast, 2013-2024.” Open Forum Blog, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Américas. University of California, Santa Cruz.