Note from BW of Brazil: Well, as we can see, they’re at it again. I have to wonder sometimes if this fetish of dressing up or taking on the attributes of black woman is some form of envy, a psychotic manner of acting out racist tendencies against a racial group that so many people around the world continue to prove they deeply despise or a secret desire to be that which they imitate. Maybe a little of all of the above and as we have seen just since the 2011 debut of this blog, imitation and ridicule of black people is not in short supply in Brazil. Without even considering the historic factor here, just in the past seven years, we’ve seen everyday people and people in the media who feel the need to don blackface, we’ve seen a theater piece in which blackface lead to a highly publicized debate, we know of the Nega Maluca Carnaval group located in the city of Angra dos Reis and recently, we’ve seen a number of Brazilian women accused of “blackfishing” due to their practice of appropriating certain aesthetics associated with black women. To put today’s piece into its proper context, we have to remind readers of that there is a history behind the “nega maluca” character, which literally means, “crazy black woman”. It seems that people don’t tire of this sick practice, as we can see in this latest story.
“Let’s all be Nega Maluca in this carnival” says makeup artist in 2019
By Silvia Nascimento
A makeup artist from Barretos abused her lack of creativity, to say the least, when performing a makeup tutorial for Carnival. The theme: Nega Maluca.
Bruna Martolelli, who uses Instagram to showcase her talents as a makeup artist, has published a tutorial para transformar gente branca em negra (to turn white people into black). That’s right, she teaches how to do blackface. This technique emerged around 1830, when white men painted themselves in black (in a caricature and exaggerated way) and presented themselves to the white aristocracy with the aim of satirizing the black population. It’s offensive to black people even today.
This she probably doesn’t know, like most, but when alerted in the comments of her post, he blocked the critics and then closed the comments, showing that she doesn’t care if she has offended someone with her racist makeup.
This costume took time, but fortunately it was recognized as offensive and racist, a result of the advancement of the black community’s level of education, which now exercises criticism expressing what bothers it. In the generation of our parents it was quite different and they grew up, as we did, listening and singing Carnival songs loaded with prejudice and racism (see note one). (Your hair does not deny it, mulata/black woman with the hard hair).
If it weren’t enough to have to listen to (singer) Daniela Mercury saying that Wakanda is in the whole world and Claudia Leitte dressed as Michael Jackson in Pelourinho in a video clip of Carnival, we will probably come across these aberrations of Nega Maluca, in the streets and in the dances.
Source: Mundo Negro
Note
- In recent years, Afro-Brazilians have began protesting the usage of blackface, which shows the rise in the level of racial consciousness in recent years. As Nascimento acknowledged in the article above, for decades, blackface has been used in Brazil without much public outcry. In 2012, prominent lawyer Humberto Adami Santos Junior told me via e-mail that, during Carnaval, these types of “jokes” and others have been tolerated. It’s good to see that it is no longer being accepted as just a “joke”.
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