Hair for light-skinned black women

between the trauma of racism and the redress of blackness

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to studies on ethnic-racial relations in conjunction with the
psychoanalytic field in the Brazilian context. This article is based on a dissertation research in which
interviews were used in order to understand how the process of constituting identity and racial belonging
of these subjects occurs. The objective here is to analyze the subjective effects of racism as a colonial
trauma with a focus on the meanings surrounding the hair of light-skinned black women, as well as to
point out possible paths of reparation, approximations with blackness and the constitution of a valued
black identity for light-skinned black women. It became possible to affirm the importance of the
meanings surrounding the body with emphasis on hair in relation to women, from which scenes of
everyday racism emerge as strategies to keep black men and women in a structural racial position of
inferiority, forming identities alienated from the precepts of whiteness, a phenomenon that creates barriers
to the constitution of a positive black identity. On the other hand, it is also through discourse about the
black body, which is linked to blackness and its collective dimensions, that the constitution of a valued
black identity becomes possible.