"todas da gente vaga, e baça, donde diz, quiere dezir, que la gente dessas partes es de color ni branca, ni negra, que em Portugal llamamos pardo, o amulatado, porque se llaman mulatos los hijos de negro y blanco, a los quales de essa mescla de padres que da esse color dudoso, o neutral entre los dos malistimo sin duia, porque hasta alli sea malo, el ser neu- tral, cosa aborrecible" [Bluteau, v. 5, 1720, pp. 628].
In Brazil, the sense of racial democracy deconstructs as we discuss the eugenicist policies introduced by governments that value white aesthetics. The discourse that the mulatto is the expression of Brazilianness breaks down, as the authorization for extra racial unions had the objective of "improving" the race. Kabengele Munanga debates the foundations of a Brazilian nationalist "identity" in which the so-called minorities - which, in fact, after an erased majority - cannot build mobilizing political identities. For the author, both in our past and present, the ideal of whitening and its atavisms is what materialized the mestizos, with the mulatto being a political-ideological and racial project of the elites. The mixed-blood subject is, first of all, the product of centuries of institutional rape of black and indigenous women - of the violation of the bodies of enslaved people or, as Abdias do Nascimento writes: "[to solve the threat of the 'black spot'] one of the resources used was the rape of the black woman by the whites of the dominant society, giving rise to the products of mixed blood: the mulatto, the pardo, the moreno, the pardavasco, the man-of-color, the fusco." Second of all, the miscegenation becomes the nexus that articulates non-racism since it is inscribed in the narrative of the nation as the "material proof" that racism does not exist, since mixed people cannot be racist. In this sense, miscegenation acts as an antidote to racism while functioning as a whitening strategy, serving the eugenicist purpose.
The brown person, since childhood, is referred to with euphemisms for "black" or "indigenous", such as "moreno", "moreninho", "mulato", "indiozinho", "marronzinho", "café com leite", and many others. They perceive themselves, all the time, as racialized but never explicitly as black or indigenous. So, when asked about "what they are", they might readily answer "brown", without understanding that brown is not a racial identity, brown is a color. The indefiniteness of brown constituted over this color/race a position of in-between-place. For Bhabha, "these 'in-between-places" provide the ground for elaborating strategies of subjectivation - singular or collective - that give rise to new signs of identity and innovative positions of collaboration and contestation. Brown marks the passage from one opposite to the other while blurring any notion of a border. For statistical purposes, brown is a color that results from the crossing of white and black races/ethnicities: it is the symbol of mestizaje. But its use suggests the need to go beyond this understanding. The very terms used in racializing these people are pejorative. Grada Kilomba, in an interview with Djamila Ribeiro, said: in Lisbon there is also this whole hierarchization of terms like 'mulatto' and 'mestiço'. And people use the term without knowing what it means. These terms are linked to hybrid animals, a reference to the black body as an animal. They are derogatory. If euphemisms deny the brown person their identity, it should also be denied as a form of identification since most of the terms that identify also sexualize and dehumanize mixed-race people.
