3.2. Levels of Analysis

Sociology across Boundaries: A Q&A with Chinyere Osuji

Chinyere Osuji is a sociologist who studies how Africans and members of the African diaspora understand racial and ethnic “others.” She examines the meanings they give to ethnic and racial differences as well as how they use other social categories to reinforce, blur, or erase those boundaries. Her first book, Boundaries of Love (2019), compared how Black-White couples in Brazil and the United States make sense of race. Currently, she is working on two book projects: one about African immigrants confronting race in the U.S. nursing profession, and another on anti-Blackness and White supremacy in South Korean media.

What drew you to study Brazil and to do your fieldwork in that country?

In graduate school, I found out that Brazil had the largest number of people of African descent in the world outside of Nigeria. I’d already had an interest in race in Latin America, and given the millions of people who identify as negro, Brazil became an obvious choice when trying to understand people of the Afro-Atlantic. Since I already spoke Spanish, I figured Portuguese would be easy to pick up.

In Boundaries of Love, you discuss the fluid and complex ways that people think about their racial and ethnic identities—not just contrasting the U.S. and Brazilian understandings of racial identity, but also talking about how multiple aspects of a person’s identity and social context shape their personal experience of race. Can you talk about how your own understanding of race and ethnicity has evolved over the years, and how you came to the nuanced theoretical perspective you put forward in your book?

I grew up in Chicago in the 1980s. My parents didn’t understand U.S. race relations. They’d come here in the late ’70s from Nigeria with the idea that they were going to get a college education and then return home to the strong economy and newly minted democracy they’d left behind. But while they were living abroad, Western-backed coups and economic policies destabilized Nigeria and many other countries in the global south. Staying in the United States seemed like the best option.

Today, bilingualism is highly valued. However, when my parents arrived, the United States was informally an English-only society. My teachers encouraged my parents not to speak to me or my siblings in their native tongue, Igbo. They thought I would have trouble with English, even though my parents speak both languages fluently.

Our family lived on the north side of the city, where many recent immigrants from Africa tend to live. However, because we lived in public housing, we were surrounded by all sorts of low-income families, including Black Americans, who were the largest group in our building. There were also other families of African immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and even Eastern European refugees living there. Since Africans were their racial status quo, my parents thought everyone with light skin—whether Puerto Rican, Middle Eastern, or Chinese—were oyibo: White people. Some Black American neighbors complained about our “stinky” African food. Meanwhile, African immigrants tsk-tsked the single-headed households of our Black and Puerto Rican low-income neighbors. One Afro-Cuban neighbor looked like us, but since she spoke only Spanish, l found her confusing—all the other foreign-born Blacks I had encountered spoke English.

Middle-class Black families lived in distant neighborhoods like Hyde Park or the south suburbs, so my understanding of Blackness from kindergarten to eighth grade was limited. It was only when I attended Whitney Young High School—also Michelle Obama’s alma mater—that I saw Black Americans across class backgrounds. I learned that many behaviors that Americans—both Black and non-Black—had insisted to me were “Black” were really traits of the urban poor.

In college, I studied abroad in the southern Spanish city of Granada, where the old Moorish palace the Alhambra still stands. In my classes, I learned that Africans ruled over much of the Mediterranean long before the concept of race existed—sometimes in cooperation with Jewish and Christian brethren, sometimes not. Several people I met in Granada looked like what we might call “mixed” or “biracial” in the United States. There, I learned to speak Castilian Spanish, lisp and all. When native Spaniards tried to speak ill of me—thinking I was an African street vendor who could not understand them and deserved poor treatment—I replied in their own tongue. In Granada, I also witnessed discrimination against Spain’s Roma population. Despite the fact that gitanos were seen as thieves and ne’er-do-wells, gitano culture was nationalized to the point that flamenco was seen as Spanish, not as a cultural product of their disenfranchised Roma people. Living in Spain—the birthplace of modern racism 550 years ago—made me interested in how people around the world understand ethnic and racial boundaries.

In your book, you push back against notions in popular culture that Brazil is a racially harmonious utopia. How did your work lead you to this view? 

I came across several articles by Edward Telles, a future advisor and mentor of mine at UCLA. He had written a lot about racial equality in Brazil. According to his research, Afro-Brazilians earned less than their White peers even when they worked in the same occupations. They had lower levels of education even when they had parents of the same socioeconomic background. They also lived in neighborhoods that were racially segregated—even if less so than hyper-segregated U.S. cities. These racial inequities were not fully explained by class in the ways that many Brazilians had assumed.

When I first went to Brazil for my research, I lived in a wealthy White neighborhood in São Paulo. I soon realized that everywhere around me were White people who looked Italian or Portuguese. The only Black or brown-skinned people there worked as domestics, doormen, or day laborers. My landlady was strange, saying things questioning my intelligence or belittling me as a human. I found it odd how her olive-skinned daughter, who was close in age to me, avoided me. The only saving grace was my White roommate, Celda, who was really kind. She had grown up in one of Portugal’s colonies in Africa, but African independence had forced her Portuguese colonizer parents to leave when she was young. Over drinks one night, Celda explained that our landlady had told her secretly that she did not like Black people and had advised her daughter not to spend time with me outside of the home. That was my cue to leave. At the end of the month, Celda helped me pack up all of my belongings. In the morning, I told our landlady that I did not like how she had been treating me and that I had decided to move out. She was completely gobsmacked as I left the keys on the table. This housing situation was when I first confronted the fraud of Brazilian racial harmony.

Your interviews with interracial couples about their past and present “romantic careers” delve into intimate territory: sexual preferences, racial and gender stereotypes, fraught family dynamics. How did you approach your interviews on these topics, and how did you guard against the possibility of alienating or offending your interviewees?

There were a lot of uncomfortable moments as I was doing those interviews. I reminded myself that I was just listening to their stories. No matter how uncomfortable or unrelatable they could be, they were still their stories and deserved all the respect and care I could muster. Any analysis I did would not occur in the moment. I would take notes on my emotions on the ride back to my apartment in Rio de Janeiro or Los Angeles. If necessary, I would discuss interesting encounters with my roommate or my friends.

Through my interviews with couples, I learned that men often expect women to do the emotional labor of recounting details of their relationship. It didn’t matter whether they were Black or White, or living in Los Angeles or Rio de Janeiro: wives crafted the narrative of their relationships, and husbands rubber-stamped them. Men’s voices are important, too, and I wanted to give them space to share their own experiences of their interracial relationships outside of their wives’ interpretations. For this reason, I conducted the rest of my interviews one-on-one—making sure that the spouse was not within hearing distance. This was more of a struggle in lower-income neighborhoods, where there was not a lot of space for interviewees to be isolated from other family members. I will never forget going to a shantytown to interview a man about his previous relationships. He quickly glanced from side to side and spoke in a hushed tone, looking very, very uncomfortable. The walls in his home were thin, and since we could hear his wife moving about in the next room, she could probably hear us as well.

What advice would you give an aspiring sociologist if they wanted to pursue the sort of cross-national interview-based research you do?

Do not do it until after you have finished your dissertation. My original goal was to study only Brazil, but I had a fellowship that required that I stay in Los Angeles for one more year. I thought, “Why not make this a comparative project?” I have no regrets, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a graduate student. I’d recommend it to somebody who’s already done work in one society or can collaborate with other researchers.