Desvioo Zine #1


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“[…] series of racial micro-agressions make it virtually impossible for people of color to stay in a white dutch anarchist space without feeling subjugated.”






“Many white people are willfully ignorant because it’s in their best interest to maintain the [racist] status quo, while also maintaining the ‘not racist’ label.”










By Mirna Wabi-Sabi

University of Color

Gods & Radicals

Konfrontatie (In Dutch)



Niterói is the city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, and its name means “hidden water” in Tupi. The leader of the now extinct Temiminó tribe, Araribóia, founded this city in the late 1500’s. Niterói is the only city in Brazil to have been founded by an indigenous person. In 16-century Brazil, Portuguese settlers married indigenous women and rewarded indigenous leaders, such as Araribóia, with expensive gifts and prestigious positions. In return, the indigenous tribe would join the fight against other indigenous tribes and European settlers from other countries, such as France and the Netherlands. These other European countries that fought Portugal for control over the colony were not as successful in collaborating with the locals. This was because they preferred to preserve the racial, religious and cultural segregation for white supremacist reasons. Despite the Pope’s claim that indigenous people had a ‘blood defect’, Araribóia eventually converted to Christianity and changed his name to Martim Afonso. Portugal’s ability to convert the indigenous into Christianity, and to have mixed marriages and offspring, lead to ‘successful’ alliances at war and land development. Of course, these alliances were not motivated by equality, but instead by patriarchal capitalist interests.

Mixed marriages lead to miscegenation, and miscegenation became an unavoidable part of Brazil’s sense of identity. It has been considered a weakness to be fixed through racial cleansing, or a source of power, beauty and pride if well managed. Unlike the United States’ ‘one-drop rule’, white Brazilian men tried to claim the opposite; white people could genetically ‘fix’ the lower races. This concept came from white European men who wanted to justify and validate their sexual relationships with women of color, and their emotional attachment to the families they were creating. Scientific journals were written about how natural it was for white men to be attracted to women of color, and how to use this to improve the Brazilian race. “The sexual fantasy of the erotic encounter with the Other is simultaneously the fantasy of whitening/browning the nation by eliminating “Africanoid exaggerations””. This was the beginning of Brazil’s mingling of medical research, race, and beauty.

“[Southeastern Brazilians] actively, today, associate beauty with health, wealth, white(er)ness.”

“Cosmetic citizenship” is a term used by Alvaro Jarrín in 2010 to describe Southeastern Brazil’s relationship with beauty in connection to race, class and gender hierarchy. To this day, we struggle with the white supremacist ideology imposed on us for hundreds of years of colonization, and we still today hold the Brazilian working class (economically) hostage to white bourgeois beauty (and behavior) standards. We actively, today, associate beauty with health, wealth, white(er)ness.

Too many people talk about the plastic surgery phenomenon in Brazil and the sexualized exotification of Brazilian women as something we created ourselves. They claim Brazilian women have nice asses and are promiscuous because that’s what they are by nature, as if that statement was an objective fact. The neutral gaze. This is reinforced by the media and popular culture, which is dominated by white capitalist patriarchy in Brazil and abroad. How can we talk about Brazilian culture without mentioning colonialism?


“[the Brazilian elite is] mesmerized by the American dream of financial success and by the European dream of white supremacist racial cleansing, while the population is held financially hostage and struggles to survive.”

Even though the Brazilian elite participates in this oppression, it doesn’t mean Western powers aren’t responsible. In fact, they are responsible for the destabilization of all of Latin America for hundreds of years and still are today. Brazilian women should not and will not be reduced to the stereotype of sexy and promiscuous, subject to sex tourism and harassment. As a Brazilian woman, I’m tired of white Western Europeans trying to educate me about my own country and even on how I should perceive myself.

Niterói is my hometown. Much of our indigenous history has been devalued, destroyed and forgotten. The legacy of this destruction defines us today. The white supremacist sexual assault of indigenous and African women, the slaughter of indigenous languages, spirituality and culture; these are all still part of our lives whenever we see a Christian church, whenever we forget what the names of our neighborhoods mean, whenever a woman feels pressure to conform to an elitist and racist beauty standard, whenever we reject our indigenous blood and heritage, and whenever we worship foreign currency over nature.

So, next time you see the “Brazilian Issue” of something with a picture of a nice ass on the cover, see it for what it really is: the colonized female body being dissected, analyzed, criticized, sexualized, and sold.

references: Alvaro Jarrín, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Gloria Wekker

“In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these [Western] values, insult them, and vomit them up.” Frantz Fanon