Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race [Hardcover]

Eugene Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 13, 1999

Eugene Robinson didn't expect to have his world turned upside down when he accompanied a group of friends and acquaintances to the beach at Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro one sunny afternoon. He had recently moved to South America as the new correspondent for the Washington Post, a position he had sought not only as an exciting professional challenge but also as a means of escape from the poisonous racial atmosphere in America's cities, which he experienced firsthand as a reporter and editor covering city politics in Washington, D.C. Black and white wouldn't matter so much, he thought, if he gave himself a little distance from the problem.

At first Robinson saw Brazil as a racial paradise, where people of all hues and colors mingled together on the beaches, in the samba schools, and at carnaval. But that day on the beach, his most basic assumptions about race were shattered when he was told that he didn't have to be black in Brazil if he didn't want to be. The society looked at people through a broad spectrum of colors, ranging from "white" to "coffee with milk" to "after midnight," and not as members of two rigidly defined races. Like most African Americans, Robinson had always recognized the existence of color gradations within the black community -- the members of his own family span the entire range from coal to cream -- but he never looked at color the same way after that encounter at Ipanema.

Coal to Cream is the story of Robinson's personal exploration of race, color, identity, culture, and heritage, as seen through the America of his youth and the South America he discovered, forging a new consciousness about himself, his people, and his country. As he immersed himself in Brazilian culture, Robinson began to see that its focus on color and class -- as opposed to race -- presents problems of its own. Discrimination and inequality still exist, but without a sense of racial identity, the Brazilians lack the anger and vocabulary they need to attack or even describe such ills. Ultimately, Robinson came to realize that racial identity, what makes him not just an American but a black American, is a gift of great value -- a shared language of history and experience -- rather than the burden it had sometimes seemed.

A penetrating look at race relations in the United States and much of the rest of the hemisphere, Coal to Cream is both a personal memoir and a striking comment on the times in which we live. At a time when many are calling for the abandonment of racial identity, Robinson cautions that we should be careful what we wish for, lest we get it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eugene Robinson, an African American assistant editor at The Washington Post, experienced strong culture shock when he went to Brazil and discovered that nation's staggering degrees of blackness: with over 60 million people of apparent African descent, Brazil is the world's largest black country after Nigeria. But as Robinson deftly articulates in the stunning Coal to Cream, most Afro-Brazilians suffer from race denial and an underdeveloped sense of racial identity, which keeps them from demanding social and political reforms. Robinson is awed by the nation's African musical, culinary, and religious influences, which, along with generations of cohabitation (in every sense of the word) with Indians and Europeans, have eliminated--at least on one level--the harsher aspects of racism. "The emphasis on the more mutable issue of color (rather than the rigidity of race) was at the heart of what I loved so much about Brazil--the absence of racial conflict," Robinson writes. "There was no silent struggle going on."

But he also notes that black Brazilians occupy the lowest rungs of Brazilian society; many of them live in the hopeless conditions of the favela slums. He also observes the emerging black consciousness movements in Bahia and the Afro-eroticism of Carnival (which serves as a safety valve for the country's poor and discontented). And he contrasts Brazil's black population with the more marginalized Afro-Peruvians and the Afro-Caribbean Brixton area of London, two regions where race consciousness abounds. Yet, with all of its ambiguities, Eugene Robinson sees Brazil as a possible future for the United States, as the absurd "one drop" rule used to arbitrate racial identity becomes a thing of the past. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From Publishers Weekly

Frustrated by American racial politics, Robinson, an accomplished journalist for the Washington Post, assumed a position as a foreign correspondent in the newspaper's South American bureau. His trip to Brazil, which he envisioned as a tropical land of racial harmony, prompted this sometimes acerbic yet constantly challenging comparison of color, class and racial identity in his native country and that tantalizing South American melting pot. He opens with an exacting recollection of his childhood in segregated South Carolina before deftly examining the significance of race in everyday life in the U.S. and the potent racial and social myths that inform our concept of it. The outward absence of interracial animosity he finds in Rio and the surrounding countryside shatters his long-held views on the invincibility of the barriers posed by skin color. Following his detailed and exuberant observations of Caricoa society and its unique emphasis on color over race, his journey through South America, especially in Peru and Chile, compels him to reassess his views of himself both as a black man and an American. Particularly entertaining is his short, informative chapter on the Brazilian black church and the role of African influences in its rituals. Robinson wryly hammers home his key points on the destructive nature of racial prejudice in America, but repetition robs his effort of much of its cumulative impact. Despite its flaws, however, the book is full of provocative and worthy insights. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First edition (August 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684857227
• ISBN-13: 978-0684857220
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ironically, he ignores Brazilians' views on this matter..., March 13, 2001

By 

Thaddeus G. Blanchette (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (Hardcover)

In spite of my better judgement, I really like this book. As a quietly emotional, introspective and beautifully written report of one Black American man's reactions to Brazilian notions of race, it has no equal.

Why do I give it only two stars then? It upsets me that people across the U.S. will use this as some sort of "text book" to decipher Brazilian race relations. It is not. In fact, for an intelligent, sensitive journalist, Robinson shows a shocking lack of knowledge of Brazilian history and culture, especially as viewed through Brazilian eyes. This fatally undermines his analysis of race relations in Brazil.

To hear Robinson tell it, Brazil is in some kind of racial purgatory. Brazil's concepts of race never change. Or rather, its /lack/ of concept of race never changes. Brazilians, as we are told again and again throughout "From Coal to Cream" simply don't believe in the idea of race: they only see colors relative one to another. This theory of race in Brazil has a long and hallowed history in American academia. Unfortunately, Brazilian social scientists have pretty well demonstrated it to be full of enormous holes. There has been quite a long and well-documented tradition of seeing things in "black" and "white" in Brazil - a tradition which the Brazilian public ideologies of race would prefer to ignore. That this tradition remains alive and well in our quotidian world, however, is a fact that's brought back to me everytime I see some light-brown skinned kid wearing a "100% Negro" t-shirt here in Rio de Janeiro.

Ironically, the years that Robinson spent as a journalist in Brazil saw some of the greatest historic changes in afro-descended Brazilians' perceptions of themselves and their nation. These changes were perhaps best (but not exclusively) symbolized by the 1988 Constitutional Resolution to give land to Brazil's surviving quilombo residents - a law which was only won through large-scale mobilization of Black Brazilian grass-roots groups. None of this exciting ferment and activity is touched upon by Robinson, whom, I suspect, is unable to read a daily newspaper in Portuguese. From what I've gathered in the book, he didn't know anything of this sort was occuring among Black Brazilians. If he did, he certainly didn't follow it up, prefering to maintain the old, thread-bare dichotomy of a Brazil which ignores race and doesn't progress opposed to a progressive, race conscious United States.

Robinson would probably be quite suprised that, as regards his conslusions on race in Brazil, he is travelling the same path that many hard-core racists once tread. The French philosopher and scientific racist Gubineau (SP, sorry...) also believed that as a mixed race nation, Brazil was a contradiction in terms which could never, ever progress. The real question, of course, is why Robinson finds it necessary to do this and how does he have the power to be more widely heard on this subject than any one of hundreds of Brazilian journalists and scholars (of all colors) who are infinitely more well-informed than he is.

Robinson needs to look into the mirror and realize that even though he's Black, he's also a U.S. citizen and thus inherits a certain degree of imperial power along with that status. Perhaps then he'd be capable of writing about Brazilian racism with a new degree of sensitivity - not only to his personal feelings, but to Brazil as well. What is scary to me is that "From Coal to Cream" is so convincingly written that even many Brazilians, ignorant of their own history, will buy into its precepts.

When a journalist who barely speaks the language of a country attempts to tackle one of its deepest, most perenial problems based upon a few superficial travels, we should take his conclusions with a large grain of salt. Though it attempts to address Brazilian racism, "From Coal to Cream" is yet another in a long series of fantastic projections of Anglo-American fears and desires upon Brazil. Nevertheless, one should buy this book if one is interested in how Americans perceive and react to Brazil. /That/ is it's true value, and in this sense, Robinson has crafted a masterpiece.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A personal story and a quietly intelligent book, October 21, 1999

By 

William Gilcher ([e-mail]) (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (Hardcover)

I read the book immediately after hearing Robinson on NPR's "Diane Rehm" show and found it one of the most quietly intelligent books I have read on the subject of race and color. Having been to Brazil recently (and speaking some Portuguese), I was eager to see how he analyzed the socio-racial scene there. This book is not a sociological tract--it is a highly personal book, the story of the author's own odyssey through his personal history and the various societies in which he has lived. By thinking about Brazil, he really does see issues of American society and history in a much clearer light--and helps us see them too. There are a string of revelations here. I would want to argue with him about some of his conclusions, but I thought Robinson came through as a man of great integrity who has put a lot of himself on the line here. I recommend the book highly.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A nice introduction, but the issue is much deeper, November 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (Hardcover)

Having returned from my first trip to Brazil recently, I was angry when I saw Mr. Robinson on C-Span discussing this book, angry that he had stolen my idea! This work offers a great introduction for someone who has never been to Brazil, but I was extremely shocked at how skin-deep Mr. Robinson's assessments were. He, over and over again, refers to the "black" people that he encountered in Brazil without ever offering a deeper investigation of what it means to be "black." His perceptions are entirely influenced by his own culture and he seems unable, or at least unwilling, to step away from his own experiences momentarily in order to objectively experience Brazil. The simple fact is that in Brazil, as in the USA, and England, and many other places around the world, light-skinned people receive a disproportionate amount of privilege regardless of what race they claim to belong to. I was really surprised that a seasoned journalist didn't go a bit deeper with his analysis. At best, this book will spark a national conversation amongst people of all races in America, a conversation that we have before but desperately need to revisit. AND SHAME ON THE FREE PRESS FOR ALLOWING SO MANY ERRORS INTO THE FINAL PRINT!