The Brooklyn Rail

I am an ex-white. Don’t get me wrong—I’m quite proud of being a brown Latino. Except that when I’m back in my native Brazil, I am most definitely white, both because no one would ever think otherwise and because of historical context. When I travel outside my two countries (the US and Brazil), sometimes I am seen as one thing, sometimes the other—and both are correct. Definitions of race are as varied as the number of cultures in the world.

Identity is messy and fluid, and chances are, my dear reader, you know that well. But there is a difference between knowing that and how we must speak about it in the face of oppression. Since the emergence of what we call Modernity—whether it began with the Renaissance (the invention of racial enslavement), the Enlightenment (global imperialism), or industrialization (the power division between commodity-producing and industrial nations)—there has been a tension between a simplistic, binary distribution of humanity and a view of people as complex agents shaped by social conditions but irreducible to any single element.

I come from two horrendously racist countries, and I know that defining identity in binary terms can be a survival tactic. In Brazil, since the left first came to power in 2002, the number of Black people in the country increased dramatically—not due to birth rates, but because of self-identification, thanks to empowerment politics, including the creation of a Cabinet for the Promotion of Racial Equality in 2003 (now a ministry) and affirmative action laws. Before that, people used all kinds of words to signify they were mixed race (some examples from the 1976 census: “cinnamon-colored,” “coffee-colored,” “chocolate-colored.”) Science magazine recently wrote that “Brazil has the largest recently admixed population in the world,” but this genetic richness is flattened by the reality that treatment still depends on skin tone. It can be a matter of life and death. By adopting the dichotomous language of racists—Black or white—we can achieve political goals and tackle inequality. But then we are forced to operate within the intellectually and morally bankrupt construction that narrows racial possibilities and that assumes that the world is divided between whites—fantasized as “pure”—and others.

Art can both participate in that stark dualism, which is politically useful and valid, or portray a more lived, complex experience. Two recent, compelling artworks—Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt (2020) and Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners (2025)—offer notable examples of how art sometimes avoids untidiness to preserve political clarity.

Leopoldstadt’s Hermann Merz lives as a Catholic, wealthy, high-society Viennese. But with the rise of Nazism, his chosen identity is stripped away. He is now a Jew and nothing else. His tragedy was his naïveté in believing that assimilation would protect him. The play seems to suggest that his cultural hybridism was always strategic, never deep or sincere. Even his gentile wife cheats on him with a Christian military officer. It was all a lie—both for the Nazis and for the play.

In Sinners, set in 1932 Mississippi, a mixed-race woman is portrayed as a symbol of contamination. Her dual identity—shown to carry the privileges of whiteness but never shown to suffer as a mixed-race person—is depicted as a threat to the “purity” of other people of color. She corrupts them. The infected Black characters (who engage with “white music”) are depicted as puppets, manipulated and inauthentic. Cultural hybridity is equated with cultural appropriation.

These works reflect a broader anxiety—and a strategy: that hybridity undermines solidarity, that complexity weakens the cause. Yet both succeed artistically, in part because they speak against racial violence and oppression to large audiences. They educate through pathos, in Aristotelian fashion.

And then there’s someone like the author Machado de Assis—a Black man in a slave society, grandson of an enslaved woman, married to a white woman, living amid Rio’s nineteenth century intellectual elite. In the novel The Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas, he writes of how the white protagonist (Brás), as a child, tortures Prudêncio, an enslaved boy about his age. Years later, Brás Cubas happens upon Prudêncio, now a free man, who is torturing his own enslaved worker. It’s a less edifying moment, but just as rich—where sociological, political, historical, economic, and psychological factors are messily presented.

Artworks such as Leopoldstat and Sinners, present dichotomous identities to educate, to build a sense of solidarity, and to achieve political goals. Other artworks, such as Brás Cubas address the complexities of experience without the obligation of a tidy solution. Art in its many forms is particularly suited for the project of examining identity and difference as it uses reasoned arguments coupled with empathy—so that we can feel what we think and think about what we live.