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I don’t think there’s going to be a black race or a white race or an Asian race,” says Dr. Michael Jones, a plastic surgeon whose claim to fame is operating on Wendy Williams. (He did my earlobes,” she announces in a radio commercial.) “As we travel more, we have more interracial unions. Essentially, in 200 years, we’re going to have one race. I see that even now, people just picking things they like from different ethnicities and calling that the ideal for the moment.” This fantasy of racial convergence, and post-racial or supra-racial beauty, is a common one, if sometimes insidious: a shortcut for imagining a sexy future beyond prejudice without any real effort, just some biracial boning. When National Geographic published a mixed-race portrait series called “The Changing Face of America,” other websites raved about “the lovely faces” showing “how the ‘average American’ will look by the year 2050.” (“Look at how beautiful it is to see everything diluted that we used to hate,” Hairpin blogger Jia Tolentino groaned.) But even the work that Jones performs, on patients who are predominantly African-American, doesn’t give a neat picture of racial convergence. “Our two big procedures are ethnic rhinoplasty, which tends to make an ethnic or African nose more Anglo—and butts! We are giving people larger derrières,” Jones says. There, “they want more ethnicity.” And unlike Asian cheekbone reduction, Jones points out that these “more ethnic” ideals have been adopted by the white mainstream, too. White women want “Kim Kardashian” butts and “a more full, Mongoloid- or African-looking lip,” he says, sounding every bit the casually blasphemous plastic surgeon. Fifteen years ago, Jones started his practice in the first floor of the Harlem brownstone he shared with his TV-anchor wife. He found himself revising bad surgeries from the 1990s that had left his black patients with significant scars or the dreaded L-shaped nasal implant, infamous for poking holes through the tips of patients’ noses. Subtler implants have since come into style, and scarring is better understood, too. “It’s almost a given that a person of color will exhibit some degree of hyperpigmentation to their scars or even a keloid behind the ear after face-lift surgery,” Jones notes. “So we evolved our techniques.” Jones estimates that 25 to 30 percent of his practice, now located at a midtown medical spa called House of Beauty, is dedicated to treating scars in patients of color. technique is sometimes referred to as “correction of the Negroid nose” in Brazil and other parts of Latin America (Vidal and Vigil 2010). While this medical description seems to racialize the facial feature, it does not assume that the feature will identify the patient as “black” (preto or negro in Portuguese). In fact, some patients requesting this surgery identify as white, or with a colour term, such as brown (moreno), or its variants. Some moreno Brazilians say they have mixed ancestry, indigenous ancestry, brown relatives, or are simply unsure of family history. Some consider themselves white. Moreno is thus a racially ambiguous term, different from the more racialized identity of negro (black), and one of the most popular descriptions of physical appearance (Sansone 2004). The surgical search for beauty in mixed and brown patients is influenced by Brazil’s long history of whitening. Embranquiamento (whitening) has a distinct significance in Brazilian nation-building. Imported from Europe, racial anthropology brought the unwelcome idea to Brazilian elites in the late nineteenth century that liberal racial mixing would doom the population to degeneration. The scientific concept of whitening offered a local form of resistance to this idea: the admixture of European blood would gradually whiten, and hence improve, the people (Skidmore 1974). Embranquiamento was later translated into policy favouring European immigration at the expense of extending full citizenship to non-whites (Andrews 1991). However, beginning in the 1920s, Brazilians again reassessed racial mixture. Scholar Gilberto Freyre used Boasian anthropology’s culture concept to challenge racial pessimism (Vianna 1999). Freyre (1956, 1986) celebrated racial and cultural mestiçagem (mixture). His vision of a vibrant, mixed Brazil became a central, often eroticized, aspect of national identity in the twentieth century (Bocayuva 2001). It was elaborated in the new modernist literature and in avant-garde paintings depicting the beautiful kaleidoscope of Brazilian phenotypes convivially mixing (Figure 2). Freyre’s work, and its uptake by the state and popular culture, helped establish a vision of the population as a meta-race that transcended racial boundaries. [Figure 2 here] This was a highly gendered gaze that made the mixed-race woman a symbol of Brazilian sensuality, and has been critiqued by black social movements. However, while this nationalist discourse aestheticizes mixture it stigmatizes blackness as “excess” (Freyre 1986). In Freyre’s vision, race in a sense became visible in blackness but (partially) disappears in mixture. Freyre’s ideas about race and beauty underline central contradictions in Brazilian society and plastic surgery practice. The blurring of racial boundaries is 10 celebrated, as is mixture in some social domains; yet, black Brazilians encounter social and aesthetic prejudice (Telles 2004), reflected in the proverb: “The whiter, the better”. The relative fluidity between color categories in Brazilian society thus does not mean that surgeons reject the race concept in their medical practice; on the contrary, they claim to have intimate medical knowledge of how race manifests in the body. They assert that whites’ skin ages poorly, that blacks gain weight more easily, that an African-European mixture produces an attractive slender waist and voluminous hips in women. Some surgeons even claim to know from which tribes (e.g. “Bantu” or “Angolan”) their black and mixed patients have descended according to their propensity to form keloid scars. Surgeons also apply this knowledge, for example, in surgeries that redistribute fat to the hips in emulation of what they see as desirable African-white mixture in women’s bodies. However, mixture also creates what surgeons see as aesthetic problems: features that do not fit the face or disharmonies. Surgery’s goal for the mixed patient is to harmonize such disharmonies. Recalling Freyre’s discourse on mixture as avoiding excess, surgeons promise to remove overly accentuated racial traits. As in Korea, such “excess” is seen as more of an aesthetic problem in women, than in men, though some male patients do request racialized rhinoplasty. Brazilian plastic surgery differs from our other two cases, however, in that it tends to unlink the racial trait from racial identity. US and Korean surgeons use sophisticated anthropometric measurement in order to know the racial feature in precise detail and then move the patient towards race-specific ideals. In Brazilian plastic surgery, on the other hand, the racial feature is not necessarily considered an index of racial identity. A brown or white patient may be considered to have a black nose. Improving the nose in these conditions is not seen as posing a risk of “changing” the racial identity of the patient, but is rather seen as a valid means of harmonizing the face. Depictions of racial phenotype as malleable feed fantasies of flexibility in racial or colour identities. Aspiring actress Noemi said, “I am all mixed, white, Indian, black . . . I can go in several directions”. Nevertheless, she was contemplating surgery to refine her nose at her employer’s suggestion, the Globo TV network. Noemi saw the procedure as a means to obtain a well-paid telenovela role. Her desire for improvement suggests how the Brazilian fantasy of the meta-racial beauty utopia is haunted by the spectre of whitening and a long history of
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