This article discusses the social dimensions which blackness and the black experience seem to be acquiring in our current days. Due to a series of political, social and cultural transformations, there has arisen the idea that African Brazilians have expanded their scenario of interactions, leading to changes in the way that they construct their social identifications. Black youths, for instance, are protagonists in a process of individualization and social differentiation which helps destabilize cultural identifications anchored in classical notions of Africanness and community. In this regard, this is a critique of the shape that contemporary race relations have taken, supposing that the classical referential markers which constitute blackness no longer seem to be legitimatizing what is really being experienced by many African Brazilians today.
Blackness; Race relations; Africanness; African Brazilians; Racism