Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness. Embodying Inclusive Conservative Conviviality in Rio de Janeiro
By Raphael Schapira
This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here.
1. Introduction
Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) originated in Brazil in the early twentieth century and has roots in traditional Japanese jiu-jitsu, which arrived on the country’s shores with Japanese immigrants and sailors. As a martial art and combat sport focusing on grappling and ground fighting techniques, BJJ practitioners typically seek to control their opponent on the ground and apply various techniques to gain a dominant position or submit their opponent by applying joint locks or chokes. During fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro in September 2022, I witnessed two Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitions. The first competition occurred at a military compound in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone. It involved about one hundred children and teenagers from social BJJ projects and was aptly called “Social Fight”. The organizers, a small Brazilian jiu-jitsu federation, wanted to give young athletes from the city’s periphery, often living in favelas, the possibility to participate in a well-run competition that would generally be too expensive for them to join. To achieve this, the participation fee was set at only 85 reais (USD 17) for individuals and 50 reais (USD 10) for social projects.
Most coaches taking part shared a common identity and goal: as members of the Fadda jiu-jitsu lineage, founded in 1950 by Grandmaster Oswaldo Fadda (1920–2005) in Bento Ribeiro in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, they aimed to continue the grandmaster’s social work, keeping youths off the street and making BJJ accessible to differently-abled persons.[1] By teaching traditional jiu-jitsu values like respect, discipline, and hierarchy – understood to have been handed down through generations of first Japanese and then Brazilian grandmasters – they hoped to give youths at risk a different perspective in life so that they would stay out of trouble and not accept “job offers” from drug gangs, and become good citizens. Nevertheless, despite the event’s focus on economically-disadvantaged athletes, which, given the racialized divisions in Brazilian society, meant that Black and Brown athletes predominated, its racial implications went largely uncommented.[2] Coach Orlando Silva summarized the shared perception by organizers and coaches understanding the event as colourless and egalitarian by saying: “For me, jiu-jitsu is very democratic. It’s neither a White nor a Black sport; it’s simply sport”.[3]

The second competition I observed occurred later that month at the Clube Municipal, close to the world-famous Maracanã stadium. The professional and established event named “Carioca” was organized by the Jiu-Jitsu Federation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FJJ-Rio) and was much more mixed regarding race.[4] Its higher participation fee of 140 reais (USD 27) and its location closer to the city centre made it more difficult for poorer athletes to participate.[5] Nevertheless, several dedicated athletes from social projects who had also participated in the “Social Fight” competition were also present, as they had obtained the necessary funds through raffles, selling sweets, or sponsorship. This time, however, they were not competing in a Fadda context but at an event marked as belonging to the Gracie lineage, whose key protagonists are widely recognized as essential in developing and diffusing Brazilian jiu-jitsu in the twentieth century.
Visually, the event was dominated by a large banner showing the pictures of three elderly Brazilian jiu-jitsu legends: Carlos Gracie (1902–1994), his younger brother Hélio Gracie (1913–2009), and Carlos Gracie’s son Robson Gracie (1935–2023), long- time president of the FJJ-Rio. Symbolically, the banner affirmed the Gracies’ claim of having created BJJ and established a line from these founding figures to the competing athletes who, like benevolent grandfathers, watched their heirs competing. However, it also conveyed White superiority associated with the Gracies by showing only White men who had belonged to Rio’s elite. Despite this symbolic marking, Carolina Santos, the event’s coordinator, claimed that BJJ is a democratic sport because “on the mats, everyone is equal”, citing the participating athletes’ racial diversity as evidence.
The two vignettes show how Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches, functionaries, and practitioners generally hold that BJJ is free of discrimination based on race, class, gender, and ableism. Although men still dominate Brazilian jiu-jitsu numerically and hold key decision-making positions – a representative survey from 2013 found that 2.2% of Brazilian men practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu compared to 0.4% of women (Ministério do Esporte 2015) – women are progressively claiming more roles as practitioners, coaches, and professional competitors in Brazil and internationally (Knijnik and Ferretti 2015; Kavoura et al. 2015), as well as taking on administrative roles. However, the symbolic construction of BJJ as a White sport is seldom problematized. Whiteness turns out to be an unmarked and unnamed category of power in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which, I argue, makes the sport attractive in distinct ways to members of different social strata. Drawing on Patricia de Santana Pinho’s concepts of “injured whiteness” and “aspirational whiteness” (Pinho 2021), I discuss how affluent BJJ practitioners employ BJJ to defend their White symbolic supremacy while lower-income practitioners use it to distance themselves from Blackness.
The paper centres on understanding and contributing to the analysis of Brazil’s reactionary moment, which became evident with the election of former President Jair Bolsonaro, by exploring Whiteness as a constitutive element within this context. Drawing from ethnographic research, I argue that the discourses of social inclusion presented by both the Gracies and the Faddas, amid pronounced social inequalities, offer valuable lessons to be learned about the nexus between conviviality and inequality (Costa 2019). Furthermore, this analysis sheds light on the ambivalent “everyday processes of how people live together in mundane encounters, of how they re/translate between their maintained differences and how they re/negotiate ways of being in the same locale” (Heil 2019: 1). I propose to grasp the specific character of conviviality emerging in Rio de Janeiro’s BJJ circles with the term “inclusive conservative conviviality” to highlight the contradictions of the conservativism of parts of Brazil’s upper and popular classes believing in social inclusion for everyone while maintaining, through strategies of Whiteness (higher income groups) and anti-Blackness (lower income groups), the frame of the “anti-Black city” (Alves 2018), in which the state protects and values Whiteness while Blackness is perceived as potentially delinquent and dangerous.
This paper is based on a total of three months of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro between June and September 2023 among jiu-jitsu practitioners, during which I engaged in embodied participant observation, recorded eleven formal interviews, and conducted five informal interviews lasting between ten and sixty minutes. Additionally, it draws on qualitative research conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Rio de Janeiro. The recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, while the informal interviews were written down as part of fieldwork notes (Becker 1998). Moreover, I took pictures and recorded videos, which were analysed on the premise of co-authorship between the person taking the picture and the person in the picture (Pink 2001).
Being a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner myself, I actively participated in BJJ training sessions, employing embodied participant observation methods (Giardina and Donnelly 2019) to use my senses as an additional research tool to “access areas of embodied, emplaced knowing and to use these as a basis from which to understand human perception, experience, action and meaning […]” (Pink 2009: 47). Furthermore, traditional participant observation was employed when accompanying my interlocutors participating as athletes, coaches, or bloggers to BJJ competitions. The transcribed interviews and fieldwork notes were coded and analysed based on the tools of the grounded theory approach to identify recurrent topics and key issues in the material (Charmaz 2014).
In the following section, I will discuss the concepts of Whiteness and anti-Blackness to establish the analytical lens used to look at the history and contemporary practice of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Afterward, I will demonstrate how the Gracie lineage established BJJ as a sport catering to the White elite by distancing it from its Japanese and Afro-Brazilian roots and how this constructed image continues to be perpetuated in the present. Subsequently, I will delve into the Fadda lineage and its approach to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which seeks to create an egalitarian ethos and embraces BJJ’s Japanese legacy. However, I will also explore how it falls short of addressing the issue of colour-blindness in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In the conclusion, I will pick up on the concept of “inclusive conservative conviviality” and briefly discuss it in the light of the afore-xpresented analysis of Whiteness in the ambit of Gracie and Fadda Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
[…]

3. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness
Sports and martial arts like Brazilian jiu-jitsu are codified forms of movement cultures that constantly interact with their social, political, and economic context (Besnier et al. 2017; Green 2003). Processes of “sportization” (Elias 1986) have been dominating the martial arts since the invention of modern sports around the second half of the nineteenth century, turning them into measurable and comparable movement practices, which are often associated with the nation-state given that “fighting” is not just done metaphorically, like in most sports, but also practically (Gaudin 2009). Brazilian jiu- jitsu developed out of the teachings of Japanese judo and jiu-jitsu experts coming to Brazil as immigrants, sailors, and travellers at the beginning of the twentieth century (Ferreira 2019; Santos Júnior 2022; Green and Svinth 2001).
Jeffrey Lesser explains that public opinion regarding Japanese immigration oscillated between approval and rejection during the first half of the twentieth century (Lesser 2013). At times, Japanese immigrants were portrayed as even more modern and Whiter than Europeans, at times labelled as unable to assimilate based on “nativist arguments about stealing jobs and land, racist arguments about biological pollution, and militarist arguments suggesting that Japanese imperial aspirations in Asia would soon move toward Brazil” (Lesser 2013: 164). Such changing opinions can be traced in newspaper reports about Japanese jiu-jitsu martial artists who were, depending on the current juncture, either portrayed as inferior or superior to local Black capoeira fighters (Santos Júnior 2021). One strategy to resolve racial anxieties regarding Afro-Brazilian capoeira and Japanese jiu-jitsu was to Whiten these martial arts by transforming them into official Brazilian movement cultures that fit into Brazil’s racial hierarchy. Capoeira changed from being perceived as a menace by White authorities to being seen as a national sport (Desch-Obi 2008; Vidor de Sousa Reis 1994), while Japanese jiu-jitsu morphed from representing a threat to White superiority and masculinity after Japan’s imperial wars to being vernacularized as Brazilian jiu-jitsu (Cairus 2020; Santos Júnior 2021: 3–4).
The Gracie family, based in Rio de Janeiro, was crucial in transforming Brazilian jiu-jitsu into a nationalistic project by ousting their Japanese-Brazilian counterparts based in São Paulo. Seeking social and spatial proximity to Rio de Janeiro’s political elite, they taught its members their jiu-jitsu (Gracie 2008: 283). In 1930, the same year Getúlio Vargas took office as the head of the provisional government, the Gracies opened their first official gym in Rio de Janeiro near the presidential palace in the neighbourhood Catete (Cairus 2012: 71–72). At that time, the geographical proximity mirrored the Gracies’ political alignment with Getúlio Vargas’ regime, leading to their appointment to teach their jiu-jitsu to the newly formed special police for political and social security purposes (DESP) (Cairus 2020: 29; Schwarcz and Starling 2018: 423). The new police units were formed in 1933 to create political repression and to defend the dictatorial Estado Novo project against its opponents, for which its head, Captain Filinto Müller, received support from the German Gestapo through the exchange of information and interrogation techniques (Schwarcz and Starling 2018: 423–424).
The Vargas regime enjoyed support from a nationalist alliance formed between Rio’s traditional elite and emerging power structures originating from oligarchies established in peripheral regions of Brazil (Cairus 2020: 29). Their counterpart was a coalition of industrialists and landowners based in São Paulo – the country’s hotspot of Japanese immigration – interested in continuing open immigration policies. The political context aggravated the competition between the Gracies based in Rio de Janeiro and their Japanese counterparts in São Paulo, in which each group came to stand for opposed nation-building projects (Cairus 2020).
From 1934 on, President Vargas’s government began restricting immigration and subsequently targeting Japanese and other immigrant groups’ cultural outlets like newspapers to foster Brazilianess (Lesser 2013: 164–166). The Gracies effectively responded to the new Zeitgeist demanding Brazilianess by disassociating Brazilian jiu- jitsu from its Japanese roots not just on the level of skills but also on the level of moral values, thus permitting their followers to embody a specific idea of the Brazilian nation associated with Whiteness, authoritarianism, and patriarchy.[6] Cairus argues that by “refusing to abide by the technical, philosophical and cultural aspects of the Japanese matrix”, the Gracie clan set off a process for Brazilian jiu-jitsu akin to the indigenization of British cricket in India (Cairus 2020: 30).
According to Arjun Appadurai, cultural forms that embody strict rules and competitive structures, such as sports, “encapsulate the core moral values of the society in which they are born” (Appadurai 1995: 24), making them resistant to easy alterations. Appadurai uses the example of Indian cricket to illustrate how its indigenization was a complex and contradictory process that coincided with the emergence of India as a nation separate from the British Empire. Moreover, as cricket was increasingly disseminated through various media channels like books, newspapers, radio, and television, it became not only a symbol of Indian nationhood but also “inscribed, as practice, into the Indian (male) body” (Appadurai 1995: 45).
Like cricket in India, the vernacularization of Japanese jiu-jitsu in Brazil was part of a specific nation-building process that articulated conflicting conceptions about the future identity of the nation. To establish Brazilian jiu-jitsu as Brazilian, the Gracies stripped their martial art style of institutional links, rituals, and movements that had marked it as Japanese. By remaining independent of Japanese institutions like the Kodokan, the governing judo institution based in Tokyo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu federations were free to implement their own rules regarding permitted techniques and the belt system. Accordingly, the Gracies eliminated Japanese rituals like Japanese bowing (reihō), replacing it with a handshake, and shifted the focus of their jiu-jitsu style to ground combat (Cairus 2020: 30). However, a classical iconoclasm has been the most visible sign of Brazilian jiu-jitsu’s independence from its Japanese institutional origins. It substituted the picture of Jigoro Kano with the images of Hélio and his older brother Carlos Gracie, who are credited with founding the Gracie BJJ lineage. Nowadays, their pictures are displayed in gyms all around the world. Furthermore, the Gracies referred to their gym as an “academy” instead of using the common Japanese term dōjō and gave new names, generally Portuguese ones, to Japanese jiu-jitsu fighting techniques.
Despite the Gracies attempt to “de-Japanize” Brazilian jiu-jitsu, they admired and acknowledged Japanese martial artists and techniques. In 1951, in the context of diminishing anti-Japanese sentiments prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s – sentiments that led to new forms of acknowledgment but also buried traumatic experiences for the Japanese-Brazilian population in silence (Toji 2023) – Hélio Gracie confronted the Japanese Judo champion Masahiko Kimura. Kimura beat Gracie with a judo technique called ude-garami (reverse shoulder lock), handing him the first defeat of his professional fighting career. Subsequently, the Gracies started calling this technique “kimura” to honour this exceptional athlete – a name that has stuck until today in international BJJ and MMA circuits (Snowden and Shields 2010: 225). The Gracies also honoured other foreign fighters by calling specific techniques after them. For example, they supposedly named the technique “americana”, a shoulder lock also known as ude-garami or keylock, after US freestyle wrestler Bob Anderson who visited them in the 1970s (Snowden and Shields 2010: 226).

However, the Gracies’ symbolic acknowledgment of elite foreign fighters and their indebtedness to them was never extended to Black Brazilian martial artists in the same way. For instance, although the Afro-Brazilian fighter Waldemar Santana won against Hélio Gracie in 1955, inflicting on Gracie his second and last defeat, his finishing technique was not given the name “santana”. Moreover, the Gracies received instruction in specific techniques from Afro-Brazilian martial artists, including the renowned capoeira master Zé Maria in the 1930s. These techniques were persistently employed by the Gracies, extending into mixed martial arts fights in the 2000s (Silva and Corrêa 2020: 299–309). However, despite not providing symbolic acknowledgment to Afro-Brazilian martial artists, the Gracies adhered to Brazil’s imperative of taking pride in racial mixture and cordiality. Like their White and well-off contemporaries, they established racial hierarchy through vertical economic inequality while maintaining horizontal social relations (Telles 2006: 12).
Given Brazil’s strong correlation between income and race (Telles 2006: 107–130), the high membership fees of the Gracie gym ensured that its White male members stayed among themselves. In 1952, Gracie students paid around USD 50 monthly for one weekly session or USD 100 for two. Considering that the minimum monthly wage in 1952 was approximately USD 31, these rates were accessible only to the privileged few (Cairus 2012: 145). Furthermore, White superiority was defended in linguistic practices that used covert terms to designate successful Afro-Brazilians as “socially white” (Roth-Gordon 2017: 45). In the case of the Gracies, Blacks were not excluded from the gym per se, as long as they were considered “clean Blacks”, a discriminating code for Afro-Brazilians regarded acceptable among Whites and used by Hélio Gracie to talk about Santana after their fight (Cairus 2012: 159).
In sporting contexts, racial stereotypes regarding Browns and Blacks often refer to the supposedly natural strength of the Black man and the cultural intelligence of the White man (Edwards 2003). Journalists have repeatedly described Gracie fighters as the more intelligent and morally superior men vis-à-vis their Black adversaries to justify their victory or grant them moral victory in the case of defeat. For instance, the renowned comic artist José Geraldo depicted the young Carlos Gracie in a comic book published in 1958. The portrayal presents him as a superhero who completes his development as a courageous, honourable, and masculine young athlete by triumphing over a larger, stronger, and more cunning capoeira fighter (Santos Júnior 2021: 18–19). Similarly, Hélio Gracie is depicted as the morally superior man after losing against Waldemar Santana on 24 May 1955 at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. News reports describe the fight between him and Santana as one of savagery against civilization, in which Santana eventually wins the fight by lifting Gracie high up, throwing him to the ground, and knocking him out with a kick to the head (Lemos 1955).
Despite Santana’s victory, the reporter from O Cruzeiro shows Gracie as the true winner in an article titled “Gracie defeated by a student”. The article cites two reasons: Santana had been Gracie’s disciple and won thanks to the techniques taught to him, and Gracie, despite being smaller, weaker, and older, had managed to stay undefeated for three hours and forty-five minutes against his bigger, stronger, and younger opponent (Lemos 1955). According to the reporter, Santana lost by winning, merely proving the superiority of the Gracies’ fighting style, which allows any frail man to withstand the onslaught of pure force. Furthermore, the report described Gracie as morally superior because he had taught everything he knew to Santana without holding back. Santana then used this knowledge to beat his teacher. Nevertheless, the article also mentiones that Santana had received Gracie’s respect for being a great and loyal adversary who had fought like a real man.
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Notes
[1] A martial arts lineage refers to a community of instructors and students who can trace their shared practical, intellectual, and philosophical teachings back to a common founding master (Brown 2014).
[2] Here, I use the racial categories as proposed by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística – IBGE): Branco (White): This category refers to people who identify themselves as having European ancestry. Preto (Black): This term is used to identify people who see themselves as having African ancestry. Pardo (Brown): This is a broad category used in Brazil to refer to multiracial individuals who do not classify themselves as being exclusively in one of the other categories. It often includes people of mixed European, African, and Indigenous ancestry, but the specific mix can vary widely. Amarelo (Yellow): This category is typically used for people who identify as having East Asian ancestry, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others. Indígena (Indigenous): This category includes people who identify as having Native Brazilian or Indigenous ancestry IBGE (2022).
[3] Places and people’s names have been anonymized, except for grandmasters and famous athletes considered public figures.
[4] I use the term “race” to highlight social inequalities rooted in racism rather than implying a prior assumption of distinct human races. According to Kabengele Munanga, race, while not a valid biological category, is a significant social and historical category inherited from colonial times (Munanga 2019: 22). Although racial differences seem to be based on obvious visible biological facts, the categories through which these differences are perceived are more the product of ideological efforts than biological facts. Consequently, the ideology of race has been used strategically to classify and rank individuals and groups, leading to systemic inequalities and discrimination. Munanga emphasizes recognizing and addressing these historical racial disparities as a means to promote social justice and equality.
[5] On average, Black or Brown athletes had to use a higher percentage of their monthly income to participate than their White counterparts. In 2021, the average monthly income of employed White individuals was significantly higher at 3,099 reais (approximately USD 485) than that of Black individuals at 1,764 reais (roughly USD 276) and Brown individuals at 1,814 reais (about USD 284) (IBGE 2022: 3). Calculations are made using an average exchange rate for 2021 (1 USD = 6.3825 BRL).
[6] Parts of the Gracie family uphold this association until today, as evidenced by their closeness to former president Jair Bolsonaro. For instance, in 2018, during the electoral campaign, Bolsonaro received an honorary black belt from Robson Gracie, then President of the FJJ-Rio (Frazão 2018). Also, during the 2022 electoral campaign, Bolsonaro was invited to speak at the headquarters of the Alliance Jiu-Jitsu team (G1 2022) and was supported with a video by famous BJJ athletes, among them the jiu-jitsu legend Royce Gracie (Poder360 2022).
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About the Author
Raphael Schapira (Mecila Junior Fellow, 2022) holds a PhD in anthropology and sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. His research encompasses the anthropology of sport, embodied research, Whiteness, mobility, religion, and urban anthropology. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Rio de Janeiro among Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, he has published works exploring topics such as evangelical Brazilian jiu-jitsu, urban sociality, inequality, and infrastructures of (im)mobility. As an avid Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, he finds fascination in martial artists’ ability to (re-)create and embody broader social processes through movement. Passionate about merging anthropology’s self- critical and transformative potential with community engagement, Raphael Schapira participates in sports and educational projects in Brazil. He also organizes webinars that connect social movements and artists, fostering meaningful dialogues between European and American audiences.
Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series Conviviality and Inequality
Joanna M. Moszczynska, Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński, 24.06.2025.
Rúrion Melo, When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy, 27.05.2025.
Ajay Gandhi, The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, 22.04.2025.
Citation: Raphael Schapira, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness. Embodying Inclusive Conservative Conviviality in Rio de Janeiro, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 12.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60782
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (August 12, 2025). Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness. Embodying Inclusive Conservative Conviviality in Rio de Janeiro. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved December 4, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14h0v


