Mixed Race Studies

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Number 21 (November 1979)
pages 20-22

Joan R. Dassin

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos Milagres), says its director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a clear direct film that confronts a human question—that of racial discrimination—with great frankness and humor.

Completed in December 1975 and first shown in Brazil in October 1977, Tent of Miracles, based on Jorge Amada’s novel, is indeed a richly-peopled, plain-speaking, and even light-hearted picture about the persecution and survival of black African culture in Brazil. With this focus, Nelson Pereira—the patriarch of nationally-minded filmmakers in Brazil for nearly 25 years—has challenged the most widely-held false belief in his society: the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

…This visual parable of “whitening” reveals the ideology implicit in the film’s defense of racial crossbreeding. It also undercuts the energetic and upbeat presentation of an autonomous Afro-Brazilian culture. Unwittingly, perhaps, Nelson Pereira repeats the error of both his literary source (Bahian novelist Jorge Amado’s 1969 novel, Tent of Miracles) and an earlier classic of Brazilian social history (Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves of 1933). Both works uncritically advocate miscegenation.

Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character. In contrast, the recognition that in siring the Brazilian race the Portuguese colonizers brutally imposed their will on black female slaves—after largely exterminating or subjugating recalcitrant Indian laborers—has spread very slowly. Indeed, historical truth has only recently made inroads into the national myth that Brazilians are the harmonious products of these three races, and live in an untroubled racial democracy.

As Brazilian culture critic Sergio Augusto has pointed out, miscegenation—both as a practice and as a widely espoused doctrine—has had two pernicious effects. Rather than fostering egalitarianism, miscegenation has promoted “whitening.” Most seriously, it has denied to blacks (Indians being long out of the picture) the opportunity to develop their cultural identity as an independent group. Another Brazilian commentator, Muniz Sodré, seconds this view. Miscegenation’s hidden value of “whitening,” he asserts, is in fact a rejection of black culture in Brazil, a relegation of the Afro-Brazilian inheritance to a “source of sensationalism, a plethora of genital tricks, and an eternal supplier of recipes.”

Lamentably, Tent of Miracles does not explore these negative consequences of miscegenation for black cultural survival in Brazil. On the contrary, the philosophy of “whitening” that lies behind supposedly egalitarian racial crossbreeding is visually and emotionally reinforced by the “success story” of Tadeu Canhoto. The U.S. viewer will probably miss the subtle racist implications of lauding miscegenation, because here the “mixed” population is considered black, and as such, is clearly subject to the will of the white majority. But in Brazil, the color line is not drawn so sharply. Indeed, the “democratic” mixing of races is the cornerstone of the dominant national ideology of race, ironically described by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes as “the prejudice of having no prejudice.”

Defenders of the doctrine of miscegenation and the myth of racial democracy come from all quarters in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, who with Jorge Amado is the greatest popularizer of Brazil for North Americans, has proudly noted that Brazil is growing ever “browner.” Freyre sees this trend as “proof” that the Brazilian “meta-race,” supposedly formed in equal parts by blacks, Indians and whites, is at last emerging.  Even some Brazilian blacks have themselves proposed miscegenation so that “the negro will disappear and we will not have racial conflict like they do in the United States.” As the young black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento recently reflected, the 18th century dictum that “Brazil is a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattos” is still the accepted national vision. The vision has only one catch: it is predicated on the “total disappearance” of those who live in “hell.”…

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Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

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Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Slate Magazine
1996-08-22

Eric Liu

The “Negro problem,” wrote Norman Podhoretz in 1963, would not be solved unless color itself disappeared: “and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” Coming after a lengthy confession of his tortured feelings toward blacks—and coming at a time when 19 states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on the books—Podhoretz’s call for a “wholesale merging of the two races” seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely prospect of intermarriage.

Podhoretz’s famous essay was regarded as bizarre at the time, but 33 years later, it seems like prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between 1970 and 1992, the number of mixed-race marriages quadrupled. Black-white unions now represent 12 percent of all marriages involving at least one black, up from 2.6 percent in 1970. Twelve percent of Asian men and 25 percent of Asian women are marrying non-Asians. Fully a quarter of married U.S.-born Latinos in Los Angeles have non-Latino spouses. We are mixing our genes with such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000. This orgy of miscegenation has not yet brought the racial harmony for which Podhoretz longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool…

…Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power of race, however, derives not from its pseudoscientific markings but from its cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed matters so much that the biologists’ protestations fall away like Copernican claims in the age of Ptolemy. So the question, as always, is whether it is possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually reinforce one another…

…One possibility is that all multiracials, over time, will find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less stigmatized than “pure” blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than “pure” whites. Their presence, like that of the “coloreds” in old South Africa, wouldn’t subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the black-white caste system. Again, however, the sheer diversity of the multiracials might militate against this kind of stratification.

Yet this same diversity makes it possible that multiracials will replicate within their ranks the “white-makes-right” mentality that prevails all around them. Thus we might expect a hierarchy of multiracials to take hold, in which a mixed child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such blood. In this scenario, multiracials wouldn’t be a distinct group—they would just be distributed across a continuum of color.

Sociologist Pierre van den Berghe argues that such a continuum is preferable to a simple black-white dichotomy. Brazilians, for instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of tipo, or “type,” behold with disdain our crude bifurcation of race. Yet no amount of baloney-slicing changes the fact that in Brazil, whitening remains the ideal. It is still better for a woman to be a branca (light skin, hair without tight curls, thin lips, narrow nose) than a morena (tan skin, wavy hair, thicker lips, broader nose); and better to be a morena than a mulata (darker skin, tightly curled hair). Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism.

Still another possibility is that whites will do to multiracials what the Democrats or Republicans have traditionally done to third-party movements: absorb their most “desirable” elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It’s quite possible, as Harvard Professor Mary Waters suggests, that the ranks of the white will simply expand to engulf the “lighter” or more “culturally white” of the multiracials. The Asian American experience may offer a precedent: As growing numbers of Asian Americans have entered the mainstream over the last decade, it is increasingly said—sometimes with pride, sometimes with scorn—that they are “becoming white.”…

…These cautionary scenarios demonstrate that our problem is not just “race” in the abstract. Our problem is the idea of the “white race” in particular. Scholar Douglas Besharov may be right when he calls multiracial kids “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” But even as a “multiracial” category blurs the color line, it can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial adoption or mixed marriages or class-climbing, so long as we speak of whiteness as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter…

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Though Many Have White Skin, their Veins Flow of Black Blood: Afro-Argentine Culture and History during the Twentieth Century in Buenos Aires, Argentina

McNair Scholars Journal
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2003)
Article 8
11 pages

Erika D. Edwards, Grand Valley State University

Although the Afro-Argentine population continued to decline during the twentieth century, the people played an integral role in shaping Argentina’s culture through their contributions in the field of dance, literature, and religion. Unfortunately, their vibrant culture and history are often ignored and overlooked because of Argentina’s subtle efforts to whiten its population. The purpose of this project is three-fold. First, it aims to recognize the survival of the Afro-Argentine community during the twentieth century. Second, it recaptures the means used to preserve African traditions. Finally, it reveals efforts of Afro-Argentine groups such as La Fundación Africa Vive that have dedicated themselves to reconstructing the Afro- Argentine role in Argentina’s culture and history.

Introduction

One of the first things I noticed while studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was that there were few, if any, blacks among the city’s inhabitants. I lived there for six months and people always assumed that I was Brazilian because of their popular belief that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. However, this is a lie: Afro-Argentines do indeed exist. Africans began arriving in Argentina as slaves in 1534, two years after the foundation of Buenos Aires, and since then they have shaped and transformed Argentina. This paper seeks to draw attention to the contributions of Afro-Argentines to the country’s culture and history. To this end, I will recognize their existence despite the country’s denial of its black population. Then, I will address the ways in which Afro-Argentines recapture their African past through dance, music, religion, and literature. Finally, I will discuss what Afro-Argentines are doing to reconstruct their history and, in the process, correct lies, misconceptions, and myths about them. In denying Afro-Argentine culture and history, many Argentines may not learn about their families’ and country’s past. Though many have white skin, their veins flow of black blood.

Recognizing the Existence of Afro-Argentines

Statisticians often claim, “the numbers never lie.” Yet in the case of census information for Argentina over the course of the twentieth century, the existence of the country’s black population is often denied or its size is underestimated. The noted Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges remembered that in 1910 or 1912 there was a tenement of blacks on the corner of Uriburu and Vicente López streets and another on Sarmiento Street in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1946, Nicolás Besio Moreno calculated that there were “one and a half million people with black blood [in Argentina]” and further stated that they could be classified as blacks based upon the United States guidelines, which suggest that people who have a lighter complexion and often might pass for whites would still be classified as blacks. The following year, in 1947, a national census identified the presence of 15,000 blacks, (5,000 blacks and 10,000 mulattos).  By 1963, Afro-Argentines were estimated to number 17,000. Their population declined over the next four years to 3,000 in 1967 but increased to 4,500 in 1968 for reasons which remain unclear. However, some people have estimated that there were as many as 10,000 blacks “not counting those mixed with dark skinned people in the provinces.” The journalist Narciso Binayan Carmona stated in 1973 that “if all Argentines with black blood were accounted there would be 2-3 million.” Based upon this information, one can see there are discrepancies involving the size of Argentina’s black population; their true number probably lies somewhere between what the census counted and people’s perceptions.

Present-day statistics tend to agree with what people saw during the twentieth century. This could be due to El Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC) which forgot to include a box for citizens to identify their descent (descendencia) during the last national census in 2001. INDEC later denied that it had forgotten to include the box. It is interesting to note that when the last national census was undertaken, INDEC included a category for the first time to check if one was of indigenous descent, a change from the last national census conducted in 1991. Their failure to inquire about people of African descent further perpetuates the myth that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. In stark contrast, La Fundación Africa Vive, an Afro-Argentine group dedicated to promoting black culture and history, believes that there are currently two million Afro-Argentines (descended from slaves) in the country. Thus, regardless of how a person may appear (dark- or light-skinned) and whether or not they are aware, many Argentines have black blood.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, miscegenation served to lighten the complexion of the country’s black population. Argentina’s black male population was already in decline as a result of wars for independence and territorial expansion as well as diseases. Then, from 1880 to 1930, a mass of European immigrants arrived in the country. Most European immigrants were male, thus their arrival led to a surplus of white males and a shortage of white females. Given the pre-existing scarcity of black males, prospective black brides often married white grooms, many of whom were European immigrants. Interracial marriages became common. The children of such unions often had lighter skin giving them access to better education and employment opportunities thereby facilitating their ability to pass themselves off as white.

However, not all blacks who wished to marry selected white spouses. There were black couples, such as the Monteros. The couple had three daughters but due to miscegenation in their family’s past, each of the girls was a different shade of brown: the eldest looked black, the middle child resembled a mulatto, and the youngest appeared to be entirely white. “So great were the physical differences… people refused to believe they were family.” However, the Monteros considered themselves black and “had a shelf of books on race and a stack of Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, and Ike and Tina records to prove it.” At the time they were interviewed in 1973, the girls were dating white boys. Were they to have married and had children, they too would have contributed to the whitening of the country’s black population. As the black population becomes lighter through miscegenation, it will become harder to identify its existence…

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Blacks, the white elite, and the politics of nation building: Inter and intraracial relationships in “Cecilia Valdes” and “O Mulato”

Tulane University
May 2006
274 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275113
ISBN: 9780549253327

Geoffrey Scott Mitchell

A Dissertation Submitted on the Twenty-Sixth day of May 2006 to the Department of Spanish and Portugues in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirments of the Graduate School of Tulate University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This project is an examination of the novels O Mulato (Aluísio Azevedo, 1889) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde, 1882) and their call for social reform and a re-examination of the place of blacks in the emerging republics of Brazil and Cuba. Both novels question and criticize social constructs of race while pressing for an improved treatment of both free and enslaved blacks.

This project provides an intellectual history of eighteenth and nineteenth century rac(ial)ist theories that exerted a pronounced influence on Azevedo and Villaverde. Specifically, this section examines physiognomy, phrenology, and craniometry in addition to sociological and anthropological approaches to racial hybridism, the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, and the geographical determinism of Buckle. Finally, the chapter provides a close reading of Comte’s positivism and its reception by the intelligentsia in Cuba and Brazil.

Azevedo’s O Mulato purports to discredit racial discrimination by white society and the destructive influence of the Catholic clergy in Brazil’s northern province of Maranhão during the 1870s by deploying the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a wealthy and educated mulatto and his white, aristocratic cousin. Although Azevedo endeavored to illustrate the problematic nature of racial discrimination and the social compartmentalization of blacks in Brazil—both relics of Portuguese colonialism—he nevertheless succumbed to the racialist ideologies of the nineteenth century and imbued his protagonist with stereotypical characteristics. Although blacks were rising socially via education and the military, Azevedo nevertheless envisioned a future, positivistic republic necessarily led by a white elite.

In Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde deploys an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a poor but beautiful, nearly-white mulatta and her aristocratic, half-brother as agents of the policy of whitening. As in O Mulato, the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship reveals the difficulty in crossing racial and social castes and thus uniting different socio-economic sectors of the imagined community. Only one intraracial romance involving whites proves to be successful in the novel. This relationship serves as a metaphor indicating that only enlightened whites are capable of leading Cuba out of colonialism and into independence.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. INTRODUCTION: SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
• 2. RACISM’S ROOTS: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF SELECT RACIALIST THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 3. BLACK MEN, WHITE WOMEN, AND THE FORMATION OF THE POSITIVIST STATE: ALUISIO AZEVEDO AND O MULATO
• 4. FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, FRAGMENTED SOCIETIES: RACE, SEX, AND METAPHOR IN CECILIA VALDES
• 5. CONCLUSION: BLACKS, THE WHITE ELITE, AND PROJECTS FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Studied in race crossing VI. The Indian remnants in Eastern Cuba

Genetica
Volume 27, Number 1 (1954)
pages 65-96
DOI: 10.1007/BF01664155

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

A preliminary account was given at the 30th International Americanist Congress, Cambridge, England, August, 1952. Received for publication July 27, 1953

This paper is in one aspect a study of the later stages of absorption of a race surviving in small numbers in a more numerous population of another race. In that respect it resembles the study of a small Negro element being partly absorbed into a Caucasian population in Canada (Gates 1953a). But in the present case the miscegenation of the Indians in Cuba has been first with the Spaniards and more recently with Negroes. It shows that the absorption of small numbers of one race in another requires many centuries before it is complete. The history of the Basques in Western France and Northern Spain shows that, even where the physical differences are of a very minor character, the differences in customs and in location will lead to the persistence of a race within a larger population for many millenia. The physical differences, where they exist, will persist indefinitely, long after the cultural differences have disappeared.

It has frequently been stated that the Indians of Cuba were exterminated by A.D. 1600, but this is not strictly true. Pichardo Moya (1945), who gives a full bibliography of Cuban history and archeology, quotes Morrell, who wrote before 1760, that traces of the last Indians still existed in the vicinity of Bayamo, Canéy and Jiguaní, possibly in Pinar del Río, around Alquízar, and certainly in Oriente. Pichardo…

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Identity and Public Policy: Redefining the Concept of Racial Democracy in Brazil

Harvard Journal of African American Policy
2011 Edition

Krystle Norman

Krystle Norman is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where she received her master’s degree in public policy. In 2008, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in Spanish language and literature and a certificate in African American studies. Her research interests include conflict areas, social policy, identity issues, human rights, foreign policy, and parallels between communities within the African diaspora.

In Brazil, the notion that raced-based inequalities have crippled the social, economic, and political progress of Afro-Brazilians is one that is quickly denied by those who are committed to Gilberto Freyre’s concept of racial democracy. However, when disparities between “White” and “Black” Brazilians are noted, it is difficult to attribute them solely to class and not race. By analyzing important concepts coined by two distinguished sociologists, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gilberto Freyre, this article explores the way in which identity affects the ability of public policy to address inequalities in Brazil. From that dialogue, this article develops a normative view of racial democracy and puts forth recommendations that will help facilitate its expansion.

While physically the presence of Afro-Latinos throughout the Latin American diaspora cannot be denied, access to resources, equal protection under the law, and political representation continue to be restricted and, in some countries, justified by law (Cottrol 2007). Essentially, the continuing struggle of Afro-Latinos to obtain these basic rights can be seen as a major pitfall of society, but more generally, it illustrates the degree to which inequality in Latin America still persists today. Since the census is used to determine the allocation of federal funding, provide social services, and guide the creation of infrastructure projects, it serves as a means to not only address inequalities but also understand the implications of identity on public policy. Simply stated, recognition of identity is critical to effective policy making, especially within the context of a country as racially diverse as Brazil.

History of Afro-Latinos

While many Americans have learned about the history of slavery and racial inequality that lies at the very core of the African American struggle in the United States, the experience of Afro-Latinos and their plight for racial equality has not received nearly as much attention (Cottrol 2007). Considering the fact that Latin America is home to the largest population of Africans living outside of Africa itself (Andrews 2004), it is a tragedy that their struggle has been seemingly overlooked…

…Identity Issues in Brazil

Afro-Latinos have struggled to mitigate the tensions that have emerged surrounding their mixed racial heritage. For instance, in the early 1900s Latin America’s response to European pressures to“civilize” was to suppress and/or hide its African heritage, encourage White migration into the region, undergo a “modern European-style” transformation of its urban landscapes, and promote European values and culture in order to “Europeanize Latin American societies” (Andrews 2004, 119).

This strong desire for all the societal gains that were thought to accompany “blanqueamiento” (a term used to describe the Whitening of a region through the settlement of large groups of Europeans) ultimately exacerbated the rate at which Afro-Latinos were marginalized (Cottrol 2007). Psychological remnants from the slavery paradigm continued to perpetuate the problematic notion that, among other things, lighter skin was synonymous with economic and social mobility. This ideology was reinforced when European settlement was encouraged and the White elite began to solidify its influence over the political, economic, and social sectors of society (Andrews 2004). As stated by Robert Cottrol, “If the national ethos dictated that the nation was white, it was all the more prudent, particularly for those of mixed ancestry, not to declare an African heritage. Thus mestizaje [racial mixing] and blanqueamiento [Whitening] both contributed to the pronounced unwillingness of many Afro-Latinos to identify as such, even when phenotype made such identification and the resulting discrimination inescapable” (2007, 4).

Since the combination of Europeans, Native Americans, Spaniards, and Africans created such a hugely multiethnic citizenry in Latin America, this grouping made it all the more difficult to rigidly define class and political status (Andrews 2004). According to Andrews, the Afro-Latino population experienced both “Whitening”and “Blackening” phases because it lacked an appreciation and understanding for its own racial identity (2004, 10). Due to societal pressures, Afro-Latinos were forced to create an identity that was both acceptable to themselves and the larger European diaspora. As a result, social status and economic privilege were determined by one’s light skin color and closeness to a European phenotype. Society would systematically devalue Blackness, which encouraged individuals to disassociate with their African ancestry, even when their phenotype would suggest otherwise (Cottrol 2007). In this way, Brazil was able to maintain a “rigid, racial hierarchy” that reinforced the supremacy of White Brazilians (Telles 2004, 230)…

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Race in Brazil: Out of Eden

The Economist
2003-07-03

Brazil used to think it could be colour-blind. Alas, no longer

JOANA, an actress and student, is white, or at least that is what her birth certificate says. She has a white father, a mixed-race mother and skin the colour of cappuccino. But she considers herself to be “more or less black”. Joana’s ambiguity about her race is quintessentially Brazilian. Brazil had slavery, but never apartheid or the formal segregation of the American south. Centuries of interracial coupling have produced a population that is 40% pardo (mixed). But Joana’s description of herself as “black”, or negra, belongs to a new era in Brazil’s racial politics. It implies that racial mixing has done nothing to correct racism, that pardos and pretos (the census term for blacks) are in the same boat and that the solution is not to ignore race but to plant it at the centre of policies to overcome vast social and economic inequalities. Though most people are only dimly aware of it, their idea of what it means to be Brazilian is about to be challenged.

The challenge is coming through racial quotas, which black leaders see as an indispensable corrective to discrimination. They are not widely used yet, but they are spreading. Three federal ministries recently introduced quotas of 20% for blacks in senior jobs. A handful of cities in São Paulo, the industrial heartland, have introduced racial quotas in the past two years. Most contentiously, so have a few public universities, the institutions that decide who will be admitted to Brazil’s elite. Congress is considering a “statute of racial equality” that would give quotas a big extra push. These and other affirmative actions add up to a “revolution” that is “much bigger than people imagine,” says Ivair dos Santos, advisor to the federal secretary for human rights…

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Is the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas in Brazil an example of Brazil’s racial democracy or, in fact, an instance of its profound racism?

IDEATE The Undergraduate Journal of Sociology
University of Essex
Volume 6, Summer 2011
8 pages

Bethan Rafferty
SC386 Anthropology of Latin America: Race, Gender and Identity

The role of mulatas in Brazilian society is one filled with social, political and historical significance. Mulatas are not seen as ordinary women, but as a living biological embodiment of the Brazilian nation. Indeed the Brazilian tourist board uses Brazilian miscegenation to sell Brazil as a potential holiday destination to tourists:

‘The mixture of races has made Brazil a culturally rich and at the same time unique country. This miscegenation began with the Indian, the African and the Portuguese, but soon after, immigrants from around the world began to arrive: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs. The result is a happy people, open to everything new, a people one can only find in Brazil. Because of this massive diversity, Brazil is one of the last places on Earth where no one is a foreigner, where one can change one’s destiny without losing one’s identity and where each and every Brazilian has a little of the entire world in his or her blood. This may be the reason why Brazilians welcome people from another land so openly.’ (Brazil Ministério do Turismo. http://www.braziltour.com/. Accessed: 22/6/2011.)

Although the strong connection between Brazil and the African continent is acknowledged by some Brazilians, and embraced in some cultural practices such as Capoeira, Black Brazilians continue to be one of the poorest social groups in the country: ‘Although 32 percent of whites are poor, more than 62 percent of African Brazilians are impoverished’ (Daniel, 2006: 190.). While some claim that the high admiration for the mulatas’ physical beauty is proof of a racial democracy (See Freyre, 1946 and the theme of erotic democracy in Goldstein, 2003.), the persistence of negative connotations regarding blackness points to a more painful reality, in which the traces of slavery and discrimination are still alive and active.

In this paper I will argue that although the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas at a micro-level may not be an indicator of personally racist views, at the macro-level it demonstrates Brazilian prejudice against blackness and is an example of racism due to the racebased sexualisation of mulatas.

In the first section of the essay I will talk about the idea of ‘whitening’ Brazilian traditions and people, in the second section I will explore the power balance in relationships between White men and women of colour, thirdly I will consider the sexualisation of mulatas, the fourth part of the essay will examine mulata beauty and interracial sexual relations at a personal or microlevel and the fifth section will analyse the sexism inherent in the objectification of mulatas…

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Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil

Ms. Magazine Blog
2010-06-11

Erica Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Model scouts strategically target towns in Southern Brazil to “find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in,” explains Alexei Barrionuevo in a recentNew York Times article, “Off Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blonde. The fact that a European standard of beauty still dominates the modeling industry should come as no surprise. But why go to Brazil in search of models with European features instead of going directly to Europe? This racial preference is deeply connected to Brazil’s complex history of race relations.

In the early 20th century, Brazil embarked on a national project of embranquecimento–whitening. Influenced by European scientific racism, state officials wanted to “breed the [black] blood out” of the national population. To do so, they encouraged Europeans to settle and hopefully, intermarry with the descendants of enslaved Africans. Despite this attempt to “dilute” the black population, many have upheld Brazil as a “racial democracy” where harmonious race relations and intermixing reined supreme, and where racism is not an issue…

…Walk to any newsstand in Salvador da Bahia and you will find dozens of postcards that use images of black women scantily clad in bikinis to “sell” the area to the rest of the world. This is nothing new. The figure of the mulata, or mixed-race woman of African descent, has long been represented in Brazilian popular culture as the epitome of sexiness. Exported abroad as early as the 1970s in Oswaldo Sargentelli’s world tour of samba shows featuring mulata women, now the term has become synonymous with “prostitute” for many European men who travel to Brazil for sex…

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