Mixed Race Studies

Fact and Myth: Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil

Kellogg Institute
Working Paper #173
April 1992
23 pages

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

This paper examines prevalent attitudes towards race in Brazil’s mutiracial society. The author notes that, while there is a considerable literature on slavery and the struggle for abolition, relatively little work has been done on race in Brazil today even though color continues to correlate highly with social stratification. He argues that historically the Brazilian elite has been able to hold to a belief in white superiority and at the same time deny the existence of a racial problem by adopting an “assimilationist” ideology. This begins with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thesis that Brazil was progressively “whitening,’ and continues up to the present day with the widely held view that disproportionate Afro-Brazilian poverty is a legacy of socioeconomic disadvantage and not a result of discrimination. This official ideology has strongly affected the availability of data until recently and has generally been a dominant influence on mainstream academic research on race. The author traces the emergence of criticism of the “myth of racial democracy” from Afro-Brazilian militants and some social scientists, and gives a brief overview of the existing research on contemporary Brazilian race relations. He concludes by outlining a future research agenda for Afro-Brazilian studies.

Every Brazilian and every perceptive visitor knows that racial terms are not clearly defined in that society. The lesson is especially striking for North Americans and Europeans, who are used to a conventional black/white (or, at least, white/nonwhite) dichotomy. That polarization was institutionalized in U.S. racial segregation, a polarity that Europeans, unused to home-country contact with nonwhites in the modern era, instinctively understood.

But Brazil, like most of Latin America, is different. In the Caribbean and Latin America the European colonizers left a legacy of multiracialism, in spite of early attempts to enforce racial endogamy, i.e., the prohibition of marriage outside the same racial category. Multiracial meant more than two racial categories—at a minimum, three. The mulatto and the mestizo became the “middle caste,” with considerable numbers attaining free legal status, even under slave systems. The result was a system of social stratification that differed sharply from the rigid color bifurcation in the U.S. (both before and after slavery) and in Europe’s African colonies. There was and is a color (here standing for a collection of physical features) spectrum on which clear lines were often not drawn. Between a “pure” black and a very light mulatto there are numerous gradations, as reflected in the scores of racial labels (many pejorative) in common Brazilian usage.

This is not to say that Brazilian society is not highly color conscious. In fact, Brazilians, like most Latin Americans, are more sensitive to variations in physical features than white North Americans or Europeans. This results from the fact that variations along the color spectrum, especially in the middle range, are considered significant, since there is no clear dividing line.

The question of accurate color terminology is especially difficult when discussing Brazil. The terms used in the Brazilian census—preto, pardo, and branco—translate literally as “black,” “brown,” and “white.” The principal distinction in this paper will be between white and nonwhite, the latter including preto and pardo. To designate the latter, i.e., nonwhite, the term used here will be “Afro-Brazilian” rather than “black,” since preto (the literal Portuguese translation of “black”) is a far more restrictive (often pejorative) label in Brazil. The increasingly common term used in Brazil (in the mass media, for example) for nonwhite is negro, but the English equivalent is archaic for an English-speaking audience. It should also be noted that negro is the label that Afro-Brazilian militants use in their campaign to convince all Brazilian nonwhites, above all mulattos, to “assume” their color and not succumb to the belief, a la whitening ideology, that a lighter nonwhite can hope for greater social mobility.

In sum, Brazil is multiracial, not biracial. This makes its race relations more complex than in the U.S., and more complex than most Europeans expect. The most important fact about this multiracial society, from the standpoint of those wishing to study it, is that until fifteen years ago there were virtually no quantitative data with which to analyze it. Between 1890 and 1940 neither the Brazilian government nor Brazilian social scientists considered race to be a significant enough variable to justify recording it in the national census. Even when race was later included, as in 1950 and 1960, until the 1976 household survey (PNAD) there were no data by race on income, education, health, and housing (there were limited data on marriage, fertility, and morbidity).

Read the entire paper here.

The Dialogue About “Racial Democracy” Among African-American and Afro-Brazilian Literatures

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2008
262 pages

Isabel Cristina Rodrigues Ferreira

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Portuguese).

This dissertation focuses on the myth of racial democracy in the works of African-American and Afro-Brazilian writers in the early and late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their novels, short stories, and a play dialogue among each other. The African-American novels Passing (1929) of Nella Larsen and Caucasia (1998) of Danzy Senna reflect on their perception of Brazilian reality of racial democracy, which was related to their own racial realities. Both authors use Brazilian racial harmony as an option to their characters to experience a different racial relation that did not involve segregation in the 1920s or violent acts in the 1960s and 1970s. The Afro-Brazilian selection of stories reflects on the Brazilian reality for Afrodescendants, which presents no sign of racial harmony. The novels Vida e morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sá (1919) and Clara dos Anjos (1923-24) of Lima Barreto, Malungos e milongas (1988) of Esmeralda Ribeiro and Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) of Conceição Evaristo; the unpublished play Uma boneca no lixo of Cristiane Sobral; and short stories of Cuti, Márcio Barbosa, Éle Semog, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Oubi Inaê Kibuko, Conceição Evaristo, Lia Vieira and Cristiane Sobral show that Afro-Brazilian reality in the 1920s and in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries is of discrimination, and prejudice, but they reflect on non-violent solutions to fight against their fate.

In Chapter One, I introduce the subject of racial democracy, which will be discussed in two African-American novels and some Afro-Brazilian literary works. Chapters Two and Three are overviews of Brazilian history, examining the role and perception of Afro-descendants by society, and Afro-Brazilian literature throughout the centuries, respectively. The former helps readers understand how important the myth of racial democracy was to maintain the order and power to those controlling the country’s economy and politics. Chapter Four examines African-American novels, relating them not only to their perception of Brazil, but also to their own history and racial relations. Chapter Five shows different racial issues discussed in some of the works. These interpretations of Brazilian racial reality can dismantle the discourse of the myth of racial democracy. The last Chapter is the conclusion of what I presented and discussed in the previous chapters and some thoughts about future research topics.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black Hole

Brazzill
November 1999

Kathleen Bond, Missioner
Maryknoll Lay Missioners

It is often said that Brazilians live under a racial democracy, meaning that in Brazil miscegenation has created a cultural mélange in which all races are equally valued. Nothing is farther from the truth.

During the elections of 1997, Margarida Pereira da Silva was the leading candidate for mayor in Pombal in the interior of the state of Paraíba, Northeastern Brazil. Margarida, beloved for her community work with youth, decided to run for office to offer an alternative to the corrupt, special interest politics that dominate the Northeastern region. With little money, she ran the campaign from her home. One week before Election Day, two strangers offered her a R$100,000 (US$50,000) donation for her youth program. There was just one condition—Margarida had to drop out of the race. She politely but firmly refused, “I’m running for my people not for money.”

Within days of the refused bribe, all of her posters were painted over with the words “Negra Feia”, Ugly Black Woman. Unable to discredit her honesty or merits, her opponents orchestrated a smear that focused solely on race. Long-time friends and even some relatives, most likely paid off, suddenly were working against her. Margarida lost by a landslide. When Margarida’s nephew caught his girlfriend tearing down Margarida’s posters, she responded, “I’m not going to waste my vote on that ugly, black thing.”

Margarida’s story of racial discrimination is not isolated to the rural areas of the Northeast. Every day millions of Afro-Brazilians experience racism. From the family living room, where darker skinned children are often discriminated against, to Church pews, barbershops, classrooms, and the Halls of Congress, racism gnaws at the fabric of Brazilian society. The South American giant is often considered by foreigners and Brazilians as a “racial democracy” because of the high number of interracial marriages and seemingly easy banter between the races in every day life. Racial Democracy, coined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in early 20th century, is the theory that a history of extended miscegenation has created a cultural mélange in which all races are equally valued. Nothing is farther from the truth in contemporary Brazil.

Race in Brazil is complex and distinct. Most Brazilians claim a mixed African, European, and indigenous ancestry. In practice, however, the weight of racism causes people to continually “whiten” themselves. For example, many “morenos” straighten their hair, people search for lighter-skinned marriage partners, and people identify themselves and each other with nicknames indicating a lighter skin tone, such as moreninho (browny), café (coffee), mulato, bronzeado (tanned), and escurinho (darky) to name a few. Rarely will someone assume an identity as negro (black). Even those who call themselves black often have a hard time convincing other Brazilians not to identify them as “moreno” or “mulato”. Calling someone black, for many, is still an insult…

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Racial Democracy in Brazilian Marriage: Toward a Typology of Negro-White Intermarriage in Five Brazilian Communities

The American Catholic Sociological Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer, 1960)
pages 146-164

Austin J. Staley, O. S. B.

Revised version of paper read at the Twenty-first Annual Convention of the American Catholic Sociological Society, Mundelein College, Chicago, Illinois, August 31-September 2, 1959.

It was Robert Park who summed up many observers’ impression of racial democracy in Brazil: “the people of Brazil have, somehow, regained that paradisaic innocence, with respect to differences of race.” After completing his study of intermarriage in São Paulo, Samuel Lowrie concluded that Brazil is “one of the largest, if not the largest, melting-pot of the races.” Brazil has been singled out as the great “laboratory of the races,” which offers a “magnificent field for experimental studies on the contacts of races and cultures.” No facet of the Brazilian culture has been studied as intensively by sociologists and anthropologists as the area included under race relations.

There is a near consensus of opinion among students of race relations at least on one issue. The crucial problem of race relations is that of Negro-white intermarriage. The common denominator and central nerve of the Negro problem is racial intermarriage. The ultimate case against integration and racial democracy…

Ambivalent examples: The multiple Creole subjects of Spanish American nineteenth-century narrative

University of Pennsylvania
2006
371 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3225427
ISBN: 9780542797194

Elisabeth L. Austin

This dissertation proposes a paradigm for 19th-century Spanish American Creole subjectivity that considers it to be a multiple, unstable construct rather than a coherent or constant entity. From this premise I explore exemplarity as a rhetorical mode that seeks to engage its reader’s subjectivity, and I posit that exemplary narrative becomes not only a site of subjectivity construction for the Creole reader but also a place for negotiating the problematics of the liberal order at the end of the 19th century. I maintain that reading exemplary narrative as an articulation of multiple Creole subjectivity allows us to study the contradictions and indeterminate pedagogy of many of these texts, and therefore to better analyze the ambivalence and problems they describe. My project investigates the work of four authors: Eugenio Cambaceres (Argentina), José Martí (Cuba), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), and Juana Manuela Gorriti (Argentina). Cambaceres’s four novels—Potpourri: silbidos de un vago (1882), Música sentimental (1884), Sin rumbo (1885), and En la sangre (1887)—establish a social critique that culminates in the invention of a Creole national subject, depicted as a father figure for the future mestiza America, who is ultimately rendered non-viable within these narratives. Martí’s only novel, Lucía Jerez (1885), articulates a profound gender anxiety that threatens Martí’s ideal “natural man” and problematizes his dreams of solidarity and miscegenation as part of a future American identity. Matto’s Aves sin nido (1889) argues for liberal political intervention on behalf of Peruvian Indians while it simultaneously launches a critique of liberal ideology as an insufficient instrument of such change. Finally, I read Gorriti’s cookbook, Cocina ecléctica (1890), as a text that exemplifies multiple Creole subjectivity and negotiates authority and gender within irreducibly plural models of feminine subjectivity. These narratives profess pedagogical pretensions that are questioned and at times undermined within the texts themselves, and my dissertation argues that such contradictions illustrate rather than resolve the crises of Creole ideology and subjectivity brought about by the failure of Spanish American liberalism at the end of the 19th century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: The Creole as Problematic Subject(ivity)
• 1. (De)Constructing Creole America: Fractured Nineteenth-Century Power and Politics
• 2. Creole Fictions: Hybridity and Indeterminacy in Nineteenth-Century Spanish American Literature
• 3. The Ethics of Criollismo: National Subjectivity in Eugenio Cambaceres
• 4. Monstrous Progeny: Gender Trouble and Fragile Virility in Jose Marti’s Lucía Jerez
• 5. Bastardized Faith and Unanswered Prayers: Impotent Readership in Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido
• Conclusion: Creole Subjectivities Inside Out: Writing Culture and Authority in Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Obama and Myths of Racial Democracy

NACLA Report
North American Congress on Latin America
2008-11-17

Marisol LeBrón

Political pundits have celebrated president-elect Barack Obama’s sweeping and historic victory as evidence that the United States has taken an initial step toward a “post-racial” or “colorblind” society.

In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Shelby Steele provocatively asked, “Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a ‘post-racial’ America?” Analysts on both sides of the political spectrum have answered yes. Phillip Morris of the Cleveland Plains Dealer declared, “America has completed its evolution into a racial meritocracy.” While Jonathan Kay of Canada’s National Post wrote, “Electing a black president won’t instantly cure ‘the ugly racial wound left by America’s history’ (as The Economist put it in its Obama endorsement). But it will at least prove that America has finally become a fundamentally post-racial society—a place where tribal loyalties are based on ideology, not skin color.” Meanwhile, another conservative columnist, Laura Hollis of Townhall.com, flatly claimed, “Racism is dead.”…

…U.S. commentators most often point to the concept of mestizaje as an example of Latin America’s seamless racial integration. Mestizaje, or racial mixing, is often seen as diametrically different to historical U.S. legal sanctions against miscegenation—the so-called “one-drop” rule. Mestizaje is cited as a prime example of how Latin Americans have been able to move beyond race. Although mestizaje has different historical roots and trajectories within different Latin American countries, there has been a rhetorical emphasis across the board on a kind harmonious racial exceptionalism at work in Latin America…

…The promotion of mestizaje and racial democracy in Latin America has often existed alongside, and as part of, the suppression of populations of African and indigenous descent. National identities based on mestizaje served the dual purpose of “uniting” fractious nations under one banner while at the same time promoting the mass marginalization of racial and ethnic groups by denying their discrimination.

Several scholars have helped dispel the myth of racial democracy in Latin America by documenting what is often referred to as blanqueamiento (whitening), or mejorando la raza (improving the race). In one example, blanqueamiento is actively sought out by marrying a lighter-skinned person, thereby producing lighter, racially mixed offspring. Sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario has traced the many ways blanqueamiento is promoted in Dominican society. As evidence, she points to the range of skin creams and hair products marketed to produce a whiter-looking phenotype among Dominican women…

Read the entire article here.

Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912

Latin American Research Review
Volume 34, Number 3 (1999)
pages 39-73

Alejandro de la Fuente, UCIS Research Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state’s cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.

In a very real sense, nothing can be more real than the unreal.
Ashley Montagu, Race, Science, and Humanity

Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called it “prejudice against prejudice”; U.S. sociologist Thomas Lynn Smith described it as “a veritable cult.” Both were referring to what has come to be known as the Brazilian myth of racial democracy.

In its simplest formulation, the “myth” is that all Brazilians, regardless of “race,” enjoy equal opportunities and live in a racially harmonious society. It could not be otherwise, according to the myth, because Brazil’s strength and greatness reside in the widespread racial mixture of its population. It therefore makes no sense to talk about blacks and whites in a country in which most citizens are some of both. “Race” in Brazilian society is constructed along a continuum moving from “black” to “white” based on phenotypical features (skin color, type of hair, facial features) and on social factors like education and financial status. Several centuries of intimate contact and miscegenation, biological and cultural, have created a new hybrid race that is authentically Brazilian.

The notoriety of the Brazilian case has been guaranteed by the brilliance of its myth makers, foremost among them Gilberto Freyre. But it has also been sustained by two fundamental facts: no other country in the hemisphere has a numerically larger population of African descent; and no other country enslaved its black population as late as Brazil did, until 1888. A hegemonic ideology advocating some form of racial fraternity is remarkable in a country like Brazil but hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, intellectual elites in numerous Latin American countries have articulated racial ideologies that were similar in purpose and content to the Brazilian myth. Mestizaje was exalted as the true American essence, a synthesis that incorporated (allegedly on equal terms) the best cultural and physical traits that the various ethnic and racial groups populating the Americas had to offer.

Forced to cope with the troubling aspects of a North Atlantic ideology that flatly advocated the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and the deleterious effects of racial mixing, the elites in Latin America had to reach a compromise that would allow them to reconcile the goal of modernity with the undeniably mixed nature of their populations. During this search, the mestizo was invented as a national symbol. The result was an ideological formulation that broke with the past while upholding it. The discourse on mestizaje remained prisoner of the same canon that scientific racism proclaimed as incontrovertible truths—the essentialness of race—but the discourse revolutionized social thinking by minimizing the other central tenet of the hegemonic racial gospel: biological determinism. Although race was still associated with ascribed characteristics as immutable and overpowering as those championed by genetically based racism, the emphasis was shifted to geographical, cultural, and historical factors. This is no small distinction. By placing social factors at the core of their ideological constructions, Latin American intellectuals were openly contesting the notion that their countries were doomed to failure and perpetual backwardness, while asserting (however implicitly) that social transformation was the way to reach modernity. They thus had fabricated a way out of the ideological iron cast that the North Atlantic world had manufactured by means of its high science, universities, and royal societies.

But the escape was only partial. While contesting or just ignoring the idea that racial miscegenation meant degeneration, Latin American thinkers accepted the premise that ample sectors of their populations were basically inferior and that their human stock needed to be “improved” Such inferiority was to be explained in terms of culture, geography, or climate rather than pure genetics, but the dominant vision still presented the lighter end of the spectrum as the ideal and denigrated the darker end as primitive and uncivilized. In this formulation, whiteness still represented progress. Miscegenation was perceived as the way to “regenerate” a population unfit to perform the duties associated with a modern polity, with white immigration serving as a precondition for progress. The idea that regeneration was possible at all subverted biological determinism, but the expressed need for regeneration presupposed acceptance of the idea that “race” explained the “backwardness” of Latin American societies. Whitening became the way to remove a surmountable, albeit formidable, obstacle on the road to modernity.

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Obama and the black wave: Deconstructing myths, building strategies

Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice
2009-02-19 (Issue 420)

Raquel Luciana de Souza

Having closely followed Barack Obama’s electoral success, Raquel Luciana de Souza considers the prospects for a presidential candidate of African descent within the South American giant of Brazil. Scrutinising the historical myth of Brazil’s racial democracy and the supposed absence of formal barriers to Afro-Brazilian social mobility in contrast to the US, de Souza considers the role of the US’s implementation of measures to address socio-racial disparities and the successful struggles of black organisations in framing the broader background behind Obama’s rise.

At last the calendar signals the much anticipated 4 November 2008, the day the long marathon of the latest American electoral process would be concluded. It is impossible to ignore the irony that after spending nine years of my life studying in the United States, I found myself in front of the television in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, homeland of Gilberto Freyre. Freyre, of course, was the very author whose racist, sexist, and fairly imaginative visions about race relations in Brazil influenced generations of national and international researchers, politicians, intellectuals, as well as common sense notions about class, race, and racism in Brazil. As the counting of the votes officially begins, a friend cautions me about the possibility of a McCain victory, which triggers an unutterable anguish in the very core of my being. However, that feeling was quickly replaced by the absolute thrill of witnessing the reconfiguration of the American electoral map. At the first hour of 5 November, it was confirmed that the US had elected its first black president. Barack Obama’s triumph was the culmination of a highly competitive political contest; the media and global frenzy surrounding the Democratic candidate’s campaign became gradually more palpable as he gained strength in opinion and voter intention polls. That day I realised that I had spent months holding my breath, immersed in an intense electoral process that was marked by unprecedented circumstances. For the first time, a black man and a woman vied to be nominated for presidential candidate of the Democratic Party…

…Therefore, while I euphorically contemplated the conclusion of an electoral process that culminated with the election of a black president for the position of commander-in-chief of the US, questions and speculations about the ramifications of such an important political development for Brazil and the African Diaspora consumed me. The triumph of a high-ranking politician, the son of a continental African from Kenya and a white American woman from Kansas, was consolidated before the whole world. Before me was a black president married to a black woman, both products of the highest quality of formal education acquired at Harvard, a prestigious university, and eloquent lawyers who demonstrated in their discourse and intervention an almost unwavering self-confidence and mastery of words that slowly but surely conquered even the favouritism of the media. As a researcher of racial issues through a comparative perspective, I realised then that such a political moment urged for perspectives and approaches that went beyond pre-established parameters. Aiming to discuss the possible ramifications of such political scenery and its broader implications more adequately, I constantly transferred my thoughts to the Brazilian context…

…Conversely, we should now consider the real scenery in which Barack Obama became the first black president of the US. In Brazil, the celebration of such a historical event has been featured prominently on the front page of all the mainstream newspapers and magazines. A sort of cynical satisfaction has also been displayed on the faces of TV anchors, political commentators, and reporters as they announced and discussed the fact that Americans had elected their first black president. Images from the US of whites, blacks, and others who celebrated Obama’s victory in euphoric tears were exhibited, demonstrating that the country had finally transcended the racism that had infested its social, legal, political, and educational relations for so many centuries. Yet, for the most accurate eyes and ears, what was implicit in accounts of celebration disseminated through Brazilian mass media was the notion that such cathartic and healing experiences were not needed in Brazil. In fact, what was almost cynically celebrated was the fallacy that finally the USA had overcome their racial injuries, while our racial problems had been resolved many decades ago, if they ever existed. After all, according to traditional hegemonic narratives that romanticise race relations in Brazil, Brazilians never had to deal with formal racial segregation that established barriers to the socio-economic ascension of Africans and their descendants, and therefore there would be no wounds to be healed and no damage to be repaired…

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Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1991
376 pages
6 x 9; 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-299-13104-3

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality. George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.

No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.

The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians’ entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery. This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers. As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites. Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s. He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.

Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy. It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Contents

• Lists of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Workers
  • Chapter 2. Slavery and Emancipation, 1800-1890
  • Chapter 3. Immigration, 1890-1930
  • Chapter 4. Working, 1920-1960
• Part 2. The Middle Class
  • Chapter 5. Living in a Racial Democracy, 1900-1940
  • Chapter 6. Blacks Ascending, 1940-1988
  • Chapter 7. Organizing, 1945-1988
• Part 3. Past, Present, Future
  • Chapter 8. One Hundred Years of Freedom: May 13, 1988
  • Chapter 9. Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Appendix A. Population of Sao Paulo State, 1800-1980
• Appendix B. Brazilian Racial Terminology
• Appendix C. Personnel Records at the Jafet and São Paulo Tramway, Light, and Power Companies
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Shifting Discourses: Exploring the Tensions between the Myth of Racial Democracy And the Implementation of Affirmative Action Policies in Brazil

Center for Latin American Social Policy – CLASPO
Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Summer Research Report
University of Texas at Austin
September 2005
29 pages

Raquel Luciana de Souza

1. INTRODUCTION

Are the recent debates surrounding the controversial topic of Affirmative Action in Brazil changing the racial landscape of the country? What impact will these laws have on issues of race, race relations, and racial identity? Will Brazil experience a shift in its racial paradigms and a restructuring of its socio-economic and political organizations in light of these latest developments. This paper is part of an ongoing research about the process of implementation of Affirmative Action policies in Brazil and the possible impacts that these laws may have in discourses about race and racial identity in that country. Those are guiding questions that I will be exploring throughout the text, but they could not possibly be answered fully in such early stages of my research. Therefore, I intend to use these questions to briefly discuss some of the pertinent issues, as well as some events concerning this momentous historical development. In this text, I also point out to the some of the implications of these developments in Brazilian politics, particularly as it relates to their possible impact on traditional discourses about race relations as well as the role of race in Brazilian society. Furthermore, I intend to place these debates within the context of a nation that has been perceived nationally and internationally as a raceless country, or, in other words, a country that does not struggle with the legacy of legally sanctioned barriers that granted or denied benefits to different groups according to their racial ancestry.

Scholars such as France W. Twine, Michael Hanchard, Anthony Marx, and others have focused on the weakness of black organizations in Brazil, especially when combating the alleged overwhelming influence of the ideology of the myth of racial democracy in the country. This myth is viewed by many as the overarching framework that shapes and informs the perceptions of Brazilians of all racial backgrounds. However, I argue that the polemics and the controversy generated by the ongoing implementation of affirmative action policies constitute a major force in the reshaping of discourses and perceptions about the role of race, racial identity, as well as racism and racial prejudice. I contend that the politically charged debates generated by these measures constitute a powerful transformative force in the traditional narratives about the harmonious nature of race relations in the country on several levels. In this paper, I also highlight the key role that black organizations have had in demanding and debating the implementation of laws that aim at compensating for centuries of socio-economic and educational opportunities. Black militants have systematically struggled and challenged traditional discourses that have historically masked Brazil as a ‘racially democratic nation’. The efforts of black organizations and their struggles for the rights of people of African descent in Brazil tend to be obliterated by mainstream narratives that usually emphasize the role of ruling elite. These discourses aim at perpetuating myths about the benevolence of ruling elites and their predisposition to “granting” rights to popular classes and minorities or oppressed sectors of its population.

Slavery and race relations in Brazil have generated an enormous amount of research, especially comparative research, in particular works that tried to establish comparisons between Brazil and the US. Many scholars across disciplines have looked at the various factors that may influence the way in which discourses around race, race relations and discrimination shift according to specific historical moments and settings. Therefore, it is my strong belief that the current controversial process of implementing affirmative action policies in Brazil will certainly contribute to the production of new original scholarship about that country…

…AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: CONTEXTUALIZING THE DEBATE

In order to shed some light into the controversy generated by the implementation of affirmative action policies in Brazil, it is necessary to contextualize them. They must be located within the parameters of a country that has historically placed great importance on the miscegenation and the whitening of its population. Such contextualization will provide the background for the arguments employed to dismiss the validity and the applicability of these policies in the country. The following session provides an overview of the discourses and historical processes that have informed and shaped historically prevailing notions about the role and the relevance of race in the country. In particular, these debates must be placed within the context of prevailing traditional ideologies and narratives about what constitutes the Brazilian. In this session, I will also elaborate on the traditional views about the institution of slavery in Brazil…

Read the entire article here.