Race in Another America

The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil

Edward E. Telles

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400837434
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the increasingly important and controversial subject of race relations in Brazil. North American scholars of race relations frequently turn to Brazil for comparisons, since its history has many key similarities to that of the United States. Brazilians have commonly compared themselves with North Americans, and have traditionally argued that race relations in Brazil are far more harmonious because the country encourages race mixture rather than formal or informal segregation.
More recently, however, scholars have challenged this national myth, seeking to show that race relations are characterized by exclusion, not inclusion, and that fair-skinned Brazilians continue to be privileged and hold a disproportionate share of wealth and power.
In this sociological and demographic study, Edward Telles seeks to understand the reality of race in Brazil and how well it squares with these traditional and revisionist views of race relations. He shows that both schools have it partly right--that there is far more miscegenation in Brazil than in the United States--but that exclusion remains a serious problem. He blends his demographic analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, history, and political theory to try to "understand" the enigma of Brazilian race relations--how inclusiveness can coexist with exclusiveness.
The book also seeks to understand some of the political pathologies of buying too readily into unexamined ideas about race relations. In the end, Telles contends, the traditional myth that Brazil had harmonious race relations compared with the United States encouraged the government to do almost nothing to address its shortcomings.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

RECENTLY, the president of the United States asked the president of Brazil, “Do you have blacks, too?”¹ Unbeknownst to President Bush and many other North Americans, that South American country currently has more than three times as many inhabitants of at least partial African origin as the United States. Both the United States and Brazil were colonized by a European power that dominated militarily weaker indigenous populations and eventually instituted systems of slavery that relied on Africans. In the Brazilian case, European colonists and their descendants enslaved and imported seven times as many Africans as their North American counterparts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both countries also received millions of immigrants from Europe as they sought to industrialize. Since then, the light-skinned descendants in the United States and Brazil have come to dominate their darker-skinned compatriots through discriminatory practices that derive from a racial ideology, creating what sociologists call racially stratified societies. Both societies have experimented with affirmative-action policies to promote blacks and members of other disadvantaged groups, beginning in the 1960s in the United States and only recently in Brazil. However, the major similarities between these two large multiracial countries regarding race may end there. For one, the vast majority of persons in the United States with any African origin are categorized as black. In Brazil, large numbers of persons who are classified and identify themselves as white (branco) have African ancestors, not to mention the brown (pardo, moreno), mixed race (mestiço, mulato), and black (preto, negro) populations. Unlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry. This difference, and many others regarding race matters, between the two countries derives from two distinct ideologies and systems of modern-day race relations. Although both racial systems are rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, their respective racial ideologies and patterns of race relations evolved in radically different ways as they responded to distinct historical, political, and cultural forces.

W.E.B. Du Bois arguably set the stage for the study of race relations in the first decade of the twentieth century when he declared the color line as the problem of the century. However, that assertion was clearly based on the bifurcated U.S. model, where blacks and whites were understood to be clearly separate groups. Had Du Bois witnessed the Brazilian case, he may have perceived that racism and discrimination were important social problems there, but he is unlikely to have identified the color line as the central problem. Also, Du Bois noted that blacks were exceptionally excluded from North American democracy; but for most of the twentieth century, there was no democracy in Brazil. Most of the population, including many whites, was excluded from access to even basic rights and subject to authoritarian domination.

Since Du Bois, the relation of blacks and whites in the United States has continued to serve as the paradigmatic case for the sociological understanding of race. Theories derived from the U.S. case are often then illegitimately applied to interpret other cases. In particular, mechanisms affecting race relations in the United States are often assumed to exist in other places like Brazil. But that is clearly not the case, as I will demonstrate in this book. Race is an important organizing principle in both Brazil and the United States but in very different ways. In the interest of building a universal sociology of race relations, I hope that this study will encourage a reexamination of sociologists’ common conceptions of race relations, which too easily get translated into general knowledge despite their narrow empirical base.

In the last several decades, race relations have become a central area of sociological study which has uncovered a considerable body of evidence for understanding them. However, comparable evidence for Brazil continues to be relatively weak, largely because the small Brazilian socialscience community considered the subject unimportant for that country. While a history of blatant and legal racism has undoubtedly contributed to making race an important area of study in the United States, racism in Brazil has generally been more subtle, and legal racial segregation has not existed since slavery. Indeed, the dominant assumption from Du Bois’ time until recent years has been that race does not really matter in Brazil.

Such differences and similarities about race in the two countries have become common knowledge, but analysts are less certain of how other features of the two race systems compare. For example, analysts often note the existence of racial inequalities in Brazil as in the United States, but these are too easily explained as simply a product of racist practices that exist despite the absence of formal segregation. On the surface, that may be true, but there is much more to it than that. While it is becoming increasingly clear that racism is a universal phenomenon, it is less accepted that its manifestations may vary widely. Are the nature and levels of racial inequalities the same? Surely, history, politics, class structure, culture, and ideology are very distinct between the Brazil and the United States. Should these not have also affected the development of a distinct system of race relations?

Most notably, racial ideologies between the two countries contrast sharply. How did such distinct ideologies come about? Do they affect the social manifestations of race relations or merely their interpretations? A special problem in comparisons of race in Brazil and the United States has been the disentangling of ideology from social analysis. To what extent is research on race simply a reflection of the ideology? Do ideologies not have elements of truth? How much do they distort reality? Ideology also affects interpretations of sociological analysis. In other words, how do analysts present comparisons in ways that are compelling and make sense to both Brazilian and North American readers?

North American sociology has developed evidence-based theories for explaining the persistence of racism and racial inequality despite the end of formal segregation. For example, a key sociological text argues that racial residential segregation, which continues today in practice despite civil-rights reforms, forms the major basis for contemporary black disadvantage and other dimensions of race relations in the United States.² It posits that the physical and social distance between blacks and whites, along with the strong social norms that maintain that distance, accounts for high levels of racial inequality. Conversely, it hypothesizes that without extreme segregation, racial discrimination and inequality will subside. Segregation is thus thought to be the linchpin of U.S. racial domination.³ The same may not be true for Brazil, at least if we are to believe its racial ideology. According to that ideology and to most of the research on the subject, residential segregation in Brazil is believed to be simply class based, and race is simply not an independent factor.

RACE MIXTURE AND EXCLUSION

Segregation between blacks and whites is a well-known fact in the United States. Segregation was long formalized through the legal and policy apparatus, and as many scholars have pointed out, urban residential segregation continues to demarcate rigid boundaries between blacks and whites. At least prior to the civil-rights reforms, segregation was the dominant ideology behind race relations. Whites dealt with blacks largely by maintaining considerable social distance from them, whether through avoidance in residence, marriage, friendships, or elsewhere. Just as importantly, the practice and ideology of racial segregation came to be known in Latin America as a defining feature of North American culture. Latin Americans—especially Brazilians—thought that their culture made them morally superior, at least regarding issues of race.

Rather than segregation, race mixture or miscegenation (in Portuguese, mestiçagem or miscegenação) forms the foundational concept of Brazilian racial ideology. Race mixture represents a set of beliefs that Brazilians hold about race, including the belief that Brazilians have long mixed across racial lines, more so than in any other society, and that nonwhites are included in the Brazilian nation. Miscegenation has long been a defining metaphor of the Brazilian nation, although it initially provoked anxiety and fear among the elite, as in the United States. Although race mixture may not necessarily reflect the reality of Brazilian social behavior, the concept has been fundamental for understanding Brazil’s race relations, on Brazilian terms. As Da Matta (1991) claims, understanding Brazil requires U.S. or other non-Brazilian readers to dismiss notions that Western societies are generally guided by ideas of purity. For him, Brazilians celebrate ambiguity, whereas North Americans seek to define clearly. In this sense, miscegenation represents the former and segregation the latter.

Like Brazil, many other Latin American countries hold dearly to their ideologies of mestizaje, the Spanish equivalent of race mixture. Those nations have melded racial differences into a single homogenous entity, creating an improved hybrid race of Mexicans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, and so on. However, accounts of Latin American race mixture tend to be romanticized versions that often became widely accepted as statesanctioned visions of nationality or peoplehood in Latin America. Latin American elites have long prescribed their form of mestizaje as the formula for a positive system of human relations, free of the racial cleavages found in North American society. Even well-known Latin American scholars have been known to proclaim the virtues of presumed miscegenation in the region. In the United States, Latino scholars have also prided themselves on their racial mestizaje, as if their own histories provide a positive example for U.S. race relations. However, these supporters of mestizaje often fail to note that throughout Latin America it was built on white supremacist ideologies and has been unable to prevent the racial injustices that are increasingly uncovered throughout Latin America. Today, many sociologists have come to a consensus that race mixture represents little more than metaphor.

Brazilian academics and journalists have increasingly used the term “exclusion” to refer to the status of blacks and poor persons in their society. Exclusion is a well-known term in Latin America, with origins in Europe where it is also widely used. Exclusion, or social exclusion, refers to the “lack of social integration which is manifested in rules constraining the access of particular groups or persons to resources or limiting their access to citizenship rights.”⁴ Social exclusion is thought to be particularly appropriate for describing Brazilian society because one-third of all Brazilians live in poverty, and most are not white.

The exclusion of blacks has thus become an important counterideology to the positive interpretation given to race mixture. Like Brazil’s black social movement, which has long promoted the counterideology, a new generation of scholars largely holds that racism is pervasive throughout Brazilian society. Like the race-mixture ideology, that counterideology is dangerous to social analysis because it may also blind analysts to reality. Some have wholly accepted the counterideology and go as far as to say that segregation is similar to that in the United States in practice, despite the lack of any postslavery history of its formal manifestation. However, rejecting the ideology hypothesis does not require us to accept the counterideology. Accepting ideology or counterideology is especially tempting where the evidence about race relations is weak.

Like ideologies and counterideologies generally, racial ideologies often reduce our understanding of race relations to simple unidimensional assumptions. According to ideology, at least, exclusion is the antithesis of miscegenation. Rather, miscegenation in Brazil connotes racial inclusion, not exclusion. Latin American concepts of race mixture hold that blacks, Indians, and whites socialize, reside together, and biologically mix to the point that racial distinctions become unimportant. But is there any truth to this? If so, how can there be both exclusion and miscegenation? Exclusion and inclusion refer to extreme points on a continuum of bad versus good societies; in the case of race, bad versus good race relations. But it is common to hear Brazilians speak of their country as being the world’s most miscegenated country and the world’s most unequal country, in the same breath. Does that imply that there has been so much mixture that only class is important, whereas race no longer makes a difference? Or does it mean that Brazilian society is racist and stratifies by race, and miscegenation is merely ideological or characteristic of an earlier historical period? What about those white Brazilians who claim to find blacks and mulattos in their family albums? How common is this? Are such ancestors merely historical remnants? Or are such findings overstated to project a culturally desirable pedigree of miscegenation?

Contemporary analysts of Brazilian race relations seem to have discarded the possibility that race mixture and racial exclusion can coexist. If white Brazilians are so racist, then why would they mix with nonwhites? Scholars argue that racial inequality and racism are so ubiquitous that they pervade all dimensions of Brazilian life. Miscegenation, some argue, occurred only among social unequals during slavery, and today occurs only for the sexual pleasure of whites but not in serious relationships. But what of all that common wisdom that miscegenation is widespread? Does it have no basis in fact? What of the earlier academic literature based on careful fieldwork which argued that Brazilian society was clearly more inclusive than the United States? Were those scholars completely wrong? Or did any inclusiveness that existed then disappear? Why would they make such an argument? Is there any evidence to support the existence of social inclusion for nonwhites anywhere, or were those scholars merely overtaken by the powerful ideologies of race mixture?

Today’s social analysts have arrived at surprisingly distinct conclusions about Brazilian race relations compared to those of an earlier generation. Current scholars emphasize exclusion; past scholars emphasized race mixture. These two generations of scholars accepted either racial exclusion or inclusion as truth while ignoring or discrediting the other. Rather than considering the possibility that both racial inclusion and exclusion may coexist, the current generation of scholars has treated that possibility as the confusion of reality with popular beliefs. Those who have argued that Brazilian society is more racially inclusive and characterized by race mixture or hybridity, have also theorized that racial inequalities and discrimination are leftover from slavery but are transitory. On the other hand, the current consensus defends the exclusivity argument and asserts that racial inclusivity, or miscegenation, is merely a popular belief that is not supported by reality.

The evidence used by the current generation is based largely on official statistics that have demonstrated high levels of racial inequality. Furthermore, these academics have marshaled plenty of evidence of discrimination to support their view. But have current scholars examined race relations widely enough and asked all the right questions? Has all the proper evidence been brought to bear? For an ideology of inclusion to be so pervasively accepted for so many years would seem to require some evidence, however limited, of its existence. What is it about the Brazilian system that supported arguments about racial inclusivity? And if there is any support for them, how can inclusiveness coexist with exclusiveness? For me, this remains the enigma of Brazilian race relations.

TWO GENERATIONS OF RACE-RELATIONS RESEARCH

A common categorization in the history of thought about Brazilian race relations maintains that there have been three main stages of thinking about Brazilian race relations. Roughly speaking, these three respective currents claimed that (1) there is little or no racial discrimination but rather great fluidity among races; (2) racial discrimination is widespread but transitory; and (3) racial discrimination is persistent and structural.⁵ While most authors are easily categorized into one of these three schools of thought, others present a mixture of these ideas or have changed their views over the course of their careers. Also, the chronological order of important contributions is not always linear but often the outcome of multiple academic debates, partially determined by the nationality of the scholars. For the purposes of this book, I generally accept this division but collapse the latter two stages into one. Thus, I characterize scholarly perspectives on Brazilian race relations as comprising two generations. The first defended racial democracy, in which Brazil is uniquely inclusive of blacks; the second challenged racial democracy, arguing that Brazil is characterized by racial exclusion. According to the first school of thought, there is little or no racism in Brazil; for the second, racism is pe...