Legacies of Race

Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Stanley R. Bailey

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804776264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Discrimination et relations raciales

The United States and Brazil were the largest slave-trading societies of the New World. The demographics of both countries reflect this shared past, but this is where comparisons end. The vast majority of the "Afro-Brazilian" population, unlike their U.S. counterparts, view themselves as neither black nor white but as mixed-race. Legacies of Race offers the first examination of Brazilian public opinion to understand racial identities, attitudes, and politics in this racially ambiguous context.

Brazilians avoid rigid notions of racial group membership, and, in stark contrast to U.S. experience, attitudes about racial inequality, African-derived culture, and antiracism strategies are not deeply divided along racial lines. Bailey argues that only through dispensing with many U.S.-inspired racial assumptions can a general theory of racial attitudes become possible. Most importantly, he shows that a strict notion of racial identification in black and white cannot be assumed universal.

1 Introduction

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH on racial dynamics in Brazil identifies the myth of racial democracy as comprising in large part the national common sense on “race.”¹ This myth provides the cognitive framework for understanding a great deal about attitudes toward racial issues in present-day Brazil and perhaps for most of the twentieth century. Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian social scientist, is credited with popularizing the ideas behind Brazil as a racial democracy among elites beginning in the 1930s.² Confronted with the period’s scientific racism, which posited the existence and unbridgeable nature of distinct human races, the superiority of a white race, and that mixed blood created degeneracy, Freyre proposed something quite different. He believed instead that “cross-breeding” produced hybrid vigor in humans and thereby heralded a bright future for the otherwise condemned dark Brazilian nation.³ His statements were bold when read against the backdrop of Jim Crow U.S. and even Nazi German emphases on white racial purity. Through emphasizing a special character and an uncommon flexibility of Portuguese colonizers that made possible extensive miscegenation, Freyre claimed that Brazilians of three races—Africans, Europeans, and indigenous—had mixed and were giving birth to a new race constituting a new world in the tropics, a Brazilian “meta-race,” a moreno (an ambiguous brownish color) people.

This new race would flourish as an ethnic or racial democracy, where “Men [sic] regard each other as fellow citizens and fellow Christians without regard to color or ethnic differences.”⁴ Freyre championed “the broad, though not perfect opportunity given in Brazil all men [sic], despite race or colour, to assert themselves as full Brazilians.”⁵ This view on “equal opportunity” coexisted, however, in a society that was decidedly hierarchical in nature, where dramatic social inequalities were rarely questioned; rather, they seemed almost naturally preordained.⁶ Nonetheless, through this Freyrean ideological framing, miscegenation became the motor behind Brazilian racial dynamics and the foundation on which the idea of racial democracy was constructed.⁷

According to this perspective, the type of violent and virulent racism and separatism common in the Jim Crow United States was impossible in Brazil. The potential boundaries of racial groups were said to have blurred, and particularistic ethnic and racial classifications yielded to a more universal national identification. Unlike the United States, where stubbornly ascribed and/or asserted ethnic and racial group identities determined national organizing principles, Brazil supposedly transcended these rigid racial categories and many of their attendant consequences. What in other societies were incompatible social segments were united in Brazil to form the basis of national belonging.

In sum, Freyre suggested that mestiçagem, or racial mixture/miscegenation, was the essence of Brazilianness and was strengthening the national community into a meta-race.⁸ He predicted that there would be “a growing lack of difference on the part of a great number of Brazilians—a tendency to consider themselves moreno not only a white moreno, as before, but the pardo⁹ in various degrees of brownness, from light to darkest, through the effects of racial mixing, and even the preto—a amorenamento [browning].”¹⁰ This vision of racial mixing creates the foundation for Brazil as a racial democracy, especially primed for the dominance of a racially ambiguous or mixed type. Munanga explicates this connection: “From the ideal of a mixed people … the myth of racial democracy was gradually elaborated …We have a mixed origin and, today, we are neither pretos nor brancos but, yes, a miscegenated people, a mestiço [mestizo] people.”¹¹ Hence, it would appear that, according to Freyre, Brazil’s racial democracy has two central ingredients: (1) the construction of a metaracial Brazilian type resulting from the blurring of racial boundaries through miscegenation and (2) the broad “though not perfect” acceptance of persons of all skin color types as full and equal participants in the benefits of citizenship in the Brazilian nation.

This seemingly innocuous understanding of racial dynamics in Brazil would appear to suggest that skin color is relatively unimportant in the lives of Brazilians, that they may have moved beyond the problem presented by prejudice and discrimination based on racial characteristics. It may even suggest a type of color-blind society. Some have gone as far as to claim that it implies a racial paradise scenario in Brazil.¹² Indeed, this mid-twentieth-century positive view of Brazilian racial dynamics led the United Nations to look to Brazil in the aftermath of Nazi racism and during the reign of Jim Crow in the United States for an alternative model of how race could be lived. To that aim, in 1950 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) funded an extensive exploration of the “enchanted” nature of race relations in Brazil in order to share it with the world.¹³

Needless to say, the prestigious social scientists of the UNESCO group did not find a racial paradise in mid-twentieth-century Brazil. Although they did find that the three “racial stocks” had “mingled and mixed to form a society in which racial tensions and conflicts are especially mild,” these researchers also documented racial prejudice and the disadvantaged position of individuals of varying degrees of African ancestry.¹⁴ They described, for example, starkly negative attitudes toward negros,¹⁵ whose physical features were “universally considered ugly,”¹⁶ and reported that much of the studied region of northern Brazil was characterized by remnants of a branca aristocratic class. Membership in this class was closed to “the Negro, the dark mestiço, and even those who have Negro ancestry or marked Negroid features.”¹⁷ In another studied area, Minas Velhas, the research documented that “residential segregation actually occurs … [along with] overt exclusion of Negroes from the Social Club.”¹⁸

Notwithstanding these findings, one of UNESCO researchers’ central theses continued to suggest that prejudice and discrimination based on race were subdued in Brazil. However, this thesis must be understood relative to the United States, which was their yardstick case characterized by legalized segregation, discrimination, and overt racial violence. They posited that in Brazil class was the most important stratifying factor and that physical features associated with race or ethnicity combined with other factors, such as education level, occupation, economic situation, and family connections, to give people their social position in Brazilian society.¹⁹

Regardless, these UNESCO findings of racial prejudice and discrimination were not given much attention at the time in Brazil. A military dictatorship had risen to power in the 1960s soon after the reports were published, and the new regime was unreceptive to criticism of the Brazilian nation. Although not as brutal as some of its South American counterparts during approximately the same years (e.g., Argentina and Chile), this authoritarianism would last into the early 1980s. During its waning years, the dictatorship loosened its hold just enough to allow civil society to think more freely and organize. In this climate, social movement actors rose from many corners of that society and demanded a voice in the nation’s affairs. Among them were negro movement participants who strongly rejected the view of Brazil as a nation where skin color was unimportant. In stark contrast to the sunny belief that Brazil was a racial democracy often propagated by the Brazilian state,²⁰ these activists knew that racial discrimination and prejudice were a part of their daily lives and that the picture many elite and state actors painted of Brazil was a deleterious myth.

According to a growing critical vision, this elite framing of the myth of a racial democracy constituted a denial of the daily experiences of discrimination and prejudice suffered by persons of varying degrees of African ancestry. As such, the myth itself became a target, and negro movements began to organize against it.²¹ Their struggle was not merely to correct a distorted understanding of racial dynamics among the elite and by the Brazilian state that had long constituted the official race story but also to address the common understanding of race among everyday Brazilians. The romanticized myth of racial democracy was believed to have thoroughly colored the societal fabric of Brazil, penetrating deep into the psyche of the general common sense.

According to negro movement actors, the perceived embrace of this myth by the general population plagued progress toward racial equality in three important ways. Primarily, they held that a majority of Brazilians, including nonwhites, denied the existence of racial discrimination. Social movement actors secondly believed that the myth therefore hampered antidiscrimination mobilization: If people did not believe in the existence of racial discrimination, surely they would not mobilize for its eradication. Lastly, the myth was said to restrict the formation of positive racial identification among Brazilians of varying degrees of African ancestry.²² In essence, the myth of racial democracy was believed to severely limit the possibilities of the advancement of nonwhite Brazilians.

At the same time that negro movements began to organize more openly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, social scientists also began to directly challenge the myth of a Brazilian racial democracy. Similarly suggesting that the Brazilian mind-set was characterized by a fundamental denial of the existence of racial discrimination, social demographers Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva published quantitative analyses demonstrating the correlation between nonwhiteness and disadvantage.²³ Other social scientists followed suit, and the published work on racial inequality in Brazil grew. This literature documents disadvantage in diverse areas—income, education, labor market, and marriage market, and so on.²⁴ Standing on this platform of evidence, some researchers and many negro movement actors heralded the death of the racial democracy myth.²⁵ They had conclusively proven that skin color constituted an independent factor creating disadvantages for Brazilians of varying degrees of African ancestry and statistically refuted the fiction that Brazil’s history of miscegenation resulted in equality.

The importance of this proof cannot be overestimated: It continues today to provide crucial impetus and backing for race scholars and social movement actors.²⁶ Brazil is no longer considered a paradisiacal counterexample to the United States in terms of race, and it is no longer believed to have found the key to moving beyond race through miscegenation. Once considered a hopeful alternative, merely blurring the boundaries of blackness and whiteness is no longer seen as a viable strategy in and of itself to fight racial discrimination. In fact, as I will discuss later, the opposite soon became the guiding belief: Only through clarifying and strengthening a dichotomously structured classification scheme in negro and white through fomenting race consciousness and robust racial identification could progress be made.²⁷

Given the research of the last decades regarding the lack of racial democracy in Brazil, one might assume that the Freyrean myth has been necessarily expurgated. However, some question whether the newer characterization of myth was even correct. Was the myth of racial democracy about denying the existence of racial discrimination, and did it in turn foster that denial among the majority of Brazilians? There is no doubt that Brazilian political elites boasted of existent racial democracy, at times heralding a level of congeniality, equality, and oneness between individuals of varying skin color unmatched anywhere in the world.²⁸ But can the sensus populi regarding the significance of skin color variation be reduced to a strategic lie or ignorance-laden empirical description? Do elite interpretations and discourses, such as Freyre’s or even those of contemporary social scientists, correspond to popular majority belief systems and the understandings of everyday Brazilians?²⁹ An assumed correlation between elite and nonelite interpretations has been commonplace, resulting in a thesis of Brazilian ignorance, i.e., that Brazilians are blind to racial discrimination.³⁰ However, it is possible that there is in fact a significant disconnect between the elite perspective and that of the nonelite. What is the essence of this myth as understood by everyday Brazilians? Moreover, what types of attitudinal stances are born of such a myth? Herein lays the crux of contemporary debate among social scientists to which this book hopes to contribute.

In addition to the above alluded movement actors and social scientists whose ideas constitute the dominant stance in the literature and discourse concerning Brazilian race politics, there is another group of social scientists who resist reducing the set of ideas known as the myth of racial democracy to a pernicious deception.³¹ These scholars, perhaps in large part more anthropological in orientation, also recognize and document discrimination and prejudice in Brazil. However, rather than blame the myth of racial democracy for fostering a denial of widespread inequality, they suggest that the myth acts as a utopian ideal for which Brazilians yearn and against which they measure reality. As stated exemplarily by Sheriff, “[Racial democracy] summons the collectively-held notion of the moral force of a shared heritage, a common family, a unified nation. Racism is repugnant. It is immoral. It is, above all, un-Brazilian.”³² Some scholars posit, then, that this utopian ideal may act as an incentive to construct a more equal Brazil.³³

This alternative view of the myth of racial democracy might be compared, albeit imperfectly, to the “American’s Creed” or “American Creed” in the United States.³⁴ This creed amounted to an early statement of values and principles, like democracy, freedom, equality, and justice, that Americans espouse and hold dear. However, the everyday reality of millions of Americans throughout the history of that nation has fallen decidedly short of these ideals. The creed, nonetheless, is neither blamed nor discarded. Similarly, Americans have been socialized into believing the Horatio Alger myth that suggests that with hard work anyone can “make it.” This is certainly not true; structural impediments have confounded even the hardest of workers throughout American history. However, instead of framing the American Creed or the Horatio Alger myth as pernicious lies, insistence on the values espoused in them can and have formed the basis of dialogue and struggles for inclusion.³⁵ Might the same be true of the racial democracy myth in Brazil? Does the myth buttress racial inequality, or could it actually help in the struggle to challenge that inequality?

To more thoroughly investigate the question of the essence and effects of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil, researchers need to hear from all strata of Brazilian society. Unfortunately, however, the beliefs and attitudes of a great number of people to whom this conversation pertains have largely been left out of the debate. There has been an absolute lacuna of public opinion research on racial attitudes in Brazil.³⁶ The assumed common sense of racial democracy has thus been studied mostly through localized ethnographies like those of the UNESCO project and more recently by important field research, including Twine’s popular in-depth portrait of racial attitudes in a rural Brazilian community in the 1990s and Sheriff’s ethnography of an u...