Mixed Race Studies

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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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

Purchase the dissertation here.

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)…

Read the entire article here.

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…

Read the entire article here.

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…

Read the entire article here.

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…

Read the entire article here.

The tan from Ipanema: Freyre, Morenidade, and the cult of the body in Rio De Janeiro

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
October 2009

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Art
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

She says she has brown skin, and a feverish body
And inside the chest, love of Brazil
“I am Brazilian, my body reveals
That my flag is green and yellow”

—Carmen Miranda

In a felicitous turn of phrase, Barbara Babcock once asserted that “what is socially marginal is often symbolically central” (1978, 38). There is no better way to describe the figure of the mulata (a light-skinned black woman) in Rio de Janeiro. As evidenced in popular culture, artistic productions, tourist brochures and TV programs, the mulata is an idealized icon in the contemporary Brazilian imagination. A polysemic category, “mulata” in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes the voluptuosity and sensuality characteristic of women who dance the samba onstage. I use the local term mulata in order to make reference to these multiple meanings. The fascination with this local figure is inscribed within the discourse of mesticagem, a dominant narrative emphasizing the process of cultural and biological fusion of the “races,” white and black in particular, as symbol of Brazilianness. I take racial and colour categories such as “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mestico” to be ideological products with material effects vis-a-vis the structuring of power relations across society. These categories acquire different symbolic value within the context of Brazilian “pigmentocracy,” where instead of a colour line, shadism permeates race relations: The lighter the skin, the greater the social value. To a point, that is.

In this article I argue that the most valued bodies in Rio de Janeiro are those of white Brazilians that are able to embody the qualities of mulattoes. In particular, I focus on the characteristics associated with mulatto women in the context of carnival, and look at how in recent years white women have progressively come to occupy the spotlight in this setting. The article explores the Brazilian fascination with the mulata in terms of stereotypes that organize images of social difference and convey specific longings and desire. It situates the emergence of this fascination within the context of colonial gender and race relations and later, the development of a national ideology focused on the value of whitening through “mixing.” I examine the discourse on mesticagem in the work of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, the most influential thinker in the history of Brazil (Schwartzman 2000). Exploring Freyre’s glorification of the mulata, I look at how women’s bodies have become surfaces upon which masculinist and nationalist desires are deployed. I then move on to argue that morenidade (brownness), while commonly thought of as interchangeable with mulatice (mulatto-ness) as a central value and self-concept in Brazilian society, is in fact the preferred social type. I explore how morenidade is one aspect of the idealized “perfect body” in Rio’s society, and look at how local people invest their physiques with numerous techniques in order to obtain such an ideal for themselves. Woven through the article is an exploration of how these issues are expressed in the narratives of my research participants. In resonance with Malysse (2002), I conclude that Rio’s culture has become obsessed with the image bodies project as expressions of personhood, and bring to bear my reflections on morenidade upon the Carioca (from Rio) perfect body.

National Identity and the “Whitening” Strategy

Why has the mulata become the central object of desire in the Brazilian imagination? How did she become a symbol of national identity, given the generalized denigration of mulattoes in colonial times, and the debased sexual role that women of colour were subjected to? Brazilian intellectual debates over race have become central to understandings of nationhood at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Contemporary gender stereotypes are deeply imbricated with larger narratives on the role of biracial peoples in the formation of Brazil as a modern nation.

The debate over national identity and the future of the nation in Brazil was not a product of independence from Portugal. It actually began to take place at the onset of the abolition of slavery and the institution of the republic in 1889. Racism took a very particular shape in Brazilian intellectual production. It was recast under the native category of branqueamento (whitening). Late-19th and early-20th-century sociological writings in Brazil reflect the ideological supremacy of the white world. Brazilian intellectuals, however, were faced with the following theoretical problem: How to treat national identity vis-a-vis racial inequalities. The solution was to emphasize the mestico element (Ortiz 1985, 20). For the 19th-century intelligentsia the mestico was—more than a concrete reality—a category through which a sociological need was expressed: the elaboration of a national identity. According to these writers, moral and ethnic miscegenation allowed for the environmental adaptation of the European civilization to the tropics. Moreover, the result of this experience permitted the characterization of Brazilian culture as different from the European. In the local appropriation of theories of hybridization, Brazilian intellectuals posited that miscegenation would ultimately derive in a process of branqueamento, through which the gradual predominance of white traits over black ones could be ensured, in both the body and the spirit of mulattoes (see Araujo 1994, 29; Skidmore 1993). As Ortiz states, the social sciences of the time reproduced, at the level of discourse, the contradictions of Brazilian society. Whilst the notion of “racial inferiority” was used to explain Brazilian “backwardness,” the notion of mesticagem also pointed toward a possible national unity. The identity thus produced was ambiguous, integrating both the negative and the positive elements of the races in question (Ortiz 1985, 34). The emphasis placed on the ideology of whitening of the Brazilian population was articulated with the particular interests of the coffee bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo state, which achieved its political hegemony with the rise of the First Republic. State immigration policies in the last quarter of the 19th century initiated programs that attracted millions of Europeans (see Skidmore and Smith 1992). These policies tackled the scarcity of labour power (defined strictly as unavailability of slaves) and established a clear association between mesticagem, whitening, and social progress. Massive immigration programs were seen not only as a solution to the lack of labourers, “but also as part of a long-term modernizing project, in which the whitening of the national population was seen as one of the most desired consequences” (Hasenbalg 1979, 128-129).

With the emphasis on whitening as a Brazilian solution for the “problem” of the races, Brazilian intellectuals such as Joao Batista de Lacerda and Oliveira Vianna shifted away from negative views of hybridity. From thinking of miscegenation as the production of a mongrel group making up a “raceless chaos,” a degraded corruption of the originals, Brazilian intellectuals reconceptualized ideas of amalgamation using elements already present in racist theories, such as the claim that all humans can interbreed prolifically and in an unlimited way, sometimes accompanied by the melting-pot notion that the mixing of people produces a new mixed race, with merged but distinct new physical and moral characteristics (see Da Matta 1981; Skidmore 1993; Stepan 1991; Young 1995). The ideal of whitening was consistently appropriated by Brazilian intellectuals from 1880 to 1920 and became consolidated, albeit transformed, with Gilberto Freyre’s culturalism in the 1930s. Nancy Leys Stepan calls this a shift to “constructive miscegenation” that overtly challenged the notion of mulatto degeneracy and reminded the country that “we are all mestizos” (Stepan 1991, 161). This particular ideology began to play a more “positive” part in Brazilian understandings of the nation…

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Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. About Black Experience in Latin America

Black in Latin America
Public Broadcasting Service
April 2011

Gates discusses his new project in this interview from the PBS site.

First, could you talk a little bit about this project?

I conceived of this as a trilogy of documentary series that would mimic the patterns of the triangle trade. There would be a series on Africa which was called Wonders of the African World in 1999. And then there would be a series on black America called America Behind the Color Line in 2004. And then the third part of the triangle trade was, of course, South America and the Caribbean. The triangle trade was Africa, South America, and the continental United States and Europe. That’s how I conceived of it. I’ve been thinking about it since before 1999. But the first two were easier to get funding for. Everyone knows about black people from Africa, everyone knows about the black American community. But surprisingly, and this is why the series is so important, not many people realize how “black” South America is. So of all the things I’ve done it was the most difficult to get funded and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive, it’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it…

The series reveals how huge a role history can play in forming a nation’s concept of race. Although each of the countries you visited has its own distinct history, did you find any commonalities between the six countries with regard to race?

Yes, each country except for Haiti went through a period of whitening, when they wanted to obliterate or bury or blend in their black roots. Each then, had a period when they celebrated their cultural heritage but as part of a multi-cultural mix and in that multi-cultural mix, somehow the blackness got diluted, blended. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be “blackish” — really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. In other words, the poverty in each of these countries has been socially constructed as black. The upper class in Brazil is virtually all white, a tiny group of black people in the upper-middle class. And that’s true in Peru, that’s true in the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s obviously an exception because it’s a country of mulatto and black people but there’s been a long tension between mulatto and black people in Haiti. So even Haiti has its racial problems…

…How do you feel the race experience differs between Latin American nations and the United States?

Whereas we have black and white or perhaps black, white, and mulatto as the three categories of race traditionally in America, Brazil has 136 kinds of blackness. Mexico, 16. Haiti, 98. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. But these are very real categories. In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. Color and race are defined in strikingly different ways in each of these countries, more akin to each other than in the United States. We’re the only country to have the one-drop rule. The only one. And that’s because of the percentage of rape and sexual harassment of black women by white males during slavery and the white owners wanted to guarantee that the children of these liaisons were maintained as property…

Read the entire interview here.

Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought

Duke University Press
1974
334 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1320-5

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

Published to wide acclaim in 1974, Thomas E. Skidmore’s intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology has become a classic in the field. Available for the first time in paperback, this edition has been updated to include a new preface and bibliography that surveys recent scholarship in the field. Black into White is a broad-ranging study of what the leading Brazilian intellectuals thought and propounded about race relations between 1870 and 1930. In an effort to reconcile social realities with the doctrines of scientific racism, the Brazilian ideal of “whitening”—the theory that the Brazilian population was becoming whiter as race mixing continued—was used to justify the recruiting of European immigrants and to falsely claim that Brazil had harmoniously combined a multiracial society of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.

The multiple dimensions of racial mixture in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: from whitening to Brazilian negritude

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Available online: 2011-08-01
18 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.589524

Graziella Moraes D. Silva
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Elisa P. Reis, Professor of Political Sociology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions—namely, ‘whitening’, ‘Brazilian negritude’, ‘national identification’ and ‘non-essentialist racialism’—and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics.

Read or purchase the article here.