Mixed Race Studies

Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Paper presented at XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gothenburg, Sweden
July 2010
21 pages

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo

Two paradigmatic cases of the building process of post-slavery societies in the Americas were, without a doubt, Brazil and the United States. While the United States had an exceptional and singular development, the Brazilian case can be generalised, with certain caveats, to other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean in terms of the incorporation of Afro-descendent and Amerindian populations into the free work regime, the formation of a class society, as well as the development of racial and national ideologies. Whereas in Brazil racial democracy was cultivated, segregation still presents a problem in the United States; whilst the former perpetuates pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and precarious employment, the latter provided for the formation of a modern black society, albeit separate from the rest of the nation; if in Brazil we have turned colour into the basic unit of a complicated symbolic system of status attribution, in the U.S. race was built into a descent status group.

In this article I aim to clarify the way in which Brazil has, since abolition, been developing a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendents. Not only do I intend to show how this system has developed through time, but how it is also shaped by the mobilization of the black population around the notion of race—as a group of solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. My strategy is to trace the terms “colour” and “race” and their meanings through time, as used or systemised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. Certainly, this is a preliminary and incomplete study, but I hope that it can serve as a guide to future and more systematic investigations about specific periods, places and social agents…

Read the entire paper here.

Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism.

Eric Liu, “Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation,” Slate Magazine, August 22, 1996. http://www.slate.com/id/2398/.

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

Duke University Press
2003
312 pages, 41 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3070-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3058-5

Jerry Dávila, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health.

Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Building the “Brazilian Man”
• 2. Educating Brazil
• 3. What Happened to Rio’s Teachers of Color?
• 4. Elementary Education
• 5. Escola Nova no Estado Novo: The New School in the New State
• 6. Behaving White: Rio’s Secondary Schools
• Epilogue: The Enduring Brazilian Fascination with Race
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

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

Joan R. Dassin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the entire article here.

Hapa-Palooza challenges mixed-race stereotypes

The Vancouver Sun
2011-09-07

Vivian Luk, Special To The Sun

‘We’re 100-per-cent whole, we’re Canadian,’ says filmmaker who faced identity struggles and discrimination while growing up

The nickname Super Nip – partly derived from a Second World War term to describe Japanese people – and racial jokes followed Jeff Chiba Stearns everywhere when he was growing up in Kelowna.

More common, however, was the question, “So, what are you anyway?” Back in elementary and high school, Stearns, now 32, would answer truthfully: He is half-Japanese (the other half being a mixture of English, Scottish, Russian and German).

His “monster truck-driving, redneck” friends would treat him like Fez, the fictional foreign exchange student from Fox Network’s That ’70s Show, whose country of origin was one of the series’ longest-running jokes.

Other times, given his slightly darker complexion, he would say for fun that he is Hawaiian or Tahitian.

But asked that question now, Stearns, an animated filmmaker, answers, “I’m hapa.”

“Hapa” is a Hawaiian term that describes someone of interracial descent. A new cultural festival in Vancouver this week will celebrate and raise awareness of people of mixedroots origins.

From today to Saturday, Hapa-Palooza will feature film, literature, dance and music produced by mixedrace artists, as well as panel discussions. While the festival is meant to foster dialogue about the identity struggles and discrimination that many mixed-race Canadians face, Stearns, whose documentary on growing up in a hapa family will be featured on Thursday, said the goal is also to challenge the idea that mixed people are only part Canadian.

“I don’t like that people refer to themselves as half because we’re not broken, we don’t need fixing,” he said. “I’ve grown to understand that we’re still 100-per-cent whole, we’re Canadian.”…

Read the entire article here.

Caught up in a scientific racism designed to breed out the black

The Sydney Morning Herald
2008-02-14

Debra Jopson

She was removed as a toddler and raped as a ward of the state. Valerie Linow knows only too well the tragedy of assimilation policy, writes Debra Jopson.

The stolen child Valerie Linow is certain she knows why she and thousands of fellow Aborigines were taken from their families and placed in institutions or with white foster families.
 
“It was because of the colour of their skin, to make the country whiter and whiter. The way to do it was to get the half-castes out of the way,” she says.
 
Compassionate Australians recoil from that idea, but the historical record shows that this humble pensioner from Miller, near Liverpool, transported to Bomaderry Children’s Home when she was just two, is right….

…In 1933 a Sunday newspaper quoted Dr Cecil Evelyn Cook, dazzlingly qualified as an anthropologist, biologist, bacteriologist, chief medical officer and “chief protector” of Aborigines in North Australia, who pronounced there was no “throwback” to the black once enough white blood was bred in. “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will be quickly eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white,” he said.

“The Australian native is the most easily assimilated race on earth, physically and mentally. A blending with the Asiatic, though tending to increase virility, is not desirable. The quickest way out is to breed him white,” Cook said.
 
Scientists and social scientists who calibrated how many drops of white blood made a person civilised gave politicians throughout Australia who were worrying about the “half-caste problem” the arguments needed to remove indigenous children from their families.
 
The Melbourne University ethnographer Professor Baldwin Spencer, who was made chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, said: “No half-caste children should be allowed to remain in any native camp.”
 
In an official 1913 report he wrote: “In practically all cases, the mother is a full-blooded Aborigine, the father may be a white man, a Chinese, a Japanese, a Malay or a Filipino.
 
“The mother is of very low intellectual grade, while the father most often belongs to the coarser and more unrefined members of the higher races. The consequence of this is that the children of such parents are not likely to be, in most cases, of much greater intellectual calibre than the more intelligent natives, though, of course, there are exceptions to this.”
 
It seemed only right to give children with enough drops of white blood a chance to join the superior race and for 50 years, from 1919, the NSW Government used its power to take indigenous young from their families and make them wards of the state…

Read the entire article here.