The Myth of Racial Democracy
Burdick, John
THERE'S NO RACISM IN BRAZIL!" MANUEL "declared with a dismissive wave of his glass. "Here we're all equal! How could there be racism when people of all colors intermarry and have children?"...
...In the great C6spedes rebellion of 1869, which called for the end of Spanish rule and freedom for the slaves, one observer estimated that twothirds of the fighting men were "of color other than black, all shades of brown predominating...
...Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (New York: Harcourt, 1971), pp...
...And during every major slave revolt of the nineteenth century, mulattos sided with the whites...
...in the early nineteenth century free mulattos owned property and slaves and were consequently less than enthusiastic about abolition...
...As early as the seventeenth century, mulattos helped Portuguese slaveholders expel Dutch invaders...
...3 2 These were men of little means, who, in contrast to the mulattos of Brazil, owned no slaves...
...38...
...Knight, "Cuba," p. 288...
...Let us not seek to perpetuate our race," wrote a Brazilian mulatto leader in the 1920s "but, yes, to infiltrate ourselves into the bosom of the privileged race, the white race...
...NUMBER 4 (FEBRUARY 1992) 43Regardless of the accuracy of this perception of Haitian history, it led to a full-scale attack on the rights of mulattos...
...And at the culmination of their careers, they could buy a certificate of whiteness...
...Forhistorical overviews ofthe black diaspora throughout the New World, see Philip Curtin, "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Basin: Intercontinental Perspectives," in Nathan Huggins, et al...
...PeggyLovell Websterand Jeffrey W. Dwyer, "TheCost of Being Nonwhite in Brazil," Social Science Research (Jan...
...and Moore, Castro...
...The elderly black men and women I spoke with in 1988 found no place for mulattos in their recounting of the story of abolition, even those who believed that abolition was a gift from the white masters...
...AN ECOnomic backwater of the Spanish empire until the late eighteenth century, its inhabitants occupied themselves primarily with cattle raising and producing food to provision the Spanish ships and troops passing through Havana port...
...4 - 2 1...
...See Santos Souza, Tornar-se negro...
...36...
...Quoted in ibid...
...Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Color, p. 167...
...Though still largely middle-class, intellectual and mulatto-based, the black consciousness movement no longer calls for assimilation, but rather black pride and power.4 Buried in Brazilian whites' strategy of selective privilege-generally successful in dividing mulattos from blacks, thereby conquering them both--lies the seed of its own destruction...
...The reality is not quite so pretty...
...The key, racial democrats argue, is that, in contrast to North America's pattern of categorizing people as either black or white, in much of Latin America people fall somewhere in between these extremes, along a broad color spectrum.' Venezuelans, for example, often say theirs is a cafd con leche country: 70% of all Venezuelans are pardos, of mixed African and non-African origin, descended from the hundred thousand slaves forced to work on coastal cacao plantations before the nineteenth century...
...Similar movements, undoubtedly influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States, have also appeared in societies with large mixed-blood populations, such as Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador...
...8 (April 1985) pp...
...Cuban musicians.The revolution eliminated the visible, legal pillars of racism, and with them any race-based political movements...
...I guess the real saying should be, 'If you're not white, you lose...
...In the hysterical repression that followed, over 3,000 blacks and mulattos lost their lives...
...The absolute number of Cuban mulattos always remained relatively small...
...37...
...The Brazilian Negro Front of the 1930s insisted in one of its publications that "the problem of the Brazilian Negro is that of definitive, total integration of the Negro in all aspects of Brazilian life...
...Mulattos usually enjoy at least some advantages over dark blacks, but their status varies greatly throughout the hemisphere...
...In Panama, racism was intensified during the construction of the Panama Canal, because U.S...
...But to a white man, I'm a moreno only if he likes me...
...Knight, Slave Society, Scott, Slave Emancipation...
...See Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, "Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as a Survival Strategy in Brazil During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Rebecca Scott, et al, The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath ofEmancipation in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp...
...June Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 18701920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), p. 67...
...As long as dark-skinned blacks were forced to remain in the lowest-paying jobs, mulattos REPORT ON TlHE AMERICASwould gladly take up the slack in the skilled trades, petty commerce, and the professions...
...MANUEL "declared with a dismissive wave of his glass...
...The revolution did eliminate the visible, legal pillars of racism, and it seems to have enjoyed the support of poor blacks and mulattos.39 Declaring its own version of racial democracy, the government has made race and racism taboo subjects, and no race-based (or any other for that matter) political movements have been allowed to emerge...
...In 1845, Vicente Queipo, attorney general of Cuba, declared in no uncertain terms that Cuba's leaders had learned "the severe lesson of the neighboring island of Santo Domingo, whose loss depended to a great deal on the close intimacy in which the white inhabitants of the French part lived with their slaves, and the numerous colored population resulting from this foreboding association...
...See Peter Wade, "Race and Class: The Case of South American Blacks," Ethnic and Racial Studies No...
...The process of abolition thus cemented ties between whites and mulattos, and allowed whites to continue counting on mulatto support in efforts to exclude blacks from social power...
...Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970...
...68-87...
...22No...
...7. Sidney Kronus and Mauricio Solaun, Discrimination Without Violence (New York: Wiley, 1973), p. 118...
...5. Rout,African Experience...
...2-24...
...233-49...
...Most observers of revolutionary Cuba concur that there is essentially no difference in status between blacks and mulattos...
...1 1. Richard L. Jackson, The Black Image in Latin American Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), p. 2. 12...
...Mulatto farmers also had a stake in slave society...
...Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington: Howard University, 1982...
...6. Neusa Santos Souza, Tornar-seNegro: As Vicissitudesda Identidade do Negro Brasileiro em Ascensdo Social (Rio de Janeiro, 1983), p. 48...
...In exchange, mulattos pledged allegiance to white values, modes of behavior, and physical aesthetics...
...This is not to say all is rosy for mulattos...
...6 Such attitudes have direct consequences for blacks' life chances...
...Here, you can be other things, like me, I'm a moreno [brown...
...Hasenbalg, Discriminacio...
...Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985...
...2 About 40% of all Brazilians are mulattos, people with some degree of descent from the three and a half million slaves who once sweated in that country's sugar and coffee plantations.' And at least a quarter of all Colombians are partially descended from the two hundred thousand slaves brought to New Granada to toil in the canefields and pan for gold...
...Elizabeth Sutherland, The Youngest Revolution (New York, 1969...
...Kitts and Grenada," Journal of Caribbean History Vol...
...f_ A nineteenth-century Cuban dwelling...
...9. See Anizio Ferreira dos Santos, Eu, negro: discriminacao racial no Brasil, existe?(S oPaulo, 1988...
...39...
...Neuza Santos Souza, a Brazilian mulatta, remembers that as a child, "I didn't know my place, but I knew I wasn't black...
...Haroldo Costa, Fala, crioulo (Rio de Janeiro, 1982), p. 98...
...The Organizaci6n Celular Asteria, formed in the 1930s argued, "since half of all Cubans were Negroid, the same percentage of government jobs must be held by Afro-Cubans...
...563-585...
...Such groups, however, have characteristically avoided calling for a distinct black identity...
...By the end of the eighteenth century, free non-whites accounted for only about 20% of Cuba's population...
...Such immigration, the editor of the Getulino wrote, would "be the death blow to the mathematical process of the disappearance of the black race of Brazil...
...In the nineteenth century, rural mulattos and blacks were mainly agricultural laborers, while urban mulattos and blacks were prevented from entering the navy, air force, and various food-handling occupations.'" The segregation introduced by U.S...
...2 4 On the eve of abolition, mulattos outnumbered free blacks in urban artisanal occupations by more than four to one, and, not surprisingly, feared the end of slavery would threaten their position in the labor market...
...This, in turn, reinforced whites' hostility toward them, and rendered unworkable a Brazilian-style white-mulatto alliance after the end of slavery...
...142,148...
...As a mulatto journalist lamented in the 1970s, "When you do well, everyone's astonished, and when you screw up, they massacre you...
...The sudden deluge of slaves at the very moment that slavery was being abolished in much of the hemisphere-as well as Cuba's geographic proximity to Haiti-made Cuban slaveholders more than a little nervous...
...My bar companion Manuel once told me, "There is a saying in Brazil: 'If you're not white you're black.' That's not really true, you know...
...5 According to racial democrats, the presence of so many mixed-bloods promotes mild, fraternal race relations...
...This enraged the latter, who proceeded between 1920 and 1940 to ban any further black immigration, refuse blacks citizenship, and threaten to expel them...
...In 1912, PIC leaders led rural blacks in a revolt against the white oligarchy...
...11 (1980) pp...
...As far as the Cuban elite was concerned, the events in Haiti were the handiwork of mixed-bloods who had been coddled by the decadent French...
...Though shunted aside from the most respectable professions, such as medicine, law, academia, upper-level government, and the officer and diplomatic corps, Brazilian mulattos are still able to enter a secondary occupational tier as schoolteachers, journalists, artists, clerks, and low-level officials in municipal government and tax offices.'" Mulattos get promoted more easily and earn more than their black counterparts.'16 Marriages between whites and mulattos are less stigmatized than those between whites and blacks.' 7 In contrast, for much of the last 200 years in Cuba, at least until the 1959 revolution (and, some say, even after it), only the smallest minority of the lightest-skinned mulattos have been able to attain positions of prestige, while the majority have faced the same sort of discrimination as darker-skinned Cubans...
...How could we be racists...
...Any explanation of the difference should take into account the experiences of free mulattos in Brazil and Cuba during the long night of slavery...
...Andrews, Blacks and Whites, p. 136...
...The Cuban mulatto population grew not from the slaveholders' economic needs, but from the Spanish Crown's desire to people the colony as thickly as possible, thereby warding off the territorial pretensions of the French and British...
...By midcentury, free non-whites (mainly mulattos) numberedjust over 200,000, only half the number of slaves on the island, and a quarter of the whites.-" These ratios spelled political trouble for the mulattos...
...So reliable were mulattos, in fact, that at the height of the sugar boom, the rate of manumission increased steadily, and free mulattos played an important role in local militias...
...73-94...
...Marvin Harris has argued that at the very inception of the Brazilian colony, planters needed free mulattos as overseers, slave-catchers, foot-soldiers and gunmen, cattlehands and subsistence farmers...
...Neither Slave nor Free, pp...
...See John Clytus, Black Man in Red Cuba (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970...
...3 5 Brazilian mulattos often redirected their resentment away from dominant whites, toward other, more vulnerable groups, a tendency reinforced by job competition with foreign immigrants...
...Rout, African Experience, gives a numbing summary of these...
...We were leaning against the counter in a small bar in a working-class town on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro...
...87 (May 1980) pp...
...Madrid: Matin Alegria, 1845), p. 33, quoted in Knight, "Cuba," p. 302...
...The planters were haunted with the specter not just of slave revolution, but mulatto-led slave revolution...
...4 Even in the Andean country of Ecuador, one tenth of the population enjoys a visible heritage from the hundred thousand slaves sent there centuries ago...
...As one told me, "The mulattos were sitting pretty up on high...
...This support for slavery is most striking in the period leading up to abolition in 1888...
...James O'Kelly, The Mambi-Land or, Adventures ofa Herald Correspondent in Cuba (Philadelphia: Lippencourt, 1874), p. 221, quoted in Scott, Slave Emancipation, p. 57...
...In the 1930s mulatto newspapers adopted a virulently anti-foreign, anti-immigrant stance, as when O Clarim da Alvorada denounced "the colonies of foreigners, who organize themselves and discriminate...
...33...
...I was a mulata...
...They wanted only to forget him...
...76-77...
...3 3 Ten years later, in yet another revolt that included the call for abolition, the so-called "Guerra Chiquita," mulattos again figured prominently...
...supervisors treated West Indian workers the same as lighter-skinned Panamanians...
...if he doesn't like me, I'm a mulatto, or I'm even apreto [black...
...They feel they have to run twice as fast as white workers just to stay even with them...
...3 8 Also in the 1930s, the Committee for the Rights of the Negro brought blacks and mulattos together to fight racist employment policies and to demonstrate against segregation in public beaches and parks...
...Marianne Masferrer and Carmelo Mesa-Lago, "The Gradual Integration of the Black in Cuba," in Robert Brent Toplin (ed...
...Such anti-mulatto legislation and color classifications left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the mixed-blood population...
...eds...
...97, 313-314...
...Scott, Slave Emancipation, p. 56...
...74-93...
...Jorge Dominguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978...
...Vincent B. Thompson, The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas, 1441-1900 (White Plains: Longman, 1987...
...The memory of the massacre was still alive in small villages in Oriente province as recently as 1968.37 In the aftermath of the bloodshed, urban blacks and mulattos limited their demands to the urban arena, yet they continued to work together toward common objectives...
...Rebecca Scott has suggested that the rebellion was based primarily among sharecroppers and squatters, atleast a third of whom were free coloreds...
...2 But most dark-skinned Brazilians did not participate in the formal abolition movement either...
...Slaves could not be used for these functions, and a labor shortage in Portugal meant not enough whites were available either...
...Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp...
...Numbering far fewer than whites and lacking a sizeable, skilled, literate urban contingent, Cuban mulattos remained extremely vulnerable both socially and politically...
...During the Pernambucan independence rebellion of 1817-1823, mulatto leaders proclaimed support for slavery...
...They play that game, you know...
...Unlike the Brazilian Negro Front, the PIC demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns of rural dark-skinned blacks by calling for land distribution to poor tenants in the densely black province of Oriente...
...In Cuba, by contrast, a small, economically marginal, politically vulnerable free mulatto population found itself the victim, in the nineteenth century, of harsh repression at the hands of a jittery slaveholding elite...
...2 " That mulattos "sat out" the abolition of slavery entered, it seems, into the popular consciousness of many working-class blacks...
...See Roy BryceLaporte, "A Less-Known Chapter of the Africa Diaspora: West Indians in Central America," in Joseph E. Harris (ed...
...Caribbean Contours (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 66...
...A great historical bargain had been struck: in exchange for at least some social recognition and advancement, mulattos threw in their lot with the white elite against the blackest members of society...
...The most dramatic change, and undoubtedly the cruelest blow, was the government's re-classification of mulattos after 1841 as belonging to the same category as blacks: gente de color...
...8. Wright, Caft Cmon Leche...
...4 IF "RACIAL DEMOCRACY" HAS ANY MEANING at all, it refers to the fact that Latin American societies make some provision for better treatment of people of visibly mixed ancestry...
...A similar pattern has been documented for the island of Grenada by Edward Cox...
...The jury is still out on the impact of the Cuban revolution on race relations in that country...
...With such a strong non-assimilationist political tradition, it is not surprising that in the 1950s, blacks and mulattos joined the Communist Party in droves...
...This attack, and itsconnection tothe reading ofHaitian history, is welldocumented by Verena Stolcke Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986...
...H. Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 108...
...A.J.R...
...this led to the execution of 80 mulattos, the arbitrary rounding up and imprisonment of others, and the exile of the most visible members of the small colored professional class to Mexico...
...Andiews, Blacks and Whites, p. 107...
...The slaughter seared the consciousness of Cuban mulattos in ways entirely unknown to people of color in Brazil...
...From such favored positions in urban areas, Brazilian mulattos readily advanced into the arts, letters and liberal professions, including medicine...
...This identification did not prevent many of them from keenly resenting their exclusion from the highest echelons of power, a resentment periodically translated into mulatto-based social and political organizations...
...3 4 SN BRAZIL, THROUGHOUT MUCH OF THE TWENtieth century, mulattos identified their ultimate interest as incorporation into, rather than rejection of, the established system of race relations...
...Moema dePoli Pacheco, "Familia e identidade racial: os limites dacornas relacoes de um grupoda baixa renda" (Master's thesis), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 1986...
...Throughout the 1890s, in Havana and the sugar-producing areas, mulattos continued to be victims of the same racism as blacks...
...Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), 306...
...2. Winthrop Wright, Cafe con Leche: Race, Class and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990...
...Herein lies a glimmer of the consciousness that has led an entire generation of mulattos to become activists in black consciousness movements, a process which has begun to undermine the hold of the myth of racial democracy...
...Only the lightest mulattos could entertain any hopes of assimilation and upward mobility...
...3. Carlos Hasenbalg, Discriminacao e desigualdades raciais no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1979...
...348-384...
...I still had hopes of being saved...
...Only a small, though visible, percentage of mulattos migrated to Havana, where limited opportunities as artisans and small merchants awaited them...
...Brazil, on the other hand, has witnessed the emergence of an entirely new kind of black movement over the past two decades...
...blacks were stupid, and I was intelligent...
...In Brazil, free mulattos remained so demographically potent and economically vital throughout the slave era that the white ruling class had little choice but to concede considerable social mobility to them...
...See Irene Maria F. Barbosa, Socializacao e relacoes raciais: um estudo defamilia negra em Campinas (Sio Paulo, 1983...
...In the early twentieth century Brazilian newspapers were up in arms at the suggestion that North American blacks be encouraged to immigrate...
...7 In Venezuela, most dark-skinned people work in the lowest-paying jobs, such as domestic service, informal labor, stevedoring, and sharecropping...
...34...
...Franklin Knight, "Cuba," in David Cohen and Jack Greene (eds...
...40...
...While official sources and some observers claim racism has been eradicated, contrary claims on the part of black nationalists Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Williams and Carlos Moore have become virtually legendary...
...1988...
...See Edward Cox, "The Free Coloreds and Slave Emancipation in the British West Indies: The Case of St...
...Many of them worked small parcels of land to supply nearby sugar plantations with food...
...H. Hoetink, "'Race' and Color in the Caribbean," in Sidney Mintz and Sally Price (eds...
...Carlos Moore, Castro, The Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles: UCLA/CAAS, 1990...
...Ana Lucia Valente, Sernegro noBrasilhoje (Sfio Paulo, 1987...
...101-103...
...2 2 Add to this the fact that most of them depended on large slaveholders for land rights, credit and protection, and it is not hard to see why rural mulattos identified with the slave system and were unwilling to fight against it.2" In addition, by the eighteenth century, many mulattos had migrated to the burgeoning cities of Salvador, Slio Luis, and Rio de Janeiro, where they found opportunities as self-employed artisans and petty merchants...
...Slavery and Race Relations in LatinAmerica (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp...
...And pockets of "pure" blacks continue to live in Colombia's Choc6 Valley and Ecuador's Esmeraldas province...
...In Colombia, virtually no graduate from middle-class secondary or law schools is a dark black, while two-thirds of the slum-dwellers near Cartagena REPORT ON THE AMERICAS ['1/ b *t'i . 0 U0 53 i'are...
...35...
...In Suriname, descendants of runaway slaves continue to live in forest hideaways...
...Ten years before the 1959 revolution, mulatto workers were still primarily "hewers of wood and drawers of water...
...9 Whether such patterns have survived in revolutionary Cuba is open to furious debate...
...Put simply, while white society holds out the promise of acceptance to mulattos, it fails to fulfill it...
...This act accelerated other laws restricting interracial marriage, so that by the 1860s all interracial marriages were prohibited...
...Mulattos never established themselves as key actors in the Cuban economy...
...See, for example, Richard L. Jackson, "Literary Blackness in Colombia," in Black Writers in Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979),nd"Mestizaje versus Black Identity: The Color Crisis in Latin America," Black World No...
...Throughout the twentieth century, the governments of Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Guatemala, among others, passed successive waves of racist, anti-black immigration legislation...
...A surprisingly large number of these poor farmers owned one or two slaves, upwards of 77% of them in one locality...
...tunity for promotion through the ranks...
...27, Quoted in Andrews, Blacks and Whites, p. 136...
...If, as Richard Jackson has put it, whites in the United States tried to get rid of blacks "through extermination," in Latin America they attempted to do so through amalgamation...
...This concession nurtured among Brazilian mulattos a willingness after the abolition of slavery to play the role of buffer between whites and blacks...
...p. 3. 13...
...Pointing to his brown skin and short, frizzy hair, he said, "I have the blood of all races in me-white, black, Indian...
...Along the coast of Costa Rica and Panama live large culturally distinct populations of West Indians, brought to work by North American fruit companies...
...Rout, African Experience, p. 307...
...Quoted in Florestan Fernandes, The Negro in Brazilian Society (New York: Columbia, 1969), p. 201...
...Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Berkeley, 1972...
...See J. Michael Turner, "Brown into Black: Changing Racial Attitudes of Afro-Brazilian University Students," in Pierre-Michel Fontaine (ed...
...An 1809 decree banned freedmen and mulattos from teaching at or attending Cuban schools, followed soon after by laws prohibiting them from owning land, serving in the militia, and travelling without special passes...
...Unlike Portugal, which was hard-pressed to send migrants to Brazil, Spain provided a small but steady flow of settlers to Cuba before 1800...
...This experience forged among many Cuban mulattos a deep-seated resentment against whites and a willingness to fight on the side of the slaves for abolition...
...instead, their aim has been to improve chances for assimilation...
...1-2 (1988), pp...
...Costa Rica, for example, refused citizenship in the 1930s to the West Indians who came to work on its railroads and banana plantations, and denied them the right to live outside certain provinces...
...The Myth of Racial Democracy I. In a number of localities, sell-proclaimed "pare" blacks continue to outnumber whites and people of mixed ancestry...
...7 C UBA'S WAS A DIFFERENT STORY...
...3 6 Nearly all of the limited number of mulatto politicians active in the last generation adopted similar postures, doing their best to blend into mainstream party politics and avoid being pulled into the political orbit of the small but growing black consciousness movement...
...Until the sugar boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slavery was a fairly minor institution on the island...
...Blacks were dirty, and I was clean...
...Race, Class and Power in Brazil (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1985), pp...
...As early as 1835, Cuban historian Jos6 Antonio Saco was already proclaiming, "The only remedy for making us respectable is whitening, whitening...
...The end of slavery in 1886, however, did not bring about an improvement in the condition of mulattos...
...Rout, African Experience...
...Warren Dean, Rio Clara (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976...
...A. R. Griffith, "Cuba from a Black Perspective," Crisis No...
...Cited in Andrews, Blacks and Whites, p. 153...
...People on the lighter end of the color-race continuum hold strong prejudices against those toward the darker end...
...blacks lived in the slum, and I did not...
...8 In Brazil, dark blacks are mainly janitors, porters, laundresses, day laborers, and domestic servants.' Jobs that require a "good appearance," such as receptionists, secretaries, or bank tellers, or even minimal authority, such as low-level federal employees, are effectively closed to them.' 0 So strong are anti-black feelings in Latin America that for much of its history, those toward the lighter end of the color spectrum have sought to "bleach" blacks right out of existence...
...The historic alliance and mulattos led, in the early twentieth century, to the form political movement: the Independent Colored Party...
...4. Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America (Canmbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp...
...By distinguishing themselves in this service, mulattos found ample opporVOLUME XXV, NUMBER 4 (FEBRUARY 1992) 41servants, and lawyers...
...Only the combination of international pressure, the growing expense of slaveholding in many regions of the country, and massive slave rebellion finally broke the back of Brazilian slavery...
...Carl Degler, NeitherBlack Nor White: Slaver andRaceRelations in Brazilandthe UnitedStates (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986 [1971t), pp...
...The rate of white immigration remained static throughout the entire colonial period...
...By contrast, a strong mulatto and black political movement emerged in Cuba: the Independent Colored Party (PIC), founded in 1907...
...Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Black Frontiersmen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974...
...See Richard Price, FirstTime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983...
...and above all, blacks had thick noses and lips, and I didn't...
...Vicente Vasquez Queipo, Informefiscalsobrefomento de lapoblacion blanca en la isla de Cuba...
...They never cared for the slave, even if they shared his blood...
...While slavery was still in force, free mulattos could become engineers, civil 1hug IIUI itlw~I IIICI Iri1e u1betwen Cuan backs attos like Andre Reboucas and ration of a strong Luis Gama were abolitionists, -,t l I - .U tt .t l elite studiously refrained from taking a stand, while others, such as the Baron of Cotegipe, were strongly antiabolitionist...
...Immediately after the Haitian revolution of 17911804, Cuba's sugar industry began to boom, flooding the country with hundreds of thousands of slaves...
...2 "Whitening" meant eliminating the racial heritage of Africa by overwhelming it with miscegenation, the importation of Europeans, and restrictions on the immigration of blacks...
...Slaveholders manumitted mulattos in such numbers that by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, free people of color represented, in virtually every province of the country, at least half and as much as twice the size of the white population.21 Many of these mulattos were employed in militias to protect white slaveholders' property...
...even after the United States no longer directly implemented segregationist rules, whites continued to keep many of them in force...
...Litanies about "racial democracy" can be heard throughout Latin America...
...Indicative of the tension were rumors in 1844 that free mulattos had instigated an uprising in Escalera...
...VOLUME XXV...
...2 0 Two societies, two patterns of mixed-blood status...
...See, for example, Johnetta Cole, "Race for Equality," Black Scholar No...
...Mulattos, anxious to maximize their distance from people darker than themselves, can be as racist, if not more so, than whites...
...24 (1975), pp...
...occupation early this century, affecting mulattos and blacks equally, dovetailed neatly with white attitudes...
...Russell-Wood, "Colonial Brazil" and Herbert Klein, "Nineteenth-Century Brazil," in Cohen and Greene (eds...
...and Grace Schubert, "To Be Black is Offensive: Racist Attitudes in San Lorenzo," in Norman Whitten (ed...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 4
