Race, Class and Color: Behind Brazil's "Racial Democracy"
Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio
Racism has its origins in the elaboration and expansion of a doctrine that justifies inequality among human beings, not so much by force and power, but by assumptions of the inequality immanent...
...In my case, the "only" in the above phrase means merely that a large number of persons who would be classified as blacks by lighterskinned others do not classify themselves that way, but as "pardos" (mixed bloods...
...After abolition, in 1888, this duality of treatment before the law was transferred to the system of "colonelship" or colonato-local power relations in which landowners called "colonels" arbitrarily ruled over those on or near their lands-that replaced slavery...
...6. Studies on workers' mobilizations in Brazil also point to moral values, like dignity, as being more important than material interests for the success of these campaigns...
...0 C 38 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE Second, the notion of color has officially replaced race...
...Racism as an ideology was a transitory way of justifying the social order, first of slavery or colonization, and later of settlement, servitude or sharecropping...
...only color exists, defined by objective, concrete characteristics, independent of the idea of race...
...Fifth, the situation of poverty and indigence in which the majority of the Brazilian population finds itself leads to forms of personal dependence and subordination that provoke discriminatory behavior...
...4 The same phenomenon of negative stereotyping of black somatic traits supports the mechanism of "police suspicion," which makes blacks disproportionate victims of abuse by police and security guards...
...See Lais Abramo, O Resgate da Dignidade, MA thesis, University of SAo Paulo, 1990...
...Therefore, many manifestations of discrimination based on color are peremptorily denied as having any racial motivation...
...A large percentage of the population with some African ancestry is classified as white or mixed, not black, and a long list of names is used to differentiate among nonblacks, mostly morena, a designation that was originally used for whites with dark hair and skin...
...See John Burdick, "The Lost Constituency of Brazil's Black Movements," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...38NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Antonio Srgio Guimardes teaches sociology at the University of 55o Paulo and is the author of Racismo e Anti-Racismo no Brasil (Editora 34, 1999...
...In this way, the illegitimate character of segregation or discrimination disappears from view...
...25, No...
...In Brazil, denying the existence of race is interpreted as a denial of racism as a system...
...5. See Antonio S~rgio Alfredo Guimaries, "Racismo e restrigoo de direitos individuals: a discriminaCAo racial publicizada," Revista de Estudos AfroAsiiticos, No...
...Indeed, the mobilization of dissidence around the question of race, while bypassing family and community solidarity, has made possible the change from individual experiences of insubordination to acts of collective resistance in Brazil...
...But long after the biological justification of racism was discarded, the alleged cultural inferiority-in material and spiritual terms-of groups in situations of subordination became the standard justification for unequal treatment...
...3 Race is invisib only color exist Third, race relations are objectivE supported by a broader social hierarchy that contaminates characteristic all social relations...
...5 Fourth, non-racialism, an integral part of the building of modem Brazilian nationality, has ingeniously and mistakenly been equated with anti-racism...
...Discrimination was justified by the poverty and dependent behavior of the subjected...
...First, there has been a change in the form of social legitimization of discourse on differences...
...Racism has its origins in the elaboration and expansion of a doctrine that justifies inequality among human beings, not so much by force and power, but by assumptions of the inequality immanent among human groups-intellectual, moral, cultural or psychic inferiorities of identifiable groups of people...
...All of them presuppose some kind of mobilization leading to the creation of social identities...
...3. See Caetana Damasceno, "'Em casa de enforcado nho se fala em corda:' notas sobre a construyao social da 'boa apar~ncia' no Brasil," in Antonio S6rgio Alfredo Guimarbes and Lynn Huntley (eds...
...Africans and Afro-Brazilians are described and stereotyped publicly as "uncultured" and "uncivilized...
...2. In census reports since 1940, only between 5 and 10% of the Brazilian population has identified itself as black...
...This essay is adapted from his "Combatendo o Racismo: Brasil, Africa do Sul e Estados Unidos, " published in Revista Brasileira de Ci6ncias Sociales, February 1999...
...The transformation of temporary cultural, social and political inequality into permanent inequality is a product of such pseudoscientific thinking-a product, mainly, of the nineteenth century...
...Racial identity has thus been formed by bypassing family and community solidarities, and Brazilian blacks have instead found their potential allies on the terrain of class struggles as well as within the human rights movement...
...Taking this into account, whites in Brazil have been defined in the most inclusive manner possible, to include all mixed-bloods having close-to-European somatic characteristics...
...Constitutionally granted individual rights and freedoms were not enforced, and discrimination and unequal treatment were still the rule in social relations...
...And class differences in Brazil are considered legitimate grounds for inequality of treatment and opportunities among people...
...Where material and cultural privileges associated with race, color and class subsist, the first step to an effective democratization consists precisely in naming the bases of these privileges: race, color, class...
...6 It is not surprising, then, that a considerable part of the black population feels more attracted to leftist political parties than to black solidarity movements...
...The disguise of racism is helped along by the fact that similar behavior can be observed in poor, indigent nonblacks...
...2 This has kept the negative stereotype associated with blacks intact, but eliminated from this category most individuals of mixed blood...
...The informal segregation of blacks was of the id the norm in Brazil until very recently, and the unequal treatment of individuals before the law is currently common practice in Brazil...
...The recognition of the idea of race and the promotion of any anti-racist action based on this idea is interpreted as racism...
...The liberal state of law that was formed with independence in 1822 guaranteed both individual liberties to the ruling classes and the continuity of slavery...
...Race, Class and Color 1. See Hannah Arendt, "Race-thinking Before Racism," in The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951) and Michel Foucault, La Genealogia del Racismo, (Madrid: Las Ediciones de la Piqueta, 1997...
...tive when in alliance with one another...
...For this reason, the building of black identity in Brazil has not worked as effectively for political mobilization as it has, for example, in the United States...
...Thus, the major roadblock to combating racism in Brazil consists of the eminence of its invisibility...
...The economic and political subordination and subjugation of Afro-Brazilians was first justified by conquest and only later by the notion of biological and/or cultural inferiority...
...Indeed, since the abolition of slavery, Brazilian SI S, racism has almost always operated through the economic destitution of black Brazilians...
...Race is invisible in Brazil...
...See France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998...
...Manifestations of discrimination are thus more easily recognized as having a class motivation...
...espite the country's non-racialist laws and discourse, there are several social mechanisms and institutions that permit the functioning of racism as a system...
...31 (1997), pp...
...Nonracialism and the cultural and biological mixing of the races have become national ideals that elites have tried to impress upon all individuals in the nation state...
...The mobilization of black Brazilians around issues of race has been much more effective in reinforcing black self-esteem and in fighting racist values than in politically confronting institu)le in Brazil...
...The explanations of social inequalities earlier attributed to race have, as mentioned above, been replaced by explanations that use the concept of culture, thereby leaving intact the notion of the superiority of white or European culture and civilization...
...Moreover, color, broadly utilized in Brazil to allocate life opportunities, operates on a largely individual basis, making even the development of family solidarity difficult as families mobilize to support lighter-skinned family members rather than family members as a whole...
...In Brazil, class solidarity has been the most successful basis for mass mobilization precisely because certain privileges of treatment before the law and inequalities of life opportunity are more visibly and verbally linked to class distinctions...
...tional racism...
...4. France Winddance Twine detects, through interviews, that in a small town in the Rio de Janeiro countryside the practice of segregation of blacks lasted practically until the 1987 Constituent Assembly debates that criminalized racism...
...John Burdick correctly calls attention to the fact that the percentage of blacks who define themselves as such in Brazil is large in spite of the way it is reported by sociologists...
...Resistance to subordination ts, defined by has typically involved social solidarity based on family ties, common ethnicity, genindependent der, race and/or class, all of which are much more effec- a of race...
...Tirando a Mdscara: Ensaios sobre o racismo no Brasil (Slo Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 2000), pp...
...The existence of racism is repeatedly denied and confused with forms of class discrimination...
...tes mostly Brazilian elites, however, have had problems fully accepting racism as a doctrine and have ended up by-and-large rejecting it...
...165-202...
...51-78...
...1 (January 1998...
...And with respect to the labor market, these stereotypes are mixed with class stereotypes to generate the job-eligibility criterion known as "good appearance," a criterion responsible for the reproduction of most racial inequalities in occupation and income...
...Despite Brazil's non-racialist ideology-an ideology of "racial democracy"-the mobilization of black identity has become, paradoxically, a component fundamental to the Brazilian democratic process...
...1 Such assumptions, expressed in the concept of "race," have established the justification for the permanent subordination of individuals and whole groups of people...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 6
