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.[1] Such assumptions, expressed in the concept of “race,” have established the justification for the permanent subordination of individuals and whole groups of people. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. Constitutionally granted individual rights and freedoms were not enforced, and discrimination and unequal treatment were still the rule in social relations.
Brazilian elites, however, have had problems fully accepting racism as a doctrine and have ended up by-and-large rejecting it. 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. Discrimination was justified by the poverty and dependent behavior of the subjected. Non-racialism 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. 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.
Despite the country’s non-racialist laws and discourse, there are several social mechanisms and institutions that permit the functioning of racism as a system. First, there has been a change in the form of social legitimization of discourse on differences. 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. Africans and Afro-Brazilians are described and stereotyped publicly as “uncultured” and “uncivilized.”
Second, the notion of color has officially replaced race. 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.[2] This has kept the negative stereotype associated with blacks intact, but eliminated from this category most individuals of mixed blood. 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.[3]
Third, race relations are supported by a broader social hierarchy that contaminates all social relations. The informal segregation of blacks was the norm in Brazil until very recently, and the unequal treatment of individuals before the law is currently common practice in Brazil.[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.[5]
Fourth, non-racialism, an integral part of the building of modern Brazilian nationality, has ingeniously and mistakenly been equated with anti-racism. In Brazil, denying the existence of race is interpreted as a denial of racism as a system. The recognition of the idea of race and the promotion of any anti-racist action based on this idea is interpreted as racism. Therefore, many manifestations of discrimination based on color are peremptorily denied as having any racial motivation. Race is invisible in Brazil; 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. The disguise of racism is helped along by the fact that similar behavior can be observed in poor, indigent non-blacks. Manifestations of discrimination are thus more easily recognized as having a class motivation. In this way, the illegitimate character of segregation or discrimination disappears from view. And class differences in Brazil are considered legitimate grounds for inequality of treatment and opportunities among people. Indeed, since the abolition of slavery, Brazilian racism has almost always operated through the economic destitution of black Brazilians.
Thus, the major roadblock to combating racism in Brazil consists of the eminence of its invisibility. The existence of racism is repeatedly denied and confused with forms of class discrimination. 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. 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 institutional racism.
Resistance to subordination has typically involved social solidarity based on family ties, common ethnicity, gender, race and/or class, all of which are much more effective when in alliance with one another. All of them presuppose some kind of mobilization leading to the creation of social identities. 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.[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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antonio Sérgio Guimarães teaches sociology at the University of São Paulo and is the author of Racismo e Anti-Racismo no Brasil (Editora 34, 1999). This essay is adapted from his “Combatendo o Racismo: Brasil, Africa do Sul e Estados Unidos,” published in Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociales, February 1999.
NOTES
1. See Hannah Arendt, “Race-thinking Before Racism,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951) and Michel Foucault, La Genealogía del Racismo, (Madrid: Las Ediciones de la Piqueta, 1997).
2. In census reports since 1940, only between 5 and 10% of the Brazilian population has identified itself as black. 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. In my case, the “only” in the above phrase means merely that a large number of persons who would be classified as blacks by lighter-skinned others do not classify themselves that way, but as “pardos” (mixed bloods). See John Burdick, “The Lost Constituency of Brazil’s Black Movements,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January 1998).
3. See Caetana Damasceno, “‘Em casa de enforcado não se fala em corda:’ notas sobre a construção social da ‘boa aparência’ no Brasil,” in Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães and Lynn Huntley (eds.), Tirando a Máscara: Ensaios sobre o racismo no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 2000), pp. 165-202.
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. See France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
5. See Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, “Racismo e restrição de direitos individuais: a discriminação racial publicizada,” Revista de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, No. 31 (1997), pp. 51-78.
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. See Lais Abramo, O Resgate da Dignidade, MA thesis, University of Sâo Paulo, 1990.
