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Combating the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil

W hile Brazil and the United States share a history of slavery, the changes to race relations in Brazil following emancipation differ greatly from the African American experience in the United States. The United States continuously enacted discriminatory laws against people of color such as Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. From this emerged a society with government-institutionalized racism. In contrast, Brazil did not experience the same type of institutionalized racism and did not have overtly racist discriminatory laws. This is not to say that Afro-Brazilians did not struggle for social and racial equality following emancipation; rather, Brazil saw substantial differences in their racial social hierarchy due to their unique reasons for emancipation. Out of this emerged the opinion that racial prejudice and stratification existed more along the lines of wealth and class as opposed to the color of one’s skin. Sociologist Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães wrote in his essay “The Misadventures of Nonracialism in Brazil” that “in Brazil racism developed in a different way, present in social practice – a racism of attitudes – but unrecognized by the legal system and denied by the nonracialist discourse of nationality.”1 Hence, a myth of racial democracy and inclusion emerged regarding Afro-Brazilians. Namely, this myth propagates that racism and inequality were not as prevalent in Brazil as they were in the United States and that blacks experienced little to no racial oppression. The 1920s saw the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan during which violence against black Americans increased dramatically. In the 1930s and 1940s, as a means to better understand and contrast the growing racial disorder in the United States, researchers turned their focus to race relations in Latin America. From these studies emerged the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. One such book by sociologist Donald Pierson entitled Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia, published in 1942, examines the racial and social status of Afro-Brazilians following emancipation in 1888. Pierson attempted to show that racial discrimination and social hierarchies based on race did not really exist in Brazil; instead, Brazilian social hierarchy was based upon class and wealth. Furthermore, Pierson claimed that those of African descent and mixed blood were better off in Brazil than in other countries, specifically the United States, due to the lack of institutionalized racism. Accordingly, while there may have been social inequality among different races, this inequality was largely based on one’s standing among social class. Pierson conducted a two-year field study in Brazil from 1935 to 1937, twenty-two months of which were spent in the seaport town of Bahia.2 His book gives a general overview of the history of Bahia and describes the social hierarchy of the town as well as the local blended population of Portuguese, Indians, and Afro-Brazilians, and gives a brief overview of the Brazilian slave trade as well as relations between the white and slave populations. The weight of Pierson’s study is in the chapter “Miscegenation” in which he examines the mixing of races through intermarriage and procreation. Pierson asserted that when the color lines broke down, so too did racial stratification in Brazil. In the next part of the book, “Race and Social Status,” Pierson continues his study of crumbling race lines by focusing on the social climb of those of mixed race to powerful and prestigious levels. Writing his book a mere fifty years after emancipation, Pierson examined how the following generations of mulattoes were able to attain certain levels of political and social successes.While it asserted no direct military threat towards the Communist mainland, it did remove a preexisting assurance of security along the Strait. By comparing it to other parts of the world with racial hierarchies resulting from European colonization, specifically India and South Africa, the final part of Negroes in Brazil, entitled “The Bahian Racial Situation,” focuses on Pierson’s main claims summarizing race relations in Bahia. Pierson contends that in India, intermarriage and mixture was frowned upon, and those of mixed races were cast out by both parental groups. Likewise, in South Africa, Pierson explained that as more Dutch women came to the colony, they attempted to minimize the mixing of races by “preserving the integrity of their racial stock.”3 Pierson argued in contrast that Brazilians celebrated miscegenation and sought to absorb and blend ethnic identity. He made this bold statement without much evidence, to which he readily admits: “the reasons for this deviation in Brazil are not quite clear, and it continues, therefore, to be a problem.”4 Although Pierson was unable to explain this deviation, other historians have offered up their own claims, to be discussed later in this paper. Another major weakness of Pierson’s study is that he focused on the seaport city of Bahia, yet often used his findings to generalize for all of Brazil. This led to inaccurate conclusions for other major cities that are demographically unlike Bahia. Furthermore, many of the conclusions his study offers lack significant data to support them.