Racism has been present in Brazil since its colonial period and is pointed as one of the major and most widespread types of discrimination, if not the most, in the country by several anthropologists, sociologists, jurists, historians and others. The myth of a racial democracy, a term originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), is used by many people in the country to deny or downplay the existence and the broad extension of racism in Brazil.
Racism was made illegal under Brazil's anti-discrimination laws, which were passed in the 1950s after Katherine Dunham, an African-American dancer touring Brazil, was barred from a hotel. Nonetheless, race has been the subject of multiple intense debates over the years within the country.
Definition of race in Brazil
Because the country has a long history of miscegenation, color lines in Brazil have long been blurred. At the same time, more and more people see themselves as Black and seek to reclaim their Blackness due to the Black pride and Black power movements.
The Brazilian census organizes the population into five, albeit imperfect, racial groups. These are branco (white), preto (black), pardo (brown, or multi-racial), amarelo (yellow, or Asian), and indígena (indigenous). Because there was never a legal genetic definition for these categories, throughout history, each of these racial groups has been defined in different ways. Racial classification in Brazilian society is often inconsistent and influenced by a myriad of factors including: class, status, education, location and phenotype. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto.
History
Slavery and abolition
Soon after the Portuguese began to settle in Brazil in the year 1500, they began to enslave the indigenous population in order to sustain their growing sugar economy. However, European induced wars and disease quickly began to deplete the indigenous populations and Portuguese settlers soon looked to Africa to satisfy their labor demands. By the end of the slave trade in 1850, the Brazilian colony had imported an estimated four million slaves from Africa, the largest number of any other country in the Americas and seven times more than what was imported to the United States. Slavery brought with it dehumanization of Africans and a multitude of negative stereotypes that set the stage for a racial hierarchy in Brazil where blacks and those of African descent would become the subservient class to whites.
Along with being the largest importer of Africans during the slave trade, Brazil was also the last country in the Americas to eradicate slavery. Calls for the end of slavery in Brazil began in the early 19th century. In 1825, José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, who was a prominent figure in leading Brazil to independence from Portugal, was in high favor of gradual emancipation. Britain also contributed to the push for abolition in Brazil, by abolishing the slave trade. This was a significant move due to the fact that the United Kingdom was Brazil's main trade partner. A small amount of legislation also helped lead up to the official abolition of slavery in 1888. First, in 1871 the Law of the Free Womb declared that all the children of slaves that were born after the law was passed were to be freed; followed by the 1885 Sexagenarian Law, which freed slaves over sixty years of age.
A large contributor to the lengthy abolition process in Brazil was in part due to the dynamics of the royal family. By the 1870s, the last emperor, Pedro II had only one surviving child, the princess Isabel. Due to her gender and her marriage to a foreigner, Isabel had trouble gaining support, despite having twice served as regent during her father's reign. During her brief time as regent, she took small measures to abolish slavery. Due to the obstacles she faced, she had to appoint an entirely new cabinet in order to completely abolish slavery. She succeeded, and the abolition of slavery was referred to as the Golden Law.
Post-emancipation Brazil (1888 – early 1900s) The abolition of slavery in Brazil meant the end of legal segregation between blacks and whites. However, racism did not die with the abolition of slavery. The racial hierarchies put in place by slavery stood strong after abolition. There was no period of "reconstruction" such as that which was instituted in the United States. Rather, newly freed black Brazilians were left to create a life for themselves out of nothing—no land, money, or education. This disadvantaged state left the country with massive amounts of inequality between whites and non-whites. Because of this, the conversation about race in Brazil became closely intertwined with conversations about poverty and class.
Though there were no laws directly targeting those of African descent on the basis of race, there were laws that were put in place that created inequality between whites and blacks. For example, when Brazil first became a republic in 1889, voting was restricted to literate men, which barred the majority of the black population from voting since there were large disparities in education after the abolition of slavery. In addition to this, there was a redefining of crime that criminalized many aspects of African culture.
Eugenics In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fear began to spread among the elite classes about how Brazil's early history of miscegenation would affect its development. This fear, in combination with the growing popularity of using pseudoscience to explain racial differences, led to the growth of different forms of pseudoscientific racism and, particularly, eugenics in Brazil.
European critics had long criticized Brazil's racially diverse society for its lack of "racial purity". Eugenics of the time suggested that blacks were inferior, and mulattoes were "degenerate," putting Brazil's large black and mixed populations in question. Further, it was thought that tropical climates, like Brazil's, hindered a country's development. One French eugenicist, Count Arthur de Gobineau, attacked Brazil saying that racial mixing in the country had affected every stratosphere of class making the entire country "lazy, ugly and infertile." These thoughts began to spark fear among Brazil's elite who sought to use ideas of eugenics to better the country's economic standing. One anthropologist who adopted eugenic thought, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, began to become concerned with the racial mixing occurring in Brazil. He conducted a 'study' on people of African origin in Brazil and found that the ethnic group was "unequivocally inferior." He advocated for separate criminal laws by race and that blacks be subject to separate laws because they were not free to choose crime because of their diminished capacities. However, Rodrigues himself was mixed race and expressed confusion about the status of mixed race individuals in the racial hierarchy. To counter this, he proposed the creation of several categories to express the spectrum of mixed people going from superior to ordinary, to degenerate.
In the end, eugenics in Brazil never took on as strong as it did in Europe, North America, or Australia. Some attribute the pseudoscience's limited success to the fact that Brazil already had a very large mixed-race population. Nina Rodrigues' confusion about how racial superiority works outside of a racial binary demonstrates this thought. Even at the time slavery was abolished in 1888, 6 percent of all marriages were interracial. This means that, at some level, racial barriers had already been broken down, making it difficult to institute hardline eugenics policies like segregation or racial sterilization. Others argue that the large presence of Catholicism in Brazil may have saved the country from harsher racial policies."The broad influence of Catholicism in Brazil and the rest of Latin America constrained eugenicists' interventions in discussions on marriage restrictions and human reproduction. In the eyes of Catholic intellectuals, these were matters of a moral and religious nature and as such not open to political or medical intervention; this kept them from making any more radical proposals such as eugenic sterilization." (From: Sebastião de Souza, Vanderlei (December 2016). "Brazilian Eugenics and Its International Connections: an Analysis Based on the Controversies between Renato Kehl and Edgard Roquette-Pinto, 1920–1930")
Policy of racial whitening
Racial whitening, or just "whitening" (), is an ideology that was widely accepted in Brazil between 1889 and 1914, as the solution to the "Negro problem". Amidst discussions of eugenics and the country's demographics hindering its development, the first Brazilian Republic decided to institute a policy of "whitening" wherein it would try to dilute the black population and drive out all signs of African culture. This was done by incentives encouraging immigrants from Europe to come and skew demographics along with suppression of African and Indigenous culture all in an effort to erase the presence of blacks from Brazil. The policy lasted until 1910 and because of it the percentage of whites in Brazil jumped from 34 percent in 1870 to 64 percent in 1940. The idea of racial whitening has become such a prevalent idea that Spanish artist Modesto Brocos painted A Redenção de Cam (Cam's Redemption). The work addressed the controversial racial policy based on eugenics and depicted the phenomenon of gradual whitening of the population over generations.
Shifting views on race
1910–1920s The end of European immigration in 1910 meant the resurfacing of fears among Brazil elite about the "blackening" of the Brazilian population. Suggestions about increasing immigration of Afro- North Americans sparked contentious debates inside and outside of the eugenics community. One such person who was troubled by this idea was eugenicist Renato Khel. Khel was influenced by aggressive eugenics policies that were being used in Germany and advocated for similar policies in Brazil, such as the sterilization of degenerates and criminals. However, the majority of the Brazilian population, including those within the eugenics community, were beginning to see miscegenation as a path to racial harmony.
1930s to 1980s: Brazil as a "racial democracy"
As Brazilian society drew farther and farther away from ideas of racial purity, Gilberto Freyre popularized the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy in his book The Masters and the Slaves. Freyre's book transformed the idea of miscegenation into a positive part of Brazilian culture and national identity and it became widely accepted that Brazil's history of intermixing between races had rendered the country a post-racial society, as it would come to be hailed for many years to come. Importantly, the idea of racial democracy became central dogma to the military governments of 1964–1985. While it was in power, the military preferred to think of race as a non-issue and pushed the idea of a unified identity among all Brazilians in order to quell resistance.