Between Brown and Black: Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil

By Antonio José Bacelar da Silva

With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978808546

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Cover: Between Brown and Black, Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil by Antonio José Bacelar Da Silva

Between Brown and Black

Between Brown and Black

Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil

ANTONIO JOSÉ BACELAR DA SILVA

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Silva, Antonio José Bacelar da, author.

Title: Between brown and black: anti-racist activism in Brazil / Antonio José Bacelar da Silva.

Description: New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021032968 | ISBN 9781978808522 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978808539 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978808546 (epub) | ISBN 9781978808553 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978808560 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Blacks—Race identity—Brazil. | Blacks—Political activity—Brazil. | Anti-racism—Brazil. | Brazil—Social conditions—21st century.

Classification: LCC F2659.B53 S54 2022 | DDC 305.896/081—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032968

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Antonio José Bacelar da Silva

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my mother, Yêda.

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s own.

Contents

1 Black into Brown, Brown into Black: Afro-Brazilians Grapple with Racial Categorization

2 The Language of Afro-Brazilian Anti-racist Socialization

3 Performing Ancestors, Claiming Blackness

4 Becoming an Anti-racist, or As Black as We Can Be

5 Who Can Be Black for Affirmative Action Programs in Brazil?

6 The Complex Calculus of Race and Electoral Politics in Salvador

Conclusion: Afro-Brazilians’ Black and Brown Anti-racism

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Between Brown and Black

1

Black into Brown, Brown into Black

Afro-Brazilians Grapple with Racial Categorization

Brazil’s national culture and identity hinge on its history of racial mixture and the mythology that there are no racial divisions in the country. In an interview with Robert Darnton of the New York Review of Books, the Brazilian historian and anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz offers insight into this phenomenon:

That is the most common image of our country, and it was, in a way, actually an artificial construct created by Getúlio Vargas, the populist president of the 1930s. He nationalized, so to speak, Capoeira, Candomblé, samba, and soccer. He even construed feijoada (a food derived from slave cooking) as a symbol of Brazil. The white of the rice, he said, stood for the white population. The black of the beans represented the Africans. The red of the pepper corresponded to the indigenous people. The yellow of the manioc symbolized the Japanese and Chinese who had poured into the country in the beginning of the twentieth century. And the green of the vegetables was the forest. You could call it political marketing, but it was very clever, and today we see Brazil as a country of one culture, even though we have many different subcultures. (Darnton 2010)

Miscegenation, or racial mixing, provides the ideological basis for this Brazilian national discourse. Growing up in Brazil, I recall the absence of racial difference, racial conflict, and legal segregation being recurring themes in conversations about what it meant to be Brazilian. To this day the notion of brasilidade (Brazilianness)—the idea that all Brazilians are a blend of African, European, and Indigenous peoples, and that there are no racial divisions or distinct racial identities in Brazil—is at the core of Brazilian lore. Even Brazil’s 2014 soccer World Cup opening ceremonies became a celebration of brasilidade with the synchronized, slick cultural presentation of three children (Black, Indigenous, and White) releasing white doves. Highlighting Brazil’s supposed racial harmony, the white dove release represented what Roberto DaMatta (1990) has called the fable of three races. The opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro was likewise steeped in Brazilian racial ideology, depicting migration and miscegenation as central to what it means to be Brazilian. The ceremony portrayed the country’s mix of cultures as contributing to make Brazil the harmonic mosaic it is today.

A good example of reinforcing Brazil’s racial exceptionalism can be seen in a remark by Jair Bolsonaro, the current president. In November 2020, during a speech at the summit of the Group of Twenty (G20), Bolsonaro emphatically stated that there was no racism in Brazil and that some people wanted to import racial tensions. He was referring to the wave of public demonstrations occurring across Brazil at the time. Echoing the marches against racial injustice across the United States after the gruesome death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Brazilians were taking to the streets to protest the death of João Alberto, beaten to death by security guards at a grocery store in the city of Porto Alegre on November 20, 2020. Bolsonaro began his speech by addressing the social unrest but without directly mentioning Alberto’s death that provoked it: Brazil has a diverse culture, unique among nations. We are a miscegenated people. Whites, blacks, and Indians built the body and spirit of a rich and wonderful people. In a single Brazilian family we can contemplate a greater diversity than whole countries (quoted in Drumond 2020).

All these examples point to Brazilians’ enduring allegiance to the idea of race mixing and racial harmony. Racial mixture and racial integration also emerge in conversations with outside observers visiting Brazil who note the ways in which Brazilians cross racial divides and come together in public spaces. During the 2014 World Cup, I was in Brazil conducting fieldwork, and my husband, Ed, came to visit during the games. Turning to me with an expression of admiration, he said, I feel there is less racial tension in Brazil. Look at all this mingling of people of all colors, many at the same table. In his perception, Brazilians lived race differently, meaning they had achieved a level of racial integration that appeared nonexistent in the United States. His comment echoed the widespread perspective that Brazil is genuinely a mixed-race culture.

Miscegenation is central to Brazilians’ concept of race, and it has long been a defining feature of how Brazilians understand racial categorization. Unlike the United States, where racial separation is often understood in terms of concrete biological (hypodescent) and cultural boundaries,¹ racial difference in Brazil is not viewed primarily as a matter of ancestry but of phenotype. To categorize someone as Black, more or less Black or more or less White (Brown), or White, Brazilians focus on bodily characteristics (skin color, hair texture, and facial features). As sociologist Denise Ferreira da Silva notes, the Brazilian soul is ‘undivided’; it is Brazilian (national) (1998, 228). Brazilians are accustomed to being racially identified in different ways over time, across contexts, or even in a single daily encounter. Without a sense of belonging to a racial community, Brazilians’ understandings of race are flexible. Brazilians have a non-exhaustive list of racial/color terms: branco (white), moreno (brown), pardo (brown), escuro (dark), preto (black), and over one hundred others. The Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), which administers censuses in Brazil, uses five categories: branco, pardo, preto, amarelo (yellow), and indígena (indigenous). In my English translations, I try to be as faithful as possible to the descriptors Brazilians typically use. I recognize, however, that they are not always perfect—especially not pardo and moreno, as there is not an equivalent intermediate category in the U.S. (multiracial, maybe, but that does not foreground phenotype).

Herein lies the paradox of Brazilian race relations: Despite widespread cohabitation of Black, Brown, and White people—along with superficial tolerance and lack of racial conflict—Brazilians are no less racist than are Americans or anyone else. Groundbreaking Brazilianist scholars have pointed out the fundamental contradiction that racism in fact exists in Brazil, not merely in isolated and individual manifestations of racist behavior but in widespread structural and institutional racism. As João Costa Vargas notes, The simultaneous negation of the relevance of race in general, and Blackness in particular, and the hyperconsciousness of race, and Blackness specifically [are] normative parameters from which behavior, representations, and institutional arrangements draw (2012, 6). In other words, the denial of racism and the invisibilization of Blackness go hand in hand with the virulent, excessive consciousness of racial difference affecting the everyday and institutional lives of Black Brazilians.

The patterns of socioeconomic disparity across racial categories have challenged Brazil’s dominant narrative. The starkest divides occur in measures of education, employment, income, and infant mortality. Blacks represent 68 percent of Brazilians in poverty (Paixão et al. 2011; Paixão and Rossetto 2019), reflecting centuries of White privilege that have made it particularly difficult for Black Brazilians to achieve economic security. When it comes to Black homicide, analyses have revealed a national crisis. According to Daniel Cerqueira and colleagues (2019, 49), in 2017, 75.5 percent of homicide victims were Black or Brown, as defined in the Brazilian census, and the homicide rate per 100,000 Blacks was 43.1, compared to 16.0 for non-Blacks (Indigenous, White, and Asian). Put another way, for each non-Black individual who was murdered in 2017, approximately 2.7 Blacks were killed (Muñoz Acebes 2016; also see C. Smith 2016). In sum, pobreza no Brazil tem cor (poverty in Brazil has color; Carneiro 2011, 57) and it is Black; or, as Jennifer Roth-Gordon notes, there are ubiquitous signs of blackness and whiteness within a context that discourages them from describing what they see in racial terms (2017, 7). This book is informed by this fundamental problem: Systemic racism has always been a major issue in Brazil, yet at the same time, most Brazilians tend to believe that they live in a country where race no longer determines exclusion and they therefore ignore racism and accept the social order as established by other factors such as class and individual limitations. In particular, I explore how the facts of Brazilian miscegenation circumscribe the ways Afro-Brazilians in Salvador (Bahia state) negotiate the boundaries of Blackness in contemporary Brazilian society. In their current approach to anti-racist activism, Afro-Brazilians employ various linguistic resources to critically engage individual and collective experiences of race and Blackness.

Rendering Blackness Invisible in the Tropical Democracy

In Tropical Democracy, Silva provides insight into how the history of miscegenation has shaped Brazilians’ relationship with Blackness. Based on a discursive study of statements on the Brazilian nation published between 1880 and the 1930s, Silva describes how changes in the meaning of miscegenation over time have been integrated and internalized into the Brazilian identity. She identifies two moments when the meaning of miscegenation significantly changed. Common to both moments was the construction of new modes of being Brazilian that sought to obliterate via the concept of racial mixture: Brazil’s racial subalterns, Africans and Indians. The first references to miscegenation, meaning the interbreeding of races, to describe Brazil’s racial situation and the majority of its people, occurred sometime in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Race mixing was associated with the ideology of eugenics to connote moral degeneration, which was deeply entrenched in the United States racial discourse at the time (D. F. Silva 2007, 222–223). Eugenicists believe a human population can be improved by increasing the occurrence of desirable, heritable (White) characteristics through controlled breeding. During the late nineteenth century, Brazilian intellectuals, politicians, and scientists would promote the perceptions and beliefs that mixed-race people were contributing to racial decline by introducing harmful, objectionable, or unpleasant African and Indigenous traits in Brazilian people.

Thinking and writing between 1870 and 1930, anthropologists Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Artur Ramos applied racial degeneration to Brazilian conceptions of race. Describing Black people as the lower strata of Brazilian society, they warned of the danger of miscegenation, specifically that the growing presence of Black people would eventually cause the disappearance of superior races and cultures. As Silva notes, their word formalized this eugenic ideology within Brazil: Miscegenation would continuously threaten Brazil’s future, as the discussion of deployments of the arsenal of race relations indicates, for it is always available as a global (racial and cultural) signifier to explain why Brazil has been condemned to remain on the outskirts of capitalist globality (2007, 231). But the ideology of miscegenation, and sentiment toward it, continued to evolve significantly as part of Brazil’s nation-building project. The most significant changes stemmed from arguments related to whitening and racial democracy, which led to the two important moments of change in the meaning of miscegenation.

In the first instance—a repudiation of the idea of racial degeneration that had spread through Brazilian society during the nationalist movement from 1870 to the 1930s—some members of the intelligentsia and political elites, such as João Baptista de Lacerda and Sílvio Romero, challenged the idea of Brazilian society as doomed. They struggled to project the notion of the Mestiço as a pathway toward civilization instead of ruin. Their views altered in significant ways the narrative that Brazilian people were destined to fail because of their degenerate racial composition. Instead they argued that Brazilian society mirrored European society and that through immigration and miscegenation, European traits would, in due course, come to dominate African and Indian physical traits in the Brazilian population. This whitening thesis reworked miscegenation and offered Brazilians a path toward replicating White European culture in their country. As Silva reminds us, the whitening thesis enabled Brazilians to see miscegenation as leading not to the degeneration of Europeans but to the eventual obliteration of the Indian and the African from Brazilian bodies and minds (2007, 238). The whitening process would cleanse the stains off Brazilian Blacks whose African heritage tainted their bodies and muddled their minds.

The next modification to the trope of miscegenation happened with the publication of Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves; 1933). At this point, a new self-definition of Brazilian society as a racial democracy emerged in parallel to the whitening ideal. Merging the ideologies of whitening and racial democracy, Brazilians found a way to live without racism and in racial harmony, but the cost was suppressing racial difference. In yet another revision of miscegenation as a representation of Brazilian culture, the racial democracy identity oriented itself toward Portuguese influence while seeking to eliminate the Black component. Here, the method of de-Africanizing the ‘new’ negro was to mix them with a mass of ‘ladinos’ or veterans, so as the slave quarters became the practical school of brazilianization (Freyre [1933] 1987, 357).

In both transformations of the meaning of miscegenation (whitening and racial democracy), the central strategy was not only to cast the Brazilian people as of mixed race but also, and simultaneously, to vanish (or erase) inferior races (especially Blacks) through assimilation (D. F. Silva 2007, 234, 238–239). This perspective on the history of miscegenation offers important insight into the complexity of any project to promote racial equity among Brazilians. Engaging critically with the many iterations of Brazilian miscegenation, I explore current changes in Brazil’s racial ideologies as a foundation for analyzing the dynamics among miscegenation, racism against dark-skinned individuals, and anti-racist activism among Afro-Brazilians. Afro-Brazilian’s linguistic approach to anti-racism is a focal point for articulating my analysis throughout the book.

Miscegenation Is Also Genocide

Novembro Negro (Black November) is an annual celebration of Black consciousness throughout Brazil. The monthlong event grew out of a meeting of Black activists in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, on November 20, 1971. November 20 was the death date of Zumbi dos Palmares, leader of the iconic Quilombo dos Palmares (a community of African escapees from enslavement) who led the resistance against slavery in the Serra da Barriga in Alagoas.² On that day in 1695, Zumbi was ambushed and assassinated, and his head was displayed in the public square as a warning against resistance. When the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU; Unified Black Movement) was founded in 1978, it designated November 20 as a national day of commemoration, and in 2003, it was officially recognized as a school holiday. In the decades since the founding of the MNU, Black Consciousness Day celebrations spread throughout Brazil as a national campaign to denounce racism and raise Black pride. In 2011 President Dilma Rousseff named November 20 as Dia Nacional de Zumbi and Consciência Negra (Zumbi and Black Consciousness Day). Legislation to make the day a national holiday has been introduced in the National Congress twice, in 2015 and 2017, but as of 2021 neither bill has come up for a vote (Projeto de lei senado 482/2017). For supporters of these bills, November 20 is a symbol of struggle, resistance, and affirmation that Blackness is not inferior and that Black people have value and a place in Brazilian society (Porfírio 2020).

In November 2009, I visited a public library in Salvador to join a group of about thirty attendees for a talk on the life and work of the Black scholar and activist Abdias do Nascimento as part of the Black November events. I had met the speaker, activist, and scholar I will call Jussara Nogueira,³ at the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais (CEAO; Center for Afro-Oriental Studies) days earlier, and she invited me to attend the talk. Having recently received her master’s degree in language studies from the Universidade do Estado da Bahia (State University of Bahia), Nogueira was an instructor of racial and gender equality at CEAO and an MNU member.

She began by greeting the audience and thanking them for taking interest in Novembro Negro events and Abdias do Nascimento in particular. She continued by asking who in the audience had heard of Nascimento, an important figure in the Brazilian Black movement, and pointing out that other important Black Brazilians are also largely unknown. She then explained that the topic of her master’s thesis was one of Nascimento’s books of poetry, but that to really understand and analyze the poems, she needed to learn about his life. Born in 1914, Nascimento was at this time ninety-five (he would die in 2011, at age ninety-seven), so he had lived through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Brazilian abolition occurred in 1888, less than three decades before Nascimento’s birth, so he experienced Brazil’s century-old history of anti-Black racism. Nogueira argued that Black Brazilians, even brilliant people like Nascimento, continued to struggle for validity and visibility not only in their outstanding work but in their very existence.

Early on Nascimento struggled to find a balance between the euphoria of Brazilians celebrating a pronationalist government and mobilization against their racist assumptions. Particularly interesting in this regard is the fact that those early twentieth-century leaders of Brazil’s emerging modern Black movement who expressed allegiance to the national project failed to engage in honest and critical discussions about racism (Davis 1999, 188–189). Reading between the lines of Nogueira’s speech, I realized she was preparing her audience for an open discussion of the interplay of race, nation, and Black consciousness. As she talked about Nascimento’s role in fighting for Black inclusion in White-dominated spaces such as theater, Nogueira invited her listeners to reflect on issues—both old and new—pertaining to Brazil’s national family, miscegenation, and the ostensible racial democracy. At that time, the thinking was that Blacks and Whites in Brazil lived in perfect harmony, even though inequality was very high, a point that Nogueira stated indignantly. But the specifics of this historical moment were actually a rhetorical strategy to provide a backdrop against which she would address contemporary issues of Black consciousness.

Moving on to a major theme of her speech, Nogueira cited important Black figures such as Edson Carneiro and Guerreiro Ramos who worked to raise awareness of inequality, emphasizing that their Black (negro) identity had been erased from public discourse. She acknowledged that her emphasis on this negro identity might strike some people as odd, though the term is being used more frequently, she added. As she continued to speak, Nogueira’s voice was hardened by sarcasm and a tinge of resentment. Admiration for Nascimento’s intellectual and political accomplishments vied with sarcasm over the intricacies of what appeared in the accepted history of Brazil and what was erased as incompatible with the dominant ideology. She told of Nascimento’s trip to Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977, to attend a colloquium at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, or FESTAC 77, where he spoke at length about the need to dispute the narrative of Brazil’s racial harmony, which was propagated not only in Brazil but worldwide. Nogueira’s voice became louder and more intense as she recited a portion of Nascimento’s poem Padê de Exu libertador:

Zumbi Luiza