Mixed Race Studies

Frantz Fanon’s reception in Brazil

Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon (Symposium on Frantz Fanon)
Université Paris 7
February 2008

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothers. However, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil, Fanon became known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when revolutionary violence was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary fighters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Kwame N’Krumah. However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places, his thinking did not become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part of Brazilian universities and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other revolutionary thinkers.

In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his lukewarm reception was due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial conflicts, highly instilled within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race, yet racially colourless. That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black professors and researchers at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity or the affirmation of racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.

Fanon’s thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas – in European books – and at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight of the Brazilian cultural and political scene.

Read the entire paper here.

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

The Husslington Post
2011-12-04

Amil Cook, Correspondent

In this interview, Husslington Post correspondent, Amil Cook, goes in depth with journal/scholar/activist Daniela Gomes about her fight against racism in Brazil. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a series of interviews by Amil.

How influential is Hip-Hop and African American culture in Brazil?

For a long time Afro Brazilians didn’t have access to information about the black leaders in our history. The myth of the racial democracy created an important issue in our country, where a lighter skin person didn’t consider him/herself as black. So for many years for mixed people in Brazil to be black was a shame. In some cases this still happens. So after a long time we were without any understanding about black consciousness but during the 1970s some cultural and political movements started to be inspired by Afro American movements and heroes such as: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. And Hip Hop is a part of this because of its cultural influence.

What is racial democracy for those who may not be familiar with this term?

Racial democracy was a theory created in the early 1900s. The main creator was Gilberto Freyre, who used to affirm that Brazilian society was totally different from other countries because it was a racially mixed country and as a mixed country there wasn’t racism here. He taught that we should value our three races [indigenous (native), African and European] that formed our society because it made us better, made our slavery less painful and things like that. It is important to explain that before Freyre the theory that used to be adopted in Brazil, was the ‘whitening theory’, it was used to affirm that if we started to mix the country we could clean our race and it was believed that in little time black people would be extinct in Brazil. The main thinker of this theory was Nina Rodrigues, a doctor who used to see the black population as a shame. Gilberto Freyre was Rodrigues’ student, and “improved” Rodrigues’ racist theories when he decided to hide the racial issue in Brazil. These two theories are fundamental to understand racial thought in Brazil. The first one [Rodrigues], made Brazilians believe that if they are mixed they aren’t black and the second one [Freyre] made them believe that we are special because we are mixed; there isn’t racism in our country so we don’t need to fight against it. And although the black struggle in my country never stopped, ideas like that made our mission harder…

Read the entire interview here.

‘ORPHEUS’; Legacy of Domination

The New York Times
2000-09-03

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

To the Editor:

In his observations about the differences in the Brazilian and foreign receptions of two very distinct cinematic renditions of the Orpheus tale [“Orpheus, Rising From Caricature,” Aug. 20], Caetano Veloso makes a number of larger, insightful points about the intense processes of creolization in Brazilian popular culture, which confound easy labels like ”global” and ”local” as well as ”authentic” and ”pure.”

Two points raised by Mr. Veloso are in tension, however, with his advocacy of what he has called ”subversive Pan-Americanism.” First, Mr. Veloso seemingly abides by a key tenet of Gilberto Freyre’s views about Brazilian race relations, one that equates miscegenation with ”racial democracy.” Although Mr. Veloso rightly acknowledges that ideas of whitening are not peculiar to Brazil, he does not mention the effects of such ideologies on darker-skinned African-descended people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas—which, in the case of someone like Michael Jackson (whom Mr. Veloso mentions), are more than a case of playful hybridity.

Like Gilberto Freyre, Mr. Veloso seems to be suggesting that miscegenation leads to racial tolerance, whereas hypodescent (the one-drop rule) does not. If one were to apply Mr. Veloso’s premise, that racial miscegenation equals racial democracy, to race relations in the United States, South Africa or Haiti, then the fact of miscegenation would have helped engender societies that were more tolerant of alleged racial differences among their populations. It did not.

The point here is that miscegenation, in Brazil and in other former slave-holding societies, began as acts of dominance and not as an egalitarian principle that led to the erosion of unequal relations. It is important to remember that the etymological origin of the term miscegenation (as well as mulatto, by the way) is to ”mis-mate,” or mate badly. In Brazil, the celebration of miscegenation has occurred simultaneously in national popular culture and mythology with terminology that denigrates darker-skinned Brazilians, while upholding Northern European ideals of feminine and masculine beauty. Thus, miscegenation cannot be considered outside the lens of power and aesthetics…

Read the entire letter here.

Brazilian ethnoracial classification and affirmative action policies: Where are we and where do we go?

Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Should we count, how should we count and why?
2007-12-06 through 2007-12-08
Montreal, Quebec Canada

September 2007
12 pages

José Luis Petruccelli, Senior Researcher
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Brésil

Brazilian society is characterized by persistent racial fragmentation, which constitutes a significant variable structuring social outcomes and is evident in the socioeconomic inequalities constantly observed in field research. A variety of information converges to demonstrate ethnoracial criterion as a decisive parameter of exclusion and of social subordination. Particularly salient among the reasons for this reality is the permanence of several discriminatory practices in public and private institutions against the populations of African and indigenous descent.

Although statistics of race have been incorporated in a continuous way in surveys only since the 1980’s, the country has a reasonable tradition of statistical experience of racial classification. In this sense, two aspects must be outlined: first, the majority of Brazilians identify according to a relatively restricted group of color representations; second, open-ended responses to racial self-classification, as well as pre-codified classic categories, demonstrate a fair amount of stability.

But an important ambiguity persists with respect to the category applied to the miscegenated groups, at the national level and particularly in some areas of the country that have been, historically, less influenced in their population composition by the Atlantic slave traffic. As a matter of fact, the pardo (brown) term designates a residual category in the racial classification system, inside which at least three types of ethnic groups can be distinguished: firstly, the group that identifies in this way due to phenotype that is perceived to be of African origin, which is, without any doubt, the most numerous in this category; secondly, a group that can be identified as predominantly of Indian descent, characteristic of the areas mentioned above; finally, a group that expresses an adhesion to a specific historical-geographical condition and does not actually constitutes a proper ethnic identification in the sense of physical appearance, since, in terms of social relationships, they don’t suffer racial discrimination.

In this way, it does have methodological pertinence to continue investigating the best possible means of identifying the mentioned racial categories, which present temporal persistence and sociological consistence. As a result, more finely tuned information would be available, indispensable for an appropriate elaboration of targeted affirmative action policies, understanding that the purposes of the ethnoracial classification range from allowing free expression of identities to the facilitation of formulating laws and nondiscrimination policies.

The reflections in this work aim to begin answering the following questions: Is the current system of racial classification in use, reasonably correct? Furthermore, is it possible to elaborate a classification system essentially “correct” ? What would the most appropriate number of ethnoracial categories be then? Or even, what would be the best means of accounting for the mentioned specific characteristics, granting the necessary recognition to the expression of socially relevant identities and of regional differences?

…The question of racial classification raises diverse arguments, from orthodox Marxism up to ideological right-wing positions, trying to depict the difficulties of identifying who the beneficiaries of the proposed actions would be. The ghost of the miscegenation ideology rises again to contest the justice of the compensatory policies. If Brazilians are all miscegenated, runs the argument, they would be all “equal” and it could not be a means of differentiating blacks from non-blacks, since all would have something to do with African origins. To this “ideological” position a “scientific” point of view recently emerged: the geneticists discourse about the genealogical mixture of the ancestries of Brazilian whites, shuffling genomic characteristics with social representation of ethnoracial identity, in spite of the well known differences between origin (and DNA) and colour (or mark). Yet, whatever the extent of racial mixture in the country “the majority have lacked the basic rights associated with citizenship for most of the twentieth century and for all of the country’s earlier history” (Nobles, 2000)…

Read the entire paper here.

Coming Into their Own? The Afro-Latin Struggle for Equality and Recognition

Grassroots Development Journal
Inter-American Foundation
African Descendants and Development (2007)

Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology
George Washington University

Most Americans have at least a passing familiarity with the history of Afro-Americans in the United States. The epic story of slavery, the Civil War and Emancipation, Jim Crow, the civil rights struggle, and the Black Power movement has become part of our common heritage. This wasn’t always the case. A few short decades ago, the history of Americans of African descent was largely unknown even by black Americans. It was the province of a small number of specialists, not part of our general education or popular culture. The civil rights movement and the demand for a more inclusive history helped change that, bringing about a greater awareness of the role of Afro-Americans in the history of the United States.
 
Still few Americans know that the Afro-American experience in the United States is but a small part of a much larger hemispheric history. Only about 6 percent of Africans brought to the Americas came to what is now the United States. Today probably less than a third of the hemisphere’s Afro-Americans are in the United States. Latin American slavery lasted longer and was more intense than its U.S. counterpart. The Portuguese and Spaniards began enslaving Africans early in the 15th century, before Columbus’s voyages to the Americas. Slavery would finally end in the hemisphere when Cuba and Brazil abolished it in the late 1880s.
 
Latin American historians have long studied slavery in the colonial era. But far less is known about Latin Americans of African descent after independence. There are significant Afro-American populations throughout the region, although some have been reluctant to acknowledge them. Throughout the 20th century, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile have insisted that they were white nations with few or no citizens of African descent. In the last decade, largely due to the insistence of local Afro-American activists, there has been an increased recognition that African descendants are not just a part of these countries’ history but very much a part of the present, even if in small numbers. Peru and Mexico have tended to emphasize their Spanish and indigenous lineage, ignoring the substantial African heritage. In the Dominican Republic, people visibly of African descent constitute a majority, but because African ancestry is stigmatized it is commonly denied even when it is obvious. In all of these countries, Afro-Latin activists are changing the national dialogue by insisting that the African and Afro-American contribution to the national culture be recognized…

…Afro-Latin activists face daunting challenges, perhaps most importantly a lack of basic information on Afro-American populations. Often it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain from census and other official records an accurate picture of the social and economic circumstances of different racial groups. Despite substantial populations of African descent throughout the Americas, their history is often not well-known, even by regional specialists. Racial classifications further complicate the task. Who should or should not be categorized as Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Colombian or Afro-Mexican can be unclear and, frequently, a matter of dispute. Students of race in the United States study a society whose culture and law have traditionally dictated that all persons with any traceable African ancestry belong to a single group—variously called colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African American—but a unified group nonetheless. There has been occasional recognition that some individuals are of mixed ancestry and stand apart; terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon were used in the past and there are contemporary debates about proposed census categories like biracial or multiracial. But recognition of mixture has not disturbed the consensus placing people with traceable African ancestry into a single group.

No such consensus exists in Latin America. If race is a social construct, it is often an elusive one for Latin Americans as well as outsiders. Spanish and Portuguese have meticulous vocabularies detailing every conceivable combination, real and imagined. Latin American lexicons include terms like negro, preto, pardo, moreno, mulato, trigueño, zambo and others detailing presumed degrees of African, European and indigenous admixtures. Traditionally individuals of partial African descent have rejected identification as negro, or black, a rejection supported by the prevailing culture. Some individuals with known African ancestry are accepted as white. In Latin America racial identity often is a complex negotiation involving ancestry, phenotype, social status and family connections. Classification is contextual. A hierarchy exists to be sure and it prizes European descent and appearance more than African ones. Yet at times whites will allow Afro-Latins to proclaim a whiter status than phenotype and ancestry might dictate, partly as a courtesy, partly because it confirms the view of many whites that they live in essentially white societies. Despite this, the individual of visible African descent who claims to be white will often be the victim of race- or color-based exclusion. The picture becomes even cloudier when individuals who look white or nearly white identify with Afro-Americans for familial or cultural reasons.

This notion of racial fluidity has created difficulties both for scholars researching Afro-Latins and for Afro-Latin activists seeking to mobilize a constituency. In many important ways, legal discrimination in the United States helped to forge a unified group. In Latin America, the multiplicity of racial/color categories coupled with the ideologies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento that read Afro-Americans out of the history and culture also served to blunt the development of Afro-American group consciousness and identity. This was true even in areas where people of visible African ancestry faced considerable racial discrimination. And yet if group consciousness and concerted action have been difficult, Latin America does have a history of Afro-American political and social activism that has challenged class and color barriers. This theme has been explored by, among others, George Reid Andrews in his book Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. The Afro-Latin struggle against racial subordination began in slavery. Colonial Latin America was dotted with cimarrón settlements of runaway slaves defying recapture. Their descendants are still to be found in Brazilian quilombos and similar enclaves throughout the hemisphere…

…Racism prevailed throughout the hemisphere. New ideologies at the start of the 20th century were helping to move the Afro-American and indigenous peoples of Latin America further to the margins of their nations’ societies and cultures. For students of U.S. history, the role of scientific racism and social Darwinism in providing the intellectual underpinnings for Jim Crow and disenfranchisement are well known. These forces influenced thinking in Latin America, but in different ways. Latin American elites saw the problem less as in terms of protecting their privilege and status than in attaining the white majority they believed required for progress and modernity. To this end large-scale European immigration was encouraged, often by generous land bounties. It would transform Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. Other nations would receive far fewer Europeans, but their strong desire for blanqueamiento further marginalized Afro-Latins. Cultural dynamics from the slave era had long dictated that the individual should strive for racial mobility via lighter racial classification. If the national ethos dictated that the nation was white, it was all the more prudent, particularly for those of mixed ancestry, not to declare an African heritage. Thus mestizaje and blanqueamiento both contributed to the pronounced unwillingness of many Afro-Latins to identify as such, even when phenotype made such identification and the resulting discrimination inescapable…

Read the entire article here.

Artspeak: Macys misses the boat on celebration of Brazil

InsightNews.com
2012-06-12

Irma McClaurin, Ph.D., Culture and Education Editor

What a delightful surprise to open my mailbox and see Macys touting a celebration of Brazil.  The merchandise colors are vibrant oranges, yellows, and shocking turquoise.  However, as I looked at the models chosen to represent Brazil, it was clear that Macys had missed the boat. Brazil is a multi-racial country. Everyone knows that its people represent a human rainbow, and in fact, after World War II, American scholars often pointed to Brazil as the racial ideal.  Thus was born what anthropologist Dr. France Winddance Twine has critiqued as the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Democracy and Intermarriage in Brazil and the United States

The Latin Americanist
Volume 55, Issue 3 (September 2011)
pages 45–66
DOI: 10.1111/j.1557-203X.2011.01063.x

Jack A. Draper III, Associate Professor of Portuguese
University of Missouri

“We see a blurring of the old lines.”
—Michael Rosenfeld, Regional-Americanist sociologist

“The maintenance of interracial barriers and the reproduction of inequalities are assured […]”
—José Luis Petruccelli, Brazilianist sociologist

Introduction: A Tripartite Scholarly Geography of U.S. and Brazilian Race Relations

Various scholars have emphasized that exogamy is a key indicator of the assimilation of racial and ethnic minorities in a given society (Silva and Hasenbalg 1992,17-18). Increased marriage across racial/ethnic lines is generally understood to indicate a higher degree of intimacy between members of the respective racial/ethnic groups, since marriage is traditionally considered to represent the “maximum degree of material and affective intimacy” to which individuals can aspire (Pinto 1998 [1953], 176). In keeping with this insight, this article traces developments in conceptions of race relations through an analysis of contemporary academic discourses on interracial marriage in Brazil and the United States. I categorize these discourses into three major geographical-ideological groups, namely, regional-Americanist, cosmopolitan-Americanist and Brazilianist studies of race relations. The regional-Americanist strand of scholarship on interracial marriage is implicitly isolationist, virtually devoid of any international comparative perspective with which to contextualize the conclusions made about exogamy rates in the United States in recent decades. Cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship, on the other hand, is far more cognizant of racial discourses outside of the U.S. national context, and therefore, with its comparative perspective on race relations, is able to provide a more measured assessment of perceived progress in US racial assimilation in relation to that achieved in other countries. Finally, Brazilianist scholarship on interracial marriage inherits the international, comparative tradition firmly established by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre since his earliest writings (Freyre 1922). While this category of scholarship thus has much in common with cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship on race relations, it has also inherited a post-Freyrean critical tradition since the 1950s (Pinto 1998 [1953]; Bastide and Fernandes 1959) that has established relatively strict criteria for determining the real extent of racial discrimination…

Read or purchase the article here.

Using Brazil’s Racial Continuum to Examine the Short-Term Effects of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

The Journal of Human Resources
Volume 47, Number 3 (Summer 2012)
pages 754-784

Andrew M. Francis, Assistant Professor of Economics
Emory University

Maria Tannuri-Pianto, Professor of Economics
University of Brasilia

In 2004, the University of Brasilia established racial quotas. We find that quotas raised the proportion of black students, and that displacing applicants were from lower socioeconomic status families than displaced applicants. The evidence suggests that racial quotas did not reduce the preuniversity effort of applicants or students. Additionally, there may have been modest racial disparities in college academic performance among students in selective departments, though the policy did not impact these. The findings also suggest that racial quotas induced some individuals to misrepresent their racial identity but inspired other individuals, especially the darkest-skinned, to consider themselves black.

…Theoretical research explores the relationship between preferences in admissions and preuniversity investments (Fryer and Loury 2005a; Fryer, Loury, and Yuret 2008; Holzer and Neumark 2000). Changes in admissions standards might relocate some individuals who otherwise would have had little chance of selection to the margin of selection, thereby inspiring effort. Alternatively, changes in admissions standards might relocate some individuals who otherwise would have been at the margin of selection to an intra-marginal position, thus reducing effort. Essentially, these studies maintain that affirmative action has a theoretically ambiguous effect on effort. This is largely an open question empirically. Ferman and Assunção (2005) use data from Brazil to study the issue. They find that black secondary school students who resided in states with a university with racial quotas had lower scores on a proficiency exam, which they argue indicates that racial quotas lowered effort. Nevertheless, Ferman and Assunção (2005) are unable to identify which students applied to college and which did not. The estimates are rather large given that the average black secondary school student would have had only a small chance of admission. Moreover, self-reported racial identity may be correlated with the adoption of quotas making the results challenging to interpret. This paper aims to build on this work by focusing on applicants and students, employing multiple measures of effort, and using both selfreported and non-self-reported race/skin tone.

Second, this paper contributes to the literature on race and skin shade. A number of papers demonstrate the significance of skin tone—beyond the influence of race—in education, employment, and family (Bodenhorn 2006; Goldsmith, Hamilton, and Darity 2006, 2007; Hersch 2006; Rangel 2007). For example, using survey data from the US, Goldsmith, Hamilton, and Darity (2007) find evidence consistent with the notion that the interracial and intraracial wage gap increases as the skin tone of the black worker darkens. Analogously, Hersch (2006) finds evidence that black Americans with lighter skin tone tend to have higher educational attainment than those with darker skin tone. Allowing the possibility that the policy might impact applicants and students of different skin tone in different ways, this paper estimates separate effects by selfreported race/skin tone (branco, pardo, preto) and by skin tone quintile derived from photo ratings.

Lastly, this paper contributes to the literature on identity. A growing body of literature analyzes the construction of identity and the role of identity in behavior (Akerlof and Kranton 2000, 2002; Austen-Smith and Fryer 2005; Darity, Dietrich, and Hamilton 2005; Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2006; Francis 2008; Fryer et al. 2008; Golash-Boza and Darity 2008; Ruebeck, Averett, and Bodenhorn 2009). To explain a wide range of behaviors and outcomes, Akerlof and Kranton (2000) propose a model where utility is a function of identity, the actions taken by the individual, and the actions taken by others. Darity, Mason, and Stewart (2006) develop a game theoretic model to study the relationship between racial identity formation and interracial disparities in outcomes. Exploring the construction of identity empirically, Darity, Dietrich, and Hamilton (2005) report that despite high African-descended population shares in some Latin American countries, Latinos living in the US largely demonstrate a preference for selfidentifying as white and an aversion to self-identifying as black. They emphasize that racial selfidentification involves choice and suggest that future research on race and social outcomes treat race as an endogenous variable. Theories of identity are complex and challenging to test. This paper is one of the few to study the construction of racial identity in the context of a relatively simple policy change. Isolating one dimension of the dynamic forces that shape identity, this paper offers evidence that racial identity may respond to the incentives created by an affirmative action policy…

Read or purchase the article here.

Black and white student ruling in a land of rainbows

University World News
Issue 224, 2012-06-03

Chrissie Long

While there appears to be little question that Brazil’s black community has been at a disadvantage regarding degree attainment, a ruling by the country’s top court upholding affirmative action in universities has sparked debate over whether the initiative will have positive outcomes for race relations.

Some say the impasse lies in socio-economics – not in skin colour – and affirmative action will create a dichotomy in a country where none existed previously. Others believe race quotas in universities are essential for equity.

“It is true that darker-coloured Brazilians are underrepresented in the most prestigious universities and courses. Yet people are excluded from excellent schools in Brazil by their poverty, not their race,” said Peter Fry, a British-born anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro…

…Race definitions are alien

Brazil has the largest number of African descendents of all countries outside the continent.

Approximately 45% of Brazil’s 191 million people consider themselves African Brazilian. Most arrived on slave ships between the 16th and 19th centuries and, over the course of the past 500 years, gradually became part of Brazilian society and the Brazilian identity.

The standard definition of ‘black’ and ‘white’ never existed in Brazil like it has in North American or European cultures, says Brazilian historian at Colorado College Professor Peter Blasenheim.

Due to generations of mixed-race marriages, Brazilians have always considered themselves more of a rainbow, where racial distinctions blur, making skin colour a complicated issue…

Race quotas in universities

Reginald Daniel, a professor of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara, reports that this variation in skin colour has already complicated the quota system in Brazil’s universities.

According to a January article in The Economist, two identical twins applied to the Universidade de Brasilia (UnB): one was classified as black, the other as white.

Daniel said UnB began requiring that photographs be reviewed by a commission after situations in which students who appeared white claimed African descent. When this became controversial, UnB began using interviews instead of photographs.

Rio de Janeiro State University, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to adopt a quota system, relied on self-classification but removed ‘pardo’, or brown, from the options so that students either had to select white ‘branco’ or black, ‘negro’…

Read the entire article here.

Brazilian Miscegenation: Disease as Social Metaphor

2012 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
San Francisco, California May 23-26, 2012
23 pages

Okezi T. Otovo, Assistant Professor of History
University of Vermont

Brazilian medicine of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a peculiar cultural relationship to disease. Certain debates consistently recurred as disease experts typically argued that Brazil was uniquely prone to higher manifestations of particular diseases or that its cultural and social milieu (or the deficiency thereof) gave universal diseases distinctive local contours – making certain diseases exceptionally Brazilian. Many considered disease to be one of the most critical issues facing Brazilian society, and disease was wrapped up in strange and often unexpected ways with intellectual and cultural understandings of Brazilian nationality. Disease became a way of understanding Brazil itself, as it was considered either the cause or effect of social phenomena as well as the expression of various “truths” or “problems” of class, race, and gender. As one prominent physician proclaimed, the entire nation of Brazil was a “vast hospital” where epidemic and endemic disease were the rule rather than the exception.

One of the most fascinating sites for analyzing these trends is the cultural history of syphilis between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, a period of great transition in which the end of slavery and empire triggered new anxieties about Brazil’s ranking amongst so-called “civilized” nations. Transmission of syphilis emerged as a major medical concern at the time as the disease was labeled a significant cause of Brazilian degeneracy, compromising the future of both nation and nationality. According to leading physicians, syphilis—like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, and alcoholism—was a disease that weakened the race and prevented Brazil from achieving its full economic potential. Physicians also worried that certain Brazilian traditions, such as the widespread use of black wet-nurses to nourish infants, contributed to the spread of syphilis and thus to the larger crisis of degeneracy. Domestic servitude and syphilis became intertwined in a certain medical dialogue that reflected changing debates about race, nation, and “progress.”

Among domestics, the figure of the black wet-nurse, the mãe preta or literally the “black mother,” is an iconic character in Brazil. This cultural veneration of the mãe preta, however, only dates back to the early 20th century when she became a folkloric symbol of harmonious and intimate relationships between white and black Brazilians. In the 1800s, at least in medical discourse, the wet-nurse was a more sinister figure whose ignorance and irresponsibility threatened the health of the infants in her care and whose transmission of syphilis through breast milk caused their premature deaths. This version of the wet-nurse as contagion did not completely disappear with the dawn of the new century; it existed alongside the newly created figure of the beloved wet-nurse of old. Yet her contagions in 20th century literature were much more likely to be expressed in cultural terms, rather than in racial ones. That is, whatever deficiencies or diseases she represented were the result of social problems rather than her African heritage. Brazilian intellectualism was by then emerging from the pessimistic trap of climatic and racial determinism and reaching a more optimistic consensus. Physicians increasingly agreed that the “problematic” demographics and racially-integrated social relations of which the wet-nurse was a part did not necessarily doom the nation to incurable backwardness.

Physicians never argued that wet-nursing was the sole or even the primary cause of syphilis in Brazil although they did consider wet-nursing to be one of the principal methods of transmission to children. By the late 19th century, prominent physicians at Brazil’s two medical schools—in Bahia and in Rio de Janeiro—identified high infant mortality rates as a major impediment to national “progress” and urged governmental action. This article examines broad Brazilian patterns, while emphasizing the state of Bahia from which the majority of evidence for this analysis is taken. The rising concern over the supposed dangers of wet-nursing was one element of this new attention to infant health, yet the alarm over wet-nursing as a mode of transmitting syphilis, in particular, held greater significance as it united various intellectual strains on race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The heightened medical interest in syphilis and servitude reflected tensions related to political and social change in the late 19th century and to Brazil’s long-standing anxieties over race. Brazilian slavery’s slow death was finally complete in 1888 and the monarchy fell apart soon after, leaving intellectuals and politicians to ponder how the new Brazil could take its rightful place amongst the community of modern 20th century nations without the institution of slavery which had organized social, political, productive, and even familial relations for centuries. During this period, and well into the 20th century, intellectuals produced a wealth of medical scholarship, social science, and political treatises analyzing the contemporary state of Brazilian “civilization” and prescribing measures that would ensure a stronger nation in the future, populated by a supposedly better class of Brazilians. The issue of race was at the center of all of these debates as it was at the center of medical discourse about syphilis and servitude.

By the early 20th century, Brazilian intellectuals, including physicians, had reached a uniquely Brazilian “solution” to their racial anxieties in the face of universally negative assessments of the political and economic potential of predominantly black and mixed-race tropical nations. According to these new homegrown theories, Brazil’s racial composition may have created certain social complications, such as the prominence of diseases like syphilis, but it should not be considered an insurmountable obstacle if the nation could “whiten” itself both biologically and culturally. Renowned scholar Gilberto Freyre, and others, went even further than this already optimistic assessment by asserting that biological and cultural miscegenation was Brazil’s distinguishing feature and that each “primordial” race had made significant contributions to the national “character.” Freyre’s ideas are treated in detail at the end of this analysis because his highly influential work posited that the enslaved black wet-nurses and nursemaids of the colonial and imperial periods were principle characters in Brazil’s historical narrative: maternal figures that culturally and biologically united the descendants of the slave masters and the descendants of the slaves. Freyre’s arguments best illustrate this new faith in Brazil’s potential. Rather than being plagued by some inherent weakness or “mestiço degeneracy” as 19th century intellectualism claimed, Brazil’s cultural and racial hybridity embodied the best of diverse elements. This type of theorizing was clear in medical discourse as well, but none of it meant that physicians abandoned the notion that there was a problematic side to their blended society. Caregivers could still be incompetent, servants sexually promiscuous, and all disease-ridden.

With a spate of new literature, the medical understanding of syphilis was color-coded in novel ways in the early years of the new century, as experts began to see the disease as a result of a uniquely Brazilian hypersexuality that resulted from historical and contemporary race relations. While the wet-nurse became an important symbol of Brazilian cultural miscegenation, syphilis was implicated in the nation’s biological miscegenation. Miscegenation, therefore, was ironically both an asset to Brazil’s cultural development and a symptom of the excessive sexuality that kept Brazil behind more “civilized” nations. The concern over race and servitude took on an updated medicalized tone in the early 20th century, turning away from the explicitly racist 19th century theories and embracing more modern ways of thinking about social “problems” and degeneracy through disease. Thus, despite Brazilian medicine’s adoption of many French medical theories, this history of the domestic servitude, syphilis, and medical discourse is fundamentally Brazilian and not simply the story of the transfer of medical ideas and racial theories across national borders. Through debates about syphilis, public health, and family welfare, experts theorized about what the reorganization of society post-slavery and empire and the assumed loosening of deeply entrenched hierarchies would mean in medical terms for Brazilian development…

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