Mixed Race Studies

Into the box and out of the picture: The rhetorical management of the mulatto in the Jim Crow era

Duke University
2005
573 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3250085

Jené Lee Schoenfeld

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

Contemporary conventional wisdom maintains that anyone who has any trace of black ancestry is black. This precept, known as the “one drop rule,” was not always so widely accepted; in fact, from 1850 to 1920 an intermediate racial category—mulatto—appeared on the United States Census. Visibly “both/and” in a society of “either/or,” the ambiguous body of the mulatto had the potential to obscure the color line and thus the system of racial hierarchy predicated on the division it marks. Therefore, the limited tolerance under slavery of an intermediate racial status became untenable during Jim Crow. In my dissertation, I argue that the fiction of the Jim Crow era helped the one drop rule gain hegemonic status.

Through sustained close readings of texts by Frances Harper, Thomas Dixon, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, I argue that the biological determinism of the one drop rule is inadequate to explain what makes their characters—who are often physically, culturally, and even socially aligned with whiteness—”truly” black and suggest that in mulatto fiction, self-identification emerges as the fundamental basis of racial identity. I argue that fiction facilitated the containment of racial indeterminacy by “rhetorically managing” the mulatto into choosing blackness for herself through characterizations of those who remained racially liminal as tragically marginal and generally despicable, and contrasting characterizations of those who chose to identify as black as noble, privileged, and supported by the embrace of their families and their communities. The possibility of choosing one’s racial identification, however, undermines racial ideology’s essentialist pretense to racial authenticity. Therefore, choice must be supplemented by demonstrations of racial allegiance, such as “intraracial” marriage, which preserves at least the illusion of biological and cultural racial continuity, and seamless performances, of blackness or whiteness. Finally, I examine the relative authority—asymmetrical because of the construction of whiteness as pure and exclusive—of self-identification with respect to whiteness and blackness, and the near impossibility of self-identification outside this binary.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• 1. “What are you?” And why it matters
• 2. “Genocidal Images” or “Imagined Community”: Converting the Marginal Mulatto into a Light-Skinned Elite Black
• 3. Keeping Race in the Family: Marriage as Racial Pledge of Allegiance
• 4. Indeterminacy on the Loose! Invisible Blackness and the Permeability of the Color Line
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Biography

Introduction

The mulatto figure in American fiction is too often treated by critics as though she is static, both within individual texts and over the course of American literary history. Critics tend to assume that the most famous version of the mulatto figure—the antebellum tragic mulatto, whose near-whiteness was used to evoke white readers’ sympathy for the abolitionist cause is the only significant template for the mulatto figure. Moreover, they take for granted the mulatto’s essential blackness, explaining away her apparent whiteness as solely a concession to white racism. My dissertation models an approach to the mulatto figure that is attentive to the figure’s development.

On the scale of American literary history, I argue that the representation of the mulatto is inextricably bound up with the (United States’) political context. Though I am also interested in the way that racial indeterminacy is represented in contemporary texts, in what I think of as the post-mulatto moment, I decided quite early on that this was better saved for a future project. I focus instead on representations of the mulatto during the Jim Crow era and how those representations differ from antebellum representations of the mulatto. At its heart, this project is fundamentally a literary one, but as I sought to explain why the mulatto was represented differently in the Jim Crow era, I became interested in the relationship between those representations and a broader social and political context.

Accordingly, I offer an interdisciplinary hypothesis that literature concerning the mulatto—what I call “mulatto fiction”—was instrumental in facilitating an historical shift in the racial structure of the United States from an antebellum racial system with some possibility of a third racial category (labeled “mulatto”) to a system that is much more rigidly a binary of black and white. The effect of this historical shift was that the mulatto “became” black. While I believe that this may be true, I want to qualify this as a provisional claim. I can and do offer (mostly in chapter one) concrete evidence that such a historical shift occurred. For example, “mulatto” appeared as a category on the United States’ census from 1850 to 1920, but from 1930 onward, mulattoes were moved into the box marked “Negro,” and thus rendered invisible as mulattoes. It is to this shift that my title, “Into the Box and Out of the Picture,” refers. To establish the causal relationship between mulatto fiction and the historical shift that I describe, at this stage I can only offer a theory about why other, more obvious, forms of racial discipline, such as the law, might have had limited power to control the mulatto’s racial identification.

I would also qualify my related claim that mulatto fiction is invested in facilitating the development of the binary racial system through the disappearance of the mulatto. Additional research into authorial biography would allow me to make that claim more forcefully, however, I stand by that claim as a description of a trend in fiction of the early Jim Crow era (in the years shortly after Reconstruction). Some of the most interesting works of mulatto fiction—those by Faulkner and Larsen, for example—are critical of the binary racial schema. Those texts, however, tend to appear later in the Jim Crow era, when the binary is already well-established. Even in those texts, as I argue at length in the body of my dissertation, the critiques are limited by the existing terms of the discourse. In Quicksand, for example, Larsen locates the “problem” of the mulatto in the system—not in her mulatto protagonist, Helga—yet she cannot imagine any positive resolution to the situation. Though Helga eventually marries a black man and settles in the most apparently “authentic” black setting—among the folk of the rural South—almost as soon as she arrives, Helga is (as usual) looking for a way out. Despite Larsen’s critique of the racial system that so confines Helga, there is no way out for her. As in earlier works of mulatto fiction, Helga must fully embrace a black racial identity or die.

Another way in which my dissertation seeks to broaden the context in which we interpret the mulatto figure is by expanding the scope of the texts we might include. I argue for the consideration of what I call “mulatto discourse,” which, in addition to literary texts, includes representations of the mulatto in such fields as law and (pseudo)science. The mulatto, especially in the Jim Crow era, is a site of contestation over the establishment and location of the color line. That is to say, the mulatto figures centrally in arguments about where whiteness (along with “legitimate” access to white privilege) ends and blackness begins. Indeed, this is a question explored in the literature I discuss, but it is a battle fought in other contexts as well. Regarding the literature, I argue that authors on both sides of the color line, and from both racist and antiracist perspectives, are invested in the racial identification of the mulatto figure. The motivation behind such an investment differs; racists, obviously, are interested in supporting racial hierarchy, whereas antiracists may hope that a strategic cssentialism will create a richer base from which to mount challenges to that hierarchy. Similarly, racists and antiracists represent the mulatto differently with respect to the question of racial identity. Racists tend to emphasize the mulatto’s degeneracy, thereby suggesting that the mulatto should not exist. Antiracists tend to push the mulatto away from racial liminality by representing the tragically marginal mulatto negatively, while drawing the mulatto into blackness by representing the “light-skinned” member of the black elite positively. Despite these variations, these approaches are part of a common discourse. What all of the fictional texts under analysis in my dissertation have in common is an interest in the possibilities (in some cases, even the necessity) and the limits of self- identification for the mulatto.

Self-identification is particularly important in mulatto discourse because of the difficulty of using the external evidence of the mulatto’s phenotype to assign the mulatto a racial classification in accord with the rules established by racial ideology, in particular, the one drop rule, which dictates that anyone with a trace of black ancestry is to be considered as unequivocally black. My work focuses on the mulatto figure, exemplified by Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, whose phenotype suggests a white racial identity; the most “problematic” figure from the perspective of those invested in racial hierarchy. (I deliberately do not say “who could pass for white,” because then I, too, would be assuming the mulatto’s essential blackness, which I do not.) This mulatto’s apparent whiteness often contradicts her legal status as a black. (I say “often” because in some cases the mulatto is not legally black.) Racial ideology developed and deployed a set of narratives in various fields to support its insistence on the mulatto’s essential blackness despite the potentially contradictory “evidence” of phenotype, legal status, or even social acceptance in white communities. Though some texts in mulatto discourse frame their exploration of the contradiction embodied by the mulatto as a critique of the “logic” of racial ideology, the driving force of mulatto discourse during the Jim Crow era seems to be an impulse toward containment of racial ambiguity.

The ramifications for Jim Crow of the problem of the mulatto’s ambiguous body were both practical and ideological. The mulatto presented a practical problem for segregation because she could move out of the places designated for her without being detected. In other words, she could access white privilege without (according to racial ideology) being legitimately entitled to it. Furthermore, the mulatto—whose body is a concrete reminder of intimate relationships between blacks and whites—presented an ideological problem for segregation, a form of racial hierarchy that sought to institute maximum distance between the races.

Because the mulatto’s blackness does not register visually, I argue that agency assumes a greater role in the mulatto’s racial identification than it otherwise might. Racism is implicated in the stakes of how the mulatto identifies racially, but because she is not visually identifiable as black, she may not be personally subjected to racism unless she identifies as black and publicly expresses this identification. For example, in Iola Leroy, set shortly after the Civil War, Iola takes a job in a Northern white establishment as salesperson. She informs the manager that she is “colored,” and he hires her, but cautions her not to tell her fellow employees. Iola does promise this, but she does not go out of her way to broadcast her racial identification either. Then one day, a coworker is where I go.” Confused by her own reluctance to make the connection between Iola’s church attendance and her racial identification—thereby admitting that she has been working with a “colored” woman without knowing it—the other salesperson asks why Iola attends a colored church. Iola finally makes her meaning plain: “Because I wished to be with my own people” Comprehending at last, the (presumably “legitimately”) white salesperson “looked surprised and pained, and almost instinctively moved a little farther from her.” By the end of the day, the entire staff knows about Iola’s racial identification and they insist that Iola be fired, which she is. This is a very clear example of the way in which agency plays a unique role in the apparently white mulatto’s racial identification and attendant experience (or lack thereof) of racism. If she had been characterized by more obvious phenotypic cues suggesting blackness, Iola would probably never have been hired, not even by the manager inclined to give a colored girl a chance. Yet if Iola had simply lied about her church (and other personal details that may have come up), the salespeople and their customers would have continued to assume that she was “legitimately” white, and she would not have been fired…

 Purchase the dissertation here.

Identity and Public Policy: Redefining the Concept of Racial Democracy in Brazil

Harvard Journal of African American Policy
2011 Edition

Krystle Norman

Krystle Norman is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where she received her master’s degree in public policy. In 2008, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in Spanish language and literature and a certificate in African American studies. Her research interests include conflict areas, social policy, identity issues, human rights, foreign policy, and parallels between communities within the African diaspora.

In Brazil, the notion that raced-based inequalities have crippled the social, economic, and political progress of Afro-Brazilians is one that is quickly denied by those who are committed to Gilberto Freyre’s concept of racial democracy. However, when disparities between “White” and “Black” Brazilians are noted, it is difficult to attribute them solely to class and not race. By analyzing important concepts coined by two distinguished sociologists, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gilberto Freyre, this article explores the way in which identity affects the ability of public policy to address inequalities in Brazil. From that dialogue, this article develops a normative view of racial democracy and puts forth recommendations that will help facilitate its expansion.

While physically the presence of Afro-Latinos throughout the Latin American diaspora cannot be denied, access to resources, equal protection under the law, and political representation continue to be restricted and, in some countries, justified by law (Cottrol 2007). Essentially, the continuing struggle of Afro-Latinos to obtain these basic rights can be seen as a major pitfall of society, but more generally, it illustrates the degree to which inequality in Latin America still persists today. Since the census is used to determine the allocation of federal funding, provide social services, and guide the creation of infrastructure projects, it serves as a means to not only address inequalities but also understand the implications of identity on public policy. Simply stated, recognition of identity is critical to effective policy making, especially within the context of a country as racially diverse as Brazil.

History of Afro-Latinos

While many Americans have learned about the history of slavery and racial inequality that lies at the very core of the African American struggle in the United States, the experience of Afro-Latinos and their plight for racial equality has not received nearly as much attention (Cottrol 2007). Considering the fact that Latin America is home to the largest population of Africans living outside of Africa itself (Andrews 2004), it is a tragedy that their struggle has been seemingly overlooked…

…Identity Issues in Brazil

Afro-Latinos have struggled to mitigate the tensions that have emerged surrounding their mixed racial heritage. For instance, in the early 1900s Latin America’s response to European pressures to“civilize” was to suppress and/or hide its African heritage, encourage White migration into the region, undergo a “modern European-style” transformation of its urban landscapes, and promote European values and culture in order to “Europeanize Latin American societies” (Andrews 2004, 119).

This strong desire for all the societal gains that were thought to accompany “blanqueamiento” (a term used to describe the Whitening of a region through the settlement of large groups of Europeans) ultimately exacerbated the rate at which Afro-Latinos were marginalized (Cottrol 2007). Psychological remnants from the slavery paradigm continued to perpetuate the problematic notion that, among other things, lighter skin was synonymous with economic and social mobility. This ideology was reinforced when European settlement was encouraged and the White elite began to solidify its influence over the political, economic, and social sectors of society (Andrews 2004). As stated by Robert Cottrol, “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 [racial mixing] and blanqueamiento [Whitening] both contributed to the pronounced unwillingness of many Afro-Latinos to identify as such, even when phenotype made such identification and the resulting discrimination inescapable” (2007, 4).

Since the combination of Europeans, Native Americans, Spaniards, and Africans created such a hugely multiethnic citizenry in Latin America, this grouping made it all the more difficult to rigidly define class and political status (Andrews 2004). According to Andrews, the Afro-Latino population experienced both “Whitening”and “Blackening” phases because it lacked an appreciation and understanding for its own racial identity (2004, 10). Due to societal pressures, Afro-Latinos were forced to create an identity that was both acceptable to themselves and the larger European diaspora. As a result, social status and economic privilege were determined by one’s light skin color and closeness to a European phenotype. Society would systematically devalue Blackness, which encouraged individuals to disassociate with their African ancestry, even when their phenotype would suggest otherwise (Cottrol 2007). In this way, Brazil was able to maintain a “rigid, racial hierarchy” that reinforced the supremacy of White Brazilians (Telles 2004, 230)…

Read the entire article here.

Race in Brazil: Out of Eden

The Economist
2003-07-03

Brazil used to think it could be colour-blind. Alas, no longer

JOANA, an actress and student, is white, or at least that is what her birth certificate says. She has a white father, a mixed-race mother and skin the colour of cappuccino. But she considers herself to be “more or less black”. Joana’s ambiguity about her race is quintessentially Brazilian. Brazil had slavery, but never apartheid or the formal segregation of the American south. Centuries of interracial coupling have produced a population that is 40% pardo (mixed). But Joana’s description of herself as “black”, or negra, belongs to a new era in Brazil’s racial politics. It implies that racial mixing has done nothing to correct racism, that pardos and pretos (the census term for blacks) are in the same boat and that the solution is not to ignore race but to plant it at the centre of policies to overcome vast social and economic inequalities. Though most people are only dimly aware of it, their idea of what it means to be Brazilian is about to be challenged.

The challenge is coming through racial quotas, which black leaders see as an indispensable corrective to discrimination. They are not widely used yet, but they are spreading. Three federal ministries recently introduced quotas of 20% for blacks in senior jobs. A handful of cities in São Paulo, the industrial heartland, have introduced racial quotas in the past two years. Most contentiously, so have a few public universities, the institutions that decide who will be admitted to Brazil’s elite. Congress is considering a “statute of racial equality” that would give quotas a big extra push. These and other affirmative actions add up to a “revolution” that is “much bigger than people imagine,” says Ivair dos Santos, advisor to the federal secretary for human rights…

Read the entire article here.

The increasing, uncritical media attention that both [Heidi] Durrow’s work and mixed-race identity have received lately gives me pause. Accepting and embracing a mixed-race identity hardly reveals racial progress. As it is currently constructed, mixed-race identity does not dismantle racial hierarchies. Rather, it reiterates white supremacy by attempting to etch a space for itself somewhere under whiteness–which it knows it can never access–and definitely above blackness. Even claiming a mixed-race identity requires enough skin privilege to compel the (unscrupulous) gazer to ask, “What are you?”

Summer McDonald, “Canon Fodder: ‘The Girl Who Fell From the Sky’ and the Problem of Mixed-Race Identity,” Specter Magazine: Ghost+Blog, August 18, 2011.

The presence of Eurasian images in fashion representations and their absence from finance representations draw attention to the historical origins, cultural trajectories and ambivalence of meaning associated with ‘raced’ and sexed representations. Although the inclusion of Asian and Eurasian women may be intended to offset their previous absence and secure a wider multicultural appeal, they inadvertently replay processes of racialisation and sexualization. This is because they incite desires for, and identifications with, White/Western/Anglo identities authorised by essentialist and quasi-biological discourses of racialisation and sexualization.

Julie Matthews, “Deconstructing the Visual: The Diasporic Hybridity of Asian and Eurasian Female Images,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 8, October 2002.

Is the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas in Brazil an example of Brazil’s racial democracy or, in fact, an instance of its profound racism?

IDEATE The Undergraduate Journal of Sociology
University of Essex
Volume 6, Summer 2011
8 pages

Bethan Rafferty
SC386 Anthropology of Latin America: Race, Gender and Identity

The role of mulatas in Brazilian society is one filled with social, political and historical significance. Mulatas are not seen as ordinary women, but as a living biological embodiment of the Brazilian nation. Indeed the Brazilian tourist board uses Brazilian miscegenation to sell Brazil as a potential holiday destination to tourists:

‘The mixture of races has made Brazil a culturally rich and at the same time unique country. This miscegenation began with the Indian, the African and the Portuguese, but soon after, immigrants from around the world began to arrive: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs. The result is a happy people, open to everything new, a people one can only find in Brazil. Because of this massive diversity, Brazil is one of the last places on Earth where no one is a foreigner, where one can change one’s destiny without losing one’s identity and where each and every Brazilian has a little of the entire world in his or her blood. This may be the reason why Brazilians welcome people from another land so openly.’ (Brazil Ministério do Turismo. http://www.braziltour.com/. Accessed: 22/6/2011.)

Although the strong connection between Brazil and the African continent is acknowledged by some Brazilians, and embraced in some cultural practices such as Capoeira, Black Brazilians continue to be one of the poorest social groups in the country: ‘Although 32 percent of whites are poor, more than 62 percent of African Brazilians are impoverished’ (Daniel, 2006: 190.). While some claim that the high admiration for the mulatas’ physical beauty is proof of a racial democracy (See Freyre, 1946 and the theme of erotic democracy in Goldstein, 2003.), the persistence of negative connotations regarding blackness points to a more painful reality, in which the traces of slavery and discrimination are still alive and active.

In this paper I will argue that although the high value placed on the beauty of mulatas at a micro-level may not be an indicator of personally racist views, at the macro-level it demonstrates Brazilian prejudice against blackness and is an example of racism due to the racebased sexualisation of mulatas.

In the first section of the essay I will talk about the idea of ‘whitening’ Brazilian traditions and people, in the second section I will explore the power balance in relationships between White men and women of colour, thirdly I will consider the sexualisation of mulatas, the fourth part of the essay will examine mulata beauty and interracial sexual relations at a personal or microlevel and the fifth section will analyse the sexism inherent in the objectification of mulatas…

Read the entire article here.

Blonde Beauties and Black Booties: Racial Hierarchies in Brazil

Ms. Magazine Blog
2010-06-11

Erica Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Model scouts strategically target towns in Southern Brazil to “find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in,” explains Alexei Barrionuevo in a recentNew York Times article, “Off Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blonde. The fact that a European standard of beauty still dominates the modeling industry should come as no surprise. But why go to Brazil in search of models with European features instead of going directly to Europe? This racial preference is deeply connected to Brazil’s complex history of race relations.

In the early 20th century, Brazil embarked on a national project of embranquecimento–whitening. Influenced by European scientific racism, state officials wanted to “breed the [black] blood out” of the national population. To do so, they encouraged Europeans to settle and hopefully, intermarry with the descendants of enslaved Africans. Despite this attempt to “dilute” the black population, many have upheld Brazil as a “racial democracy” where harmonious race relations and intermixing reined supreme, and where racism is not an issue…

…Walk to any newsstand in Salvador da Bahia and you will find dozens of postcards that use images of black women scantily clad in bikinis to “sell” the area to the rest of the world. This is nothing new. The figure of the mulata, or mixed-race woman of African descent, has long been represented in Brazilian popular culture as the epitome of sexiness. Exported abroad as early as the 1970s in Oswaldo Sargentelli’s world tour of samba shows featuring mulata women, now the term has become synonymous with “prostitute” for many European men who travel to Brazil for sex…

Read the entire article here.

The tan from Ipanema: Freyre, Morenidade, and the cult of the body in Rio De Janeiro

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
October 2009

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Art
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

She says she has brown skin, and a feverish body
And inside the chest, love of Brazil
“I am Brazilian, my body reveals
That my flag is green and yellow”

—Carmen Miranda

In a felicitous turn of phrase, Barbara Babcock once asserted that “what is socially marginal is often symbolically central” (1978, 38). There is no better way to describe the figure of the mulata (a light-skinned black woman) in Rio de Janeiro. As evidenced in popular culture, artistic productions, tourist brochures and TV programs, the mulata is an idealized icon in the contemporary Brazilian imagination. A polysemic category, “mulata” in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes the voluptuosity and sensuality characteristic of women who dance the samba onstage. I use the local term mulata in order to make reference to these multiple meanings. The fascination with this local figure is inscribed within the discourse of mesticagem, a dominant narrative emphasizing the process of cultural and biological fusion of the “races,” white and black in particular, as symbol of Brazilianness. I take racial and colour categories such as “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mestico” to be ideological products with material effects vis-a-vis the structuring of power relations across society. These categories acquire different symbolic value within the context of Brazilian “pigmentocracy,” where instead of a colour line, shadism permeates race relations: The lighter the skin, the greater the social value. To a point, that is.

In this article I argue that the most valued bodies in Rio de Janeiro are those of white Brazilians that are able to embody the qualities of mulattoes. In particular, I focus on the characteristics associated with mulatto women in the context of carnival, and look at how in recent years white women have progressively come to occupy the spotlight in this setting. The article explores the Brazilian fascination with the mulata in terms of stereotypes that organize images of social difference and convey specific longings and desire. It situates the emergence of this fascination within the context of colonial gender and race relations and later, the development of a national ideology focused on the value of whitening through “mixing.” I examine the discourse on mesticagem in the work of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, the most influential thinker in the history of Brazil (Schwartzman 2000). Exploring Freyre’s glorification of the mulata, I look at how women’s bodies have become surfaces upon which masculinist and nationalist desires are deployed. I then move on to argue that morenidade (brownness), while commonly thought of as interchangeable with mulatice (mulatto-ness) as a central value and self-concept in Brazilian society, is in fact the preferred social type. I explore how morenidade is one aspect of the idealized “perfect body” in Rio’s society, and look at how local people invest their physiques with numerous techniques in order to obtain such an ideal for themselves. Woven through the article is an exploration of how these issues are expressed in the narratives of my research participants. In resonance with Malysse (2002), I conclude that Rio’s culture has become obsessed with the image bodies project as expressions of personhood, and bring to bear my reflections on morenidade upon the Carioca (from Rio) perfect body.

National Identity and the “Whitening” Strategy

Why has the mulata become the central object of desire in the Brazilian imagination? How did she become a symbol of national identity, given the generalized denigration of mulattoes in colonial times, and the debased sexual role that women of colour were subjected to? Brazilian intellectual debates over race have become central to understandings of nationhood at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Contemporary gender stereotypes are deeply imbricated with larger narratives on the role of biracial peoples in the formation of Brazil as a modern nation.

The debate over national identity and the future of the nation in Brazil was not a product of independence from Portugal. It actually began to take place at the onset of the abolition of slavery and the institution of the republic in 1889. Racism took a very particular shape in Brazilian intellectual production. It was recast under the native category of branqueamento (whitening). Late-19th and early-20th-century sociological writings in Brazil reflect the ideological supremacy of the white world. Brazilian intellectuals, however, were faced with the following theoretical problem: How to treat national identity vis-a-vis racial inequalities. The solution was to emphasize the mestico element (Ortiz 1985, 20). For the 19th-century intelligentsia the mestico was—more than a concrete reality—a category through which a sociological need was expressed: the elaboration of a national identity. According to these writers, moral and ethnic miscegenation allowed for the environmental adaptation of the European civilization to the tropics. Moreover, the result of this experience permitted the characterization of Brazilian culture as different from the European. In the local appropriation of theories of hybridization, Brazilian intellectuals posited that miscegenation would ultimately derive in a process of branqueamento, through which the gradual predominance of white traits over black ones could be ensured, in both the body and the spirit of mulattoes (see Araujo 1994, 29; Skidmore 1993). As Ortiz states, the social sciences of the time reproduced, at the level of discourse, the contradictions of Brazilian society. Whilst the notion of “racial inferiority” was used to explain Brazilian “backwardness,” the notion of mesticagem also pointed toward a possible national unity. The identity thus produced was ambiguous, integrating both the negative and the positive elements of the races in question (Ortiz 1985, 34). The emphasis placed on the ideology of whitening of the Brazilian population was articulated with the particular interests of the coffee bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo state, which achieved its political hegemony with the rise of the First Republic. State immigration policies in the last quarter of the 19th century initiated programs that attracted millions of Europeans (see Skidmore and Smith 1992). These policies tackled the scarcity of labour power (defined strictly as unavailability of slaves) and established a clear association between mesticagem, whitening, and social progress. Massive immigration programs were seen not only as a solution to the lack of labourers, “but also as part of a long-term modernizing project, in which the whitening of the national population was seen as one of the most desired consequences” (Hasenbalg 1979, 128-129).

With the emphasis on whitening as a Brazilian solution for the “problem” of the races, Brazilian intellectuals such as Joao Batista de Lacerda and Oliveira Vianna shifted away from negative views of hybridity. From thinking of miscegenation as the production of a mongrel group making up a “raceless chaos,” a degraded corruption of the originals, Brazilian intellectuals reconceptualized ideas of amalgamation using elements already present in racist theories, such as the claim that all humans can interbreed prolifically and in an unlimited way, sometimes accompanied by the melting-pot notion that the mixing of people produces a new mixed race, with merged but distinct new physical and moral characteristics (see Da Matta 1981; Skidmore 1993; Stepan 1991; Young 1995). The ideal of whitening was consistently appropriated by Brazilian intellectuals from 1880 to 1920 and became consolidated, albeit transformed, with Gilberto Freyre’s culturalism in the 1930s. Nancy Leys Stepan calls this a shift to “constructive miscegenation” that overtly challenged the notion of mulatto degeneracy and reminded the country that “we are all mestizos” (Stepan 1991, 161). This particular ideology began to play a more “positive” part in Brazilian understandings of the nation…

Read the entire article here or here.

Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. About Black Experience in Latin America

Black in Latin America
Public Broadcasting Service
April 2011

Gates discusses his new project in this interview from the PBS site.

First, could you talk a little bit about this project?

I conceived of this as a trilogy of documentary series that would mimic the patterns of the triangle trade. There would be a series on Africa which was called Wonders of the African World in 1999. And then there would be a series on black America called America Behind the Color Line in 2004. And then the third part of the triangle trade was, of course, South America and the Caribbean. The triangle trade was Africa, South America, and the continental United States and Europe. That’s how I conceived of it. I’ve been thinking about it since before 1999. But the first two were easier to get funding for. Everyone knows about black people from Africa, everyone knows about the black American community. But surprisingly, and this is why the series is so important, not many people realize how “black” South America is. So of all the things I’ve done it was the most difficult to get funded and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive, it’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it…

The series reveals how huge a role history can play in forming a nation’s concept of race. Although each of the countries you visited has its own distinct history, did you find any commonalities between the six countries with regard to race?

Yes, each country except for Haiti went through a period of whitening, when they wanted to obliterate or bury or blend in their black roots. Each then, had a period when they celebrated their cultural heritage but as part of a multi-cultural mix and in that multi-cultural mix, somehow the blackness got diluted, blended. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be “blackish” — really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. In other words, the poverty in each of these countries has been socially constructed as black. The upper class in Brazil is virtually all white, a tiny group of black people in the upper-middle class. And that’s true in Peru, that’s true in the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s obviously an exception because it’s a country of mulatto and black people but there’s been a long tension between mulatto and black people in Haiti. So even Haiti has its racial problems…

…How do you feel the race experience differs between Latin American nations and the United States?

Whereas we have black and white or perhaps black, white, and mulatto as the three categories of race traditionally in America, Brazil has 136 kinds of blackness. Mexico, 16. Haiti, 98. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. But these are very real categories. In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. Color and race are defined in strikingly different ways in each of these countries, more akin to each other than in the United States. We’re the only country to have the one-drop rule. The only one. And that’s because of the percentage of rape and sexual harassment of black women by white males during slavery and the white owners wanted to guarantee that the children of these liaisons were maintained as property…

Read the entire interview here.

Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought

Duke University Press
1974
334 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1320-5

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

Published to wide acclaim in 1974, Thomas E. Skidmore’s intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology has become a classic in the field. Available for the first time in paperback, this edition has been updated to include a new preface and bibliography that surveys recent scholarship in the field. Black into White is a broad-ranging study of what the leading Brazilian intellectuals thought and propounded about race relations between 1870 and 1930. In an effort to reconcile social realities with the doctrines of scientific racism, the Brazilian ideal of “whitening”—the theory that the Brazilian population was becoming whiter as race mixing continued—was used to justify the recruiting of European immigrants and to falsely claim that Brazil had harmoniously combined a multiracial society of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.