The silencing and sanitization of the nation’s history of rape, sexual violence, and abuse during slavery and its aftermath laid the foundation for an enduring legacy of erasure that then created the illusion of equality and racial progressivism, while in reality, solidifying an antiblack, racist system that preserved white male supremacy in Brazil’s past and present.

The idea of widespread interracial sex was central to the construction of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy. Sex and its traditional connection to intimacy and interracial reproduction were used to create a racially complex society and as an effective weapon of subjugation for the enslaved. Sex was attributed a transcendental meaning by many of the nation’s white elite and racial theorists; that is, sex and reproduction had the capacity to erase barriers and served as proof that race could be and had been transcended. This conceptualization of sex and its connection to race was central to Portuguese colonialism and became the very basis of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy.1 The silencing and sanitization of the nation’s history of rape, sexual violence, and abuse during slavery and its aftermath laid the foundation for an enduring legacy of erasure that then created the illusion of equality and racial progressivism, while in reality, solidifying an antiblack, racist system that preserved white male supremacy in Brazil’s past and present.

Lamonte Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 3

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