Mixed Race Studies

All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil

National Black Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 3 (2009)
41 pages

Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society . . . ?” A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.

Introduction

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society… ?”1 A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.  This conclusion, in turn, would inform a judgment as to the relative necessity and efficacy of the administration of affirmative action in both nations. Instead of using the apparent differences between legal definitions of race and color in the two countries as a reference point for comparing the utility of affirmative action as a means of eradicating color-coded inequality, this article uses as its point of departure, the similar ways that racial and color-based inequality have been manufactured in the United States and Brazil.4 “Because they share the same battle against insidious systems of racial hierarchy, it is sensible for both Americas to… focus upon the commonality of the historical legacy of slavery and its outgrowth in the continuing societal efforts to maintain privilege…” “North and South America… share a societal use of segregation for the promotion of supremacy. The segregation of education has been a key to this agenda of privilege.” Within the context of education, this piece treats affirmative action as a crucible, revealing racialized narratives, polarities, hierarchies and constructs, which have created and maintained the color-coded inequality that characterizes both American and Brazilian social, political, and economic realities…

…A substantively different construction of affirmative action, called by the same name, is being implemented in Brazil. Brazil has historically been described as a Racial Democracy, a national ideology that shares with colorblindness a resistance to the legal relevance of race. As this ideology yields to a national narrative that recognizes color-coded realities,16 the Brazilian government is utilizing the most aggressive form of affirmative action, quotas, to both remedy significant racialized social, economic and political disparities and to achieve substantive economic, social and political equality for its citizens. Brazilians opposed to affirmative action practices and policies, echoing objections raised by affirmative action detractors in the United States, charge that racial assignment and classification for the purpose of including some and excluding others (i.e., the legalization of racial classifications) is divisive,17 destabilizing, and impossible in a nation that has existed without categorical racial identities. This article considers whether a diversity focused affirmative action policy would provide a more politically palatable framework for race-conscious governmental action, and offer a justification that is more concentric with the Brazilian orientation towards difference, than a remediation focused policy.

The growing awareness of racial disparities as a catalyst to and justification for efforts to achieve substantive equality in Brazil and the growing reticence in the United States to the use of race conscious means of facilitating substantive equality, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis of the ways in which racism and colorism construct social, economic and political inequality for Afro- Brazilians and Black Americans and the extent to which affirmative action can provide an effective vehicle for reform in both nations. Part I of this article begins with an examination of the history and evolution of the significance and uses of race and color that have informed the current climate of raceblindness in the face of racial inequality in both nations. This section explores the ways in which the legend of Racial Democracy continues to pervade perceptions of race and challenge efforts to remedy racial inequities in Brazil and the ways in which the ideology of colorblindness has provided a jurisprudential framework inherently hostile to race-conscious efforts to achieve substantive equality in America.

Part II of this article highlights racial disparities in both nations and identifies racial polarity, which expresses fixed and diametrically opposed valuations of whiteness and blackness, reflected in white-to-black color hierarchies that operate in both the United States and Brazil, as their chief article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil architect. In keeping with this theme, race and color are considered throughout this piece within a binary (black/white) framework, which underscores the central thesis that black-white racial polarities, in concert with normative whiteness, create substantive social, economic, and political inequality in both countries.

Part III of this article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil and addresses how racial and color-based inequality are both masked and manufactured at the intersection of racial polarity and resistance to an acknowledgement of the legal relevance of race in both nations. This section of the article then focuses on the prospects of a Brazilian affirmative action project based on educational diversity and its transformative possibilities for creating substantive equality. It highlights how Brazil’s Constitution and its affirmative action legislation accommodate and instigate responses to racial inequality that challenge normative whiteness. This article ends on an optimistic note, concluding that an educational diversity focused affirmative action project may be a more effective tool with which to disrupt racial polarity in Brazil and dismantle the consequent color hierarchy that creates and perpetuates substantive inequality.

…The prospect of freedom for the slaves inspired insecurity among white Brazilians, and created the need for structures and policies that would maintain their status as the ruling elite. Responding to this exigency, the Brazilian government engaged in large scale immigration of European whites and encouraged miscegenation in order to improve the racial balance between blacks and whites. The “whitening” of the Brazilian population, through miscegenation, was believed to have a civilizing effect on the Brazilian population of observable African ancestry and reinforced normative whiteness (i.e., whiteness as the value standard). A popular slogan of the day, “Marry White to Improve the Race,” captured the pervasive sentiment.

Gilberto Freyre, credited with popularizing the idea of Racial Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, studied at Baylor University in Texas in the early 1900s and reacted with horror to the Jim Crow institutions and practices he witnessed during his visit, including a lynching.

The shock of Freyre’s encounter with the racial hostility and segregation of the United States led him to construct a vision of Brazil’s past (and, by extension, its present and future) that proved deeply appealing to many Brazilians. Scientific racism and its Brazilian variant, the whitening thesis, had viewed Brazil’s history of slavery and miscegenation, and the racially mixed population which was its legacy, as shameful obstacles that had to be overcome if Brazil were to enter the community of civilized nations. Freyre… rehabilitated that past, recasting it as the basis of a new national identity independent, for the first time in Brazilian history, of European norms and models…. Freyre’s writings thus became the basis of a new, semi-official ideology propagated in public proclamations, schools, universities, and the national media…

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