{"id":24507,"date":"2012-07-26T01:43:52","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T01:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24507"},"modified":"2013-09-01T03:43:50","modified_gmt":"2013-09-01T03:43:50","slug":"the-core-of-the-doctrine-disseminated-under-vargas-was-that-no-matter-what-their-ethnic-background-brazilians-are-all-mixed-and-hence-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24507","title":{"rendered":"The core of the doctrine disseminated under Vargas was that no matter what their ethnic background, Brazilians are all mixed and hence one."},"content":{"rendered":"

Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to\u00a0forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusiveness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in\u00a0Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was forced onto them and used\u00a0to hold them at the bottom of Brazil\u2019s social hierarchies, and it left no doubt\u00a0that Brazilian whites had no intention whatsoever to accept the moral and legal\u00a0equality of blacks, which held true well into the twentieth century. The sense\u00a0of black identity was indeed so strong during most of the colonial period and\u00a0slavery, which lasted until 1888, that African and Brazilian blacks of different\u00a0ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and of different degrees of biological mixture repeatedly united to contest white supremacy and attempted to overthrow\u00a0the system that held them at the bottom. On several occasions, Brazil barely escaped its \u201cHaitian moment.\u201d As late as 1931, the radical Frente Negra Brasileira<\/em>,\u00a0the Brazilian Black Front, had a membership of about 200,000, mostly concentrated in the industrialized south (Davis 1999: 187). In 1936, however, the authoritarian government of Vargas<\/a> outlawed the Black Front, together with all\u00a0other oppositional political parties. The Vargas government sought to discourage\u00a0any association that had the potential to endanger his project of national unity. The risk of factionalism and even secession was so great during the 1930s that\u00a0the Vargas government undertook extraordinary measures to forge a sense of nationality, national pride, and even a sense of what it meant to be Brazilian.<\/p>\n

Among the most successful in this cause was sociologist Gilberto Freyre<\/a> (1986). Freyre\u2019s writings on the Brazilian national character provided the ideological foundation upon which a unified nation could be constructed, and the\u00a0Vargas regime left no means untouched to disseminate this ideology. Brazil\u00a0would be a racial paradise<\/em>, inhabited by one race, the Brazilian version of\u00a0\u201ccosmic race\u201d\u2014a tropical mulatto republic. Anybody daring to say differently\u00a0was transformed into a naysayer and a reactionary. The concept of a racial paradise promised a solution to finally catch up to the developed world, even if\u2014and especially because\u2014Brazil had such a large mixed population.<\/p>\n

To the black-power movement, this move proved devastating. Up until the\u00a01930s, Brazilian blacks were forcefully united by the perverse power of racism\u00a0and social Darwinism; after the 1930s, asserting one\u2019s blackness was transformed\u00a0into an act of civic upheaval and antipatriotism and little by little, as the Vargas regime made sure that its version of the truth was accepted, asserting ethnic difference became an act of political incorrectness not only aimed against\u00a0the state, but against mainstream society. Under Vargas, race<\/em> was removed from\u00a0textbooks, censuses, and from the official discourse about Brazil. The state\u00a0thus produced the main and only official way to represent the country, and any\u00a0Brazilian\u2014black or white, mixed or indigenous\u2014had no other choice but to\u00a0accept that reality and to find ways of social mobility that explicitly took it into\u00a0account. The core of the doctrine disseminated under Vargas was that no matter what their ethnic background, Brazilians are all mixed and hence one<\/em>.<\/strong> Nevertheless, this was not an \u201cimagined community,\u201d as Benedict Anderson (1991)\u00a0suggests. Rather, it was a designed community, designed by the state and forced\u00a0onto its people. The only one imagining, dreaming, and sometimes hallucinating\u00a0such a community was the father of the idea, Gilberto Freyre.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Vargas years severely delegitimized any attempt to forge a sense of\u00a0racial solidarity among excluded blacks. Just as black-power movements regrouped during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state stepped in again, this time\u00a0to avoid a potentially explosive bonding between labor and racialized groups.\u00a0During the military regime, black-power activism became subversive and was\u00a0subject to prosecution in the best-case scenario, but also to state-sponsored\u00a0persecution, imprisonment, torture, and even death. The military regime also\u00a0ensured that the category race would disappear again from the census, and it\u00a0thus sought to curtail even the prospects for an emerging racial solidarity that\u00a0would embrace and represent all those affected by the forces of racism and\u00a0racialized exclusion. Categories, after all, are the building blocks of group consciousness (Brubaker 2004). Without numbers, mobilization is greatly complicated, as there can be no sense of a shared destiny if it is not known with whom,\u00a0and with how many, this destiny is shared. Political activism is all but rendered impossible if there are no data and no existing categories other than being\u00a0Brazilian.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), \u201cThe New Politics of Race in Brazil\u201d\u00a0in Brazil\u2019s New Racial Politics<\/a><\/em>, edited by\u00a0Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012): 3-5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to\u00a0forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusiveness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in\u00a0Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8701,6984,2652,11386,11387],"class_list":["post-24507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-bernd-reiter","tag-getulio-vargas","tag-gilberto-freyre","tag-gladys-l-mitchell","tag-gladys-mitchell-walthour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}