{"id":49311,"date":"2016-10-04T00:30:32","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T00:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49311"},"modified":"2017-04-05T20:54:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-05T20:54:58","slug":"slaverys-legacies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=49311","title":{"rendered":"Slavery\u2019s legacies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavery\u2019s legacies<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Economist<\/a>
\n2016-09-10<\/p>\n

S\u00c3O PAULO<\/a><\/p>\n

American thinking about race is starting to influence Brazil, the country whose population was shaped more than any other\u2019s by the Atlantic slave trade<\/em><\/p>\n

ALEXANDRA LORAS has lived in eight countries and visited 50-odd more. In most, any racism she might have experienced because of her black skin was deflected by her status as a diplomat\u2019s wife. Not in Brazil<\/a>, where her white husband acted as French consul in S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a> for four years. At consular events, Ms Loras would be handed coats by guests who mistook her for a maid. She was often taken for a nanny to her fair-haired son. \u201cBrazil is the most racist country I know,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Many Brazilians would bristle at this characterisation\u2014and not just whites. Plenty of preto<\/em> (black) and pardo<\/em> (mixed-race) Brazilians, who together make up just over half of the country\u2019s 208m people, proudly contrast its cordial race relations with America\u2019s interracial strife. They see Brazil as a \u201cracial democracy<\/a>\u201d, following the ideas of Gilberto Freyre<\/a>, a Brazilian sociologist who argued in the 1930s that race did not divide Brazil as it did other post-slavery societies. Yet the gulf between white Brazilians and their black and mixed-race compatriots is huge…<\/p>\n

…Of the 12.5m Africans trafficked across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866, only 300,000-400,000 disembarked in what is now the United States. They were quickly outnumbered by European settlers. Most whites arrived in families, so interracial relationships were rare. Though white masters fathered many slave children, miscegenation<\/a> was frowned upon, and later criminalised in most American states.<\/p>\n

As black Americans entered the labour market after emancipation, they threatened white incomes, says Avidit Acharya<\/a> of Stanford University. \u201cOne drop\u201d of black blood<\/a> came to be seen as polluting; laws were passed defining mixed-race children as black and cutting them out of inheritance (though the palest sometimes \u201cpassed<\/a>\u201d as white). Racial resentment, as measured by negative feelings towards blacks, is still greater in areas where slavery was more common. After abolition, violence and racist legislation, such as segregation laws and literacy tests for voters, kept black Americans down.<\/p>\n

But these also fostered solidarity among blacks, and mobilisation during the civil-rights era. The black middle class is now quite large. Ms Loras would not seem anomalous in any American city, as she did in S\u00e3o Paulo…<\/p>\n

…Both black and white Brazilians have long considered \u201cwhiteness\u201d something that can be striven towards. In 1912 Jo\u00e3o Baptista de Lacerda<\/a>, a medic and advocate of \u201cwhitening<\/a>\u201d Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo, explains, an individual could \u201cwhiten his soul\u201d by working hard or getting rich. Tom\u00e1s Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a dark-skinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too \u201cused to be black\u201d.<\/p>\n

Though only a few black and mixed-race Brazilians ever succeeded in \u201cbecoming white\u201d, their existence, and the non-binary conception of race, allowed politicians to hold up Brazil as an exemplar of post-colonial harmony. It also made it harder to rally black Brazilians round a hyphenated identity of the sort that unites African-Americans. Brazil\u2019s Unified Black Movement<\/a>, founded in 1978 and inspired by militant American outfits such as the Black Panthers<\/a>, failed to gain traction. Racism was left not only unchallenged but largely unarticulated.<\/p>\n

Now Brazil\u2019s racial boundaries are shifting\u2014and in the opposite direction to that predicted by Baptista de Lacerda. After falling from 20% to 5% between 1872 and 1990, the share of self-described pretos edged up in the past quarter-century, to 8%. The share of pardos jumped from 39% in 2000 to 43% in 2010. These increases are bigger than can be explained by births, deaths and immigration, suggesting that some Brazilians who used to see themselves as white or pardo are shifting to pardo or preto. This \u201cchromatographic convergence\u201d, as Marcelo Paix\u00e3o<\/a> of the University of Texas, in Austin, dubs it, owes a lot to policy choices…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American thinking about race is starting to influence Brazil, the country whose population was shaped more than any other\u2019s by the Atlantic slave trade<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,21,33,459,8,26,6940,394],"tags":[25133,25134,2652,25135,25137,25136,10265,9201,6366],"class_list":["post-49311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-census","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-slavery","category-socialscience","tag-alexandra-loras","tag-avidit-acharya","tag-gilberto-freyre","tag-joao-baptista-de-lacerda","tag-luciana-alves","tag-marcelo-j-p-paixao","tag-marcelo-paixao","tag-sao-paulo","tag-the-economist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49311","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=49311"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53251,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49311\/revisions\/53251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}