Race in Brazil and the United States: Myth of Racial Democracy

Many sociologists, historians, and specialists on Brazil have long unveiled the myth that is racial democracy. Gilberto Freyre and like-minded Brazilian intellectuals who have constructed the myth of race relations in Brazil being "democratic" and somehow creating conditions for less racial inequality are invalid. George Reid Andrews, using data from the 20th century, wrote an excellent comparative analysis using statistics to show how African-Americans living in the United States have reached greater parity with white Americans than Afro-Brazilians (pardo and preto, or multiracial and black) have with white Brazilians. Though racial miscegenation was far more accepted and eventually promoted by the Brazilian state, unlike the United States, it quickly became obvious that the multiracial category was still marginalized, oppressed, and living in an intermediate social position far closer to that of 'blacks' or pretos than whites. Thus, the "mulatto escape hatch" through which multiracial individuals in Brazil were able to, using their phenotypic and cultural similarities with whites, able to access token roles in spots in the middle class and elites of Brazilian society, does nothing for the vast majority of multiracial and black Brazilians who are still lagging far behind whites in terms of income, healthcare, education, poverty, life expectancy and illiteracy. This means the racial divide in Brazil is really a white vs. nonwhite issue, and secondarily, multiracial vs. black, although pardos and pretos occupy essentially the same inferior status and exclusion from education, wealth, and many other indicators of social status. This article published in the Guardian here explains it.

Similarly, the US had and has an obvious persisting problem with racial inequality. Like Brazil, African-Americans are mostly descendants of enslaved Africans whose progeny were still exploited, marginalized, and excluded from the benefits of the industrialization and improvements in American life well into the 20th century. Indeed, like Afro-Brazilians, until the Great Migration during the 20th century, most African-Americans were concentrated in economically backward rural farming economies of the South where sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the peripheral Southern economy ensured a life of poverty. Afro-Brazilians were also concentrated in the former plantation zone of the northeast, which, after slavery, fell behind the industrializing, significantly whiter southeast. African-Americans, however, unlike Afro-Brazilians, were able to migrate to the North and West at higher rates than Afro-Brazilians and became an urbanized population living in industrial cities where Jim Crow was less severe, employment provided higher wages than in the South, and education and voting were more accessible. Afro-Brazilians, though also migrating throughout the 20th century to the emerging industrial centers such as Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, were not able to migrate as frequently as whites in the northeast, leaving behind the black and brown population to languish in poverty in the countryside or poor city of Salvador in Bahia and other northeastern urban centers lacking the more developed industrial sector to provide employment. Therefore, the Great Migration and the shift to an urban, industrial economy by many African-Americans (also to cities in the South, not just the North) under their own initiative in the 20th century provided an escape from some of the extreme disparities between whites and Afro-Brazilians/nonwhites. Of course, the collapse of the industrial Northeast and other cities across the United States has devastated African-American communities, especially in male employment and poverty. In this regard, Afro-Brazilian males, both pardo and preto, have greater participation with white males in the Brazilian formal labor system according to 1987 data, at around 76% of men of all three racial categories. 

             George Reid Andrew's comparative analysis also emphasizes the positive results of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of pushing for redistributive policies, such as affirmative action, and the creation and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Obviously, these gains have not achieved the "racial democracy" we would all envision, but African-Americans have made tremendous gains in the past 50 years in becoming a higher proportion of the college-educated populace, entry into professions previously considered the domain of white Americans, and, to a certain degree, bridging the educational and income disparities. Unfortunately, white Americans still enjoy greater employment, higher rates of college education, home ownership and assets, longer life expectancies, and many other indicators of social status African-Americans lack, but compared to Afro-Brazilians, the gap in education has been significantly lessened, although the comparison to Brazil becomes problematic due to the vastly different levels of economic development in both nations. In other ways, however, Afro-Brazilians appear better off or closer to a parity with whites in that housing segregation between pardos and whites is not as severe as whites and blacks in Brazil or the United States, and the fact that a higher proportion of nonwhite families in Brazil are headed by a couple versus the higher rate of black families headed by single females in the US, with black families being nearly 3.5 times more likely to be headed by a single mother. Nevertheless, this trend must be contextualized and properly placed in the context of persisting sexism in both Brazil and the United States. A single mother raising a child should not automatically be linked to poverty if racism and sexism were not operating in extreme manifestations that significantly lowered the chances for a single mother to raise children and escape acute poverty. Moreover, the problem in the United States of black male unemployment, the New Jim Crow, and increasing class inequality in conjunction with resistance to redistributive economic policies inevitably will lead to higher rates of poverty, lower rates of marriage and two-parent households, and maintain the stigma attached to single mothers and blackness.

Andrews and many others have noted the lack of a concerted Civil Rights Movement able to unify Afro-Brazilians across the pardo/preto divide as a cause for the lack of governmental enforcement of anti-racism laws and the creation for affirmative action policies and, at the very least, some superficial housing discrimination laws. Though Afro-Brazilian organizations throughout the 20th century have endeavored to combat racism and the official image of Brazil as a racial democracy (how democratic can your society be if the elite is blindingly white, whites receive higher wages, whites occupy most positions of power, whites attend college at higher rates, whites live in regions of the nation with greater economic development, and whites monopolize images of Brazil in the media, television, and blacks remain on the margins of Brazilian economic advances?) but received accusations of “reverse racism” or faced resistance from multiracial pardos hesistant to accept the “negro” or black identity espoused by black cultural nationalists. Though I do not have enough information about A Frente Negra, an earlier black rights organization, Movimento Negro Unificado was influenced directly by the American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement and pushed for Brazilian demographic data to include pardos and pretos as “negros” of blacks, given their similar social marginalization.

Perhaps some elements of these black nationalist, black power-oriented Afro-Brazilian organizations were also endeavoring to push away from the ternary racial system of Brazil and encourage pardos to identify more strongly with their African ancestry as a way of removing the stigma associated with blackness and Africa in Brazilian society. Indeed, during the 1970s, Brazilian music reflected these trends through the celebratory “black is beautiful” and soul influences in popular Brazilian music. Instilling cultural pride in all Afro-Brazilians’ mutual African origins, even though most Afro-Brazilians identify as pardos or multiracial, would counteract the troubling tendency of racial integration within Brazil as being synonymous with following white Brazilian cultural norms and behavior. As already demonstrated earlier, pardo and preto Afro-Brazilians have far more in common as victims of white dominance, and by perpetuating the division between themselves, have only aided white supremacy in the nation. This, as well as the extreme class inequalities of Brazil and the official dogma of racial democracy, has crippled the black freedom struggle in Brazil. Fortunately, the push for affirmative action continues in Brazilian universities and will hopefully open the door to additional redistributive policies to decrease racial inequality. In addition, one of the best avenues to that path is creating conditions of more solidarity and a politicized, black consciousness that, although present in Brazil, was never as strong there as in the US among African-Americans.

Though I, like most rational people, acknowledge that race is purely a social construct and does not reflect our ancestry or not even our culture, as a political identity it is has beneficial for people of African descent here in the United States. It has strengthened black solidarity against the common enemy of white supremacy and I for one am glad that the US Census stopped collecting data on “mulattoes” after the 1920 census Though the one drop rule does not reflect our actual genetic background or even our culture, being dark-skinned in the United States or Brazil, regardless of how “Negroid” one appears, means one is far more likely to live in poverty, suffer from police brutality and mass incarceration, and many other signs of living in a white supremacist society. Obviously, people can and will self-identify as whatever they want when it comes to census data. Indeed, according to research in Brazil, the categories of white, pardo, and preto are so fluid and subjective that many individuals changed their reported identity in different years. However, in order to avoid perpetuating the mulatto “buffer” between the black poor and whites in Brazil, it is essential for Afro-Brazilians of all hues to embrace their unity since, statistically, both are oppressed and silenced in Brazilian society, and cultivate resistance to the ongoing disparities in education, healthcare, employment, and between regions. Politically, this means pushing for affirmative action, economic redistribution, improving access to education in the favelas and low-income areas of the country, and representation in the state that reflects their majority status and economic interests.

I, for one, am disturbed by some of the similar outdated, anti-black measures and approaches to addressing racial equality embraced by the multiracial movement here in the United States and colorblindness. This disturbing trend among conservatives, some African-Americans, and many multiracial people seems to want to remove the one drop rule, end affirmative action, and further the divisions among people of color striving for racial justice. This, on the part of the multiracial movement, seems to want to create a more fluid racial caste system like Brazil’s where mixed black/white people will occupy the buffer zone and be able to distance themselves from the stigma of blackness and its alleged inferiority. The good thing about this is it will never happen. White Americans, for the most part, will still treat multiracial African-Americans like other African-Americans unless they can pass for white. Nevertheless, it’s problematic that some sectors of the multiracial African-American population would want to further divisions between themselves and other African-Americans, especially in ways that do not reflect the political realities of their lives. Sure, one can mark oneself as “biracial” on a census form, but blackness as a social construct and politicized identity would serve one better since their marginalization will continue like that of “full-blooded” African-Americans.

            I suppose the one-drop rule in the US has obviously created a far more rigid system of whiteness than in Brazil. Regardless, we know that from statistical data and the material lives of Afro-Brazilians of black and multiracial heritage, whites remain on the top in Brazil as well and pretending otherwise or continuing to divide Afro-Brazilians into mixed and non-mixed categories is meaningless. Naturally, as someone of “mixed” heritage myself, I accept that “blackness” does not define me as an individual, but embracing my “blackness” politically means identifying with other African-Americans who, regardless of our specific ethnic mixing, suffer from living in a racist society. I see the problems of racism in Brazil as partly stemming from this historic divide between black and multiracial people of African descent. Indeed, it often comes out as a desire to attach themselves to whiteness, which is understandable given the horrendous experiences of slavery and the negative stereotypes associated with Afro-Brazilians.

My source is primarily a 1992 study on racial inequality in Brazil and the United States by George Reid Andrews, a specialist on the African diaspora in Latin America. He has written extensively about the Afro-Argentine presence as well as engaging with the intersections of labor and race across Latin America.

George Reid Andrews, “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 229-263.