African Americans and Brazil in the 1920s: The Search for Eldorado

Meade and Pirio’s article makes several suggestive and useful points in addition to revealing an aspect of African American emigrationism usually not mentioned. They begin their analysis providing some context for the long history of emigrationism and its ties with black nationalism, pointing to Liberia in the 1840s being the best example. However, white philanthropists and racists who saw blacks as incapable of being integrated into American society supported this form of emigrationism. By the late 19th  and early 20th century, however, many black nationalists espoused emigration to Africa or elsewhere without the aid of white philanthropists, including Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Chief Alfred Sam. Unfortunately, African American settlement in Africa proved to be impossible during this period since the entire continent besides Ethiopia and Liberia were under colonial rule, and neither of the aforementioned independent nations were willing to accept black settlers due to the resistance of European colonial powers. Since the possibility of a black-ruled territory in Africa was ruled out, some fringes of the Garveyite, black nationalist movement across the US began to focus on emigration to Brazil and Latin America to escape racism and form an autonomous black nation in the Americas that could act as a beacon of anti-colonial and black nationalist ideology for Africans.

Ironically, Brazil, beginning in 1889, promoted a policy of whitening or branquismo that barred entry to blacks while offering favorable deals for agricultural land or work to white immigrants from Europe and North America. The vast majority of the 4.1 million immigrants were whites, usually from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, who were concentrated in southeastern Brazil. However, black nationalists favoring emigration to Brazil kept promoting it through different UNIA chapters, the black press, and because Brazil lacked the explicit signs of racism and discrimination seen in the US. Falling prey to the racial paradise image Brazil wanted to export, blacks saw Brazil as a land where racial discrimination was non-existent, a land where a black man could even be elected president! Other blacks who actually visited Brazil during the 1920s realized that it was only possible for blacks to prosper if they were skilled workers or professionals, but many continued to believe it was a racial democracy because miscegenation was encouraged, which obviously deviates from the US policy of strict Jim Crow. Thus, because blacks, whites, and multiracial Brazilians were more likely to mix and the absence of obvious, explicit racist organizations or policies, African Americans saw Brazil as an Eldorado where black farmers and workers could create their own independent, black-governed society.

The Brazilian government pressured the US to reject visas of African Americans from entering the country during the period. However, since the Brazilian state did not want to tarnish its image of a racially tolerant nation, they never explicitly stated that race was the factor in denying entry to blacks from North America. According to Meade and Pirio, another reason for Brazilian state opposition to black nationalist settlers was a desire to insulate the race consciousness and politicized manifestations of Afro-Brazilian resistance. Although they are reluctant to admit it due to a lack of further evidence, both Pirio and Meade present evidence that black sailors knew of and participated in the spread of black nationalism across the Black Atlantic, including coastal Brazil. Furthermore, the rise of Frente Negra Brasileira, an Afro-Brazilian civil rights organization in the 1930s, suggests that the black nationalist politics of Garveyism did indeed permeate Brazilian society. The organization sought cultivation of racial pride, organized black militias, held military-style parades through Sao Paulo and Rio, and sponsored all-black commercial and industrial businesses and schools. Clearly, black nationalism, specifically that of Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, resonated with and influenced Afro-Brazilian resistance to white supremacy.

Since black North Americans idealized Brazilian race relations while Afro-Brazilians themselves 

were living in society dominated by the whitening ideal, this gulf underscores the importance of comprehending race as a social construct. African-Americans, seeing the lack of organized white hate groups and formal, racist policies, even took the existence of a multiracial impoverished Brazil as evidence of racial democracy. This essay also opens up several questions as to the relationship between black nationalism and black civil rights movements in Brazil and Latin America and their relationship with the contemporary movements in the United States. Brazil, a nation where black nationalism and separatism were said to take place less frequently than the US, where a strict one-drop rule operates and clear demarcated lines for segregation of the races exists, nevertheless resembles the US because of racist immigration and domestic policies. In addition, the fluid, pro-miscegenation views of race developed in Brazil, though dividing people of African descent based on how much white ancestry they have, did not hide the goals of branquismo to reinforce a hierarchy where white tops everything else, regardless of the degree of racial mixing.

The only weakness of the article is the reluctance to identify the influence of Garveyism on the Black Movement of the 1930s and the later decades of it, during the 1970s. The authors also neglect to mention the role of Haiti as a destination and seeker of black immigration during the 1820s, when an estimated 6,000 African Americans actually settled in Haiti. Although most eventually left, some of their descendants can be found today in Samaná, Dominican Republic. Though Haiti was later rejected as a suitable location for black emigration, it’s early role in African American emigrationism and black nationalism cannot go unmentioned.

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.

Class Reflection from December 2009 on a Brazilian Literature and Race Course

During this semester, I believe I have learned a lot of useful and fascinating information about Brazilian history, culture, literature, and race relations. Through various articles dealing with the aforementioned topics and a series of novels with the common theme of race in Brazilian society, I discovered a once latent appreciation for the largest nation in Latin America and its people. Initially, I expected the class to only cover Brazilian literature, but to my surprise, most of the material read in the course was historical and sociological analyses of race and ethnicity in Brazil. Being someone who appreciates researching the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora and its myriad cultures, these books made the course more enjoyable. Naturally, the ideas conveyed in those readings left an indelible mark on my mind that determined what I learned in the course.

Perhaps the most significant idea covered in the course, the ambiguity of racial identity in Brazil versus the biracial system in the United States stands out as a constant theme in the course. Gilberto Freyre, Thomas Skidmore, and nearly every other article address the issue, because of its stark contrast to American race relations. Some studies even demonstrate the fallacy of the mulatto escape hatch, inextricably linked to the multiracial character of Brazilian race relations. One study, using data from a survey, shows that nearly half of black respondents did not self-identify as blacks, but the rest of the article proves that regardless of racial identification, blacks and mulattoes are nearly equal in terms of their statistical inferiority to whites in many markers of status.  Therefore, blacks and mulattoes should be subsumed in a single nonwhite category in studies of race. This single nonwhite category for people of African descent in Brazil contradicts notions of mulatto success in Brazilian society, and probably Latin America as a whole. As for the literature relevant to this idea, racial consciousness appears in Jubiaba and Carolina de Jesus’ diary, which abound in references. For example, the light-skinned mulatto who insults de Jesus for being a resident of the slum, and the significance of Candomble and other African-derived traditions and customs such as samba illustrates its role in uniting Afro-Brazilians regardless of racial self-identification. 

In addition to the nuanced nature of multiracial Brazilian race relations, another significant theme in the readings is the creation of Brazilian national literature and identity, a concern always connected with racist discourse of the 19th and 20th centuries. White elites’ fear of being associated with “inferior races” like Africans and indigenous peoples, led to many merely copying European styles and neglecting the African and Amerindian contributions to Brazilian culture. Attempts to rectify this situation include the Indigenist literary movement, exemplified by Jose de Alencar’s Iracema, and the Cannibalist movement that began with Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto. While Alencar focused on the Amerindian past, antropophagia encouraged taking the best of foreign cultures and mixing them with the diverse origins of Brazilian culture to make a unique Brazilian aesthetic. Of course, the whitening ideal also influenced the development of Brazilian identity and is omnipresent in the books read in the course. The hordes of European immigrants who came to southeastern Brazil and measures taken by the Brazilian government to attract white immigrants also shows the influence of scientific racism and positivism on white elites’ perception of the country.

In spite of being a literature class, the main themes of the course are more relevant to the various non-literary historical and social studies. The two universal themes that I learned the most from include the black-brown division of Afro-Brazilians and endeavors to cultivate Brazilian national identity. Both are nuanced themes in the readings which enhance one’s understanding of the novels. Due to my interest in African Diaspora cultures throughout the Americas, this class was enlightening in terms of opening my eyes to the theories, problems, and goals of scholars who specialize in the field. Furthermore, the class introduced Brazilian literature, various literary movements and styles utilized by writers, aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture, music and religion. Consequently, I have ineffably gained a lot from this course.