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Prelude to the Decline: Brazilian Race Relations in Global Perspective The Brazilian elite appropriated racist theory from Europe and the United States to formulate their solution to the “Negro problem.” However, they abandoned two of its principal tenets: the belief in absolute racial differences and the degeneracy of multiracial individuals. By rejecting the existence of intrinsic racial differences, whitening through miscegenation provided Brazil an escape from the determinism of “scientific” racism. This whitening ideology was also reconciled with the existence of a sizable population of individuals designated as multiracial (or mulatto) in Brazil. Of course, it was quite arbitrary to conceptualize a single category of Brazilians as mulatto, considering that African phenotypical traits (not to mention African ancestry) were widespread throughout the entire population, including large numbers of self-identified and socially designated whites. Yet belief in this intermediate category of individuals was central to Brazilian racial thinking, as well as to eliminating the “black peril” (Skidmore 1974, 76–77). During the first two decades of the Republic, the Brazilian elite maintained an abiding faith in the ideal of whitening, which rationalized a process that supposedly was already transpiring. The whitening ideology and the alleged lack of discrimination granted Brazil a feeling of moral superiority over technologically more developed nations like the United States, where bitter racial divisions and systematic domination and exclusion of African Americans and other communities of color prevailed. With its supposedly more tolerant attitudes, Brazil was eliminating the “Negro problem” through black attrition (Skidmore 1974, 76–77, 209). European American visitors acknowledged Brazil’s progress in solving the race problem. These opinions reached as high as the Oval Office, where President Theodore Roosevelt had a very favorable reaction (Skidmore 1974, 68, 76–77). A Decline in the Racial Democracy Ideology seven a new brazilian racial order For much of the twentieth century, many African Americans, including sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, became ardent supporters of Brazil’s “solution” to the race problem through miscegenation and social integration (Hellwig 1990, 4–59; 1992, xi–xiii, 47–50, 123, 125, 133). They used the image of Brazil as a racially democratic, color-blind paradise to instill hope among African Americans, who, long after the legal abolition of slavery, lived in social, economic, and political servitude. Some African American leaders were so inspired by Brazilian race relations—or so discouraged by those in the United States—that they considered Brazil a potential refuge, akin to a black homeland. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, some African Americans who visited Brazil observed the subtleties of race and class discrimination and began to question its prevailing image. Still, some of the most prominent African American scholars endorsed Brazil’s racially democratic image, even when their observations and personal experiences contradicted that image (Hellwig 1990, 4–59; 1992, xi–xiii, 47–50, 123, 125, 133). As the mystique of Brazil’s racial democracy proliferated across the globe, the United States continued to practice legalized apartheid. Brazil joined the Allied forces in World War I, and again during World War II to defeat Nazi Germany (and its racist doctrines). However, this did not prompt the Brazilian elite to question their own racial thinking. Even after racist theories were being repudiated by the scientific establishment and in the larger global public sphere in the years prior to and following World War II, Brazilians continued to support the whitening ideal and the belief that Brazil was in fact becoming progressively whiter. However, as this ideal rested on increasingly disreputable notions of racial superiority and inferiority, it would be rearticulated as racial amalgamation or integration. This framed the whitening ideal as a more egalitarian solution to the race problem (Skidmore 1974, 207–10). The censuses conducted between 1900 and 1930 did not collect data on color supposedly because such data were unreliable and ambiguous. Yet the 1940 census not only returned to the use of color designations but also seemingly supported claims of an increasingly amalgamated (and whiter) Brazil. In addition, one purpose of the census was to “reeducate” children of immigrants to assume the appropriate ethnoracial identity of white and the appropriate national identity as Brazilian, instead of maintaining ethnocultural identification with their various national origins. Otherwise, they might “harbor political sympathies with the fascist regimes [in Europe], and organize themselves accordingly” (Nobles 2000, 93, 98). The 1940 census employed the color categories of branco, preto, and pardo, as well as amarelo (yellow) for the recent Asian immigrants (primarily Japanese). The pardo category, which...

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