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Neither Black Nor White:The Origin of the Ternary Racial Project The Brazilian racial order, like other racial orders in the Americas, originated in the Eurocentric paradigm. Consequently, blackness and whiteness represent the negative and positive designations, respectively, in a dichotomous hierarchy premised on the “law of the excluded middle” and grounded in African and European racial and cultural differences. In comparison with racial formation in the United States, Latin American racial formation, particularly in places like Brazil, has been characterized by a more attenuated dichotomization of blackness and whiteness—and thus a more mitigated implementation of the “law of the excluded middle.” This is reflected in the region’s extensive miscegenation and the validation of this blending by the implementation of a ternary racial project that differentiates the population into whites, multiracial individuals, and blacks. Moreover, blackness and whiteness are merely extremes on a continuum where physical appearance, in conjunction with class and cultural (rather than exclusively racial) signifiers, has come to determine one’s identity and status in the social hierarchy. This, in turn, has led to fluid racial/cultural markers and been accompanied by the absence of legalized barriers to equality in both the public and private spheres. Brazil’s supposedly more equitable ternary racial project was popularized by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre and attributed largely to the exceptional racial altruism on the part of the Portuguese colonizers. However, Freyre’s argument was more romantic than realistic. Indeed, the quantity and quality of miscegenation and the social differentiation of multiracial individuals from whites and blacks were primarily motivated by self-interest. These appear to have been influenced less by the varying national and cultural origins of the colonizing Europeans The Ternary Racial Project two the brazilian path than by social conditions that prevailed in the Americas, particularly the ratios of European men to women and whites to blacks (Bender 1978, 33–41). In Brazil, and other areas of Latin America—including areas of “Latin” North America such as the lower Mississippi Valley, the Gulf Coast, and South Carolina—the early colonizing Europeans were mostly single adult males, either bachelors, widowers, or married men who arrived without wives (Bender 1978, 33–41).1 In Brazil, this was exacerbated by the fact that at the time of colonization in the early 1500s, Portugal had a population of only about one million, and was able to send only four hundred settlers. This was compounded by the Portuguese Crown’s restrictions on immigration from other parts of Europe to Brazil. Moreover , immigrants found Brazil’s dyewood, parrots, and hostile Native Americans, along with the intractable tropical environment, less appealing than, for example, the riches of India. Consequently, the Crown found it difficult to get immigrants to settle in Brazil, despite expanding its penal code to make some two hundred crimes punishable by exile to that locale (Coon 1965, 70–72; Schwartz 1987b, 21). Although there are no reliable national data on the racial composition of the Brazilian population prior to 1872, the number of whites in Brazil remained small throughout the colonial period. As late as the seventeenth century, whites were predominantly European by birth. By 1600 they represented about one-third of the population. By 1798, estimates indicate that whites numbered 1,000,000, slaves 1,500,000, Free Coloreds 225,000, and Native Americans 250,000 out of a total population of almost 3 million (Alden 1963 173–205; Burns 1970, 103; Marcílio 1984, 37–63). African slaves were the primary source of labor and composed a large portion, if not the majority, of the population in the coastal lowlands. In some areas, slaves outnumbered Europeans by fifteen to one. Even in many urban centers, almost half of the colonial population had some degree of African ancestry (Bender 1978, 33–41). Africans supplemented, or replaced, the Native American labor force, slave or otherwise, which had been decimated by overwork, physical abuse, and the constraints of sedentary life, whether on the plantations or the cloistered confines of the missions. Old World diseases had even more of a devastating impact, slaughtering millions of Native Americans. Also, many Native Americans resisted enslavement, as well as encroachment on their lands, by escaping into 28 the historical foundation 1. In Brazil, the southern provinces of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul were the exception to this pattern. The Crown organized the immigration of families from the Azores and Madeira to that region as part of its policy to protect strategically important and peripheral...

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