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10. "The Fact of Blackness" in Brazil
- University of Minnesota Press
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Chapter 10 "The Fact of Blackness" in Brazil My title, evoking Fanon's famous discussion of race and colonialism (1967 [1952]), signals the principal objective of this chapter: to use Fanon's work to discuss some dilemmas in the analysis of race in Brazil.There has been relatively little application of Fanon's analyses of race to the Brazilian context . I offer some remarks about the particular relevance of his insights to Brazil, but because my chief interest here is to address Brazilian racialdynamics , I do not attempt an overall interpretation of Fanon. I am well aware that his work is almost as hotly debated as that of Marx, Gramsci, or Freud (Bhabha 1990b; Gates 1989), but I claim the right to use some of his core perceptions in an applied, rather than exegetical, mode. But before taking on that task, I shall first discuss race in Brazil, framing what I see as the dilemmas posed by the available analyses. Then I shall reintroduce the Fanonian framework and employ it to reinterpret Brazilian racial politics. Explaining the Relative Absence of Racial Politics in Brazil The analytical and theoretical dilemmas posed by the question of race in Brazil, and particularly "the fact of blackness," are really daunting. Racial dynamics simply refuse to behave as social scientists, both Brazilian and 148 "The Fact of Blackness" in Brazil 149 otherwise, might expect. The chief dilemma is this: vast inequalities that we can identify by various types of social scientific research stubbornly resist political articulation. The immediate corollary of this assertion is that the question of "difference" is intensely contested in Brazil. Of course there is some mobilization along racial lines, and however continuous as opposed to dichotomous, racial identities are framed along lines of color and hierarchized from light to dark. Thus all the basic dimensions of a racialized society can be specified in the Brazilian case. Indeed , most blacks, if not most whites, will acknowledge the racism thatexists in Braziliansociety. This, incidentally,is one area where, as far as I know,data is limited and out of date: Brazilian racial attitudes have not been studied in depth since the late 1950s and early 1960s (Bastide and van den Berghe 1957; Fernandes 1978). Asfar as I know there has never been a comprehensive, methodologically sophisticated survey of racial attitudes, something on the order of Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo's RacialAttitudes in America (1985). Of course survey research on racial attitudes is notoriously difficult, as Schuman et al. recognize. The veracity of respondents is always a crucial problem, as is the reliability of research instruments. But if nobody even attempts such work, then all of us qualitative and theoretical types are really left in the dark. So in the absence of good information on attitudes, and with plenty of social change going on in every area one would want to name—from demographic shifts to democratization, from the intense political climatesurrounding the impeachment of the president (taking place as I write in late 1992) to the endless economic crisis, from struggles over land, the environment , and the role of women in Brazilian society to conflict within the Catholic Church—the near absence, or let us saythe relative weakness, of a black movement is rather striking. Many people have professed to see that movement on the horizon many times. Indeed, I freely admit that I am among that number; I have also argued , and am still prepared to argue, that in some respects U.S.and Brazilian racial politics are converging. The Afro-Brazilian movement's failure to present itself has thus come to constitute a rather glaring challenge to those of us who have so eagerly awaited it. Meanwhile, many important analysts have devoted their energies to explaining why such a movement has not come into existence. These explanations are also unsatisfying, since they tend to demonize or grant inordinate powers to the Brazilianpowers that be. Toconsider just a few of these approaches, let us look at the work of Abdias do Nascimento (1978a, 1978b) and Carlos Hasenbalg (1979). [34.228.168.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:17 GMT) 150 "The Fact of Blackness" In Brazil Nascimento has claimed that Brazil has the most effective system of apartheid in the world: in his view this system is based in the well-known myth of racial democracy. Nascimento's analysis makes some telling points about how a superficially "tolerant" ideology of race can mask and indeed foment racial injustice and inequality.But a...