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196 5. Difference São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia, 1950–1964 The language of an antiracist, unified Brazilian identity permeated Brazilian public life so thoroughly in the years following the return of democracy in 1945 that black organizations themselves soon came under suspicion as racist entities. In July 1949 a writer in Rio’s Diário Carioca accused black thinkers of sowing “seeds of hatred.” In April 1950 a front-page editorial in Rio’s O Globo accused black organizations of “preto racism.” “From the most remote times of our formation,” this writer declared, “pretos and whites have treated each other cordially. . . . Yet for some time now, we have seen the emergence of elements concerned with giving negros a separate situation. . . . Negro theater, negro newspapers, negro clubs.” These organizations, the product of “pure and simple imitation” of foreign, North American racial ideas, were having a “pernicious effect” on Brazil, “creat[ing] among us a problem that never before existed.”1 The problem with negro theater, negro newspapers, and negro clubs, to critics like these, was not just that they undermined the idea that Brazil was truly a society without racism and therefore without need for social transformation . Perhaps more ominously, groups or publications built around distinctly negro racial identities threatened the increasingly widespread idea of a unified Brazilian identity blessed by the absence of racial divisions. At midcentury, this idea was dear not just to conservatives like the Globo editorialist, who, from the extreme position of denying that Brazil ever had racism, saw negro organizations of any kind as out of place and even treasonous. It was also dear to moderate and progressive social scientists committed to democracy and antiracism, and even to leftist thinkers and politicians who aspired to foment cross-racial alliances among the Brazilian povo. Difference : 197 Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, as more and more Brazilians from across the political spectrum subscribed to the consensus that Brazil was a society uniquely graced by racial equality—an image partially buttressed by the deepening social democracy of the Second Republic—black intellectuals encountered more and more public formulations of racial democracy that placed limits on black politics, especially politics based on cultural or racial difference. An article by Gilberto Freyre in the black Carioca magazine Quilombo spelled out, in 1948, what many Brazilian thinkers and politicians in subsequent years would come to see as the rightful price of belonging in a racial democracy. Freyre granted that Brazilians of different ethnic backgrounds “might, and even should, preserve, from their mother culture or ‘race,’ values that can be useful to the whole.” But he warned Brazilians to be “vigilant” against any divisions along racial or ethnic lines, to avoid behaving “as if the descendant of the African [were] a neo-African surrounded by enemies, and the descendant of Europeans . . . a civilized neo-European surrounded by savages.” Brazilians, Freyre urged, “should behave as Brazilians,” subordinating any racial or ethnic affiliations to “the mestiço, plural, and complex culture of Brazil.”2 Ironically, the same social transformations that had allowed black thinkers to use both democracy and antiracism to sharpen their race-based demands in the second half of the 1940s made it increasingly difficult for them, in subsequent years, to discuss racial inequality, organize around distinct racial identities, or call into question their fellow citizens’ much vaunted racial tolerance. Claiming difference, or exposing differential treatment, became a tricky proposition in a purportedly postracial society. These constraints, however, did not make racial democracy simply an oppressive myth, any more than black thinkers’ initial enthusiasm for racial democracy had made it a reality. Black intellectuals in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia in the 1950s and early 1960s found different ways to continue making use of widespread antiracist rhetoric in Brazilian public life, while asserting their rights to independent organizing and to countervailing ideas of racial or cultural difference from what Freyre called the mestiço “whole.” As in earlier years, black politics took on different casts in different cities. The supposed problem of “preto racism,” raised by the visibility of “negro theater, negro newspapers, and negro clubs,” was of concern to white observers particularly in the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where a number of specifically race-based organizations flourished at midcentury. In both cities, leaders of race-based organizations and publications held on to the hope that a broad antiracist consensus would ultimately help their...

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