Since Black into White : Thomas Skidmore on Brazilian Race Relations

In the 40 years since he published Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy, Thomas Skidmore has simultaneously been a leading U.S. scholar of Latin American history and a prominent public figure in Brazil. Balancing these roles, Skidmore has written and commented extensively on recent Brazilian political and economic history. But he is also the author of an influential intellectual history of racial thought in Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974). Black into White examines what Skidmore calls the "whitening thesis" by which Brazilian intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries managed their racial and nationalist anxieties by interpreting miscegenation as a dynamic process that would dilute Brazil's black population.

Black into White remains widely read and taught in both the United States and Brazil. Since its publication, however, the landscape of race relations in Brazil has changed. Where racial discrimination was once seen by most Brazilians as a foreign problem, popular awareness now more closely approximates the research data that show deep inequalities. The public and institutions ranging from the office of the presidency to grass-roots organizations are experimenting with programs for racial inclusion including affirmative action and quotas for university admissions and government hiring.

As Tom Skidmore's advisees at Brown University in the 1990s, Black into White influenced our own work. We saw this interview as an opportunity to get his sense of the environment the book was first published in, and to hear his thoughts of how racial thought in Brazil has changed in the decades since. In the interview that follows, Thomas Skidmore reflects on the book, on the field of study on race relations in Latin America, on the Brazilian reaction to Black into White, and on the emergence of race-based quota and affirmative action policies. He also offers advice for new scholars interested in the history of race relations in Latin America: study anthropology.

Q: How did you first become interested in the subject of Black into White?

Skidmore: I got interested simply because I was an American in Brazil learning about Brazil, which included soaking up Brazilian elite cultural comments about race. What I heard, of course, was the then conventional view that Brazil was fine and the United States was off the track, because the U.S. had discrimination and Brazil didn't. What I also heard there as a young scholar was the ideology of how race relations were really doce [gentle] in Brazil—that in Brazil people touched each other and had intimate relations, which was one of the reasons, they felt, why race relations were so different in the two countries.

What was most interesting to me was that they trumpeted their interpretation as proof of the superiority of Brazil. The Brazilians thought they were superior in race relations, that they had humane race relations and the U.S. didn't. The pervasive problem for Brazilians was how one measured oneself against the U.S. It was constant. Brazilians had to concede that the Americans had better automobiles, more movies and so on, but felt strongly that this was outweighed by the fact that they had better race relations. And so race relations for the Brazilian elite was a very essential part of their national ideology and defense against the U.S. They knew that the Americans were moralistic and felt guilty about their race relations, so the fact that Brazilians could point to those barbaric race relations was a big plus for them.

Since white Americans imagined themselves to be superior to blacks, white Brazilians took that up and decided that their own "better" feelings about blacks made them superior to white Americans. The comparison is what is important. That's why you wind up with the irony that so much of the anti-discrimination legislation passed throughout Latin America—not only in Brazil—comes as a response to acts of discrimination against North American blacks. The Brazilian example was that of African American dancer Katherine Dunham, who was denied a hotel...