Brazilian Race Relations: A Changing Context

BRAZILIAN RACE RELATIONS: A CHANGING CONTEXT Jerry Dávila University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In 1977, First Lady Rosaylnn Carter visited Brazil and met with President Ernesto Geisel to express the Carter Administration’s concern over the military regime’s human rights violations. Geisel responded by invoking the official discourse about Brazilian race relations: “The fact that better than any other reflects the profound Brazilian respect for human rights is the absence of racial and religious prejudice. Brazil is really perhaps an example to the world, with its multi-racial society coexisting in harmony. We have legislation that has been in place for many years, and which severely punishes any racist tendencies. We are a free country that respects freedom.”1 The absence of political democracy was of no matter, for Brazil was a racial democracy. Geisel’s words reflected a context in which Brazilian authorities, prominent intellectuals and broad segments of the public believed racial discrimination and racial inequality were foreign problems. For generations, the scholarship on race in Brazil worked to challenge that perception by systematically mining demographic data, as well as producing studies on employment, political organization as well as social and institutional histories that revealed widespread racial inequality and discrimination. That scholarship has contributed to a powerful change in Brazilian racial politics . Geisel’s remarks were commonplace in the twentieth century, yet they are inconceivable in the twenty-first. Those of us interested in Brazilian race relations find ourselves working in a changed landscape. There is no longer a need for scholarship that asserts the existence of racial inequality, and it is no longer helpful to ask why Afro-Brazilians did not mobilize for racial justice in the manner of African Americans. The changed context places new demands on our work, such as understanding the public and private life of Brazilian racial values; tracing the sites of negotiation by which black Brazilians have navigated race relations; and conceptualizing Brazilian racial politics not in the frame of an absence of mobilization, but as elements of a successful movement of mobilization. In this respect, we are aided by George Reid Andrews’ admonition that the US is a less helpful point of comparison for the Brazilian experience than is Latin America: compared to the rest of Latin America, we are struck but the high degree of race-based political mobilization.2 The changes afoot in Brazilian racial politics are rooted in the transition to democracy that began in the late 1970s. Black political organizations, like the Movimento Negro Unificado founded in 1978, emerged as one of the C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 The Latin Americanist, December 2012 points of opposition to military rule. Amid the transition, federal, state and local governments became responsive to pressure from these groups. For instance, President José Sarney created the federal Fundação Palmares in 1988, charged with promoting Afro-Brazilian culture (an uncontroversial mandate) as well as the “social, economic and political” experiences of Afro-Brazilians (this was new ground for a federal office).3 Similar state offices were created in São Paulo in 1986 and Rio de Janeiro in 1991. The 1988 Constitution offered legal protections to the descendants of quilombo communities, and the Fundação Palmares gained latitude to provide title to the lands claimed by quilombolas. The new constitution also provided protections against racial discrimination. In 1990, an observer regarding these changes would have seen something new, wrapped in much that was old. After all, racist acts had been legally banned by the 1951 Afonso Arinos Law. As far back the 1934 Constitution , “privileges and distinctions” based on race have been illegal. The National Security Law decreed by the military dictatorship in 1967 made racial discrimination punishable by military tribunals. The military regime’s 1969 National Security Law, toughened after the protests of 1968 and the promulgation of Institutional Act No. 5, added minimum sentences for practicing discrimination. Cloaked in this enlightened jurisprudence, it was a simple matter for President Geisel to assert Brazil’s moral superiority over the United States with regard to race relations. In his defense of Brazilian racial democracy, Geisel went so far as...