The End of Cordiality and the Invention of Racism?: Evidence from Recent Cultural Production

THE END OF CORDIALITY AND THE INVENTION OF RACISM?: EVIDENCE FROM RECENT CULTURAL PRODUCTION Robert N. Anderson III Winston-Salem State University Introduction: Brazilian Culture at the Crossroads Brazilian race relations are at crossroads. This junction is one at which the ontological status of Brazil’s “racial democracy” is being revisited: is it falsehood, partial truth, or unfulfilled ideal? In other words, there is an intellectual and scholarly debate. These crossroads, however, are also where domains of society are making tactical choices, among the most salient of which is the enactment of anti-racist and affirmative action public policies. A study of these crossroads thus includes research on the status and perceptions of race in Brazil, the social and artistic contexts themselves, and how artists and intellectuals are shaping race-conscious public policies. As the image of crossroads reveals, there are tensions, diverging paths, and both tactical and philosophical choices embedded in the historical moment, a moment at which some may wonder if Brazil is leaving behind the cordiality of its supposed racial democracy and entering a more combative, confrontational phase of race relations. Though the historical moment is unique, the debate is not new. Whereas scholarship may indeed be entering a new phase, as just noted, it has already successfully established the reality of racial inequality regardless of the modalities of social relations. For much of the twentieth century, Brazilians have tended to imagine their country as a “racial democracy,” free of the kinds of racism and discrimination prevalent in the United States. Many have preferred to interpret any inequality as class- rather than racebased . Parallel with and embedded in society’s journey is the reflective path of scholarship, militancy, and the arts. Intellectuals, activists, and artists encountered crossroads four decades ago when they questioned radically the “myth of racial democracy.”1 This interrogation of the common sense around Brazilian race relations also witnessed moments when the various agents of inquiry and change converged, and this convergence sometimes gave rise to new questions for the stakeholders to address. For instance, when energized by the public debates surrounding the Centennial of Abolition (1988) and the Constituent Assembly that gave rise to the Constitution of 1988, anthropologists and historians, not always working in concert, further engaged what it meant to be Black in Brazil.2 In the question of constitutional rights of surviving maroon communities, scholars successfully mapped and vetted thousands of communities in Brazil, a first step in securing constitutionally guaranteed land rights. But they found it was easier to define a comunidade negra C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 57 The Latin Americanist, December 2012 rural (rural Black community) than a remanescente de quilombo (surviving maroon community). Moreover, those activists who joined the ranks of the academics soon confronted empirically their own deeply held beliefs about Black identity. Defining Blackness as a problematic arose ironically at the same time that color-based racism had been shown to be real. Today intellectuals, activists, and artists stand at new crossroads, which offer new paths for science, for public policy and politics of race, and for creative expression. To understand the current “post-heroic phase” of scholarship, it is useful to revisit one of its pioneers. The publication of Carl N. Degler’s Neither Black nor White in 1971 was a turning point in US scholarship on race in Brazil. Not only was the book well received by the scholarly community, but it was an explicitly comparative approach to the question, something rarely attempted before or since in any discipline. Within this comparative perspective, Degler attempted to address the underlying paradox of how Brazil and the United States were similar yet different in their experience of enslavement of Africans and the outcomes of this socio-economic process. Degler’s essay is a fulcrum because, in the preceding decades, scholars in both countries and beyond were trying to get past a facile apprehension of supposedly radical differences between the United States and Brazilian institutions of slavery (e.g. Tannenbaum, Freyre) within a larger context of assertion of extreme difference in patterns and outcomes of Northern European and Iberian colonization (e.g. Moog). So what about the United...