Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Introduction

Since Carl Degler published his pivotal comparative historical research on race relations in Brazil and the United States (Neither Black nor White, 1971), several scholars have compared the gradual demise of Brazil’s ideology of racial democracy and the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation in the United States.1 There are also several comparative historical analyses of state-defined racial categories as these relate to the multiracial movement in the United States and the black movement in Brazil that emerged in the late 1970s.2 In this book I build on this research as well as examine broader racial dynamics as they relate to the multiracial phenomenon. Part I (“The Historical Foundation ”) argues that the historical trajectories of the seemingly divergent racial orders in Brazil and the United States have much in common. Chapter 1 traces the origin of Eurocentrism, as well as its companions white racism and white supremacy, which are the foundation of the Brazilian and U.S. racial orders. Chapter 2 examines the history of Brazil’s ternary racial project, the mulatto escape hatch, and the associated “whitening through miscegenation” ideology, along with the absence of legalized barriers to racial equality. These phenomena led to the notion that class and cultural rather than racial signifiers determine social stratification in Brazil. More important, they earned Brazil the reputation as a racial democracy, an image popularized by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in his monumental studies of Brazilian race relations: The Masters and the Slaves (1933), The Mansions and the Shanties (1936), and Order and Progress (1959). 1. See Skidmore 1993, Sundiata 1987, Winant 1994, Penha-Lopes 1996, and Daniel 2000. 2. See Daniel 2000 and Nobles 2000. introduction Chapter 3 highlights racial projects during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that challenged the ternary racial project, the mulatto escape hatch, and whitening ideology. These included projects formulated by individuals such as Luís Gama and Lima Barreto, who spoke out against racial oppression. Collective strategies involved the Black Guard (Guarda Negra), the Brazilian Black Front (Frente Negra Brasileira), and the Black Experimental Theater (O Teatro Experimental do Negro), which sought to unify blacks and mulattoes in the struggle for African Brazilian rights. In order to accomplish this aim these organizations and others like them deployed binary racial projects similar to those in the United States. Yet racial pluralism was generally viewed as a temporary tactic in the struggle for racial equality. The goal was to fulfill Brazil’s ideology of racial democracy by integrating blacks and mulattoes into the social order as equals, rather than maintaining African Brazilians as a distinct group. Chapter 4 maps out the historical development of the U.S. one-drop rule and the binary racial project. It also analyzes the informal and formal practices sanctioning the unequal treatment of African-descent Americans in most aspects of social life. Chapter 5 focuses on racial projects that historically contested the binary racial project and the one-drop rule. Individual projects have included “passing.” Collective strategies have included the formation of blue-vein societies, Louisiana Creoles of color, and triracial isolates, which created alternative third identities (or ternary racial projects) in a manner similar to Brazil. Yet these tactics were inegalitarian and maintained the racial hierarchy. Part II (“Converging Paths”) analyzes the changes in Brazilian and U.S. race relations beginning in the 1950s and 1960s that led to the gradual erosion of the racial democracy ideology in Brazil and the dismantling of legalized racial segregation in the United States. I argue that by the late 1970s race relations in these two countries began to converge, particularly in terms of the multiracial phenomenon. Chapter 6 examines the U.S. racial order that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s with the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation, the implementation of civil rights legislation and affirmative action initiatives, and the removal of the last laws against racial intermarriage (Loving v. Virginia). After the 1967 Loving decision, social relations became comparatively more fluid, the rate of interracial marriage rose, and many interracial couples began raising their offspring to embrace a “multiracial” identity. By 1979, interracial couples in Berkeley, California, founded I-Pride (Interracial/Intercultural Pride) to demand that the Berkeley Board of Education include a multiracial identifier on public school forms. Although previous work on the one-drop rule existed, only beginning in the late 1980s did there emerge ground-breaking research on the “new” multiracial identity generally, and more specifically, the implications of the one-drop rule 2 introduction [3.149...