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3 Introduction Until 1888, when Brazil became the last society in the Americas to abolish slavery, the slave system was as extensive there as it had been anywhere in the new world. Slavery was not just the center of Brazil’s brutal economic engine; it was a way of life, the foundation of a deeply hierarchical society marked by pervasive distinctions of color and class. The stigmas of race and servility associated with African slavery extended beyond those in bondage, shaping the lives of a large population of free people of color as well. After abolition, freedom and citizenship were similarly conditioned by racial and class inequities that survived and evolved in the absence of slavery. Brazilians of African descent made up roughly half the country’s population in the century after abolition, but they accounted for the vast majority of the nation’s poor and dispossessed. Yet throughout this period, many Brazilians, of different racial and class backgrounds, congratulated themselves on the limited social damage that slavery had wrought among them. Centuries of slavery had seemingly not produced a rigid line between “blacks” and “whites.” Nor had they bequeathed Brazil a legacy of racial violence and institutionalized discrimination, as in the United States. Instead, many believed, a softer form of slavery had made Brazil into an exceptional postemancipation society, a place where members of a racially mixed and culturally hybrid population coexisted in harmony. Over the course of the twentieth century, regimes authoritarian and democratic made the idea of Brazilian racial harmony into an official ideology. This book asks what people of color thought about both the racial inequalities and the discourses of racial harmony so central to Brazilian public life in the twentieth century. It does so by considering the words and actions of black intellectuals—a group of men and a few women of some education and public standing, who proudly claimed their African racial or cultural heritage and who aspired to represent other Brazilians of color in national discussions about race and national identity since the early 1900s. It traces the emergence On these sad shoulders, Now broken, and older, Was made the Canaan Of this cruel Brazilian nation That will not call me brother. —Lino Guedes, “For the Love of God,” Urucungo, 1936 4 : Introduction of their writings and organizations in the rich political and cultural life that evolved, with local variations, among people of color in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia. In recovering their work, the book that follows provides an intellectual and cultural history of the idea of racial harmony in twentieth-century Brazil, told through the life stories and the ideological and political struggles of a small but influential group of black men and women. Toward the end of the twentieth century, most black thinkers and many other students of black Brazilian politics argued that ideologies of racial harmony had effectively prevented even politically committed black Brazilians from challenging or indeed fully grasping the deep racial inequalities and pervasive racism they encountered in the century after abolition. For this reason , most histories of black thought and politics highlight the moment in the 1970s and 1980s when members of an emerging Black Movement denounced national ideologies of racial harmony, labeling them a pernicious “myth” that hid Brazil’s glaring racism from its victims and undermined any attempt at collective race-based action. The story of that rebellion is often told, by black and other thinkers, as the true or definitive moment of racial activism, the long-delayed awakening of consciousness, when a few Brazilians of color finally lifted the veil from their eyes after nearly a century of false freedom and failed political initiatives. Yet as powerful as this moment was, it should not obscure the equally compelling history of earlier generations of black thinkers who, since the first decades of the century, played a vital role in constructing and contesting Brazilian ideologies of racial harmony. Even as they labored under intense pressure to endorse these ideologies and to remain silent about racial inequality , black thinkers in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia found ways to publicly condemn discrimination and to demand their fuller inclusion as Brazilian citizens. At times, they did so by relying on the sort of open and direct denunciations of racism typically associated with the Black Movement of the late twentieth century. But they also often passionately endorsed national ideologies of racial harmony, recasting them as shared...

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