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151 4. Democracy São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1945–1950 In 1945 growing opposition in Brazil helped bring down Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship, inaugurating a Second Republic (1946–64) that deepened and expanded Brazil’s historically weak democratic institutions.1 This transformation coincided with the Allied victory in World War II, which brought the end of totalitarian regimes in Europe and fueled enthusiasm for democracy across Latin America. In Brazil, democracy, and how it should be defined, became a central issue of national politics for the rest of the decade. In the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, black thinkers took full advantage of reinstated freedoms of speech and association to resume older organizations and publications, and to form new ones. Even the titles of their newspapers, like Alvorada (Dawn), Novo Horizonte (New Horizon), and Mundo Novo (New World), reflected the prevailing mood of hope and renewal. “In São Paulo, as in the rest of Brazil,” one postwar Paulistano black newspaper proclaimed, “the black man is in motion, trying to get back to the work of definitively conquering those fundamental citizenship rights . . . once dreamed of by our great family.”2 Yet even as they returned, after a seven-year hiatus, to their long-standing project of publicly demanding full citizenship for Brazilians of color, black thinkers framed their politics of belonging in distinctly new terms. In place of an older language of fraternity or a more recent turn to nativist nationalism, their publications and public declarations made the language of democracy central to claims for racial inclusion. The widespread currency of the ideal of democracy in postwar Brazil reflected significant transformations in ideas about both politics and race in the mid-1940s, nationally as well as abroad. The genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany had contributed to discrediting scientific racism along with totalitarianism in much of the West. In the wake of the Nazis’ defeat, a group 152 : Democracy of prominent organizations, leaders, and scholars in the emerging international community made the eradication of racism an integral component of the project to uphold democracy and human rights worldwide. As international organizations enlisted social scientists to address the problem of racism and to find models of harmonious race relations, Brazil, where antiracism had become state doctrine, received new visibility. It was in this context that Brazilian and foreign intellectuals, including black thinkers, restated an older idea of Brazilian racial harmony in the dominant political language of the times: Brazil’s extensive mixture and lack of institutionalized racism made it a “racial democracy.” Prominent negro activist and sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos voiced the sentiments of many of his fellow black thinkers when he claimed in 1950 that “Brazil should assume a leadership role in teaching the world the politics of racial democracy. Because it is the only country on earth that offers a satisfactory solution to the racial problem.”3 It was precisely this sort of sanguine endorsement of ideas of racial democracy that black thinkers in later years, looking back from the other side of a brutal military dictatorship that invoked racial democracy to silence dissent, would regret as naive or deeply compromised. Yet in the heady years following the end of the Estado Novo, widespread enthusiasm for new ideas about both race and democracy seemed to, and in many ways did, offer black thinkers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a more powerful set of tools with which to demand inclusion than earlier claims based on brotherhood or nativist nationalism. Institutionally, black thinkers in these cities seized the openings created by political democracy—like freedom of assembly and the press, a new constitution, expanded party politics, an emerging international consensus about human rights, and alliances with white politicians—to pursue and defend their participation, as black Brazilians, in the civic life of their nation. They used their new papers and organizations to promote black candidates, to encourage fellow Brazilians of color to vote, and to push for a law criminalizing racial discrimination. Rhetorically, black thinkers in this period also upheld racial equality as the ultimate test of Brazil’s fledgling political democracy. As long as discrimination persisted, they argued, Brazil’s much vaunted transition to democracy was incomplete. Finally, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, black intellectuals availed themselves of transformations in social scientific inquiry about race, and of alliances with progressive white intellectuals, to bolster their politics of inclusion. Unlike earlier in the century, when the social and medical...

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