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Beyond Racial Democracy
Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães
What is Brazilian Racial Democracy after all? After being denounced as a myth
(Fernandes, 1965) and - in the 1980s - being converted into the main target of attacks of the
black movement, who regarded it as a racist ideology1, "racial democracy" became the
object of a more systematic investigation by social scientists and historians. At first, the
idea that it was really a national founding myth prevailed. This was perhaps most
completely synthesized by Viotti da Costa (1985). After all, Brazil came to be seen
historically as a country where whites had little or almost no race consciousness (Freyre,
1933); where miscegenation was, from the colonial period onwards, disseminated and
morally accepted; where mestiços [people of mixed race], as long as they were well
educated, would generally be incorporated as part of the elites2, and finally, where race
prejudice had never been strong enough to create a "colour line".
In the mid-1990s, with the increase of attacks by black activists on "racial
democracy" and the fact that it became the dominant ideology (and that of the oppressor
race), some anthropologists (Maggie, 1996; Fry, 1995-1996; Schwarcz, 1999) reminded us
that this myth was more than just "false consciousness", it was a set of values which had
concrete effects on the practices of individuals. The myth of "racial democracy" could not,
therefore, be interpreted simply as an "illusion", since it was largely - and still is - an
important set of ideas used to abate and constrain prejudices.
In successive attempts (see Guimarães 2001; 2002; 2003) I introduced another
element into the debate. Going against the trend of interpreting "racial democracy" as an
atemporal national founding myth, I tried to historically pinpoint its emergence, by
deciding to investigate when the expression "racial democracy" first came about, instead of
searching for the historical origins of the ideas which make up this myth. Thus, I
analytically separated what historians used to call "racial paradise" – a set of beliefs about
the absence of race prejudice in Brazil, which can be traced back to the Empire - from the
same set of beliefs which claimed for Brazil, not the image of paradise, but of democracy.
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Campos' research (2002; 2006) re-enforced my arguments by later revealing that the
expression becomes widespread among Brazilian intellectuals between 1937-1944, that is,
during the Estado Novo, in the face of the enormous challenge of integrating Brazil into the
free and democratic world by opposing racism and nazi-fascist totalitarianism, which had
been defeated during the Second World War.
This change in the way of understanding "racial democracy" allows us to study it
not only as a myth - that is, as a cultural construction - but also as political "cooperation",
"consent" or "compromise"3. "Racial Democracy" was more than just an ideology, it
established a tacit pact for the integration of black people into the Brazilian post-war class
society - to allude to Florestan's famous title - both with regard to national imagery and
social and economic policy. But this pact was doubly limited: firstly, it included only urban
formal sector workers, leaving out not only other poor sectors of urban society, such as
domestic servants, but also all rural workers; and secondly the pact had limited powers
since it did not leave space for the recognition of ethnic-racial groupings which were
prevented from participating in the political system. In fact, the conception and the
functioning of the political system was guided by generic universal principles which
disregarded specific social belongings, whereas in practice, that is at the regime level4 , it
sought to bind workers' unions, associations and local community leaders – usually
neighbourhood leaders – to political leaders and their parties.
Elsewhere (Guimarães, 2002) I describe how this class and racial compromise
broke down with the 1964 military coup, the implantation of the authoritarian regime
which followed and the international political situation of the 1970s, influenced by the
successful establishment of a multiracial order in the United States. Let us, in general terms,
review how this happened.
From an ideological point of view, one of the peculiar characteristics of the
democratic compromise was the mobilisation of intellectuals against the personalism and
mandonismo [abuse of power] of the oligarchies. It is true that the modernisation of social
mores and the moralisation of political practices were ideals which were pursued by both
the centre and the left of the political spectrum. Racial prejudice was understood by the
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sociologists of the 1960s (Azevedo, 1953; Bastide e Fernandes, 1955; Fernandes, 1965) as
being a characteristic of the privileges of the caste regime (Wagley, 1952) or of the
Brazilian patrimonialism (Faoro, 1958). They all thought (or wished?) that racial prejudice
and inequalities resulting from slavery should be effectively combated by universalising
life opportunities (mainly education and health) and by ensuring competition based on
merit in markets free from social, political and biological particularisms. Like in earlier
times in Western Europe and in the United States (the English, French and American
revolutions), the solution would be to establish democracy by means of a revolution
(Holanda, 1936; Wagley, 1960) which would remove the landowning classes from power
and establish a representative democracy based on the urban productive and working
classes. Thus, black people and people of mixed race would, in political terms, enter into
this democratic compromise as the people, as workers and as intellectuals. Barbosa (2007),
in a well researched article, clarifies the way in which Guerreiro Ramos' universalism is
fused with the diasporic identity of Negritude to forge a peculiar kind of nationalism.
The military regime between 1964 and 1985 broke with some - but not all - of the
presuppositions of this compromise. For instance, important banners of the authoritarian
regime were the universalisation of life opportunities and the combat of corruption which
undermined competition based on merit. Let us take as an example what happened to
higher education in the country, something which is particularly important to us because of
the current demands for quotas. The educational reforms during the military period aimed,
above all, to expand the educational system as a whole, universalising primary and
secondary education, and to ensure that - through the establishment of objective,
classificatory and unified (multiple choice tests) university entrance examinations – entry
to university would depend only on exam performance. University public education
remained free, although the expansion of higher education became mainly dependent on
the creation of private and fee-paying universities. The consequences of these choices were
already felt by the mid-1970s: the proliferation of private "pre-university entrance" courses,
the expansion of the private primary and secondary education network and the consequent
movement of the children of middle-class families to these schools. Therefore access to the
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best universities became associated with fee-paying and private secondary education, and
no longer with public education. This also meant there was a link between admission to
these universities and higher family incomes and lighter skin colour. A good proportion of
students in private universities – those who performed less well - came mainly from public
secondary schools, where those with a lower income and darker skin studied.
All political efforts to make higher income families pay for public higher education
failed, which, if successful, would have opened up the possibility of social inclusion
programmes based on scholarship grants or fee exemption, and would have preserved the
legitimacy and the merit of entrance exams. The opposite occurred as entrance to
prestigious universities such as the Universidade de São Paulo USP [São Paulo State
University] became more dependent on being educated at fee-paying schools. In 2006, for
example, only 27% of students who were admitted to USP came from public schools. In
this way the social reproduction of the elites became more rigid, with class and colour
becoming once again associated with social mobility opportunities at levels similar to - at
least relatively - those found during the period of the Primeira República [First Republic].
Multiculturalism in Brazil and in Latin America
The majority of Latin American countries went through wide-ranging constitutional
reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. This can be explained in great part by the
reconstruction of the democratic rule of law after two decades of authoritarianism which
took hold of the continent from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. However, this
reconstruction was not similar to the one which occurred during the post-war period in that
the democratic and liberal conceptions of the 1980s were very different from those of the
1940s. Nevertheless there are similarities in the way countries of the region sought to
mirror themselves once again on Europe and the United States in order to reconstruct their
democratic models.
But, between the 1940s and the 1980s there were important changes to at least two
paradigms: the nation and civil rights. Firstly, the model of national construction according to which nations were homogeneous communities of cultural, linguistic and
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racial belonging - which emerged during the 19th Century was no longer dominant
internationally. On the contrary, the paradigms of multiculturalism and multiracialism
prevailed, in which the State is obliged to preserve and ensure the linguistic and cultural
diversity of its citizens. Secondly, democracy could no longer be understood in strictly
liberal terms as the formal equality between citizens and the guarantee of individual
liberties. Nowadays, ideas such as collective rights, that there are social groups and
collectivities to whom equal opportunities should be guaranteed, as well as the idea that
this equality should be reflected in outcomes are currently internationally accepted.
So in relation to racial identities, the conception of pluriethnic and multicultural
societies and nations is an innovation of recent constitutional reforms in Latin America.
These constitutions, therefore, set aside the founding ideals of mixed race and culturally
homogeneous nations, seen as a product of biological and cultural miscegenation between
European, American indigenous and African people, an ideal which was carefully and
laboriously propagated since the Independence Wars of the 19th Century.
Countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela
recognised in their new constitutions the historic rights of their indigenous minorities.
Others recognised collective rights or adopted forms of positive discrimination for black
minorities such as Brazil (1988 Constitution, Law n. 7.716, University quotas, 2001),
Colombia (1991 Constitution and law n. 70, 1993), Ecuador (1998 Constitution), Honduras,
Guatemala and Nicaragua.
According to Donna Van Cott (2000), this constitutional model, which could be
called multicultural, has the following characteristics: 1) the formal recognition of the
multicultural character of their societies and the existence of indigenous populations as
distinctive social and sub-state collectivities; 2) the recognition of consuetudinary laws of
the indigenous peoples as public and official laws; 3) the right to collective property with
restrictions in relation to the alienation and the division of communal lands; 4) official
status to indigenous languages in territory units of residence; and 5) the guarantee of
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bilingual education. In the Brazilian case, we must add a sixth element to this model: the
recognition of racism as a national problem.
Indeed, constitutional reforms took place at the same time as - or were almost
immediately followed by - the introduction of neo-liberal policies in the social and
economic areas. That is, it was inevitable that re-democratisation would coincide with the
reintegration of Latin-American economies into the new world economy after the crisis of
the 1980s. The concomitant changes in the political and economic spheres inspired some
interpretations that should be mentioned.
The first of these (Brysk e Wise, 1997; Yashar, 1999) claims that it was the
neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s which got the constitutional reforms off the ground.
According to these authors, neo-liberal reforms threatened local autonomy, which led to
protests and ethnic mobilisation. The reforms, by granting cultural rights, were the State's
response to this mobilisation. It is worth noting that these authors mainly studied Central
American States.
A slightly different interpretation is given by Van Cott (2000) who argued that
multiculturalism was the means by which political elites regained the legitimacy that had
been eroded by economic reforms and growing social demands. Hale (2002) preferred to
argue that Latin American States recognised or conceded rights to their indigenous or black
minorities as a way to de-legitimise more radical demands, which would undermine the
neo-liberal economic system. On the other hand, Hooker (2007), comparing the
developments in relation to recognition of these different minorities, argued that
indigenous populations had more facility in obtaining collective rights than black people
because historically they had been defined as belonging to another culture. She states:
I argue that the main criterion used to determine the recipients of collective rights in
Latin American has been the possession of distinct cultural groups identity.
Furthermore, because of the different ways in which indians and blacks have been
racialised in Latin America, utilising the existence of a separate group identity
conceived in ethnic or cultural terms as the basis for awarding group rights has
made it possible for Indians to claim these rights more successfully than blacks…
(Hooker, 2005:291)
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However the fact is that greater or lesser recognition obtained by Latin American
ethnic minorities in the re-democratisation period of the 1980s depended mainly on factors
which can be divided into two groups: the internal conditions of each country and the
external or international conditions.
In general, we could say that the characteristics assumed by Latin American black
movements fighting for their ethnic or racial recognition depend mainly on two factors
internally: local traditions which can be mobilised and the nature of the political and
demographic context in which they find themselves5.
The demographic differences between these countries do not explain, however, the most
intriguing of facts: that only in Brazil was the goal of political mobilisation the fight
against racial inequalities, whereas in all other countries the main goal of mobilisation was
the recognition of black cultural diversity, which in this way belatedly followed the steps
of the indigenous movements. We understand that in relation to the indigenous populations
- as Van Cott well reminded us - the theoretical and ideological collapse of "race" and
"ethnicity" had always been characteristic of European colonisation in the Americas,
including that of Brazil, something that naturally brought together the Anglo-Saxon and
Latin American worlds.
In the case of Brazilian blacks, however, the enduring practice of incorporating
African traditions to the national culture historically inhibited ethnic-cultural mobilisations
and favoured purely racial ones (that is, those whose agenda was the struggle against the
social consequences of prejudice and racial discrimination). What were the international
circumstances in which these mobilisations took place?
First of all, we must mention the State regime changes which took place during the
1980s. The military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, for example, were substituted by
representative democracies, which were looking for new forms of international legitimacy
for their countries. The second, related to the first, was that their integration into the
international economic order took place under a new capital accumulation regime which
became known as neo-liberalism. Finally, still in relation to the external circumstances, it is
worth mentioning three other factors of a more cultural and ideological nature: 1) the
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doctrine of multiculturalism is victorious in the struggle against racism in the United States,
South Africa and in English speaking countries; 2) the fight for human rights gains
international prominence, which for black people means the fight against racism; and
finally, 3) the importance which ecology, the protection of the environment and biological
and cultural diversity were given by international development agencies.
The Latin American regimes in crisis during the 1970s were, in their majority,
authoritarian national-developmentist States which managed their earlier legitimacy crisis
by strengthening their identity as mixed-race nations and racial democracies. Moreover,
during the re-democratisation period of the 1980s, the political opposition and the people in
general were seeking a more radical meaning for democracy, which was more egalitarian
in terms of the re-distribution of wealth and of life opportunities.
Multiculturalism and identity politics were ideological practices which were
available in the international market of ideas at the same time as the new Latin American
democracies were writing their constitutions. It is in this sense that Christian Gros (2000)
claimed that multiculturalism is for neo-liberalism what racial democracy was for
national-developmentism.
The new Minimum State
Despite the fact that Brazil never experienced the Welfare State, it is true that the
conquests which urban workers accumulated from the Vargas era onwards, in the areas of
social security, labour legislation, public health and education, etc., served as models for all
popular mobilisations and demands since the 1930s. The policy of class compromise also
served as a model for the State in response to the demands from the lower class sectors of
the population, organised in social movements, including black organisations. In general,
popular demands were met through the expansion of social security or labour legislation to
include new geographical areas, new populational groups, or simply by the growth of the
State apparatus, expanding it to new areas and providing services to a larger number of
social groups.
As I have already stressed, in relation to the black population, racial democracy
constituted a compromise with two axes, one material and one symbolic. Materially, the
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expansion of the urban labour market absorbed large numbers of black and mixed race
workers, definitively incorporating them into the urban lower and working classes. This
incorporation was institutionalised by laws such as the Amparo ao Trabalhador Brasileiro
Nato [Assistance to Native Workers], signed by Vargas in 1931, which ensured that
two-thirds of employees in industrial establishments were native Brazilians; or the Afonso
Arinos law, 1951, which turned racial prejudice into a misdemeanor. Symbolically, the
modernist ideal of a mixed race nation was absorbed by the State and the artistic, folkloric
and symbolic manifestations of black Brazilians were recognised as Afro-Brazilian culture.
The "Afro" however, designated only the origin of a culture which was, above all, defined
as regional, mixed race and like black people themselves, creole. The political ideology of
racial democracy, as a social pact, was predominantly labour-oriented, a tendency that
dates back to the First Republic (as for example, that of Manoel Querino) and which was
inherited by new leaders, such as Abdias do Nascimento6.
We have seen that from 1964, the military regime, whilst maintaining the material
and symbolic content of racial democracy, sought to exclude all its political meaning by
forcibly repressing all union and associative activities, and their informal and formal links
with political parties. Thus the pact broke down, and with it representative democracy and
the national-developmentist State.
For a short while, once democratic life had been restored in 1985, the State tried to
re-install the old game of classes in an attempt to establish relations with the new social
movements through political parties, the expansion of its own apparatus and the
aggiornamiento of legislation. With regard to the black population, legislative reform took
place with the 1988 Constitution, which introduced the criminalisation of racism, regulated
by law n. 7.716 of 1989; whereas in the symbolic realm, the main landmarks were the
creation of the Fundação Cultural Palmares [Palmares Cultural Foundation] in 1988, and
the nomination of Zumbi as a national hero in 1995.
For a brief period, black activism itself started to flourish in its association with
class politics, other social movements and with the support of political parties, mainly PT
[Workers' Party], PDT [Democratic Labour Party] and the PMDB [Brazilian Democratic
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Movement Party], and later on the PSDB [Brazilian Social Democratic Party]. However,
from 1988 onwards the black movement increasingly starts to organise itself into a variety
of financially, ideologically and politically autonomous non-governmental organisations.
Many of the new black NGOs distanced themselves from the old labour parties now represented by the PDT - and from the new ones - represented by the PT. There is a
fusion of two tendencies, which in Brazil seemed to oppose one another: the search for
greater integration and participation in national life and the construction of an ethnic
sentiment based on race consciousness. Even if we can clearly distinguish between
political and cultural NGOs, today it is difficult to find black cultural institutions which do
not endorse some sort of affirmative action in the social arena; likewise, it is also difficult
to find black political organisations that do not infuse their discourse with what is
nowadays called "black culture".
On the other hand, in 1990, from the Collor government onwards, the Brazilian State
explicitly assumed a more liberal discourse. Its objective was the restructuring of the
governmental apparatus in an attempt to rid itself of many of the functions of the old
national-developmentist State and, above all, to focus on the reforms of the social security,
labour, education and health systems so as to uncouple social policy management from the
management of the economy. State planning departments were slimmed down with the aim
of removing political conflict from the task of wealth re-distribution; thus many of the
State's social care and assistance functions were transferred to NGOs and private
companies, mainly through partnerships.
This re-directioning of the State apparatus strengthened NGOs in general, and black
NGOs in particular, which made enormous strides in relation to the care provision of poor
populations, providing various services in the areas of education, health, leisure and human
rights advocacy. In this way, there was also a consolidation of the phenomenon which
started with the expansion of higher education: a substantial black intellectual class,
consisting of university-trained professionals, who were largely autonomous in relation to
the State and who depended on large international foundations, churches and private
institutions as their main source of income.
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On the other hand, the Brazilian State distances itself from the management of
national identity, removing it from the agenda of the Education and Culture Ministries. It
adopts a multiculturalist discourse and gives non-governmental agents responsibility and
management freedom.
In my understanding, the culmination of this type of Minimum State occurs in the
Lula Government, where the State seeks largely to absorb the demands of the social
movements by incorporating their cadres into official State positions, so as to improve
communication between the State and NGOs, whilst at the same time keeping economic
policy totally dissociated from social policy. This perhaps explains why the Partido dos
Trabalhadores [Workers' Party] - which whilst in opposition was unsympathetic towards
affirmative actions and non-classist identity policies, which were seen as bourgeois – on
gaining power, formed a Government that made the most progress in terms of meeting the
demands of black organisations.
Thus, the new neo-liberal regime encourages the autonomy of the NGOs; as
opposed to the old national-developmentist regime which favoured political compromises
forcing the State to address the demands of the social movements and therefore creating
direct links between, on the one hand, its apparatus and cadres and, on the other, the
apparatus and cadres of political parties or associative organisations. At that time, social
movements lost something of their own ideology, part of their own ethnic language, in
order to adjust to the national ideology; nowadays, the State gives up its nationalist
discourse in favour of a multiplicity of languages and identities which live in harmony
according to social and democratic norms of coexistence incorporated into the rights of
citizenship. What Gramsci called transformism, that is, the absorption of the social
movements' cadres by the establishment, creating a sort of routinization of social demands
and stripping them of their revolutionary potential, was substituted by a relative
independence which is enjoyed by all political agents, whose incorporation into the system
is automatic: the general rule of the regime is the participation in the democratic game in
conformity with the rule of law, whereby all allegiances which are not required are
withheld.
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The earlier regime dealt with the demands of the black movements (mainly in
relation to fighting discrimination and racial prejudices) by stripping them of their ethnic
language and symbolically integrating them into the nation. Internationally, it could also
flaunt the ideology of racial democracy as the most civilised solution for overcoming the
real problem of the inequality in the distribution of wealth and opportunities between
blacks and whites.
However, since the democratic rupture of 1964, black leaders came to doubt the
effectiveness of racial democracy. Instead, they started to express their complaints using an
ethnic language. What we now know is that this language fuses traditional Afro-Brazilian
identity elements with prominent diasporic black ideologies, such as pan-Africanism,
Negritude and Afro centrism.
But it is clear that neither the building of a new language, nor new State regimes,
can explain everything. Most of what has been achieved by the movement, in terms of
university quotas, for example, occurred in independent instances of power, such as within
federal universities. In some of them, black activists, acting as representatives of the social
movement, even participate in the selection process of quota students.
Therefore, the way in which the banners of the black movement, in particular
university quotas for blacks, gained the support of politicians, technocrats and university
authorities still needs to be researched. In other words, how and why multiculturalism
became the dominant ideology within the various spheres of the State.
For many today (Petruccelli, 2006), multiculturalism is the appropriate ideology of
a contemporaneous State which needs to recognise new social identities based on race and
culture, that is, new social groups and political agents (Blacks, Indians, etc.). To govern
well it needs to identify and measure the differences and social inequalities which
negatively affect these groups. For others, (Carvalho, 2004), multiculturalism is an
ideology which is profoundly against the spirit which guided the historical formation of the
Brazilian nation. Furthermore, they argue that the policy of quotas would necessarily lead
to the formation of arbitration commissions to decide about the "colour" or "ethnicity" of a
potential beneficiary, thereby establishing two things: that in sociological terms, "colour"
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or "ethnicity" have a less solid or consensual nature than would be required for such
selection criteria; and that the individual right to self-definition or self-representation
would consequently not be respected.
Currently in Brazil, an opinion gaining in strength is that racial inequalities - social
inequalities which are attributed to the idea of race and to the way that people racially
classify themselves or are racially classified - can only be combated through actions and
policies which re-enforce these same racial identities. That is, affirmative action policies
require identity policies.
The reproduction of inequalities in different State regimes
The argument that social inequalities in Brazil are linked to invisible (or hidden)
racial discrimination mechanisms, exacerbating their reproduction, has gradually become
consensual, so that during the last decade, it permeated not only the public spaces where
social movements act, but also government planning departments. The argument of
"cumulative cycles of disadvantages" was originally conceived by the sociologists Carlos
Hasenbalg ([1979] 2005) and Nelson do Valle Silva (1978) at the end of the 1970s. Basing
themselves on census data (or domiciliary samples) on income, education, place of birth,
rural or urban origin, occupation, parents' occupation, state of residence, colour and others,
they demonstrated, in a statistically irrefutable way, that the colour of individuals was a
major factor in explaining poverty and its reproduction. Poverty was, therefore, black and
mixed race.
The ensuing political argument claimed that just the universalisation of formal
education, the absence of legal race barriers and the expansion of job opportunities and
income as consequences of capitalist development, would not be sufficient to reduce
Brazilian social inequalities, since they had an implicit and non-visible racial character
which shattered the illusion of opportunities for all. Racial democracy was really a myth
and a farce, as some black leaders and some sociologists had been saying since the end of
the 1960s (after the military coup).
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In fact, the same political conclusion had already been adopted by different social
and political agents, in their majority young black university students - who having
benefited from the 1970s boom, completed their education but encountered racial and
cultural resistance in being admitted to professional markets which were established as
white middle-class niches: for instance, the media, schools and universities (Santos, 1985)
- as well as by civil rights activists who were not totally at ease with explanations derived
exclusively from Marxism.
This is how the struggle against racial discrimination became, right from the start,
involved in the movement for the country's re-democratisation. Democratic resistance
gained strength at the end of the 1970s leading to the adoption of anti-racist and
multicultural chapters and articles, both in the Constitution and in legislation during the
1980s and 1990s.
The scenario I described serves as a basis for debating the proposition (Tilly, 2003a;
2003b) which argues that in current Brazilian society, social inequalities (in the case of
racial inequalities) could become entrenched if public policies which categorize and
"create" groups based on racial labels are implemented. Particularly in view of the fact that
currently, in 2007, there are at least thirty public universities which have already adopted
quotas for black people or some other form of affirmative action.
Indeed, in Brazil two of the most prominent arguments against the adoption of
affirmative action policies which benefit blacks, closely follow the causal scheme
expounded by Tilly. Firstly, the State's imposition of classificatory categories based on
racial belonging would lead to the racialisation of Brazilian society, fixing the idea of race
as social identity in public and private discourses, consequently re-enforcing existing
racism; secondly, the categorization of Brazilians into whites and blacks (or non-whites) is
an unfortunate "borrowing" from our Northern neighbours.
I start by noting that for Tilly, "imposition" in either its governmental form or
otherwise, seems to come from the dominant group or is used for their benefit, whereas the
dominated group would take on the role of resistance, defence or reaction. The situation
here is reversed, it is the dominated group which apparently benefits from State imposition,
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and "resistance" comes from the dominant group. That is, if applied to Brazil, this scheme
would have a "conservative" nature apparently undesired by Tilly7, but well noted by João
Feres (2005), who follows Hirschman's (1991) characterisation about conservative
discourse strategies: the "racialisation" of Brazilian society, that is, the adoption of public
policies based on racial belonging would in the long term benefit only the racists.
In any case, conservative or not, whether it is a discursive strategy used by
conservatives or radical anti-racists Tilly's causal explanation places three different
questions before us: are "races" in Brazil a mechanism for increasing the reproduction of
social inequalities, as according to Hasenbalg e Silva (1988; 1992), Telles (2003), Soares
(2000) and others? If so, how do we combat them without recognising them publicly as
racial constructs and therefore running the risk of crystallising them and reproducing them
as natural facts? Historically, in the real realm of the history of black Brazilians, are
"races" and "racialised strategies" for demanding public goods foreign to their tradition?
That is, can we characterise the activist discourse of the last few years about the demand
for quotas at public universities, in the media and in public and private employment as
simply "borrowing"?
Historically, black identities in Brazil evolved through conversation with other
black identities in the Americas. Within this context, it seems to me that the idea of a Black
Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) where people, objects and ideas circulate is more productive than
the concept of "borrowing". In the same way it is perhaps more correct to ask: why is it
that it is only from the 1980s that the idea of "race" and "black culture" gains in strength
among activists and intellectuals who consider themselves black, and not before; for
example, during the post-war years when the prestige of French negritude was very high in
Brazil? Why is it that only in the 1990s the idea of affirmative action seems applicable to
Brazil when since 1925 black activists have been complaining about "colour prejudice"
which affects all the Brazilian "black" community? Which discursive consensuses had to
be overcome or broken so that these claims could be formulated?
At the same time, we saw that the idea of "racial democracy" cannot be analysed as
a mere myth, ideal or ideology. We have to ask about the real character of "democracy" in
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Brazil during the post-war years (1945-1964); the military dictatorship (1964-1985); and
the Nova República (after 1985). Did "democracy" have the same meaning, did it raise the
same expectations, nurture the same hopes and aspirations during the three periods?
My argument is largely founded on the hypothesis that it was the change in the
aspirations present in today's democracies, based mainly on the promise of full civil, social
and political rights for all, which led Latin American "racial democracies" to lose their
initial appeal. At their core was the absence of legal or violent barriers to the social
mobility of "men of colour", in contrast to the hierarchical segmentation inherited by
slavery and the colonial period. On the other hand, the new democracies which were
re-instituted from the 1980s onwards, must provide multicultural rights and recognise
racial differences so as to accommodate expectations of integration, mobility and equality
which otherwise could only have been addressed within the paradigm of class conflicts,
either in the French or English manner. To begin with, modern social organisation in
classes presupposes far superior levels of social equality, full employment and social
security than those found in current Latin American societies.
Above all, the strongest implication of Tilly's model is that he does not deny - in
fact he reaffirms - the idea that we are dealing with processes which, as they develop, are
moulded by deeply ingrained social, economic and personality structures. Thus,
"imposition" or "borrowing" - in other words, causal mechanisms - seem to be contingent
and refer to a concrete period; they cannot be used arbitrarily, disconnected from the flow
of history, so to speak. When they are used to resolve a particular form of inequality, racial
categories do not have the ability to undo social or even racial inequalities, but can only
re-establish a certain equilibrium of forces between different struggling groups. If in the
past these categories were imposed to create a monopoly over resources (as in the initial
case of colonisation), they can now be used to escape the fate imposed by that same
colonisation (post-colonial period).
Finally, there still remains an important point to be examined in Tilly's explicative
model. Even if we can discard it as a tool to analyse the way in which social inequalities in
Brazil came to be seen by blacks, and even if we can convincingly argue that the racial
17
categories "imposed" by public policies were already in action within secular Brazilian
society, we need to respond to the most important implication contained in the model
which is that racialised or multicultural public policies by themselves do not overcome or
suppress inequalities, but only reproduce them under clearer and more precise conditions.
In other words, they regulate the distribution conflict within new parameters without
risking the reproduction of the system as a whole.
In this Tilly seems to be right: there is no reason to expect that the new
organisational framework for political actions (based on ethnicity, race or culture) will
necessarily be more efficient in preventing the reproduction of social inequalities.
18
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21
1
Not only the activists, I also wrote; "During the military dictatorship, between 1968 and 1978 'racial
democracy' became a dogma, a kind of ideology of the Brazililan State. Well, the reduction of anti-racism
into anti-racialism, and its usage in denying discrimination and racial inequalities, both growing in the
country at the time led to a racist ideology, that is a justification for actual discrimination and racial
inequality" (Guimarães, 1999, p. 62). Ronaldo Sales Jr. (2007) develops this same argument.
2
Research on race relations from 1940 to 1960 supports this view. See amongst others, Pierson ([1942]
1971); Azevedo (1953); Wagley (1952); Harris (1956).3 I have the same understanding of "consent" as
Przeworski (1985), collective behaviour in which black people act hoping to improve their material
conditions according to given social rules. "Cooperation" means using strategies and threats known by
opponents in the course of negotiation. In "compromise" black organisations' consent to representative
democracy is possible in exchange for the expectation of social integration and an improvement in the
material life.
4
From now on, I will use the word "regime" to mean "State Regime" as according to Barth (1994).
5
In demographic terms, Latin American countries which had some black presence can be classified into at
least four groups: 1) countries with large black populations and with large cultural tradition of African origin,
such as Brazil and Cuba; 2) black countries such as Haiti and Santo Domingo; 3) countries with important
black minorities such as Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador; 4) countries with small black populations and
mobilisation such as Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina.
6
On Manoel Querino, see Leal's biography (2004); on Abdias do Nascimento, see Police (2000), Nascimento
(2003) and Macedo (2006).
7
It is also worth noting here that Tilly's causal model is morally charged with meanings: "imposition" for
example, is an act of force, when it is not authoritarian; "resistance" is an act of defence against aggression;
"borrowing" is something that is not authentic, and therefore contemptible, according to the romantic
tradition which prizes the authenticity of national and local cultures.