Gilberto Freyre, Racial Democracy, and Contemporary Race Relations in Brazil
Start Date
12-4-2024 3:15 PM
Location
CASB 108
Document Type
Presentation
Abstract
This interdisciplinary history project explores the sociohistorical discussion of racial mixing (miscegenation) and race relations in Brazil, famously discussed by Gilberto Freyre in his The Master and the Slave trilogy. Consequently, Freyre’s work popularized “Racial Democracy”, a purported harmonic democracy without racial tension, gained precedence. Freyre, like some of his predecessors, posited that the African diaspora in Brazil was paramount in shaping a powerful, homogenized race of Portuguese, African, and Indigenous Brasilidade. To understand racial democracy and its social and intellectual development, I analyzed literature outside of Freyre’s corpus throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century as scholars came to terms with the on-the-ground realities facing Afro-Brazilians. I incorporate an interdisciplinary discourse into my research, addressing historiographic, sociological, and anthropological scholarship on both race relations and Racial Democracy. Such scholarship on identity, Afro-Brazilian resistance, immigration, and nation-building deconstructed the Freyrean paradigm. I also assess the intellectual history of Brazilian identity from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century to assert that Racial Democracy was the product of a nation-building philosophy that attempted to come to terms with the slavocracy’s propagation of the African diaspora in Brazil. In light of this survey, I postulate that “cordial racism” is persistent socially and various governments–from populist to militarocratic to democratic–commodified Afro-Brazilian culture as an essentialistic patrimony. Moreover, this Racial Democracy silenced discussions of racial inequality and discrimination. Afro-Brazilians not only remained essentialized but dispossessed: an absence in racial discourse meant systemic discrimination self-propagated. Indeed, phenomena such as police brutality, favela (derogatorily translated as slums), socio-cultural discrimination, and pro-immigration policy point to this reality. I interpret Brazil’s adherence to the historical myth and memory elucidated in Racial Democracy as a way to silence discriminatory practices on the micro- and macrocosmic scale. I now incorporate this research into the colonial and imperial (nineteenth century) context, analyzing quilombo (escaped slave, or “maroon”) resistance as it influenced abolition in 1888 as well as Afro-Brazilian social identities, politics, and living, historic, communities. Subsequently, quilombismo became an important political philosophy posited by black activist, Abdias do Nascimento, who asserts that escaped-slave resistance is a valuable ideology in contemporary racial activism and dialogue. It is my intention to utilize these findings as a convergence between the nineteenth and twentieth-twenty first century contexts of race and identity in Brazil, centering Afro-Brazilians in an alternative lens as slave resistors to freed, citizen resistors, compared to the racially-homogenous, commodifying lens of Racial Democracy.
Keywords
Brazil, Racial Democracy, Afro-Brazilian history, African Diaspora, Social History, Nation-Building, Twentieth Century Brazil
Gilberto Freyre, Racial Democracy, and Contemporary Race Relations in Brazil
CASB 108
This interdisciplinary history project explores the sociohistorical discussion of racial mixing (miscegenation) and race relations in Brazil, famously discussed by Gilberto Freyre in his The Master and the Slave trilogy. Consequently, Freyre’s work popularized “Racial Democracy”, a purported harmonic democracy without racial tension, gained precedence. Freyre, like some of his predecessors, posited that the African diaspora in Brazil was paramount in shaping a powerful, homogenized race of Portuguese, African, and Indigenous Brasilidade. To understand racial democracy and its social and intellectual development, I analyzed literature outside of Freyre’s corpus throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century as scholars came to terms with the on-the-ground realities facing Afro-Brazilians. I incorporate an interdisciplinary discourse into my research, addressing historiographic, sociological, and anthropological scholarship on both race relations and Racial Democracy. Such scholarship on identity, Afro-Brazilian resistance, immigration, and nation-building deconstructed the Freyrean paradigm. I also assess the intellectual history of Brazilian identity from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century to assert that Racial Democracy was the product of a nation-building philosophy that attempted to come to terms with the slavocracy’s propagation of the African diaspora in Brazil. In light of this survey, I postulate that “cordial racism” is persistent socially and various governments–from populist to militarocratic to democratic–commodified Afro-Brazilian culture as an essentialistic patrimony. Moreover, this Racial Democracy silenced discussions of racial inequality and discrimination. Afro-Brazilians not only remained essentialized but dispossessed: an absence in racial discourse meant systemic discrimination self-propagated. Indeed, phenomena such as police brutality, favela (derogatorily translated as slums), socio-cultural discrimination, and pro-immigration policy point to this reality. I interpret Brazil’s adherence to the historical myth and memory elucidated in Racial Democracy as a way to silence discriminatory practices on the micro- and macrocosmic scale. I now incorporate this research into the colonial and imperial (nineteenth century) context, analyzing quilombo (escaped slave, or “maroon”) resistance as it influenced abolition in 1888 as well as Afro-Brazilian social identities, politics, and living, historic, communities. Subsequently, quilombismo became an important political philosophy posited by black activist, Abdias do Nascimento, who asserts that escaped-slave resistance is a valuable ideology in contemporary racial activism and dialogue. It is my intention to utilize these findings as a convergence between the nineteenth and twentieth-twenty first century contexts of race and identity in Brazil, centering Afro-Brazilians in an alternative lens as slave resistors to freed, citizen resistors, compared to the racially-homogenous, commodifying lens of Racial Democracy.