Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900-90: An American Counterpoint

Abstract

Brazil is one of the largest multi-racial societies in the world, and the home of the largest single component of the overseas African diaspora.' During the first half of the 1900s, it was frequently described, both by native-born and foreign observers, as a 'racial democracy', in which blacks, mulattoes, and whites lived under conditions of juridical and, to a large degree, social equality. During the second half of the century, however, that description has been sharply revised. From 1940 to the present, national censuses have documented persistent disparities between the white and non-white populations in education, vocational achievement, earnings, and life expectancy. Survey research has shown racist attitudes and stereotypes concerning blacks and mulattoes to be widely diffused throughout Brazilian society, and Afro-Brazilians report being the victims of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, racism and discrimination. Thus while observers writing in the 1930s and 1940s focused on the harmonious, egalitarian quality of interaction in Brazil, similar discussions in the 1980s and 1990s have emphasized 'the perception, ever more widespread, that [the concept of] racial in its official and semi-official versions, does not reflect Brazilian reality'. 'The myth of democracy appears to be definitively in its grave', observed the newsmagazine Istoe during the celebrations marking the centennial of the abolition of slavery, in 1988; 'racial discrimination', not democracy, 'is the basis of Brazilian culture', argued historian Decio Freitas.2 What accounts for this transformation in characterizations of