Race, Science, and Social Thought in 20th-Century Brazil

Abstract

Race is a fundamental theme in the sciences and social thought of 20th-century Brazil. The republican regime, inaugurated in the country in 1889, was already born troubled by questions concerning the viability of the nation, which, from the viewpoint of European scientific theories on race, was doomed to fail due to the high contingent of black and indigenous people, and its racial mixture. The solution proposed by the country’s scientific and political elites was characteristically the theory of whitening, which, without breaking completely from scientific racism, established its own path for nation building. The 1910s were marked by the growth of the sanitarist movement led by the medical elite, the country’s leading scientific community at the time, which shifted the explanation for the country’s ills from its racial constitution to parasitic diseases. The eugenics movement emerged in Brazil closely connected to the sanitarist movement and was dominated in the 1920s by a Lamarckian conception of heredity, seeking to improve the “Brazilian race” through social medicine. This eugenics framework did not signify the absence of more racial interventionist proposals, however, such as the sterilization of the “unfit” and immigration restrictions. The latter proposition acquired the force of law under the 1934 Constitution and was maintained under the 1937 Constitution, which lasted throughout the Estado Novo. Nevertheless, the first Vargas government (1930–1945) invested in strengthening the image of a country with harmonious race relations and the identity of the Brazilian as miscegenated, an idea sustained by the social thought and intellectual production of the period. Following the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship and the Second World War, Brazil became a field for research on race relations promoted by UNESCO. The project’s starting point was the notion that the country could provide an example of harmonious race relations for a world traumatized by war and the Holocaust. The research findings, though, pointed to the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination. From the 1950s, research in the social sciences and the black movement deepened the investigation and the denunciation of racial inequalities in Brazil. Concurrently, research in the genetics of human populations insisted that the Brazilian population was characterized by racial mixture and biological diversity. After the 1970s, during the military dictatorship still, the black movement emphasized negritude as an identity and denounced racial democracy as a myth that concealed inequality. In this context, the sociology of race relations began to affirm race as one of the determinant variables of class structure in Brazil. In the 1990s, some sectors of the black movement and the social sciences asserted that antiracism should strengthen race as an identity and the black/white polarization. At the same time, in dialogue with the tradition of social thought and with modern research on the human genome, other intellectuals highlighted miscegenation as characteristic of the Brazilian population and advanced the need to combat prejudice and discrimination. The clashes of the 20th century eventually resulted in affirmative actions and quota policies being implemented by the Brazilian government from the 2000s.