Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil by Jessica Lynn Graham

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil by Jessica Lynn Graham Travis Knoll Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil. By Jessica Lynn Graham. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, p. 392, $29.95. This richly sourced and concisely written expansive diplomatic and cultural history brings the growing scholarship on Black internationalism (Keisha Blain 2018, 2021; Sarah Azaransky 2017) in conversation with the vast national literatures on race relations in two countries with the world's largest African diasporas. Graham's traces "the co-constitutive emergence of racially inclusive nationalisms as Brazilian and US state doctrine" (2) during the presidencies of Getúlio Vargas and Franklin Roosevelt. These doctrines responded to Communist and fascist efforts to undermine liberal democracy as incapable of delivering for its citizens. She divides fascist, Communist, and liberal democratic treatments of race into four categories: racial realism, racial denial, racial dissuasion, and racial obstructionism (8). Communist competition drives the first chapter, beginning with the Third Communist International (1919-1943), or the Comintern's, efforts to bring U.S. and Brazilian Blacks into worldwide struggles, especially in Asia (43). The Comintern exploited the new racial rhetoric ushered in by the New Deal even as it clashed with rival organizations like with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which preached self-sufficiency and conservative bourgeois values. While US communists made racial struggle a cornerstone of their anti-imperialist agenda, the Comintern had to pressure the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) to admit Brazil had a racial problem, something it only did after stiff competition from Brazilian Integral Action (AIB) and Arlindo Veiga dos Santos' Brazilian Black Front (FNB). The second chapter lays out how Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo and US government officials made racial plurality central to their anti-Communist efforts. Graham counters traditional scholarship that says the United States incorporated racial democracy in the 2000s, centers important right-wing actors, and shows elements of the Vargas regime highlighting racial plurality in a more forceful and confident manner than its US counterpart. The United States' response to Communism's assertion of a more racially equal society suffered from divisions embodied by the struggle between New York Rep. Hamilton Fish, who acknowledged racial inequality, and Texas Rep. Martin Dies, who denied it. Blacks in turn sought to cast the Ku Klux Klan and other rightist domestic terror groups as more dangerous than either German fascism or the Soviet Union. Architects of the Estado Novo, such as Francisco Campos, sought to frame democracy as stability, the state's defense of itself (90-91), through cultural events like the Estado Novo Exposition and books like Brazil is Good (92-93). [End Page 583] Chapter Three explains how pre-war fascists Plínio Salgado and African-American Lawrence Dennis claimed the democratic mantle and contested US definitions of democracy. As portrayed in works such as the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation (1934/5) and Hitler Speaks (1939), US-style democracy was a sham that neither provided order nor lived up to the multi-racial ideas for which the system ostensibly advocated. The Nazis believed that this contradiction would lead Brazil into their camp, but Brazilian Integral Action (AIB) was put off by the Nazis' racial exclusivity and instead mixed Italian fascist ideas with homegrown discourses of racial harmony. This racially plural fascism influenced Black activists like Veiga dos Santos (and, in his early years, Abdias de Nascimento). Dennis longed for a modified version of US fascism which would embrace efficient government, discard racial superiority, and reject imperialistic ambitions. Other Brazilian and US Blacks such as Júlio Romão, Joel Augustus Rogers, and Adam Clayton Powell dissented from these fascist organizations but lamented that the sad example of race relations in liberal democracies was a poor counterpoint to fascist pretentions. Chapter Four covers the use of New Deal-era radio programs such as Harold Ickes' Radio Education Project and the Estado Novo's support for samba schools to juxtapose democracy's racial tolerance with fascism's racial chauvinism. Though centering Blacks, these programs often celebrated formal abolition while absolving the two...