Whitening Theory in Brazil

Modesto y Brocco's 1895 painting, The Redemption of Cain, offers a graphic representation of whitening theory. In it, an old black woman praises God for the fact that her grandson is white.

Over on Abagond’s blog, I was asked a pretty interesting question regarding Brazilian racial neuroses. In the question, however, there was a statement which sort of sums up American prejudices regarding Brazil. I thought it might be a good idea to address this statement as simply as I can, hopefully to give the internet a resource which explains Brazilian Whitening theory and practice to smart folks who aren’t specialists. If any colleagues or students of mine are reading this, a warning: This is off the top of my head, without references and it is a very abstract gloss on what we all know to be a complex topic. What follows below is a simplification of an extremely touchy issue for Americans who are interested in Brazil but who in general still think our country’s capital is Buenos Aires.
The comment was from a poster named eshowoman and this is her understanding of how race works in Brazil. I really like this comment because it puts in a very small nutshell, the most commonly held prejudice out there regarding Brazilian history:

Brazil is a place that promotes sex with black and native women as a way to “lighten up” the country.

As is the case with almost every stereotype or prejudice, at the bottom of this statement lies a hard core of truth which is then distorted and twisted around so that the result is a parody of history. Yes, it is true that Brazil (like the U.S.) is historically a deeply racist and white supremacist nation. And it is also true that, as in the U.S., the Brazilian white power elite spent a lot of time thinking about how to resolve their black and Indian “problems” – the "problem" in both countries ultimately being that blacks and Indians existed and the “solution” to said problem being their elimination.

My dislike of the phrase above, however, stems from the fact that it forgets that racists in both the U.S. and Brazil (and, indeed, in most nations in the Americas) have historically wished to “lighten up” their populations. What makes Brazil fairly (though not exclusively) unique in this respect was the fact that a certain portion of the Brazilian elite believed that this could be accomplished through correct breeding rather than through what their white American counterparts euphemistically called " competition” (i.e. killing or exile). From roughly 1880 on, a certain portion of the Brazilian power elite believed that the nation could be “whitened” and thus “improved” if whites were to mate with blacks and Indians.

"Whitening theory" in Brazil was hegemonic from about 1880 onto, maybe, 1940. 60 years out of the 500 that make up Brazilian history. To truly understand it, one needs to look at the context of the times. This period was the heyday of scientific racism in the United States and Western Europe and most of the world's top biologists looking at human race believed that intermixture between the races (i.e. miscegenation) led to immediate and utter devolution: the creation of "mixed" people who were morally, physically and intellectually inferior to their parents. (Something certain white and black Americans still believe unto this day, apparently…)

Well, this presented Brazil with a quandary. A huge portion of its population was black or native and  even more of what was left was mixed. If the racist presumption regarding intermixture was true, then Brazil was doomed to be a degenerate, sub-evolved mongrel nation (again, sort of like what certain Americans - black and white - believe it to be today).

Now remember, racist scientific theory wasn't just an academic debate at this point in history: it was widely believed by everyone as representing the key to human behavior. It was very pop. Hell, even such black luminaries as W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey apparently bought into it, going on their comments at the time. If I recall correctly, Garvey once made the claim that North American blacks were more "evolved" than other types because of "evolutionary pressure" from "the highly aggressive Anglo Saxon". Everyone thought that biology held the key to explaining human social behavior and almost everyone believed that "purity of race" created an unbeatable evolutionary advantage.

Faced with this consensus, Brazilian scientists split into two general groups: those who agreed with racial purity and those who sought other information from the biological sciences to question it.
The first group believed that "natural competition" from the "superior white race" would eventually eliminate blacks and Indians in Brazil. Obviously, then, Brazil would have to import more whites to make up for this fall-off. The United States, by the way, was these gentlemens’ model because, according to them, the U.S. was well on the way to eliminating its "black problem" through actual physical elimination (though they usually used the euphemisms of their American counterparts and said things like "out compete"). I call these boys (and they were almost exclusively male) the "kill the bastards off" crowd.

The second group is perhaps best represented by João Batista de Lacerda. This group took a long, hard look at what little information existed about genetics and interbreeding at the time and concluded that there was no scientific basis for the notion that racial purity was inherently superior. They looked at dog breeders and plant breeders and concluded that, with the proper management, hybridism could in fact create a super race. For this group, the question then became "well, what is the proper mix for the future Brazilian super race?" Given that they were indeed racists (as even most Black scientists were at the time) and also white supremacists, it was pretty much universally agreed that Brazil had "too much black blood for its own good" and that importation of white blood from Europe via immigration was called for. The members of this crowd were the real "whiteners" in that they actively encouraged interracial mating and marriage.

Now, these groups were locked in a struggle and neither one could truly be said to have achieved hegemony within Brazilian thought until Gilberto Freyre came along in the 1930s and kicked the blocks out from under both by proclaiming, in Casa Grande e Senzala, that blacks were historically the most “successfully competing” race in Brazil in pure biological and cultural terms and that there was no reason at all to see them as necessarily inferior.

Neither the white purists nor the miscegenists were able to enact significant legislation of any sort in Brazil. Their debate provided an intellectual pastime for the Brazilian elite during the Belle Époque, but it had very little impact in the way of national – or even local – laws. This needs to be emphasized because I’ve met many Americans who seem to think that Brazil actually engaged in some sort of effective national eugenics policy during the “whitening” period. In fact, Brazil’s migration and colonization policy stayed firmly anchored to the country’s economic need for cheap agrarian labor, no matter what the ethnicity. Brazil imported immigrants from Europe during this period, but also from Japan, because that was primarily where people were migrating from and those nations (again, in the case of Japan) were willing in many cases to subsidize immigration.

In other words, Brazilian law makers and scientists might have talked a nice line about applying eugenics, but the country's immigration policy was, in general, more concerned with picking up field laborers on the cheap from wherever they could be had at a decent price.

For all its supposed import in the eyes of Americans, it is difficult for me to see whitening theory as really having had much of an impact on life as it’s lived in Brazil today. Long before the theory became popular, interracial sex was fairly common in Brazil. The theory seems to me to have simply put the best possible gloss on Brazilian reality in order to contradict the purist eugenicists who were dominant in Europe and the U.S. at the time and whose theories condemned Brazil to eternal degradation. Most of the people who were having heterochromatic sex in Brazil at the time probably never even heard about the debate.

Furthermore, Brazil was a racist and white supremacist nation long before whitening theory came into vogue. Whitening theory certainly didn't cause Brazilian racism and may be seen, ironically enough, represent Brazil's first tentative step away from classic white supremacy, in that its at least postulated some sort of incorporation of blacks, Indians and mestiços into the body of the nation. While Lacerda himself didn't believe this (stating in 1911 that Brazil would eventually indeed become entirely white through selective breeding), other "whiteners" believed that the process would create a truly unique and new race, a "Brazilian" race, that was neither black nor white. This was ultimately the view of Lacerda's student, Edgar Roquette-Pinto, who would be an immense influence on Gilberto Freyre and who go on to found Brazilian national public radio.

Satan responds to Pat Robertson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

As you may have heard, Pat Roberton claims that Haiti's pact with Satan caused last week's earthquake. What you may not have heard is that Satan responded to Pat in the Minneapolis Star Tribune today. We present the following transcript of the Prince of Darkness' missive as a service to our readership.

(Tip o' the hat to Lily Coyle, who was apparently the first person to recieve Ol' Scratch's message.)

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

Black tourism in Brazil

Capoeira, perhaps the single image most associated with Brazilian blackness by the English-speaking media.

Tourism Black and Blues


by Ana Paula da Silva

When African Americans talk about travelling to Brazil, two types of tourism tend to be discussed. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in so-called “heritage tourism” to Salvador da Bahia, supposedly Brazil’s blackest city. On the other, there’s the “scandal” of what author Jewel Woods has called black America’s best kept secret: black male sexual tourism in Rio de Janeiro. In recent articles and books, these two types of tourism have been set up as diametrically opposed faces of middle-class black America’s recently conquered global mobility. However, as an African Brazilian woman who is also something of a professional gringo watcher, what strikes me about these two forms of tourism is not their differences, but their commonalities.

Both are predicated upon structures which not only reserve global mobility to a privileged few, but which also reserve the right to represent and interpret what is seen and experienced to those same few. Simply put, both sex and heritage tourists are empowered to forge interpretations of Brazil which – given the English language’s global reach – end up drowning out the diversity, ambiguity and complexity of Brazilians own views of themselves and their country. To cop a metaphor from anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt, both forms of tourism end up engaging and empowering an “imperial eye”, which rearranges the landscape according to its satisfaction and, in so doing, creates interpretations which are widely seen as “more authentic” than native realities themselves.

It’s easy to see this black imperial eye at work in the context of sexual tourism. Jewel Wood’s recently published Don’t Blame it on Rio records several examples as does W. J. Cobb’s famous Essence article. Wood’s informants and Cobb himself often project as fact their preconceived fantasies of Brazil and Brazilians on the spaces and people through which they transit. According to these men, Brazilian women are supposedly more natural, easy-going and sexy than their American cousins, with no weight issues due to a better diet and more exercise. This will come as quite a shock to anyone who lives in Brazil and is confronted by our country’s growing obesity problem and high incidence of elective cosmetic surgery. It will also surprise Brazilian sexologists who report that Brazilian women have fewer partners, less sexual fulfillment and more conservative attitudes towards sex than most of the other women of the Americas. Finally, I’m sure that Brazilian men will find the descriptions of Brazilian women as “non-confrontational” and “non-feminist” to be amusing, to say the least.

These illusions are fairly easy to spot and critique, but what about the more subtle fantasies of “roots Brazilian culture” which are often articulated by heritage tourists?

To hear African Americans talk, heritage tourism is a more respectful form of wandering about the world, one which involves learning about “our history”.

Wait a minute: “our history”…?

Listen, I am down with the idea that there is a Black Atlantic, but it is a diaspora and diasporas are defined by cultural, political and historical diversity and yes, power imbalances. Though I may be deeply inspired by the history of the U.S. American civil rights movement, it is not my history. If it were my history, I wouldn’t need to be interrogated by immigration agents every time I visit New York, now would I? And yet Brazil’s history – which most Americans, black or white, can hardly be bothered to learn – is now somehow a part of black U.S. heritage.

The idea of heritage is itself disturbing to me. It’s one of those buzz-words which doesn’t translate well into Portuguese. What precisely is heritage, as opposed to history? Having pestered many Americans about the topic, it seems to me that heritage can best be described as a myth-making attempt to fix claims to certain elements of history as personal or collective property. It thus disturbs me when black Americans come to Bahia in search of their heritage. What they seem to be saying is that Bahia – and by extension, Brazil – makes no useful sense on its own terms and holds little interest for them except as it fits into their personal mythologies of identity.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the forms of “Brazilian black culture” which will be visible to most heritage tourists are those which most closely fit preconceived ideas of “African culture”. Capoeira and Candomblé will thus get the nod as “roots” and “real”, whereas Jiu Jitsu or evangelism will be seen as regrettable breaches of ethnic purity – if they’re seen at all. “Black Brazilian music” needs must have an “African” or “Latin” beat (whatever that means), because black Brazilians don’t play rock, European classical music, or (perish the thought!) heavy metal. And as for black Brazilian literature, well, it’s just not on the agenda at all. The next black American heritage tourist I meet who’s read Machado de Assis – let alone Cruz e Souza – will be the first and believe me, I’m not holding my breath.

Think about what this sort of attitude implies about black Brazilians. It implies that we have not participated in the modern world, that the only cultural forms which we can call our own are those which have supposedly been handed down from African ancestors. There is nothing wrong with traditional cultural forms, but since when has the be-all and end-all of blackness been tradition? Imagine African Brazilians flocking to the Carolina Sea Islands and declaring the Gullah to be the only “real” black culture in the U.S. Imagine a North America where jazz was not recognized as a black invention, where Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were unknown entities, where the black churches were seen as “sell-outs” because they didn’t openly acknowledge the Orixás. Many times I have heard African Americans describe Brazil as “backwards” simply because things here aren’t done the same way they’re done back in the U.S.. Hearing this, I have wanted to shout “But isn’t that precisely why you’re here? Because you believe that we belong to another time and world, one that is not your own, but one which you feel free to define for us?”

American tourists of all colors recognize their own diversity and yet often reduce Brazilians to a superficial singular type. Of course, all peoples the world over engage in this sort of behavior – it’s practically a defining characteristic of being human. The problem is not that it happens, but that American structures of power, prejudice and pride are so strongly imbedded in the global scene that they almost completely drown out anything Brazilians have to say about themselves which does not fit into the limitations predefined by Americans.

And this, my friends, is where the “nasty” African American sexual tourist and his supposed opposite, the “respectful” heritage tourist, meet and shake hands: smack dab in the middle of imperial privilege. While it might seem ludicrous to decry African American privilege, given the deep and abiding white supremacy that still characterizes mainstream U.S. culture, it must be recognized that African Americans are playing a growing role in designating what is “really black” and what is not in the world beyond the Empire’s borders. Whether it’s playas with a couple of months of accumulated experience in Copa’s red light district expounding on what it means to be female in Brazil, or earnest social workers back from two weeks in Bahia, rhapsodizing about the Boa Morte Sisterhood as a “living document of African culture”, black Americans are determining what is to be seen and what is to be overlooked in Brazil. In so doing, they are ascribing to themselves – consciously or not – the role of purveyors of black Brazilian authenticity. And black Brazilians, as was traditional in the days of the casa grande e senzala, are left to cater to strangers’ fancies, whether these be carnal or of a more rarified nature.

Personally, I have no problem with either breed of tourist. I’m happy Brazilians can make a buck selling dreams to Americans. But I reserve the right to call “brother” and “sister” those people who attempt to step eyond fantasy, who are willing to accept me as an equal on my own terms and who recognize that I and the peoples which surround me have histories which cannot be reduced to the building blocks of U.S. American heritage – whatever its color.

Photos: Geographer Milton Santos, dramaturge and Senator Abdias do Nascimento, symbolic poet Cruz e Souza. Three of the many icons of black Brazilian modernity which are largely off the black American radar screen when it comes to thinking about Brazil.

Tossing flowers to Iemanjá

Hoje é dia de festa, hoje é dia de festa
É dia de levar flores para o mar
É dia de dar presentes para Iemanjá
Sabonete, colônia, água de cheiro
Batom, esmalte, rouge, pente, grampo, escova, jóias e espelho
              "Hoje é Dia de Festa", Jorge Ben Jor

 On Tuesday afternoon (29/12/2009), Ana Paula and I biked down to Copacabana to participate in the annual celebration/invocation of Iemanjá, the Afrobrazilian goddess of the sea by Rio de Janeiro's main candomblé and umbanda centers.

Tradionally, the festival occurs on New Year's Eve or one day before that. In the last few years, however, the city's preparations for their blow-out New Year's party has made it difficult to find a calm and open stretch of beach for a night's worth of drumming and singing. Additonally, increased religious intolerance on the part of Rio's ever-growing evangelical Christian community has made having the celebration on a fixed and pre-determined date without police support a Bad Idea. For five years now, Iemanjá's have had toi work together with the city government to assure that their celebrations won't be interrupted by fanatics spewing filth in Jesus' name.

So we'd had our ear to the ground for a couple of weeks and finally discovered on Saturday that this year's event would occur on Tuesday evening.

Basically, the Barco de Iemanjá is put together by several of the city's main terreiros and is set up principally for the faithful. Other events will be put on for other groups during the New Year's party, but these are mainly for gringos to see. The terreiros set up camp on Copacabana and start their rituals at about 5PM. There's singing and dancing and free consultations with the various divinities that show up and take possession of the faithful. People make their own altars in the sand and give offerings to Iemanjá, typically cheap champagne, perfume and flowers. Finally, a boat is put to sea filled with the terreiros' offerings to Iemanjá. The event opens a cycle of religious activity in Candomblé/Umbanda which will close on February 2nd, Iemanja's "official" day.

Offering boat.

We arrived at the beach at 5PM, just when everything was started, and set up our altar close to the waves. The wind was so strong that we couldn't get our candles lit, even after place them in a foot-deep sandpit. We eventually had to pile them all together and light them at once, as it was the only way to get and keep them going.

The faithful begin to gather.

Members of one of the various terreiros set up their "official" altar.

Our sad excuse for an altar.

Post-modern Pai de Santo, complete with Tommy Hilfinger bag....

It's interesting to note that while Rio's terreiros proudly display their African roots, they still insist on portraying Iemanjá as a white woman. Compare Iemanja´s portrait in New Orleans, for example, and her icon at the head of the main altar (shaped like a sea horse) during the 2009 ceremony in Rio:

The ironic thing about that New Orleans image is that it's an almost perfect copy of a typical Brazilian image sold all across the nation, except for the fact that Iemanjá is portrayed as brown. Below is a copy of the Brazilian original of that painting, set next to an African-Brazilian portrayal of Iemanjá. What this means is that somewhere in the past, some gringo voodoo practicioner came to Brazil, bought the most commercial Iemanjá image s/he could find, took it back to New Orleans and did a brown-skinned version of, essentially, a white lady. One wonders why this person didn't just pick up a black Iemanjá in the first place? What's more lulzworthy is that said Iemanjá image probably gets passed off to tourists as an "original" based on "slave drawings" or what have you...

At about 6PM, the singing and drumming began with a recital of Brazil's national anthem. This might sound odd to some folks until one remembers that African-Brazilian cultural phenomena such as candomblé, capoeira and even samba were seen as being "backwards" until they were enshrined as "national culture" by the Vargas administration in the 1930s and '40s. Since then, events of this sort have gone to some pains to emphasize their essential patriotic nature as "organic expressions of true Brazilian culture".

Shortly after the anthem, however, Iemanja's sister Iansã apparently got narked off and decided to piss all over us - or, as Ana puts it "Iansã wanted to mark the celebration with her blessings", In any case, the heavens opened up and poured rain. We beat a hasty retreat to a nearby beer kiosk, along with some 200 other faithful. The terreiro people took refuge under their tents and immediately started sending up prayers to Iansã. About an hour later, Saint Barbara decided to reduce the rain to a drizzle and we decided to head out for some Arab food.

"Look! Blessings!"

After dinner, I decided to head back to the celebration to snap some final photos. The terreiros were still thanking Iansã who was still raining blessings down from on high, though albeit not as violently as earlier. Many of the altars had been lit and were now beautifully ablaze, in spite of the drizzle. Also, the Orixá (who'd apparently also taken a powder in the beer tent during the downpour) had shown up and were dancing and giving out consultations.

Altars near the sidwalk, blazing away.

Woman praying at an altar.

Woman praying at the main altar.

Woman consulting a Preta Velha, apparently regarding some problem that her child is having.

One consultation went on for  a long time and apparently involved a Preta Velha and some problem that a woman was having with her young daughter. Or it could be that the woman simply wanted the Preta Velha's blessing over her daughter. Only Umbanda has "Preto Velhos". Candomblé - at least the more traditional variants - tends to hew closely to the original African orixá. Here's what Wiki has to say about "Preto Velhos", the original "magical negros"...

They are wise, peaceful and kind spirits that know all about suffering, compassion, forgiveness and hope. They also often prescribe herbal remedies. The female counterpart of this spirit is the Preta Velha ("old black woman") who demonstrates maternal compassion and concern [can you say "mammy"?]. In the beginning of Umbanda, Preto Velho introduced himself as an old slave who died after being flogged for some unjust accusation; today, Pretos Velhos introduce themselves as old slaves who died in persecution after they had run away from the plantation.

It's no wonder that Umbanda tends to be seen as "whiter" than Candomblé (racists in Umbanda will even sya that it's "more evolved").

I wanted to talk to Exú, but the lines were just too long and I was worried that Ana would be wondering where I'd gotten to if I didn't get home on time. I avoided a rather nasty mugging while biking way home across Flamengo, so Exú was keeping an eye out for me, in any case and he has my most sincere thanks.

Pornography and objectification

....by Thaddeus

Every half-bright college grad whoever took a freshman women’s studies course to kill a breadth requirement can tell you that pornography’s greatest sin is that it “objectifies women”. For years, I’ve considered this argument to be so much half-baked horseshit, but lately, Ana Paula’s research has caused me to revise my thinking, though not, perhaps, in the ways conservative feminists would expect.

I still have my doubts about porn as something which has the power to turn women into objects. In the first place, porn is most certainly not exclusively directed towards het men anymore: women and gay men now have their porn, too, so at the very least, objectification has become more democractic . Secondly, human sex and love relations under conditions of late capitalism are objectifying in general. When both women and men qualify potential mates in terms of whether they are “winners” or “losers” and feel that happiness with a partner can be guaranteed by crossing off a check list of characteristics, then we can truly say that objectification – the treating of human beings as if they were instruments, things, or (better yet) items of consumption – has become the central motif of our dating culture. It’s always been my belief that porn reflects this culture rather than causes it, given that so many people who wouldn’t dream of watching icky porn size up potential partners with a gimlet eye as to their imagined (often wholly imagined) qualities and defects, as critical as any basement dwelling nerd whoever said of Jenna Jameson, “yeah, she’d be cute if she just got bigger implants”.

Objectification is late capitalism’s main erotic impulse, so my view has been that one should either reject it entirely or roll with it: it’s useless to try and calve off Buttman 15 from Titanic when it comes to talking about objectifying sexual fantasy. As my friend Sadakni once cogently observed, “I’m not so much against porn as I’m in favor of the production of better porn. The current porn bores the hell out of me”.

However, Ana’s recent research has shown me that porn may very possibly be objectifying in a way that other sexual/affective fantasies aren’t.

By “objectifying”, however, I don’t mean treating a person as a thing or object without regards to their personal characteristics (the traditional feminist critique of porn). I mean that porn is objectifying in that it ends up transforming a subjective and ultimately abstract concept (sexual pleasure) into something concrete and measureable.

Reading her straight male informants’ descriptions of their sexual experiences with prostitutes, Ana and has been struck with how often what’s classified as a “first-class” sex sounds as if it came right out of the script for a straight-to-video porno film. “Good sex”, for most of these men, starts with a striptease, moves on to oral, then to vaginal and concludes with anal or oral, together with a face shot or with swallowed ejaculate (the woman, it goes without saying, is the “catcher” for all this activity). There are no descriptions of feelings of pleasure in these men’s reports, of tastes, smells, textures – of, in short, the vast majority of sensual experience which make up the warp and weft of sexual pleasure.

It is not that these men can’t feel these aspects of sexual pleasure: I’m very sure they do. But sexual enjoyment is a very private, subjective and even perverse thing. For men who invest a big portion of their male identity on being able to share with other men the details of sexual exploits, discussing sexual pleasure is a risky affair. What if one’s tastes are not understood?

And this is where porn comes in: it gives a simple and easily understood grading system for sex whereby experience can be shared and compared with other men. It gives men a common language and script for describing and judging sex in a way that – perversely (given that it’s porn) – can’t be considered perverse.

One could say that this insight is a fruit of our research with men who have sex with prostitutes, but a brief comparison with the ways men describe “good sex” in general, outside of prostitution contexts, should show that porn-as-model-for-description holds true generally throughout the west. It’s certainly the case among the men I deal with in general in Brazil or the U.S.

For the better part of a generation now, it’s been presumed that male sexuality is visual and performatic. Now I wonder if that’s so true, however. I wonder if it perhaps ends up being that way because it’s so important for men to be seen as sexually normative by other men and the visual spectacle of performance is simply the easiest way such normativeness can be constructed, discussed and shared.

Rudy Giuliani and the majestic equality of the law

The poor have to labor in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

                                                                                       - Anatole France

Rudy sees a panhandler and imagines bloody murder.

Well, it’s official. The city of Rio de Janeiro will probably hire Rudy Giulani to tell us how to clean up our town for the Olympics. Let me tell you why this is a bad idea.

Rudy’s good at tooting his own horn and, to hear the man talk, he got rid of crime in the Big Apple in only 6 years by instituting a “zero tolerance” policy. According to Rudy, “It’s the logic of the broken window. You should fix it first before another is broken. In New York we tackled problems showing the population that disorder is not the example to be followed.”

Wonderful theory. In practice, however, what it means is that what Rudy did was simply apply Anatole France’s “majestic law” by basically outlawing poverty in Manhattan. “Disorder” was simply defined as behaviors that poor people engage in far more often than rich people and the police were then set to crack the heads of the “disorderly”.

Panhandling – asking for spare change on the street – was declared disorderly, as was being homeless or sleeping in subways and pissing on the street. Jaywalking was declared disorderly, as was prostitution and graffiti writing. Manhattan was thus made a free zone for those who had the disposable income to follow every city ordinance to the letter. Those who didn’t quickly learned to stay away.

And, by god, it turns out that in a capitalist society, if you get rid of the lumpen and ride tight herd on the working class, why crime does indeed go down – at least crime of the squalid, individualist sort (white collar crime unfortunately probably grew during the period: ain’t that right Bernie Madoff?)

But did Rudy really rid New York of crime? Let’s take a look at the facts…

Rudy was Mayor of New York from 1994 to 2002. Crime had already been dropping nationwide and in the New York region for several years before Giuliani took office and it continued to do so throughout Giuliani’s terms as mayor. The most intensive phase of Giuliani’s “zero tolerance”, however, occurred under the reign of Police Commissioner Bill Braton, from 1994-1996. Now take a look at what happens to crime in New York City and the neighboring city of Newark New Jersey from 1994 to 1996: it drops a bit in NYC but leaps up in Newark. For Brazilian readers not familiar with American geography, let me point out that Newark is just across the river from NYC. What was going on here was that a significant amount of criminal behavior seems to have migrated across the river from New York City.

In the following years, however, one can see that even crime in Newark took a big drop downwards. By 2002, at the end of Giuliani’s time in office, crime stats had dropped by about 50% in each city. Hold on, though: those stats are somewhat misleading. Note that in both non-Giuliani Newark and Giuliani-led NYC, violent crime dropped by almost exactly the same amount over the same period. Meanwhile, even in chaotic, poorly-administered, crime ridden Washington DC, violent crime dropped by about 30% during the same period. So while Rudy’s policies after 1996 may indeed have impacted upon crime, it’s doubtful whether they were responsible for the majority of the decrease, which seems to have been caused by an improving economy and demographic changes (i.e. more rich people living downtown and more poor and desperate people being shunted off to jail or to suburbs, where social chaos doesn’t impact on major city crime stats).

But the big thing Rudy introduced in New York and which most analysts seem to agree has had an impacted on crime has been CompStat. Those of you who have watched the hit T.V. series The Wire should be aware of what I’m talking about. That’s right: Rudy was responsible for bringing that CompStat into the world.

CompStat – or computer statistics is a management tool which pretty much allows police departments unprecedented control over crime statistics. Proponents claim that it allows police to quickly see and get atop of emerging crime patterns. Detractors claim that it can easily be abused to manipulate crime data so that improvements appear to be occurring where none actually occur.

CompStat vastly increases sensitivity to crime statistics all up and down the policing hierarchy and this, in turn, creates the sensation that “the numbers are everything”, which can lead to some fast and tricky play with the books. For example, a department which records 100 aggravated assaults and 400 cases of simple assaults in a year can easily create an illusory sense of improvement by using CompStat meetings to push for the qualitative reclassification of these crimes. If police manage to reclassify 75 aggravated assaults as simple, they can create the illusion of a huge drop in crime when, in fact, not much has happened.

In fact, CompStat has already been implemented in Brazil – in São Paulo – and, true to expectations, crime stats have dropped drastically. CompStat true believers will, of course, say this points out the system’s excellence. Anyone who understands the history of policing in Brazil, however, has cause to doubt that such a huge drop could, in fact, occur practically overnight simply through the implementation of what is effectively crime mapping. An integral component of the CompStat process is that it creates an enormous amount of “accountability” and thus competition between departments. The temptation to doctor statistics in such an environment is enormous and, of course, there’s no independent oversight to the process: we basically accept – or don’t accept – what the cops tell us.

But hey, the Military Police of Brazil would never lie to us, the citizenry, would they? Just looking at their corporate history should be enough to quell the doubts in any loyal citizens heart. If you know what’s good for you, that is…

Compared to Rio and São Paulo’s cops, the NYPD is a model of liberality and respect for human rights. Even so, the implementation of “zero tolerance” and CompStat on Mayor Rudy’s watch led to a distinctly human rights unfriendly environment. Several unarmed suspects were tortured and killed by the NYPD on Rudy’s watch, the most notorious case being the that of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was brutally sodomized by New York’s finest with a broken broomstick after being picked up for disorderly conduct in 1997. The general atmosphere of the Giuliani reign in New York was one of extreme disrespect for the rights of any human being who couldn’t afford a top-notch lawyer.

So this is the model which we are about to import to Rio de Janeiro, a city whose record of police violence and corruption is extremely well-documented. To the PM’s armored cars and assault helicopters, we shall now add an official ideology that sees any infraction as tantamount to murder and a computer statistics management program which will allow the police an unprecedented amount of control over the crime rate (on paper, if not in actuality).

What we are set to see is another assault on the poor of this city in the name of “hygiene” and “order”, the likes of which has not been seen since the Pereira Passos period in the early 20th century.

Is it too much to wonder whether the result will not be another revolt on the order of the Revolta da Vacina…?

Black women and white men

by Thaddeus
A recent trip to the U.S. really brought home the bi-racial dating issue to me. On our last three voyages to the U.S., Ana and I've noticed quite a few bi-racial couples, but always and without exception white women with black men. On this trip, we had a 24 hour layover in Atlanta and went out to see the city. Returning via MARTA to the airport after a long day, I leaned up against Ana, laying my head on her shoulder and closing my eyes. 10 minutes later, when I opened them again, the entire car was scowling at us.

It freaked Ana out more than me, to be sure. And what really freaked her out was the fact that all the passengers were black: "It was as if I was betraying the race," she said. "And yet I never see those kind of looks directed against black men - white women couples. What, because I'm a woman I can't sleep outside the race? Is that the deal here?"

Ironically enough, I'd just bought a library's worth of books about miscegenation, black women and interracial relationships in the U.S., so I've been reading up on this topic. Furthermore, Ana's recent line of research at USP ("What is it about Brazilian women?") touches on this point as does my on-going work with prostitutes and clients on Copacabana.

To put it simply, many authors have noted that one of the main differences between the Brazilian and American flavors of race relations is that heterochromatic relationships have traditionally encountered more (though far from total) acceptance in Brazil. This has led many Brazilians to conclude that Brazil is "less racist than the U.S". Meanwhile, Americans - and especially Black Americans - often feel that Brazilian tolerance of heterochromatic sex and marriage is, in fact, an expression of deepset and unchallenged white supremacist values. One can easily see these positions illustrated when one looks at both countries' literature, cinema and T.V. programing. Regarding sex between white men and black women, almost every single pop source I've ever seen in the U.S. situates these in a context of rape or extreme sexual exploitation. Meanwhile, Brazilian pop sources generally understand the same thing to be an expression of love which radically transcends the social limitations imposed by racism.

My view of the subject has yet to jell, but I feel I know enough to conclusively reject both the common American and Brazilian views regarding sex between black women/white men to be so much myth-making bullshit. Obviously, unequal power relations in both countries during and after slavery created massive opportunities for sexual exploitation and violence and just as obviously, the history of sexual and affective relations between black women and white men cannot be reduced to an unending sequence of rape and prostitution.

I`ve just finished reading J.W. Cash`s The Mind of the South (1940) and have found his views on the south's "rape complex" to be very illuminating and I can't help but wonder if this doesn't somehow play into current American views on sex between black women and white men. Basically, Cash takes a look at the claims and counterclaims regarding supposed black rape of white women in the south (remember that he was writing in 1940). While basically believing that such rapes were very few in number, Cash artfully sidesteps the whole issue by focusing on another point entirely. According to Cash, though "the actual danger [of black on white rape] was small,  it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the [white] South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held off". This because, again according to Cash, the idea of virginal, pure, white southern womanhood was central to the notion of southern identity and "with this in view, it is obvious that the assault on the South would be felt as, in some true sense, an assault on her also."

We strike back to the fact that this Southern woman's place in the Southern mind proceeded primarily from the natural tendency of the great basic pattern of pride in superiority of race to center upon her as the perpetuator of that superiority in legitimate line, and attached itself precisely, and before everything else, to her enormous remoteness from the males of the inferior group, to the absolute taboo on any sexual approach to her by the Negro.... If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and  lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage?

What the Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the condition of Reconstruction was a passage for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a condition, moreover, which logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the  term "rape" stood as truly as  for the de facto deed. (Cash, 1940: 116)

Now, what I'm wondering is if something like this isn't what's currently operating in the U.S. today when we turn to black women and white men dating.

I do not wish to claim that Black American notions of peoplehood are simply a rerun (or a photo negative) of Southern White notions of the same: there are obviously many differences. However, it seems to me that there are certain general continuities between the two which might usefully illustrate the topic at hand. First and foremost, Black Americans' notions of identity are generally American concepts and by this I mean that Black Americans have not escaped from belief in  blood, heritage and purity which have traditionally informed American notions of self and Other. More importantly, it seems to me that Black Americans have deeply imbibed from the well of American belief in exceptionalism and manifest destiny.

In short, like their Southern White cousins, Black Americans have a tendency to see themselves as a people marked by an essentially homogenous past and set of experiences which transcend class, region and even history. Furthermore, this sense of "peopleness" is characterized by a belief in the blood transmission of said identity. Finally, like Americans in general, Black Americans tend to believe that, as a people, they have a  special relationship to God or Destiny - that they are a chosen people, in other words.

(I should take a moment here to point out the obvious: I am speaking in generalizing terms here, creating ideal types which might help us to discuss large-scale social phenomena. I am most emphatically not saying that everyone of such and such a type or nationality or whatever behaves in such and sort a way. I'm talking here about patterns and trends, not determinist laws. What I think we can say is that when you see a theme repeated a gazillion times in T.V. sitcoms, paperback romances, or on Oprah, one can say that it's a theme that has a certain impact on a given society, whether or not every single individual within said society agrees with it.)

Given all this, it seems to me that one of the things that makes black women's relationships with white men a relatively taboo subject in the U.S. is this abiding belief in Woman as the Mother of the Race, a belief whose ultimate matrix is precisely that southern enobling of womanhood as the centerpoint of racial identity that Cash talks about. Now, as far as this goes, this isn't such a peculiar thing: many anthropologists, after all, have pointed out that women are understood to be the "womb of the people" the world over. However, it seems to me that what gives this question a particular vehemence in the U.S. is the generalized American belief in themselves as an expansionist people with a particular covenant with God. In this sort of situation, marrying or dating outside of one's race can never be seen as a personal choice, but as an act which materially decreases the possibility that God's People will finally encounter salvation through the creation of heaven on Earth.

Artigo de Milton Ribeiro sobre o caso Geisy

Milton Ribeiro postou um artigo excelente sobre o caso Geisy aqui. Nos o traduzimos e esperamos que o Milton não veja problema com isto!

Milton Ribeiro has posted an excellent article on the Geisy case and we have taken the libery of translating it.

I spent most of this morning reading about Geisy Vila Nova Arruda, the girl who was virtually bitch-slapped and almost lynched and is now expelled from Uniban University in São Bernardo do Campo. 20 year old Geisy showed up at school for her classes in tourism dressed in a hot pink micro-skirt. This provoked the ire of the student body who tried to push her out of the school. The young lady needed to be taken under police protection and was removed from Uniban's corredors to shouts of “whore, whore!” It's not as simple as all that, however. Students accuse her of showing her ass in the corridor, provoking them and acting like a prostitute outside the classroom.

I say "So what?"

The Hottest Spot North of Havana: Why Gringos Come to Rio for Sex

Americans often ask, “Why are so many men going to Rio de Janeiro for sex?” This is often followed by another question:“What is it that Brazilian women have that American women don’t?”

It is this second question – the presumption that Brazilian women are somehow sexually unique – that ends up obfuscating the first.

Welcome to O Mangue!

Welcome to "O Mangue", our blog which presents information and opinions about life in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, concentrating on sex, race, class and those damned foreigners who make this city their home.