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.

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.