RACE AND POLITICS IN BRAZIL

RACE AND POLITICS IN BRAZIL THE AFRICAN-BRAZILIANS

Early History of the African-Brazilian Community • Portuguese as slave traders • Brazil: first stop on the transit of Africans to the New World • Colonial period: most African slaves end up in the Northeast

Atlantic Ocean

Plantations of Colonial and 19th Century Brazil • Daily life on the eughenios and the fazendas • Patriarchial organization • Authority of Portuguese Don absolute • Physical work done by the African slaves • Influence of the Africans permeated life of the plantations

Brazilian Highlands

African Influence • The propinquity of the races within the regime of slavery enabled African culture to leave its stamp on the Luso-Brazilian civilization. The little white child … had been suckled by a black nurse who sang African lullabies as she rocked him …

African Influence • At the age when the mind is most malleable, most susceptible to outside impressions and influences, he was impregnated with totally African values..

Later, when his sexual awakening began, he would watch the Negro women bathing naked in the river and wear himself out in enervating, more or less erotic games with the little black girls, finally “proving his manhood” with some black girl he happened to meet in the fields

Dynamics of Miscegenation He would have an endless series of black mistresses and father an infinite number of mulatto babies. And the influence of Africa did not end when he passed from childhood to adolescence but maintained its subtle hold throughout his life, chiefly through this eroticism, this worship of the black Venus (Bastide 1978, 69)

Politics of Emancipation (1870’s/1880’s) • Growing information about emancipation in other countries • Number of run-aways increased dramatically • Emancipation (1887)

Frente Negra Brazileira (1931) • First explicitly political African-Brazilian organization • Opposed immigrants on the grounds that they foreigners • Gétulio Vargas demoblized the FNB after he imposed O Estado Novo

Teatro Experimental do Negro (post- 1946) • Elitist mobilization • Early identification of masses in Carnival groups • Laid basis for African-Brazilians as a political interest group

Myth of Racial Democracy - Reality of Mechanism of Control? • Classic thesis of Gilberto Freyre (1933) • “There is no color bar to advancement, there is no social bar to advancement” • Persistence of stereotypes • Carnival in the 1990’s • Shifting sands metaphor • “Whitening” policy

Myth of Racial Democracy – Economic Realities • Black males – wages 40% lower than white males • Black females – wages 75% lower than those of white males

Bahia

Military Rule and the Political Status of African Brazilians • Afro-Brazilian movement of the 1970’s born around cultural – as opposed to political issues • Salvador as the geopolitical focus of African-Brazilian mobilization • “Black Soul” phenomenon – focus on music • Instituto de Pesquisa das Cultural Negras (Rio de Janeiro)

Movimiento Negro Unificado • Protest against torture • Integrated race and class to make political demands • Raised racial consciousness among the black population

African-Brazilians and the New Democracy • Exercise of leadership at local level but few African-Brazilian leaders at state and national level • New generation of African-Brazilian leaders continues to have mixed feelings toward the Brazilian state • Brazilian political culture still tends not to recognize political organizational focus other than class • International influences

RACE AND POLITICS IN BRAZIL