An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture

Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 6, 2004 An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA University of CaliforniaSan Diego ABSTRACT: ‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil. For almost half a century many studies of Brazilian racial conditions have been proving that racial democracy is, after all, a myth. What else is there to say about race and the nation in Brazil? Quite a bit if one is not invested in the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ and ventures to explore of how ‘modern mythologies’ — the ‘white mythologies’ Jacques Derrida and others have unpacked — play out here, producing the social (juridical, economic, and moral) configurations within which men and women of colour exist as subaltern subjects. While they do not radically depart from studies that denounce racial democracy as the main instrument of racial subjection in Brazil, the papers published in this issue of Social Identities avoid (re)producing the predicament of the Brazilian culture — i.e., the need to demonstrate that widespread miscegenation does not render the Brazilian subject an affectable (pathological) consciousness. This claim is at the core of the main national constructs of whitening and racial democracy. In many contemporary analyses of racial subjection, it is displaced onto the black Brazilian subject. By contrast, the papers collected here deploy historical, legal, sociological, and anthropological analytical methodologies to show how representations of blackness produced in this construction of the Brazilian subject demarcate the subaltern social positions black (here I include mestiços) Brazilians occupy in contemporary Brazil. In doing so, they challenge the pervasive view that, because of the powerful grip racial democracy holds over Brazilian (white and black) minds, the racial does not configure this country’s political landscape. My task in this introduction is to situate the papers published in this Special Issue of Social Identities among the current trend of studies of Brazilian racial 1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 On-line/04/060719-16  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000323950 720 Denise Ferreira da Silva conditions. Much of the recent scholarship on racial subjection in Brazil is informed by the conclusions of the 1970s and 1980s sociological (quantitative) studies that demonstrate that race operates as a principle of social exclusion, determining black Brazilians’ subordinate social trajectories (most notably in formal education, employment, and income). By deploying the conceptual and methodological arsenal of the sociology of race relations, this line of investigation, which here I call the Escola Carioca (Carioca School) of Race Relations, challenges both the hegemonic national construction of Brazil as a racial democracy and previous sociological descriptions of Brazil’s social (juridical, economic, and moral) configuration.1 Though informed by the Carioca paradigm, the four papers I have included here move beyond this dominant scholarship — and depart from previous social scientific accounts of the Brazilian racial conditions. They deploy historical, sociological, legal, and anthropological analyses to reveal how racial democracy governs the cultural, economic, and gender mechanisms of subjection that demarcate the subaltern social positions blacks have inhabited post-slavery Brazil. The Brazilian Schools of Race Relations Following the prevailing account of racial subjection, what I call the logic of exclusion,2 Brazilian students of race relations could not but deny race any political significance in the modern Brazilian social configuration. In the 1950s and 1960s, the works of the Escola Paulista, as this body of analysis would be known, explained the instances of ‘race’ or ‘colour prejudice’ they identified as expressions of the persistence of traditional strongholds in the ‘yet to be modernized’ Brazilian social space. This explanation perhaps was to be expected, given that the arsenal of modernization theory guides these investigations. It was ironic, nevertheless, as the work of the Escola Paulista resulted from a project funded by UNESCO aiming to explain why the Brazilian social configuration was not fraught with the ‘problem of race relations’.3 Instead of breaking the code of the tropical racial paradise, however, these investigations would end up revealing that the racial indeed constitutes a principle operating in post-slavery Brazil. Because these studies already assumed that the Brazilian social configuration was ruled by both modern and traditional principles, it is not surprising that these accounts would resemble Robert E. Park’s (1950) description of the post-Slavery U.S. South. Since the 1970s, another body of work, the Escola Carioca, has been deploying the logic of exclusion to challenge the Paulista statement that ‘race prejudice’ is a leftover of traditional Brazil.4 To be sure, the importance of these studies does not reside in any theoretical innovation regarding the workings of racial subjection in Brazil but from the fact that their conclusions challenge both the allegory of the Brazilian racial paradise and the Paulista conclusion that modernization would lead to the disappearance of all mechanisms of racial subjection. Though the predicament of Brazilian culture results, as I argue elsewhere (Silva, forthcoming), from how the racial situates Brazil in the modern global configuration, there is no question that it accounts for why these An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 721 deployments of the logic of exclusion have reached conclusions that contradict what the arsenal of the sociology of race relations has taught them to expect. The Paulista School What distinguishes the Paulista school, as the deployment of the arsenal of the sociology of race relations, is the fact that it also follows the modernization theory’s argument that postcolonial societies, like Brazil, still retained traditional principles which would be eliminated with the universalization of Brazilian culture (‘norms and values’). Not surprisingly, unlike the early sociology of race relations’ view that the ‘race problem’ does not trouble traditional (hierarchical) societies (Park, 1950), the Paulista studies concluded that ‘race prejudice’ and ‘racial discrimination’ would disappear with the complete (cultural) modernization of Brazil precisely because miscegenation was eliminating racial difference as the visible signs of cultural difference, which gives rise to them. More importantly, these investigations also depart from previous historical analyses — such as Tannenbaum (1946) and Pierson (1942) — which deploy the arsenal of race relations in their respective analyses of post-slavery Brazil. In the Paulista studies, one finds a rewriting of miscegenation as a signifier of Brazil’s particularity combined with the construction of ‘race prejudice’ as a socio-historical (cultural and ideological) signifier of the nation’s particularity which enables the severance of the link between miscegenation and racial democracy that sustains the prevailing construction of the Brazilian nation. For this reason, instead of constituting a complete rupture with these earlier views of Brazil’s social configuration, by linking ‘race prejudice’ to traditional Brazil and retaining miscegenation as a natural signifier of Brazil’s difference, these studies would add to the hegemonic construction of the nation the argument that the concept of class rather than the racial captures the mechanisms of social subjection in Brazil. With this, not only do they provide a sociological version of the main claim of the framers of the racial democracy thesis, but they also add another dimension to the predicament of Brazilian culture, namely, the construction of the Brazilian social configuration as still permeated by traditional (hierarchical/patriarchal) principles, which hampered its ability to reconfigure as a modern (liberal-capitalist) society. In Negros e Brancos in São Paulo, Fernandes and Bastide (1952) reiterate Pierson’s conclusions, but rather than immediately writing Brazil as a social configuration free of racial subjection, they explain ‘race prejudice’ (which they rename ‘colour prejudice)’ as an effect of social (class/status) difference. For Fernandes and Bastide, the co-existence of expressions of ‘race prejudice’ and miscegenation results from the prevailing ‘racial ideology’ — ‘the [national] prejudice, Brazil’s fidelity to its ideal of racial democracy’ (p. 164) — which leads many Brazilians to hide their ‘race prejudice’. This, however, does not contradict the ‘race relations cycle’ because the forces of miscegenation work against this ‘racial ideology’. Two processes ‘prove’ their thesis. On the one hand, they argue that the fact that opposition to blacks was more evident among the upper strata, ‘traditional families’ and the bourgeoisie of foreign origin suggested that a function of ‘race prejudice’ is to maintain the previous 722 Denise Ferreira da Silva ‘social order’ and to prevent the modernizing of blacks and mestiços by creating ‘racial solidarity’ among the white population, which would facilitate domination and protect them from economic competition with the blacks and mulattos. On the other hand, their observations show an absence of ‘race prejudice’ in working-class neighbourhoods, which indicates that ‘colour stereotype [in Brazil] is at bottom class prejudice’ (p. 179). What the severance of the link between racial democracy and miscegenation entails is the writing of the latter as a substantive trait in Brazil’s social conditions, as an effect of its particular historical trajectory. Moreover, the ‘discovery’ this gesture enables serves two purposes. Not only does it testify to the universal applicability of the arsenal of the sociology of race relations by showing that miscegenation does eliminate racial subjection, but it also proves the logic of modernization, according to which ‘cultural changes’ are crucial for the institution of modern social configurations. More importantly, it also has the added effect of giving Brazil points in the global race for modernization, which seems to require the obliteration of anything that signifies otherwise. For instance, according to the authors, in the United States, ‘racial segregation’ has benefited blacks because it forced them to create their own banks of credit, universities, schools, etc. (…) however there remains a state of tension which Brazil ignores due to intensive miscegenation. Hence, the advantage of the Brazilian ‘solution to the racial problem’, over the United States, they argue, resides precisely in how miscegenation progressively eliminates color oppositions … thus, tending to abolish the racial problem in the best manner possible, simply suppressing the races. (p. 204) Nevertheless, while it constructs miscegenation as a ‘natural’ process, the result inter-racial sexual intercourse would extricate from the racial democracy thesis, the Paulista arsenal also rewrites miscegenation as a social scientific strategy, as a socio-historical (cultural) category, by deploying it as a category of social difference.5 In O Negro no Rio de Janeiro, a study of ‘race prejudice’ among Rio de Janeiro’s high school students, L. Costa Pinto (1952) deploys Myrdal’s (1994) framework that defines ‘race prejudice’ as ‘rationalization of beliefs’. Rehearsing the Paulista’s basic account of Brazilian racial conditions, Costa Pinto attributes their persistence to how the impact of Brazilian social modernization upon the ‘coloured population’ entails the deployment of this protective mechanism of the ‘traditional social order’. When addressing the effect of miscegenation, he takes up the two Paulista conclusions which now inform — and which the pieces in this issue engage — hegemonic representations of the Brazilian racial configuration, namely that, in Brazil, it is virtually impossible to separate class from racial determinants of social subjection and that miscegenation has a rather porous ‘colour line’. ‘In a society where class positions and ethnicity were so clearly identified’, he notes, the whiter, or less black, the individual — the greater were his opportu- An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 723 nities of transposing the barriers to social mobility which depended directly on color or on other apparently ethnic traits. What his study shows is that mulattoes are the main targets of white high school students’ prejudice which, he explains, results from the advantage of the mulatto over the black [and] seems to be compensated by the fact that, as a consequence, the mulatto is always closer than the negro to cross the social line of color. That is, miscegenation here becomes a signifier of social (status) difference. This definition of position is a daily problem, permanent, constant, many times dramatic, not always conscious, lived [he argues], by all Brazilian mulattoes who are in the process of acquiring a social status from that occupied by the overwhelming majority of those who are ethnically similar and of those from whom he socially distances himself. (pp. 216–17) Undoubtedly, separating miscegenation and racial democracy was the most effective strategic move of the Escola Paulista intervention. It thus became possible to construct the expressions of ‘race prejudice’ captured for the first time in their investigations as effects of the country’s ‘modernization’ without conceiving them as the governing principle of modern Brazilian configuration. Not only did it allow the Paulista studies to remain faithful to the sociology of racial relations’ conclusions that attribute the absence of ‘race prejudice’ in a postslavery configuration to widespread miscegenation. More importantly, this split also made it possible to think of racial democracy as an ideological strategy that had no fundamental link with miscegenation, which is rewritten as a substantive (natural, as in god-given) signifier of historical difference and is taken to give Brazil its particularity. Re-signified as an ideological mechanism that hides and fosters ‘traditional norms and values’ connecting social and racial difference, racial democracy would then follow the expected destiny of ‘race prejudice’, the particular interests of a traditional (patriarchal/hierarchical) elite which was losing ground with the modernization of the Brazilian social (juridical, economic, and moral) configuration. Elsewhere (Silva, 2001) I show how, much like other social scientific accounts of racial subjection, the Paulista studies also construct the Brazilian racial subaltern as a pathological (affectable) social subject. Here, I expand the discussion to indicate how this re-presentation is tied to the predicament of Brazilian culture, i.e., the nation’s fragile status as a modern social configuration. My point is that the identification of the causes for the emergence of this particular racial subaltern subject reflects the combined effect of the construction of miscegenation as a substantive signifier of Brazil’s (historical) particularity and the sociology of race relations’ (scientific) assumption that as miscegenation eliminates racial difference, the conditions for racial subjection cease to exist. In A Integração do Negro na Sociedade de Classes, Florestan Fernandes ([1964] 1978) examines the effect of post-slavery Brazilian political-economic modern- 724 Denise Ferreira da Silva ization upon the black and mestiço population. According to Fernandes, blacks and mestiços exhibit ‘mental and behavior patterns’, ‘cultural handicaps’ inherited from their previous conditions which rendered them unable to compete in the ‘free social order’ with the European immigrants. From this ‘moral’ incapacity to integrate into modern society results a ‘vicious circle’ which prevents blacks and mestiços from moving out of the situation of economic dispossession in which they found themselves after emancipation. In the early 1960s, Fernandes argues, blacks and mestiços are incarcerated at the margins of modern Brazilian society, in a situation of ‘structural dislocation’, a permanent state of ‘social disorganization’ suffering from the ‘social pathologies’ usually connected with them. ‘[L]ife under permanent conditions of social disorganization’, he explains, turned into a cultural tradition and invisible chain. This could only be unquestionably broken at one point: when the ‘negro’ dared to break the edges of his rural conception of the world and assault the ethical code of the inclusive society. Then, for better or worse, the ‘marginal’ and the ‘criminal’ could appear as successful people with their own destiny. (pp. 146–47) This writing of the racial subaltern consciousness in Brazil would have an additional twist. In the absence of ‘race segregation’, ‘cultural incapacity’ becomes the immediate cause of black Brazilians’ subaltern position. Not only did ‘degraded social conditions’ prevent the emergence, and survival, of institutions which would apply the dominant ‘values’ to the black community and maintain them in conditions of ‘moral’ isolation. They likewise prevent the formation of ‘social bonds’ which would enable blacks to act as a ‘group’, in attempting to transform these conditions. They would prevent, in other words, the emergence of a black self-consciousness — of the kind of racial (‘inauthentic Negro’) consciousness Park (1950) characterizes as an effect of incompleted/ borrowed modernization. Because blacks and mestiços did not constitute a ‘historically integrated racial minority’, Fernandes notes, there was a tendency to the ‘pulverizing and individualizing of individuals’ aspirations to social uplift’ (p. 240). Nonetheless, here again, the determinants of this affectable consciousness are the cultural/ideological, social-historical strategies deployed by a dominant ‘racial group’. For Fernandes, the ‘archaic behavioral and mental patterns’ prevailing among the Brazilian elite contributed to the subjection of blacks and mestiços. Instead of creating ‘racial antagonisms’ and the mechanism of ‘race segregation’, the prevailing ‘racial ideology’ — the ‘myth of racial democracy’ — relied on a rather distinct strategy to maintain the status quo. The ideological principle ruling the first five decades of modernization, the ‘myth of racial democracy’ operates in many ways, but more importantly, Fernandes argues, it produced a false consciousness by reducing and evaluating the relations between blacks and whites through the exteriority and appearance of the racial adjustments. (p. 255) Its ‘traditionalist and patrimonialist’ basis had also prevented the moderniza- An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 725 tion of Brazilian social conditions and arrangements. It prevented, in short, democratic ‘values and norms’ that informed the relations between whites and blacks and mestiços (p. 269). These unremitting traces of the ‘traditional order’, he concludes, contribute to the ‘Brazilian racial dilemma’ which, he names a problem of ‘cultural lag’. Though it employs the arsenal of the sociology of race relations, and confirms its validity as a scientific toolbox, the Escola Paulista reaches an unexpected conclusion, a feat only possible for investigations of a social configuration which failed to exhibit the basic requirement of the prevailing account of racial subjection, i.e. the socio-logic of exclusion. Highlighting the absence of ‘race segregation’ and widespread miscegenation, the Paulista studies conclude (not without some conceptual and interpretive gymnastics) that ‘race prejudice’ was but a manifestation of traditional ‘cultural and behavioral patterns’, that racial subjection results from Brazil’s incomplete modernization, the co-existence of a (modern) economic configuration and (traditional) cultural principles, which would disappear once the country had been fully modernized. With this version of the logic of obliteration, the Escola Paulista investigations introduced two competing statements on racial subjection in Brazil. With few exceptions, Brazilian social scientists and intellectuals would privilege the claim that in modern Brazil class rather than the racial operates as a mechanism of social subjection, and black activists and intellectuals privilege the statement that ‘race prejudice’ does rule the Brazilian social order. What these apparently contradictory appropriations of the Paulista conclusions indicate is how the logic of exclusion limits our understanding of how the racial produces social subjects (Silva, 2001). The Carioca School Precisely for this reason, because it also deploys an arsenal informed by the logic of exclusion, two interrelated questions threaten to undermine the Escola Carioca’s analysis of the mechanisms of racial subjection in contemporary Brazil. How can an ‘anti-racist racial ideology’, racial democracy, co-exist with high levels of ‘racial [socio-economic] inequalities?’ Why don’t these inequalities lead to the emergence of ‘race consciousness’ among black Brazilians? As a critique of the Escola Paulista, the Carioca school could not but inherit the latter’s reformulation of the ‘problem of race relations’ in Brazil. And yet it would unleash a powerful critique of these earlier studies, by re-uniting miscegenation and racial democracy. This has now become the dominant paradigm in studies of racial subjection in Brazil, which assumes that the study of black Brazilian’s self-representations will answer the question of why and how they inhabit subaltern social positions. In Discriminação e Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil, Carlos Hasenbalg (1979) introduces an analysis of the Brazilian social configuration that inaugurates the Carioca version of race relations. In this study of ‘racial inequality’ in Brazil, he challenges the Paulista argument that blacks’ and mestiços’ subaltern condition results from traditional ‘cultural patterns’ that emerged during slavery and the years immediately following emancipation. He argues that, since the abolition 726 Denise Ferreira da Silva of slavery, racism has informed Brazilian society where it has ensured members of the dominant ‘racial group’ the monopoly of more prestigious and materially rewarding positions in the class structure. To be born black or mulatto in Brazil [he concludes], normally means to be born in low status families. The probabilities of escaping the limitations linked to a low social position are considerably smaller for nonwhites than for whites of the same social origin. By comparison with whites, non-whites suffer a competitive disadvantage in all phases of the process of status transmission. (pp. 220–21) Not ‘cultural incapacity’, he concludes, but the operations of racial difference, as an ‘ascriptive’ feature, a ‘criterion of social selection’, promote unequal opportunities of ‘social mobility’ for blacks and mestiços, determining their concentration in the least prestigious positions in the occupational system, limited access to formal education, and lower income. Hasenbalg’s study provides ample statistical evidence of the effects of the operations of the racial, in raising the question of how racial democracy and miscegenation co-exist with ‘racial inequality’. To address this question, Hasenbalg re-deploys the argument already introduced in the Escola Paulista account that ‘racial democracy’ is a repressive strategy of power (an ‘ideology of domination’) which operates by controlling ‘interior racist sentiments’, imposing the ‘disguise [of] discriminatory practices’, and undermining political mobilization among blacks and mestiços. Two factors, he argues, have prevented ‘high levels of racial antagonism and objective forms of collective action on the part of the racially subordinate groups’. Though it results in part from the lack of resources for ‘social mobilization’, mostly, he argues, it derives from the fact that Brazilian white elites have deployed several mechanisms to assure the ‘acceptance of the racially subordinated’: controlled social mobility of its light-skinned members, ideological manipulation, and the deployment (or threat to) of violent repressive strategies (p. 225). Reuniting racial democracy and miscegenation, Hasenbalg’s critique of the Paulista school ascribes the latter’s statement on the causes of black subjection to another articulation of the ruling ‘ideologies of domination’. According to Hasenbalg, the ‘whitening thesis’ and the ‘myth of racial democracy’ are the primary ideological weapons of ‘racial subordination’ in Brazil. They ‘socialize the whole Brazilian population and prevent areas of potential conflict’. The ‘whitening thesis’, he argues, has produced a system of ‘racial classification’, the ‘color continuum’, which implies the fragmentation of racial identity among non-whites and the transformation of the potential of collective action in individual expectations of upward mobility. (p. 238) Thus, what Fernandes sees as resulting from degraded social conditions partly maintained by black and mestiço Brazilians’ ‘mental backwardness’, Hasenbalg explains as an effect of the dominant ‘racial ideology’, which operates by placing upon blacks and mestiços the responsibility for their subaltern con- An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 727 dition. This, in turn, enables Hasenbalg to argue that manifestations of ‘race prejudice’ derive from social (status or class) rather than from racial difference. Much of the Carioca scholarship has been dedicated to gathering sociological evidence of racial exclusion in Brazil. Deploying models to measure patterns of social mobility and income distribution, educational trajectory, and demographic indicators, they consistently demonstrate that blacks and mestiços remain concentrated on the margins, or altogether outside, of Brazilian capitalism.6 More importantly, they effectively challenge the conventional (sociological) wisdom produced in Pierson’s and the Escola Paulista interpretations that mestiços suffer no restriction to ‘social mobility’ by demonstrating that the differentials in terms of occupation, income, and education between them and black Brazilians are insignificant. As it appears in the works of the Escola Carioca, Brazilian social arrangements differ little from those of the United States.7 Nevertheless, their deployment of the arsenal of the sociology of race relations becomes problematic because the absence of ‘race segregation’ renders its strategies incapable of distinguishing the effects of racial from class subjection. For instance, Telles (1993) counters the Paulista argument that class rather than racial difference determines patterns of residential distribution in Brazilian cities. He concludes that Brazil’s lack of ‘extreme segregation’ may be explained by the absence of juridical mechanisms of segregation. But the evidence of ‘moderate’ racial segregation within the same socio-economic status and the concentration of blacks and mestiços in certain urban residential areas indicate that class is not the sole principle of residential distribution. Nevertheless, Telles opens the door to a class explanation when commenting on the concentration of the white middle-class in certain residential areas and on the ‘relatively limited [racial] segregation’ among the urban economically dispossessed population. What I am suggesting here is that the predicament of Brazilian culture, produced in the hegemonic constructions of the Brazilian nation — whitening and racial democracy — and re-produced in the Paulista studies haunts the Escola Carioca, as indicated in studies of ‘racial classification’ among working class Brazilians’ ‘race consciousness’. Pacheco (1997), for instance, studies race/ colour classification among low-income residents of a favela, where she finds a multiple ‘system of racial classification’ which is circumstantial, relational, and ambiguous. Its primary effect, she argues, is to avoid the use of the extreme colour categories, black and white, by privileging personal relations, such as family ties, and by using other attributes with no explicit ‘racial connotation’. This is revealed by the fact that working-class Brazilians are well-aware of the inferiority indicated in the term black (preto or negro) and the superiority implicit in the term white. For this reason, they only employ these terms in the absence of the person being classified or to mark ‘distance’ from the referred individual. As expected, Pacheco suggests that miscegenation and racial democracy provide ‘material’ and ‘cultural’ support for patterns of ‘racial identification’. Racial identification, in turn, perceives but refuses to articulate the ‘distance’ signified in black and white bodies. These identifications appear in two common practices. On the one hand, references to ‘practices of miscegenation’ are taken to support the argument that the favela residents are not 728 Denise Ferreira da Silva racist; on the other hand, the attempt to avoid ‘opposition and conflict’ produces speech that articulates universality, which privileges equality, friendship, and social solidarity. This concern with the ‘system of racial classification’ prevailing among working-class Brazilians signals the question haunting the Carioca school’s ‘successful’ account of Brazilian racial conditions. If the sociological machinery so effectively reveals the operations of racism in Brazil’s social configuration, why has this ‘truth’ yet to become self-evident to the majority of Brazilians, as it was for U.S. blacks and South Africans? To which I add another one: why has it become such a powerful weapon in the hands of the black Brazilian movement, an unavoidable question on the left, and a crucial theme in recent projects of re-configuring Brazil along neo-liberal lines, as the Cardoso and Luiz Lula da Silva’s administrations’ affirmative action policies indicate — while still remaining an uncomfortable one to everyone else? Elsewhere, I approach the latter question by discussing how sociological studies have been crucial to the formulation of contemporary black Brazilian discourse (Silva, 2001) and by examining how the new account of racial subjection — which stresses on the need to promote policies that include social subaltern subjects not only juridically and economically but also culturally, i.e. the principle of cultural liberty articulated in the 2004 Human Development Report — at work in the contemporary global configuration are once again entailing a rewriting of the narrative of the Brazilian nation (Silva, 2002). Regarding the first (more problematic) question, I think, it indicates the operation of another social scientific account of racial subjection, which has also become a strategy of racial subjection, namely the logic of obliteration.8 When combined with the modernization theory, in the Paulista perspective, this account of racial subjection leads to the separation of miscegenation and racial democracy that enables the writing of racial subjection as an effect of traditional (cultural) principles; in Carioca studies it entails their reunion in the view of racial democracy as a powerful ideological strategy which, contra the pervasive logic of exclusion, produces racial subjection by obliterating its ‘empirical’ referent, i.e. racial difference, renders the arsenal of the sociology of race relations insufficient to capture how the racial governs Brazil’s social configuration. Precisely this inability, which the logic of exclusion places at the core analyses of racial subjection, of conceiving the racial as a modern political concept has resulted in the proliferation of studies of racial politics in Brazil which would reproduce the argument that the ‘fact’ of miscegenation and the pervasiveness of racial democracy explain the black Brazilian movement’s failure. Though these studies correctly identify a distinct mode of racial subjection, their conceptual arsenal constructs the Brazilian social configuration as a sociological paradox. They rewrite the predicament of the Brazilian culture when describing Brazil’s as a post-slavery social configuration in which the fulfillment of miscegenation’s task — the obliteration of racial difference and of the social subjects it entails — had not been followed by its necessary consequence, namely the end of racial subjection. An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 729 Where to go from here When investigating black Brazilian social trajectories, the Carioca studies show that they are consistently and firmly placed at the bottom of the Brazilian social pyramid but also that, against expectations, this subaltern positioning is not accompanied by the emergence of racial (black) self-consciousness. Throughout the last decade or so, this has been the focus of numerous studies that deploy the Carioca paradigm, i.e. investigations that focus upon how the racial democracy thesis prevents the emergence of racial consciousness among black Brazilians. For this reason, while they offer valuable insights about how black Brazilians (re)interpret the hegemonic construction of the Brazilian nation, more often than not these works merely reiterate the Carioca studies’ conclusion that miscegenation and racial democracy prevent the emergence of the kind of racial subaltern subject found in the United States. Thus, rewriting black Brazilians not involved in the black movement as the paroxysm of the affectable subject, i.e. as subaltern social entities that lack the minimum conditions for emerging as self-consciousness, namely the ability to recognize their subjugated condition.9 While the papers included in this issue do not radically depart from the Carioca paradigm, they move beyond this prevailing trend to explore historical and structural determinants of racial subjection in Brazil. That is, instead of assuming that racial democracy hampers their emergence of a black self-consciousness and moving on to show prove once again that it does so, the authors engage the question of how this representation of the Brazilian national subject, which informs the prevailing view of how the Brazilian social landscape is and should be configured, institute subaltern regions which are consistently occupied by black Brazilians. As such, they shift from the ‘dominant ideology’ thesis towards the view of national/racial narratives as productive strategies of power and, in doing so, each paper shows how the Brazilian black subject — as any other racial subaltern subject elsewhere, including the United States — emerges as an effect of the particular mode of racial subjection the racial democracy thesis governs, i.e. they examine how this symbolic strategy of racial subjection does its work. Not surprisingly, their descriptions of the Brazilian social configuration do not privilege race or class as the more adequate social scientific device but show how — along with gender — these social categories produce the subaltern social regions black Brazilian inhabit. What one learns in Flávio dos Santos Gomes’s historical investigation is that, while the black peasantry emerges during slavery — many of today’s black rural populations were initially quilombos (maroon communities) — its constitution cannot be separated from the larger process of formation of Brazilian peasantry. By doing so, he provides an account that links the historical subjection of black Brazilians to the most dramatic expression of Brazil’s extreme social inequalities, the land concentration that has produced an increasingly large population of landless peasants. From analyses of quantitative and qualitative material, Claudia Rezende and Marcia Lima’s piece explores the interplay of race and gender, in an investigation of how a particular category of female workers — trabalhadora 730 Denise Ferreira da Silva doméstica (domestic worker) — make sense of their working conditions and relationship with their employers. What their study, which combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies, shows is that, while gender inform the trajectories of domestic workers and their (mostly white middle-class female) employers and the prevailing tendency is to resolve social differences in terms of class distinctions, the representation of blackness — as a signifier of mental inferiority — which mediates these relationships among women do not escape black domestic workers. When examining recent legal cases of racial discrimination, Seth Racusen shows how racial democracy informs a theory of discrimination which rather than privileging the ‘objective’ matters of each case, addresses the ‘subjective’ determinants of a given action. What his research uncovers is that the recent legislation that construct racial discrimination as a criminal act has the expected — in that the racial democracy thesis stipulates that ‘race prejudice’ has no place in Brazilian national consciousness — effect of determining that the Courts will address motivation — which is precisely that which, in criminal cases, tends to favour defendants. Finally, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry’s analyses of urban dwellers’ mobilization against exclusionary urban renewal projects challenges the prevailing argument that, in Brazil, race does not constitute a basis for political organizing. From material collected in ethnographic research in an economically dispossessed neighbourhood in the city Salvador, in the state of Bahia, she produces an account of how negative representations of blackness combine the gendered arrangements that render them more concerned with most immediate dimensions of social existence to create a female-lead social protest against that the project of expulsion of the black population from the city’s central neighbourhoods. Because they neither prove what the Paulista school’s investigations have concluded half a century ago — i.e. once again denouncing racial democracy as a myth — nor do they assume that racial subjection is an effect of false (negative) representations that justify social exclusion, these researchbased pieces suggest that, in Brazil as elsewhere, race is a productive symbolic device, a principle that governs modern social configurations when it produces social subjects that differentially placed in their economic, juridical, and moral dimensions. Denise Ferreira da Silva teaches at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego and can be reached at dsilva@weber.ucsd.edu. Notes 1. The core argument of the modernization theory was that a cultural reconfiguration — the substitution of ‘modern’ (universalistic/egalitarian) ‘norms and values’ for ‘traditional’ (hierarchical) — was necessary for non-European (post-colonial or otherwise) to achieve the same high levels of economic development and sustainable modern juridical structures. Its basic premises can be found in Parsons (1951 and 1977) and for the An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 731 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. example of studies that deploy the modernization thesis, see Eisenstadt (1968 and 1970), Nettl and Robertson (1968), and Smeltser (1966). I have coined the term logic of exclusion, or socio-logic of exclusion, to describe the prevailing account of racial subjection deployed in the sociology of race relations. Basically, it refers to the argument that unlike culture and the nation, for instance — which are seen a productive of moral bound even though they function to exclude — race only operates as an exclusionary strategy, as a cultural or ideological device which targets individuals and collectivities with non-white phenotypical traits. For an expanded discussion of this account of racial subjection see Silva (2001 and forthcoming). According to the Brazilian sociologist Luiz Costa Pinto, this project was inspired by Latin American scholars who suggested that UNESCO use ‘Brazil as a laboratory of research for human relations, because of the original nature of social structures existing on this side of the world (…) [which] are characterized by the co-existence, in the already long and painful transitional phase, of problems common to all developed capitalist societies, side by side with problems typical of backward agrarian structures, which recall situations other countries experienced one or more centuries ago. Consequently, the image, sometimes dramatic, these [Latin American] countries presents to the sociologist is that of organisms which, not merely on surface but on the basis and in the very structural plan of its framework, participate simultaneously in two eras, two historical styles, one could even say two worlds’. This term is probably unknown to many. In the mid-1980s, I joined the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos in Rio de Janeiro, where many ‘members’ of this group — who live and work all over Brazil — worked together in a project that challenged the Brazilian social sciences’ disregard for racial subjection, in which the Paulista school text played a central role. We (myself and some of other young social scientists) used to (very teasingly) employ this term to characterize the 1970s writings on race in Brazil within which we began our careers. Without the desire to suggest a paradigm, I use this term not merely for the sake of economy but also because I believe that, more than a theoretical perspective the term Escola Carioca (Carioca School) embodies a political instance which has been a crucial for re-writing race in(to) Brazilian academic and political contexts. In the Paulista text, one also finds a constant theme in later studies of racial subjection in Brazil which, attribute to miscegenation a de-politicizing effect, deriving from the fact that the product of miscegenation, the mulatto, is constructed as a mediator, a buffer of sorts (Degler, 1976). Nonetheless, miscegenation would still haunt Carioca scholars, who would engage in studies of ‘race prejudice’ and ‘racial attitudes’. For instance, Figueira (1990) the Escola Paulista’s argument that ‘race prejudice’ is absent among low-income individuals given their similar social conditions. In her research of high school students in Rio de Janeiro, she found results similar to Costa Pinto (1952) and Cardoso and Ianni (1952). Like these Paulista researchers, who investigated white middle-class students in Rio de 732 Denise Ferreira da Silva 7. 8. 9. Janeiro, São Paulo, and Florianópolis, she also finds a general denial of ‘race prejudice’ and ‘stereotypical’ description of blacks and mestiços. In a study that employs the Bogardus social distance instrument examining interracial marriage, Silva (1987) concludes that — contrary to what is observed in socioeconomic measures — mestiços occupy an intermediary position in relation to blacks and whites, since they show a higher tendency for exogamy which, according to Silva, suggests that the ‘social distance’ operating in interracial marriage does not follow socio-economic hierarchies or, one could suggest, the ‘hierarchies’ of miscegenation. See, among others, Oliveira et al. (1987, 1989); Porcaro (1993); Hasenbalg (1989); Hasenbalg and Silva (1993); Silva and Lima (1992); and Silva (1987). In Silva (forthcoming), I identify two accounts of racial subjection deployed in early twentieth century sociology of race relations, namely the already discussed logic of exclusion and the logic of obliteration. There, I show how the latter is at the core of the this social scientific arsenal, informing its basic strategy, the ‘theory of race and culture contacts’, which is refigured in Park’s (1950) notion of the ‘race relations cycle’, with which he describe the necessary trajectory of racially/culturally ‘inferior’ populations in the modern Anglo-Saxon U.S. society. Basically, it states that when in contact with the latter, these populations would eventually assimilate or amalgamate — i.e. their cultural and racial difference would disappear. See for instance, Andrews (1992): Hanchard (1993); Winant (1995); Twine (1998); and Sheriff (2001). References Andrews, G.R. (1992ba) Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. – (1992) ‘Racial Inequalities in Brazil and the United States; a Statistical Comparison’, Journal of Social History, 26 (2, Winter). Araújo, R.B. (1994) Guerra e Paz, Rio de Janeiro, Editora 34. Azevedo, T. (1966) Cultura e Situação Racial no Brasil, São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Barcelos, L.C. et al. (1991) Catálogo: Escravidão e Relações Raciais no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos. Bastide, R. and F. Fernandes (1952) Brancos e Negros em São Paulo, São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Cardoso, F.H. and O. Ianni (1960) Cor e Mobilidade Social em Florianópolis, São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Costa Pinto, L. (1952) O Negro no Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Cox, O.C. (1948) Caste, Class, and Race, Garden City, NJ.: Doubleday. Degler, C. ([1971] 1986) Neither Black nor White; Slavery and Race in Brazil and the United States, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1968) The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. A Comparative View, New York: Basic Books. – (1970) Readings in Social Evolution and Development, London: Pregamon Press. An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture 733 Fernandes, F. ([1964] 1978) A Integração do Negro na Sociedade de Classes, São Paulo: Editora Ática. Figueira, V.M. (1990) ‘O Preconceito Racial na Escola’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 18: 63–72. Frazier, F. ([1957] 1965) Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, Boston: Beacon Press. – (1968) On Race Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freyre, G. ([1933 [1987) Casa Grande e Senzala, Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora. – (1969) Novo Mundo nos Trópicos, São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Fry, P. (1982) Para Ingles Ver, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Hanchard, M. (1994) Orpheus and Power, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Hasenbalg, C. (1979) Discriminação e Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Graal. – (1987) ‘O Negro nas Vésperas do Centenário’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 13: 79–86. Hasenbalg, C. and N. do V. Silva (1993) ‘Raça e Oportunidades Educacionais no Brasil’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 18: 73–92. – (1993) Estrutura Social, Mobilidade e Raça, Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ & Vertice. Hasenbalg, C. et al. (1989) ‘Notas Sobre Miscegenação no Brasil’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 16: 188–97. Maggie, Y. (1989) ‘Cor, Hierarquia e Sistema de Classificação: a diferença fora do lugar’, in Catálogo Centenário da Abolição, Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Marx, A.W. (1998) Making Race and Nation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maués, M.A.M. (1991) ‘Da ‘Senhora Branca’ ao ‘Negro Herói’: a trajetória de um dicurso racial’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 21: 119–30. Monteiro, H. (1991) O Resurgimento do Movimento Negro na Década de 70, unpublished M.A. thesis, Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Myrdal, G. ([1944] 1962) An American Dilemma, New York: Harper & Row. Nascimento, M.E. (1989) A Estratégia da Desigualdade: o movimento negro nos anos 70, unpublished M.A thesis, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. Nettl, J.P. and R. Robertson (1968) International Systems and the Modernization of Societies, New York: Basic Books. Nogueira, O. (1985) Tanto Preto Quanto Branco, São Paulo: T.A. Queiroz. Oliveira, L.E. et al. (1987) ‘Repensando o Lugar da Mulher Negra’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 13: 87–99. Oliveira, L.E., R.M. Porcaro and T.C. Araújo (1987) ‘Efeitos da Crise na Reprodução da Desigualdade Racial’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 14: 98–108. Pacheco, M. (1986) Famı́lia e Identidade Racial, unpublished M.A. Thesis, Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal Fluminense. – (1987) ‘A Questão da Cor nas Relações de um Grupo de Baixa Renda’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 14: 85–97. Park, R.E. ([1913] 1950) Race and Culture, Glencoe: The Free Press. Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System, New York: Free Press. 734 Denise Ferreira da Silva – (1977) The Evolution of Societies, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall. Pierson, D. (1942) Negroes in Brazil, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Porcaro, R.M. (1988) ‘Desigualdade Racial e Segmentação do Mercado de Trabalho’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 15: 171–207. Sheriff, R. (2001) Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Silva, D.F. da (1998) ‘Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not (Quite) the United States … and Racial Politics in Brazil?’, Social Identities, 4 (2): 201–23. – (1999) ‘The Drama of Modernity: race and symbolic exclusion in the Telenovelas’, in L. Crook and R. Johnson (eds), Black Brazil. Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization, Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center. – (2001) ‘ ‘Voicing ‘Resistance’ ’: Race and Nation in the Global Space’, in E. Ben-Rafael and Y. Sternberg (eds), Identity, Culture, and Globalization, Boston: Brill. – (2001a) ‘Towards a Critique of the Socio-Logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality’, Social Identities, 7 (3): 421–54. – (2002) ‘Re-writing the Black Subject’, in P. Osborne and S. Sandford (eds), Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity, London: Continuum. – (forthcoming) Homo Modernus: A Mapping of the Analytics of Raciality, Durham: Duke University Press. Silva, Denise Ferreira da (1989) ‘Repensando a ‘Democracia Racial’: raça e identidade nacional no Pensamento Brasileiro’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 16: 157–70. Silva, D.F. da and M. Lima (1992) ‘Raça e Gênero no Mercado de Trabalho’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 23: 97–111. Silva, N. do V. (1987) ‘Distância Social e Casamento Inter-Racial no Brasil’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 14: 54–84. – (1996) ‘Morenidade: O modo de usar’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 30: 79–96. Silva, N. do V. and C. Hasenbalg (1992) Relações Raciais no Brasil Contemporâneo, Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo Editora. Smelser, N. and S.M. Lipset (1966) Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Tannenbaum, F. (1946) Slave and Citizen, New York: Vintage Books. Telles, E.E. (1993) ‘Cor da Pele e Segregação Residencial no Brasil’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 24: 5–22. Twine, F.W. (1998) Racism in a Racial Democracy, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Winant, H. (1994) Racial Conditions, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.