User:Colewill110/Racial whitening

Article Draft

Introduction

Racial whitening, or "whitening" (branqueamento), is an ideology that was widely accepted in Brazil between 1889 and 1914, as the solution to the "Negro problem". Whitening in Brazil is a sociological term to explain the change in perception of one's race as a black or mixed race person rises in the class structure of Brazil. However, racial whitening specific to Brazil also encompasses the perception of individuals as being white in relation to their position in the class system.

Racial whitening in Brazil is a social concept that is deeply rooted in the history of the nation. Similar to that of the United States, Brazil experienced massive colonization by Europeans and importation of Africans in the 18th and 19th century. This type of political and social climate inherently represses a group of people while one group dominates the other. As a way of making Brazil seem like a modernized country comparable with European nations, Brazil encouraged the immigration of white Europenas and through miscegenation was thought to be achieving racial whitening. Once they arrived, European immigrants dominated high-skilled jobs, and libertos (freedmen) were relegated to service or seasonal jobs. Additionally, whitening led to the formulation of the Brazilian idea of “racial democracy”, the idea of an absence of racial prejudice and discrimination, which led to an “egalitarian economic and social opportunities for Whites and Blacks in Brazil”. Together, the lack of a strict segregationist culture, and the frequency of interracial marriage, resulted in a country viewed as one not bound by racial lines, although issues caused by the elimination of a racial factor, and inherently racism, instead festered under the surface.

The use of Whitening Ideology in the Context of Brazil

The use of whitening ideology in Brazil is unique among former European colonies, distinct from the structural racial segregation seen in Europe and other former colonial societies such as the United States. While many Europeans believed that interracial relationships would produce degenerate offspring and threaten the white race, the Portuguese were more accepting of miscegenation. Furthermore, Brazil already had a high level of racial integration in the colonial era compared to other European colonies. With the rising prominence of racist scientific ideologies in the 1850s, Brazilian society sought the whitening ideology as an ideal solution to remedy the problems posed by supposedly inferior races while conforming with Brazil’s pre-existing multicultural landscape.

The Brazilian brand of the whitening ideology is based upon the concept of “racial democracy:” the idea that racial prejudice and discrimination are nonexistent, allowing equal socioeconomic opportunities for blacks and whites alike. Essentially, Brazilian racial democracy entails that racial classifications and divisions ought to be overlooked, effectively creating a race-blind society. This absence of racial boundaries is accomplished by defining race as merely a spectrum influenced by social forces. In Brazil, one’s race is subject to change based on a variety of factors such as social class and educational attainment.

In a race-blind society such as Brazil’s, it is socially unacceptable and even offensive to overtly classify individuals based on their race. This inattention to race implied that all Brazilians had an equal opportunity to attain social mobility. However, this masked the true goal of whitening as a means to nullify the identities of black and indigenous identities. Racial mixing in Brazilian society entailed that minority races ought to adopt the characteristics of the white race, with the goal of creating a singular Brazilian race that emulates the white race, striving to create a social society best emulating that of Europe. The nullification of minority cultures was achieved largely by either becoming “sponsored” by a wealthier white family, marrying someone of a lighter skin color, or by adopting white social customs.

Ultimately, racial whitening in Brazil did not serve as a vehicle for inclusion, but rather one of exclusion, with the goal of pushing those not classified as mestizo (a mixture of European and indigenous race) out of the social framework. According to a recent study, being black in Brazil is often accompanied with poverty and with the stereotype of being dangerous. As a result, minorities lack a sufficient safety net to fall back upon, thus denying them access to social mobility that racial democracy heralds at its surface. The state fails to provide sufficient socioeconomic resources, such as education and healthcare, to these communities. Minorities also contend with racism within the job market, deterring them from taking out business loans, leaving them stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. Due to being ostracized from the national political conversation due to their non-conformity with the principles of whitening, minorities lack the same ability to advocate for themselves and fight for equal opportunity. The most tenable way to achieve social equality for minority communities is to exercise the “Mulatto escape hatch,” using the aforementioned methods of white sponsorship, interracial marriage and adopting white rituals to integrate with the broader mestizo society, thus allowing those of minority descent to “escape” their racial heritage.

Whitening ideology was adopted by the Brazilian government as official policy. This governmental stance is based upon three principles, which scholar Marcus Eugenio Oliveira Lima describes as “institutional relations towards ‘national eugenics;’ social perceptions and inter-group relations; and self-perception and interpersonal relations.” Central to governmental policy was the explicit denial of racism within Brazilian society. In fact, under the Institutional Acts of the Brazilian military regime, speaking about racism and racial prejudice was expressly prohibited. One justification for this denial of racism was to forge foreign relations, specifically African countries. Ultimately, while no legal policies acknowledge the presence of racial prejudice, it was nonetheless still practiced discreetly, with grave consequences for millions of Brazilians. The Justification for Racial WhiteningPrior to the abolishment of slavery, plantation owners feared a post-emancipatory society of freed slaves who had, “deficiencies such as indolence and immorality” that needed to be wiped out. Brazil’s export based economy was largely reliant on slave labor, and slaveholders felt the freedmen would hinder the country’s development because of their inferior characteristics. After the emancipation of slavery, Brazilians theorized about the ideal phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of future laborers. Initially, Brazil saw the success of Chinese immigrants in the U.S and other nations, but the risk of introducing another purportedly degenerate race like the Africans was too high. Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat sent to Brazil by Napoleon, felt introducing the Europeans was a perfect solution because it would purify elements of Brazil’s inferior race through interbreeding. This solution would return the white race to their superior place. Brazilian elites believed that freed slaves didn’t have a place in post-emancipation Brazil because of scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Brazilian writers and politicians blamed Portuguese colonials for importing a large slave population. Their solution to the problem was to flood the labor market with white immigrants and deny freedmen the economic opportunities they had fought for.

Apart from its racial justification, Brazilian farmers argued that the post-emancipation labor market in Brazil would be controlled by supply and demand. Thus, incentivization of foreign immigrants would create a situation where laborers searched for employers at cheap prices instead of employers looking for a small pool of laborers at a high wage. Working with the São Paulo province, Brazil officially started incentivizing European immigration in 1884 when it created the semi-private Society for the Promotion of Immigration. The program was, “responsible for informing European workers of employment opportunities available in São Paulo, paying their passage, overseeing their arrival in Brazil, and dispatching them to the coffee groves.” By 1895, the State Department of Agriculture had fully taken control of the operation because São Paulo province was officially transformed into a state. Until the abolition of slavery in 1888, Europeans were hesitant to emigrate away from their home countries because they believed that Brazilian farmers would treat them like slaves. After slavery’s abolishment in 1888, Brazil was flooded with European immigrants. Statistics demonstrate that, “compared to 195,000 immigrants who arrived in Brazil between 1870 and 1889, immigration between 1890 and 1909 totaled 1,100,000.” Once they arrived, most São Paulo immigrants worked as colonos (tenant farmers) which “received a fixed monetary income for maintaining a certain number of coffee trees plus a variable payment depending on the volume of the harvest.” Apart from São Paulo, there was no subsidized immigration program in Brazil. In these areas, the libertos’ experience varied: in Sergipe, vagrancy laws were implimented to force the free black population back onto the plantation, but some libertos stayed with their former employers or emigrated elsewhere.

Labor Market Experience of European Immigrants in BrazilContrasting the racially exclusive labor unions in the United States and South Africa in the early 20th century, the Brazilian labor movement welcomed all races. In an effort to create a unified movement, the Brazilian unions replaced speaking European languages with Portuguese. Specifically in São Paolo’s unions, they desired workplace equality for two reasons: emancipation and the capitalistic exploitations of both races. However, Brazilian corporations promoted racial antagonism by hiring libertos (freed slaves) to quell labor strikes. The arrival of European immigrants created a two-tiered labor market where immigrants dominated factory, commerce, industrial, and artisanal jobs whereas Afro-Brazilians were relegated to seasonal or service jobs. Freed slaves lacked the mettle to compete with European immigrants in the technical jobs and preferred the variety of the service jobs. However, other historians like Florestan Fernandes attributes these labor market differences to a pre-emancipation mentality that avoided work during slavery and a lack of marketable skills to offer when the slaves were freed. For employed Afro-Brazilains, they demanded better working conditions after emancipation, but European immigrants, especially Italians, accepted lower pay and harsher treatment to secure a higher social position. Apart from their willingness, the source of the immigrants’ vulnerabilities in the labor force was two fold: Brazil was populated with low-skilled emigrants who didn’t have bargaining power with their employers, and most immigrants valued their spouse or child over joining a labor union that could get them fired. In one area of Brazil, “Eighty percent of the people who passed through the immigrant hostel in São Paulo city came as families.” In São Paulo, child-labor was common because of the meager pay that their parents received.

Socioeconomic and Political Outcomes of Whitening The Brazilian class system is heavily influenced from the history of slavery and colonization, with whitening policies further exacerbating socioeconomic divides. This puts people who identify as white at the top of the class system and those who identify as black at the bottom of the class system. Upward mobility is possible in Brazil, but very rare. An aspect that influences the upward mobility of individuals is education, which is alleged to lead to greater whitening. Racial whitening translated to a decrease in openings for black labor. Between 1890 and 1914, the Brazilian government strategized to change black labor to white labor. According to an analysis by Edward Telles, a prominent scholar with extensive research on racism in Brazil, than a million Europeans came to Sao Paulo in this period, with most travel tickets subsidized by the Sao Paulo state government. The black population was deemed to not qualify for these travel subsidies. As a result of this aspect of whitening, there was a constant decline in the Afro-Brazilian population between the censuses of 1872 and 1990, decreasing from 19.2% to under 5%, although the rate recovered to 6.2% at the 2000 census.

In Brazil and most other countries, public sector employment generally brings higher wages and more comprehensive benefits for minority workers than the private sector, in contrast to that of the United States. This is in contrast to the notion that white benefactors bring upward social mobility to Afro-Brazilians, according to recent research cited by Angels Figueiredo of Newsweek International. The Great Depression was critical in first enabling the entry of Afro-Brazilians into the workforce, as labor laws enacted during the time required two thirds of businesses’ new hires to be Brazilian-born. However, black Brazilians still struggle mightily with racist private sector hiring processes. Government incentives for minority-owned businesses are scant in Brazil, evident of an every-man-for-himself survivalist environment for black business people. This is consistent with the increase in discrimination in the workplace indicated by the Brazilian censuses of the 1960s and 70s, despite the passage of federal non-discrimination legislation in 1953.

While black workers maintain sizable numbers in the workforce, especially small and midsize retailers and restaurants, they still struggle to break into high-paying corporate landscapes such as the accounting and tech industries. Based on a recent survey, 94% of top executives in Brazil’s top corporations are white, which translates into minuscule opportunities for black Brazilians to gain the experience of going into business independently. In fact, non-whites make up 45.3% of the Brazilian population, yet they make up only 17.8% of all registered entrepreneurs. Much of this has to deal with the educational and economic roots of many black business people in the country. While black business leaders are younger, they have spent less time in the classroom than whites, with nearly half of all black leaders dropping out of school by the eighth grade and only 15.8% completing twelve years of schooling. This is in contrast to the 35.8% of white leaders who have completed twelve years of schooling. Further evidence of the arduous path to black success in the private sector is the statistic that more than a third of black business leaders hail from poor rural or blue-collar urban families, compared to just a quarter of white business leaders. Moreover, just 29.3% of black entrepreneurs have white-collar backgrounds, while 50.1% of white entrepreneurs have such backgrounds.

The education deficit between black and white entrepreneurs is better explained by a much higher illiteracy rate amongst blacks than whites. In 1980, the number of illiterate black Brazilians was double that of whites, with blacks also being seven times less likely to graduate college. However, Afro-Brazilians were still able to forge a political role in Brazil despite being marginalized on the broader political spectrum. They were instrumental in the downfall of Brazil’s First Republic, which endorsed the whitening-esque ideologies of social Darwinism and scientific racism. This gave rise to political movements such as Frente Negra Brasileria in 1931 and Movimento Negro Unificado in 1978 that fought for the rights of Afro-Brazilians.

Such hardships within the business landscape for black Brazilians has led them to take measures to identify closer to the white race in order to place them on a level playing field. In a 1995 national survey, Brazilian citizens were asked to consistently classify race on an overall and contextual basis. This study found that persons of lighter color tended to be consistently classified, while those of a darker skin tone tended to be classified more ambiguously. Factors that impacted consistency by 20% to 100% included education, age, sex, and local racial composition, trending in the direction of either “whitening” or “darkening.” To combat this, the Campanha Censo of 1990 sought to combat the trend of self-whitening, the false identification of oneself as white, in Brazil.

The Role of Affirmative ActionWith the advent of several political, cultural, and social groups in Brazil trying to gain equal rights and a good Afro-Brazilian image for and among black Brazilians, a trend to identify blackness as a separate and significant identity, when traditionally it was erased, began to emerge. These initiatives have been implemented in the twenty-first century thanks to the adoption of affirmative action policies by a number of educational institutions and the federal government, which are meant to assist Afro-Brazilian students in obtaining a higher education and pursuing better opportunities similar to those available to Brazilians who are not black.

The University of Brasilia (UnB), the first university in Brazil to implement a racial quota in 2004, served as the "guinea pig" for such initiatives. After the quota was implemented, UnB's white population fell by 4.3%, while mixed and black both grew by 1.4% and 3% respectively. However, because the data is self-reported and racial identity is variable and endogenous, this information is challenging to assess. In actuality, race and privilege collide at a location known as colorism and skin tone is indeed a significant factor in analysis that academics take into account in Brazilian affirmative action cases. Therefore, a panel of Brazilian reviewers were employed by Francis and Tannuri-Pianto for the semester both before and after the quota was put into effect. They were told to grade the subjects' skin tones on a scale of 1 (lightest) to 7 (darkest). The data indicates that after just one year of affirmative action at UnB, there is a noticeable increase in the number of black students or students who are generally of darker skin tone. In fact, a significant increase in the average skin tone indicates that the policy was successful in attracting more brown and black students to the university, particularly in the first semester following its introduction. The university's experiences with the policy and its consequences on the students, however, provide important information for the broader study of racial disparity in institutional settings for higher education and the workplace. Although there is a blueprint, it is already evident that affirmative action has proven to be an uncomfortable fit for Brazil as a strategy for racial equality. Burnt white, brown, dark nut, light nut, black, and copper are just a few of the 136 categories the census department discovered Brazilians to use for self-identification in a 1976 research. Today, Brazilians regard themselves as falling across a spectrum of skin hues with a range of names. The realization that a person's appearance matters, particularly in terms of social mobility and job opportunities, is what ties these categories together. The federal government established the Law of Social Quotas in 2012 to address inequalities in higher education. Regardless of color, the legislation guarantees public high school graduates half of all openings at institutions receiving federal funding. (Public universities, unlike high schools, are more prestigious in Brazil than private ones.) Half of those reserved seats go to students whose families make less than 1.5 minimum wage, or $443 per month, on average. According to the proportion of white to non-white residents in each state, a share of the openings in both categories are therefore reserved for black, brown, and indigenous students. Despite the fact that this is trying to address certain racial challenges, it is actually causing brand-new ones. In 2014, a statute was passed by the federal government allocating 20% of public sector positions to people of color. Where individuals don't cleanly fit into black-and-white classifications, it becomes difficult to label those eligible for affirmative action. “If you look at a photograph of the incoming medical class of 2015, only one of the students looks black,” said Georgina Lima, a professor and head of UFPel’s Center for Affirmative Action and Diversity. “And he’s not even Brazilian. He’s from Africa.” After it became obvious that the law allowed for fraud, the government instructed all departments to set up verification committees in August 2016. However, it did not offer any guidance to the agencies. Verification committees attempt to fulfill this mandate mostly through checklists on physical appearance. Among the criteria to be scored on for The Department of Education in Para, Brazil’s blackest state: Does the job applicant have a short, wide, and flat nose? How thick are their lips? Are their gums a deep enough purple color?  Does their jaw protrude forward? Checklists like these motivate applicants to change their physical appearance to appear “blacker.” The precise criteria, the first checklist of its kind in any Brazilian institution, elicited a variety of answers. Some others thought that these "desired" traits were too reminiscent of the slave trade, in which buyers would spin slaves around to look for specific traits. Others believed that these moves were regrettably essential to achieve true equity in Brazil. Knowing these requirements, people looked for any means to improve their eligibility for the advantages provided by the affirmative action legislation. People would shave their heads, wear beanies, and obtain tans, according to Rogerio Reis, chair of the committee at UFPel. Simply a series of methods for turning themselves black. Particularly in Brazil, colorism is the standard by which people are judged and stereotypes are associated with every shade on the spectrum.

How Race is Understood in Brazil Today Brazil’s whitening ideology was based on the concept of “racial democracy”, which as mentioned previously effectively led to a race-blind society. Brazilians can look at race through both social perceptions and self-perception. There is a strong correlation between social class and skin color, with a general appreciation for whites and depreciation for blacks. Many blacks have been assimilated into the whitening ideology to the extent at which they lose their racial identity, instead seeking others of different races to pursue relations with. They were not viewed by themselves as “Afro-Brazilian,” but simply as “Brazilian.” Moreover, whitening was subconsciously viewed as a way to escape the inferiority of black people in Brazil. Because of the close relationship between class and race, many Brazilians do not identify as Black until they experience a common moment of realization of their blackness. This is described as a process in which many benign to understand that aggressions that they suffered occurred because of racism. Because many don’t consciously identify as black, many instances of prejudice are not recognized as racism, thus it becomes a cycle, and racism continues to exist in Brazil. Furthermore, there is a widespread difficulty in admitting that racism exists in Brazil. In fact, Brazil almost prides itself as having somehow moved past racial discrimination because it was built on the mixing of Amerindian, African and European ethnic groups. However, racism in Brazil exists and can take on a variety of forms of prejudices and stereotypes. In fact, a 2022 study on Racial Democracy and Black Victimization in Brazil finds that disparities in employment, income, education, access to justice, and vulnerability to violent death are heavily influenced by race, and in fact found that blacks are more exposed to homicides and physical assaults than whites, and 40% of this difference is evidence of racial discrimination.

Though Brazil has increasingly promoted its standing as a country with a significant African-origin base within the international community, prejudice and stereotypes still persist, inhibiting the black population from obtaining upward social mobility. In the article How Far is the ‘Rhetoric of Inclusion; Reality of Exclusion’, Creighton finds that in the 20th century, the transition away from self-identification with Europe towards the development of a more distinctly Latin-American identity, has caused greater inclusivity for black Brazilians. However, this did not necessarily promote black culture. It primarily served as a means to create a single national identity that is race-blind, and actually aims to bring blacks further into the government’s sphere of influence (increasing endorsement from Afro-Latinos). This brands racial democracy as essentially a re-purposing of the imagery of black culture to make it suitable for mass consumption across races.