The Long, Lingering Shadow

The Long, Lingering Shadow is a masterful examination of the law’s critical role in establishing and maintaining racial hierarchy in Brazil, Spanish America, and the United States, particularly for individuals of African descent. By so doing Robert J. Cottrol brings into sharp focus the essential value and necessity of comparative historical analyses of racial formations and race relations as these relate to legal processes. Part 1 discusses the evolution of the institution of slavery and the social forces that led to its abolition. This section also provides an excellent analysis of the development of fluid and ambiguous racial categories as well as social mobility in terms of racial hierarchy and social stratification in Latin America. These patterns differ markedly from the equally hierarchical yet more constricting ones in the United States. Part 2 offers a compelling cross-regional examination of the problematic relationship between scientific racism, racial whitening through miscegenation and immigration policy, and the advance of racial democracy ideologies in Latin America’s more inclusive racial orders. These social forces differed noticeably from the more exclusionary US Jim Crow racial order that maintained legalized segregation. Part 3 includes an insightful investigation of the complex legal and political processes central to contemporary debates on race-based affirmative action in Brazil, Spanish America, and the United States. This section closes with a thoughtful discussion of present-day antiracist struggles in Spanish-speaking Latin America that seek to counter the social inequities and invisibility experienced by Afro-Latin Americans.Cottrol points out that US slavery was rooted in a legal and cultural foundation based on racial exclusion unparalleled in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, many Euro-American scientists, intellectuals, and nation makers warned about the perils of miscegenation, mongrelization, and civilizational decline. Euro-Americans sought to preserve their cultural and racial “purity,” as well as their dominant status, by enforcing the one-drop rule of hypodescent. This served to underpin the legal and informal exclusion of individuals of African descent from equality in most aspects of social life, including the area of intermarriage. These social forces, Cottrol argues, reached draconian proportions with Jim Crow segregation, which legalized racial discrimination.This in turn prompted Latin American thinkers to regard their social orders as paragons of racial equality, due to the absence of de jure racial discrimination and an enduring integration of diverse racial and cultural elements through miscegenation. Latin American nation makers and intellectuals enthusiastically celebrated mestizaje as their path to the future and as a creative solution to the racial problem. Cottrol maintains, however, that this also masked patterns of de facto race-based inequality. Notwithstanding the history of more rigid and formalized racial exclusion in the United States, Cottrol argues convincingly that in the post–World War II era this country had a more robust civil rights movement, which not only achieved significant legal victories over racial discrimination compared to Latin America but also served as a beacon for civil rights activists throughout the latter region.My principal reservation with Cottrol’s study is its heavy reliance on Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946). There has been extensive debate surrounding Tannenbaum’s thesis that law and religion in Latin America had a beneficial effect on slavery and the slave’s humanity that, more importantly, eased the transition to freedom. Latin American laws may have been more egalitarian on paper than those in the United States, but slavery’s reality was considerably harsher. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars argued that there was a wide gap between legal codes and slaves’ daily lives in Latin America. To many scholars the law at best reflected social realities or an imperfect compromise reached between the competing institutional factions of the church, colonial governments, and the planter class. Additionally, scholars concluded that slaves’ status in the United States was more contradictory and ambiguous than Tannenbaum had recognized.Following Tannenbaum’s line of thinking, differences in the nature of law and legal institutions in Latin America and the United States were causally linked to their, respectively, inclusionary and exclusionary postslavery racial orders. Yet by the early 1950s, new research, specifically on Brazil, challenged the racial democracy paradigm by documenting pervasive, although regionally variable and informal, patterns of racial inequality. The harmonious integration considered the hallmark of Latin American race relations failed to correspond to the empirical data collected by social scientists.Even if Tannenbaum, according to Cottrol, “remains the starting point for modern discussions on comparative slavery and race relations in the Americas” (p. 3), it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a causal link between slavery and postslavery race relations, particularly in terms of legal precepts and institutions. That the law and slavery did not condition race relations in postslavery societies does not mean, however, that they did not play a critical role in the formation of postslavery racial orders and the legal apparatus that governed them. Yet the correlation involved an intricate array of interlocking factors—geographic, demographic, economic, political, cultural, and intellectual—that informed race relations dating back to the colonial period. Basically, scholars reached a consensus that whatever differences may have existed between the slave regimes and race relations in the United States and Latin America, they could be adequately explained by geography, demography, and political economy rather than by differences in laws or church and state practices regarding slavery.That said, Cottrol has made an immensely valuable contribution to analyses of racial formation and jurisprudence. His book is a must-read for not only legal scholars but also scholars in other fields such as sociology, history, and ethnic studies. Cottrol is a scholar of considerable intellectual depth and breadth who has produced a book that is a compelling intellectual achievement. Even if one disagrees with some of his core argument, one has to respect the clarity with which he makes his case and the sustained manner in which he has embraced it in his analysis

Affirmative action · Criminology · Eugenics · Ideology · Immigration · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Racial formation theory · Racial hierarchy · Racism · Shadow (psychology) · Social stratification · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law