Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States

In 1933, Gilberto Freyre published his classic Casagrande y senzala. Although it was ostensibly about the uniquely Portuguese origins of Brazilian civilization, it included innumerable obiter dicta about the difference between the role of race in Portuguese and English America. Freyre argued that the relatively harmonious Brazilian race relations were due to more or less smooth Afro-European miscegenation, which contrasted so sharply with the rigid “one-drop rule” of the United States.In the years since Freyre published his classic, Brazilian and U.S. scholars and social critics have been debating Freyre’s claims. But the issue has been viewed largely through the prism of each country’s distinct racial experience. In the earlier literature, in particular, relatively few scholars achieved an analysis that could be described as truly objective. That situation began to change several decades ago, as scholars emerged who were generally familiar with both countries. Reginald Daniel is certainly prominent among that number and has given us a systematic work on what is a most complex issue, making the volume useful for scholars in a variety of disciplines.Much of the book is a well-synthesized review of this scholarship. Its unusual feature is that the author approaches the topic from a sociological as well as a historical viewpoint. This interdisciplinary approach is valuable, because the subject in both countries needs a deeply historical as well as a cultural focus, a task in which the author achieves substantial success.Daniel documents how the respective systems of race relations worked and how their scholarly interpretations have evolved in tandem. The pictures he draws are supported by the latest census data and legislative actions in the two countries. What has changed in the last two decades is the deliberate borrowing of ideas by one country from the other. Unusually insightful is his in-depth analysis of affirmative action as it is being worked out in the two countries. The U.S. lay reader may be surprised to learn that affirmative action is on the rise in Brazil even as it is on the decline in the United States. Brazil has, since 1970, borrowed and adapted the affirmative action model, while the United States has increasingly accepted multiracial categories and concepts.One of Daniel’s original contributions is his analysis of the changes made in the conception and application of the respective population censuses. He also gives us a well-articulated argument of where he thinks the historical process should be headed: “The critical challenge is to dismantle completely the European underpinnings of the racial order in both nations by demonstrating the dichotomous and hierarchical relationship between blackness and whiteness” (p. 295).The author assumes a process of convergence between the two systems of race relations, but his analysis actually warns us that any given social policy can have a short life. Why should there be convergence? Is there some mysterious force driving the two countries toward the same point? If so, how does it operate? Has it been the force of the international media, above all television? Or has it been the growing contact between Brazilian, U.S., and African elites? Or should we be satisfied with the explanation that the humanistic instinct was at work throughout the Western hemisphere?In the midst of this speculation, we must remember that the “convergence” Daniel speaks of has been, in good part, a reaction against institutional racism, which has proved more resilient than its opponents in Brazil and the United States hoped. But does history run in only one direction? Not always, as European Jewry paid a horrendous price to discover

Civilization · Political science · Race (biology) · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Variety (cybernetics) · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, Identity, and Education in Brazil

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