Shifting the Meaning of Democracy

Jessica Lynn Graham's book upends the story of Brazilian exceptionalism as a “racial democracy,” persistent even in the extensive scholarship contextualizing that nationalist ideology. Using an impressive array of sources from Brazil and the United States—diplomatic and congressional records, party propaganda, the Black press, and the files of secret or political police, among others—Graham tells a new story in which racial democracy's language and ideals emerged dialogically in both countries in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when democracy's meanings were especially fluid. Graham masterfully demonstrates how the struggles between Left and Right before and during World War II, and the machinations of both Brazilian and US officials to position their states advantageously during the war and in the postwar order, led to “a theoretical tug-of-war over the meanings of democracy” in which race became newly central (p. 4).In both Brazil and the country long cast as its foil, state officials, intellectuals, artists, and activists of various political persuasions in these decades of state expansion embraced the ideal and rhetoric of racial democracy to buttress their own particular definitions of democracy and to delegitimize those of their adversaries. In both countries, members of large African-descended populations seized the moment to force racial inclusion onto national and international agendas as democracy's litmus test. And in both countries, the state's co-optation or defensive deployment of racial democracy produced outcomes that fell well short of the ideal's transformational potential. Brazil usually bears the brunt of this unflattering scrutiny in comparative studies of race; the United States following the civil rights era tends to occupy the moral high ground. Yet Graham's comparative and connective framework sheds new light on Black activists' colossal efforts in both places to make democracy essentially about race in these years and on the broader forces—including coordination between US and Brazilian authorities—that undermined their efforts.Each chapter traces parallel and intersecting stories about Brazil and the United States, spotlighting the efforts of intellectuals, activists, and state officials of different racial and political backgrounds to inflect democracy with racial meaning. Chapter 1 challenges the traditional narrative that the Left in Brazil ignored the racial question, ceding ground to Black anticommunist and fascist organizations. Graham reveals how Communists in both the United States and Brazil used the racial issue to portray communism as democratic, expose the failures of traditional liberal democracies, and undercut fascist organizations competing for Black membership. In the United States, Black Communists successfully forced the Communist International after 1928 to support the right to Black self-determination, making it “perhaps the most influential international organization to directly equate ideals of democracy with racial justice in the 1930s” (p. 29). This in turn reshaped the priorities of the Brazilian Communist Party, which began to compete vigorously for Black support with more conservative parties and organizations. Yet rivals on the right, the next two chapters show, also used racial democracy rhetoric to compete for Black membership. Deploying their nations' failures on race as evidence of liberal democracy's shortcomings, the Right argued that only a strong fascist regime could effectively enforce antiracist policy. Graham demonstrates, with great nuance, how and why some Black thinkers in both places embraced illiberal regimes.Yet despite the efforts of Black activists of all stripes, it was in these years that “official doctrines of racial democracy . . . emerged as tools of national defense” to dissuade Blacks from joining politically threatening organizations (p. 69). Subsequent chapters trace some of the concrete openings that World War II and the postwar years presented Brazilian and US Black artists, intellectuals, and activists seeking to make democracy racial. Yet despite surprising successes, state priorities—especially Brazil's position as the United States' most important Latin American wartime ally and both nations' interest in using cultural exchanges that positioned Black people and cultures front and center as propaganda to shore up their racially democratic image—yielded few of the fruits of social justice.It has become commonplace to note that racial democracy ideologies, in Brazil and elsewhere, are powerful because they can mean many things to many people. Graham reins in the resultant “cacophony of racial political ideals” by proposing four conceptual categories “to analyze this rhetoric in the aggregate, identifying common threads of thought”: racial realism (that racism existed in society and racial democracy had to be fought for as a far-off ideal), racial denial (that society had already achieved racial democracy), racial dissuasion (which used racially inclusive language to forestall Black membership in politically threatening movements), and racial obstructionism (which opposed even the ideal of racial democracy) (p. 8). She also usefully distinguishes between rhetoric that was “action-oriented,” or conducive to tangible change, and rhetoric that was not. This framework, which describes strategic positions on racial democracy without binding them to individuals, political affiliations, occupations, or racial and national backgrounds, furnishes scholars, teachers, and activists with powerful new tools to analyze rhetorics of racial democracy—and similar ideologies of inclusion—within and across nations. The four categories and the measure of orientation toward action brilliantly account for recurring (and easily comparable) kinds of positioning and maneuvering while leaving room for the unique conceptions and unexpected partnerships, clashes, and outcomes that such ideologies have long engendered.In a field as densely populated as comparative US-Brazilian racial formations, it is hard to say something new. Jessica Lynn Graham has done so in scintillating detail, with an admirable balance of subtlety and clarity that will serve as a model for future work

Democracy · Ideology · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Gender Studies · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America