Nov. 20, 2024, marked the first time Black Awareness Day has been celebrated as a national holiday in Brazil. The holiday already existed in some states, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made it national. To celebrate the date, the Brazilian Football Confederation, or CBF, released the DNA test of the black soccer player Vinícius Junior. The announcement stated only that his ancestors came from the Tikar tribe of Cameroon. It isn’t really credible that Vinícius’s ancestry is exclusively Cameroonian; his family roots in Brazil stretch back many generations. By way of comparison, a 2007 DNA test showed that the black sambista Neguinho da Beija-Flor was of 67 percent European ancestry. The CBF announcement left out any such complications.
The attempt to identify a prominent Brazilian with a singular, exclusive ethnic identity is just the latest sign of a cultural shift. Since their country’s founding as an independent nation in 1822, Brazilians have seen themselves as a mix of indigenous, European, and African—not a mosaic of separate races, as in the United States, but an amalgam of the blood of all three races. But in recent decades, a quasi-American understanding of race has taken hold in many institutions, and is being promoted by the current left-wing government. Despite the ostensibly progressive origins of the new racial politics, its implications often resemble those of the one-drop rule of Jim Crow.
Brazil’s mixed racial national self-conception, first proposed by the “patriarch” of independence, José Bonifácio, prevailed well into the 20th century. In the history of Brazil, there has never been anything that deserved the name of racisme d’État. Although black skin carried the stigma of slave origins, the Brazilian Empire, which lasted from 1822 until 1889, granted noble titles to blacks and mulattos, some of whom also owned slaves. Some poor and middle-class people were also slave owners; even slaves had slaves.
To be sure, darker-skinned Brazilians have remained poorer on average for various historical reasons. For one, black men who rose to prominence often married white women and had lighter-skinned offspring, such that in the upper classes there remained few blacks. Furthermore, the parts of Brazil with the largest black population were those that imported African slaves to plant sugarcane in the 19th century. With the decline of sugarcane, these areas declined economically. On top of that, Brazil, like the United States and Argentina, received a large influx of immigrants from Europe between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This population was concentrated in the south and in the southeast, which modernized while the heavily non-white northeast of the country, which had been the center of sugarcane cultivation, was left behind.
This was a reversal from the prior historical pattern. In the 18th century, the majority-black city of Salvador was the second largest city in the Portuguese empire, while São Paulo was a poor backwater. Nowadays, Salvador is devoured by unemployment, while São Paulo is the largest metropolis in Latin America. In the United States, as Thomas Sowell showed, racial inequality is partly a result of regional inequality. In Brazil, the regional problem has been clear for decades: Just as black Americans left rural areas for cities during the Great Migration, in Brazil, northeasterners of all colors left home (and still leave today) to seek work in the southeast. There, they face regional prejudice. Even if they have very light skin, northeasterners are recognized by their accent, not unlike “white trash” in the United States. In Brazil, prejudice against skin color and region are both rooted in social class. Nobody wants to have the color or accent of the poor.
The other piece of the puzzle are indigenous Brazilians. When the Portuguese arrived, they encountered the Tupi people of the coastal region, who were divided into several tribes that spoke the same language and were always at war with each other. The Tupis were what anthropologists call patrilineal and matrilocal: When a Tupi man married, he would go live in his in-laws’ village, but his son was seen as a descendant of himself and his father. The chieftain’s mission was to use his daughters to recruit the best warriors for his own village.
After the Portuguese arrived, Tupi chieftains were interested in obtaining European axes and knives. As a result, the Portuguese became highly sought-after sons-in-law: Every Tupi wanted to be related to them. By obtaining a number of wives, the newcomers could ascend in rank within the tribe, resulting in many polygamous Portuguese chieftains with mixed-race offspring. Children of these Portuguese men and Tupi women were considered whites, because they were children of the father. Until at least the 18th century, mixed Portuguese and Amerindian people were called “whites of the land,” as opposed to “whites of the kingdom”—that is, of Europe.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this: First, the concept of “whiteness” in Brazil is quite flexible; second, many traditional oligarchic families in Brazil have Tupi blood.
From the end of the 19th century until World War II, eugenics thrived in scientific institutions worldwide. The version of eugenic ideology that took hold in Brazil held that it was possible to solve Brazilian “dysgenics” with miscegenation, reflecting the national elite’s self-understanding as a racial amalgam. European immigration, it was believed, would eventually allow for undesirable traits, including those associated with African ancestry, to be slowly extirpated. (This idea is illustrated in the 1895 painting The Redemption of Ham.)
The apex of the subsequent backlash against eugenics came in 1933, with the publication of Gilberto Freyre’s book The Slaves and the Masters. Freyre was a student of Columbia University’s Franz Boas, an influential critic of scientific racism and proponent of cultural relativism. Rejecting eugenic schemes to whiten the population, Freyre celebrated Brazil as a mongrel nation, instead of a divided, racially polarized country like the United States.
Freyre’s views held sway for some time, but later came under attack from the sociologist Florestan Fernandes. Turning Freyre on his head, Fernandes alleged that Brazilian society harbored a veiled racism more sinister than that of the United States, where it was at least out in the open. He also believed that black Brazilians, to achieve social progress, should establish themselves as a distinct racial community in the style of black Americans. The University of São Paulo, where Fernandes taught, became a center of attacks on Freyre’s legacy. The word “mulatto,” a widely used term for someone of mixed African and European ancestry, was condemned as racist; mulattos, it was argued, should be redefined as black. Fernandes’s theories enjoyed support from a powerful American sponsor. As the historian Wanderson Chaves shows in his 2019 book A Questão Negra (The Black Question), in the 1960s the Ford Foundation invested in “Afrocentric” groups worldwide, including in Brazil.
Over the subsequent decades, Brazil came to be perceived as a country of terrible, veiled racism. Connected to this has been a systematic attempt to reclassify Brazilians according to a US-style biracial model, and to promote policy ideas including racial reparations, affirmative action, and quotas. To do all of this, it is necessary to distort the statistics.
Average Brazilians tend to place themselves in three categories: black (preto), brown (pardo), and white. These self-declarations are descriptive, based on skin color, not on DNA. The “brown” category includes those who are neither black nor white, whether mulattoes or descendants of Amerindians. But as the historian José Murilo de Carvalho pointed out already in 2004, there has been a movement among academics and activists to reclassify as black (negro) all Brazilians who describe themselves as brown (pardo), while replacing preto with negro. The two terms are synonymous in vernacular Portuguese, but in the new classification, negro encompasses both pretos and pardos. The supposed anti-racist justification for this revival of the one-drop rule is that pardos are, in fact, blacks who are ashamed to declare their actual race.
The result is that Brazil is redefined as 45 percent “white” and 55 percent “black.” Once the consensus is reached that there is a “black” majority, affirmative-action policies are proposed to remedy the dearth of black Brazilians in positions of power and prestige. However, the difficult part is determining who is entitled to these reparations. To this end, racial tribunals have been created, in which a panel of judges determines whether an applicant is white or black.
“The results have often been bizarre.”
The results have often been bizarre. In 2007, a racial court ruled one identical twin to be white and the other to be black. This year, a young man whom it would be hard to describe as anything but “brown” was ruled to be white by a tribunal at the University of São Paulo. And on Nov. 20—again, the first national Black Awareness Day—the same institution published on its website a list of black professors. Among them were an anthropologist with a Japanese name and appearance (there are around 2 million Brazilians of Japanese descent), as well as Marilena de Souza Chaui, a well-known philosopher who was one of the founders of the ruling Workers Party; in her long public career, she had never been described as black previously.
A backlash against woke excesses has begun in Brazil, as was evident in the recent mayoral election in São Paulo. The victorious incumbent mayor and his supporters criticized racial quotas and set-asides as well as other new progressive dogmas. Hopefully, the emerging anti-woke coalition will eventually be able to end the racialist madness. The racial courts must be dismantled, along with the distorting new classification systems. However, Lula’s new national holiday and the case of the “Cameroonian” soccer star suggest things may get worse before they get better.