Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil [Paperback]

Francine Winddance Twine (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0813523656 | ISBN-13: 978-0813523651 | Publication Date: October 1, 1997

"Twine offers one of the most sophisticated analyses to date of the intransigence of Brazilian racism. Her nuanced account of the complex interplay of gender, race, and class is particularly exciting. This book will have a powerful impact not only on the field of Brazilian racial studies, but on the whole burgeoning literature on the African Diaspora." --Howard Winant, author of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons "This wonderfully engaging study explodes the myth of racial democracy in a pathbreaking analysis of racism Brazilian style." --Karen Brodkin, UCLA "A revealing and sharply observed dissection of how racism works 'on the ground' in Brazil." --George Reid, author of Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy. This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how they conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working-class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling. France Winddance Twine is professor of sociology at Duke University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A revealing and sharply observed dissection of how racism works 'on the ground' in Brazil." -- George Reid Andrews, author of Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988

"This wonderfully engaging study explodes the myth of racial democracy in a pathbreaking analysis of Brazilian style." -- Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks

"Twine offers one of the most sophisticated analyses to date of the intransigence of Brazilian racism. Her nuanced account of the complex interplay of gender, race, and class is particularly exciting. This book will have a powerful impact not only on the field of Brazilian racial studies, but on the whole burgeoning literature on the African Diaspora." -- Howard Winant, author of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons

From the Back Cover

In Racism in Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how they conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illustrates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working-class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813523656
• ISBN-13: 978-0813523651
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

France Winddance Twine was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent most of her early life on Chicago's Southside in a working class community. She attended Catholic schools and at age 16 entered Northwestern University where she earned her B.A. at the age of 20. She spent four years employed as a clinical specialist working in inpatient psychiatry before moving to New York and then New Orleans where she worked as a waitress, bookbinder and an artist and lived a bohemian lifestyle. She has taught at Duke University, University of Washington in Seattle and was a Visiting Distinguished Professor at The London School of Economics & Political Science. In 2008-09 she was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Twine, a leading scholar of social inequalities has more than 56 publications including 3 single authored books, 5 edited volumes and more than 40 journal articles, essays and reviews and has conducted field research in Brazil, Britain and the US. She is currently writing 3 books including one titled Girls with Guns which will be published in 2012 by Routledge.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely the way it is!, October 17, 2002

By 

John W. Lloyd (Decatur, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (Paperback)

The suggestion that Brazil is divided only by class is the argument that Twine attacke directly in this book. It is precisely the maintenance of a white supremacist social system that has convinced both whites and people of color in Brazil that racism does not exist. Time and again her interviewees insist that racism does not exist, despite mestizo and black Brazilians being paid slave wages for hours and hours of work or the absence of people of color in the government, economy, or the elite, rich, ruling class. There is just enough mobility for people to deny racism in Brazil exists, but Twine dismantles this argument piece by piece...

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best written analysis of race in Brazil, August 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (Paperback)

Ms. France W. Twine has written a superb analysis on how race is still, in the end of the 20th century, perhaps the main factor determining an individual's social and economic position within Brazilian society. This is truly a myth-shattering book; and it is impressive how an American student (though the fact of being African-American may have helped her not to swallow the official, non-racist myths of official propaganda) has managed, after a stay of only a few months, to understand a reality that has eluded dozens of academics and experts who've written about Brazil in the last decades.

According to Ms. Frances, it is only in the lower classes that the myth of a "non-racial" Brazilian society broadly corresponds to reality; in fact, there are no "black" or brown" ghettoes in Brazil - in the favelas one may find people of all colours, even if darker skin usually predominates. But to gain access to the middle or upper classes while being black or of mixed race is virtually impossible in Brazil (with the possible exception of soccer stars and a few outstanding musicians) - thanks to the deadly efficient system of "polite and hidden" racism that Ms. Frances has understood and analysed so well. A Brazilian citizen, after reading this book, can only say: "obrigado, senhorita Frances!".

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Analysis with a lot of Surprising and Disappointing revelations About Brazil's Racial Democracy, February 16, 2010

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (Paperback)

With an established reputation as the most racially mixed country in the world, any number of books have touted Brazil's "Racial Democracy" as being the very paragon of the modern multicultural nation state (I have reviewed a couple of those books here on Amazon.com myself). Unlike the U.S., the Caribbean and much of the rest of South America, Brazil, alone has survived with its reputation as a non-racist nation remaining virtually untarnished. The fact that it has been able to do so, given that it is indeed a white supremacist run nation that has a predominately Mulatto population, seems on its face, convincing evidence of Brazil's unique ability to deal successfully with the complex racial realities of its slave-based past and its mixed-race present. Thus, given its racial makeup, its avowedly white supremacist power arrangements, and its unsullied reputation, one can understand why this author sought as her thesis to answer the question: How did Brazil succeed in dodging the bullet of racial strife while others like the U.S., the Caribbean, and much of the rest of South America and South Africa, did not?

The answer, according to this carefully researched PhD thesis (turned into a full-length book), is that Brazil's "Racial Democracy" is little more than a carefully groomed national myth, a neatly woven together mental charade that hides a great deal more than it reveals about Brazilian society. That is to say, it hides from view many painful and unflattering deeper truths about how Brazil became a "stealth white supremacist nation" at the same time that it also became a predominantly Mulatto nation. And about how it has willfully "un-remembered" these facts and then covered them up and erased them from the record books rather than face up to the consequences of a past that was ultimately responsible for the racial realities of contemporary Brazil.

The real value of this book is that this author gives us the other side, the untold story of the Brazilian narrative of race. It is an unalloyed and brilliantly told story provided to the reader in reams of cross-confirming and eminently believable details, mostly as recorded interviews. What we learn is that just beneath its "stage-managed" public persona, instead of being a racial paradise, Brazil is a seething racial cauldron: a virtual hothouse of deep-seated, race-sensitive psychologically driven horrors. And just like the racial horrors that lay on the substrate of U.S. racial troubles, Brazil's troubles too have their origins firmly rooted in slavery. In the subtext of the book, coiled unasked is the mother of all questions: How did Brazil become such a mixed-race culture? It of course is no secret as to us Americans how a nation engaged in slavery over several centuries becomes a mixed-race nation. It is accomplished in only one way: by having its white men engage in the kind of race-mixing at night that they pretend to so abhor during the day.

So, according to this book, Brazil in fact did not dodge the bullet of racial strife at all. It simply buried it inwardly through a number of bizarre practices and psychological stratagems to cover them up, stratagems that would embarrass even a 1932 vintage racist USA: To wit, even today every level of class stratification in Brazil engages in some form of "whitening," mostly by "passing," or changing official records about family pedigree, or openly lying about it, and about the past ownership of slaves, or any evidence in the family tree of having a slave past. Parents, even of black children, are not required to bring their children with them when registering their birth certificates. As a result, even most blacks are registered officially as white. This artificial "inflation in whiteness" would be comical if it were not such an urgent and revealing aspect of how twisted Brazilian society really is.

Also, like the role the prison system serves for the US, slavery in Brazil also is continued by other more modern means. However, in Brazil, it is not the prison system that accomplishes this task of updating slavery, but the adoption and exploitation of young black girls. Once adopted into wealthy white families, these girls work unpaid throughout their lives, ostensibly as extended members of the family when in fact they are more like indentured family pets. Most are not allowed to attend school or to get married and are never paid. Yet, many are referred to as Tia, sexually abused and exploited, often mysteriously ending up with un-fathered "white babies." Likewise, Blacks with only rare exceptions are blocked from taking examines that would allow them to enter Brazilian Universities. They are excluded from professional jobs and from Brazilian social clubs, not to mention that they are not allowed to share in the nation's political power and economic wealth. At the same time Brazilians engage in the same kind of stereotyping of blacks that the U.S. made famous during its days of legal Apartheid more than a half a century ago. And curiously even blacks believe the rough, mean-spirited and demeaning imagery about them perpetuated by the "white run" Brazilian media. And these are just for starters. The only positive side to Brazilian racism is the fact that only in rare instances, do Brazilians engage in violence and brutality against non-whites to defend their white supremacist prerogatives. There is also the isolated fact that poor whites do not engage in solidarity with upper class whites, preferring to cast their lot with non-whites.

Against this societal backdrop of bizarre rules and practices, comes the familiar color-coded palette of racial meaningfulness with its spectrum running from white skin, straight hair and thin noses, to black skin, kinky hair and broad noses; one spells a direct route to wealth, power, and sexual beauty; while the other spells a life of grinding poverty and a slow-motion walk to an inevitable social death.

How does Brazil keep the lid on this seething bizarre melting pot? As part of its national duty, any controversial aspects of Brazil's racial past (and present) is heavily censored and then quietly brushed under the national rug where it can be sanitized, cleansed and bleached into congruence with the national myth of "Racial Democracy." Like the U.S. Brazil has many anti-racist laws on its books, but as far as we know, no one has yet to be prosecuted for practicing racism in Brazil? Put simply, this author shows brilliantly how Brazil carries its own unique burden of guilt-free collective denial about the past on the only issue that makes Brazil unique among nations, the issue of race. Thus according to this author, the idea that Brazil is a harmonious multi-racial South American paradise is little more than a carefully nurtured Brazilian fairy tale. The truth about race relations in Brazil as told here is quite another story; and is a great deal less flattering than what must be recognized (even if somewhat after the fact) as, at best little more than collective Brazilian denial; or at worse, willful state sanctioned Brazilian propaganda.

In point of fact, racism in Brazil is a deep structure psychological game, a consensual affair, a dance played out simultaneously at all class levels and within all gradations of colors as "The" national drama. It is a dance in which all of the rules are obeyed implicitly at all levels. Brazilians all learn their steps "by heart" through social osmosis and through whispers within the families and through unwritten and often unspeakable knowledge about the past. But despite the whispers, the feints, the bullying, the little white lies and the big black ones, everyone knows what is the truth: to be white, blond and blue eyed is to inherit the earth; to be born black is to inherit a terminal disease that leads to a slow walk to an early social death. The unwritten rules are enforced rigidly and with absolute social certainty. Exceptions are rare even in Vasalia, where at the writing of this book there was only one mulatto teacher in the public schools, only one black employee in the Vasalia bank; no blacks living on the prestigious "front streets" of Vasalia, etc.

Two rules are inviolable in Brazilian society. The first is the Holy Grail of all racist societies. It is that the ideology of "whiteness rules all." Whiteness, white values, white religion, white morality, white humanity all are to be accepted without question and without critique as the accepted basis of all universal norms. Whiteness alone occupies the pinnacle at the top of the color-coded societal hierarchy in Brazil. To be white is to be powerful, beautiful, have money and be sexually attractive. To be black of course is to be just the opposite. However, if you are black, or, a poor white, your station in Brazilian society is also set by whether or not you represent a threat to the white supremacist power structure. The most feared threat to this structure, the bugaboo of all white supremacist societies, and the one upper class Brazilian whites are on constant patrol against, is "black man on white women sex." This is one of the few areas where Brazilian white supremacy is exactly the same as it is in other white supremacist nations. Thoughts and ideas about race that threaten the established white supremacist social order are not to be tolerated. They are carefully, civilly, and informally put down, and censored via a host of psychological stratagems that all amount to applying pressure at the sight of the threat. After which, the threats are never allowed to gain any traction in Brazilian society.

A perfect case in point are the anti-racist African militants who have tried to raise both the glaring issue of racism in Brazil and also raise Afro-Brazilian race consciousness. Unaccountably, they have failed in both instances. There is a deep-seated... Read more ›