04 the Color Blind Subject of Myth. or Where to Findf Africa in the Nation de R. L. Segato

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1998. 27:12951Copyright 1998 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

THE COLOR-BLIND SUBJECT OFMYTH; Or, Where To Find Africa in

the Nation

R. L. SegatoDepartment of Anthropology, University of Brasilia, 70910-900 Braslia-DF, Brazil;

e-mail: [email protected]

KEY WORDS: multiculturalism, ethno-racial paradigms, Afro-Brazilians, African-Americans,

Afro-Brazilian religion

ABSTRACT

African influence in a nation must be examined within the framework of thenations formation of diversity, ethno-racial paradigm, and particular his-tory. Based on the paradigmatic cases of Brazil and the United States, I con-

tend here that racial attitudes and the position and role of African traditionsin a nation are interrelated. Discerning racial conceptions, perceptions, and

patterns of discrimination in a nation provides us with strong clues about theplace and role assigned to the African presence in that context. Racisms maynot differ much in intensity, but they do in the cognitive operations they im-

ply, because they are grounded in encoded ethnic knowledge accumulatedthrough specific historical experiences.

LOCALIZING INFLUENCE

An examination of Africa in the New World and the influence of its traditionsshould consider more than just form, content, and diffusion of cultural prac-tices and beliefs. It must also look at location and reception. Where is Africa to

be found in the nation? What is its place in the national formation? How wasthe African element processed in the construction of each national society overtime? How have African traditions found their way into history? One cannotspeak adequately of Africa in the New World without locating it within theequation of the nation. There is no Africa in the New World without hyphena-tion signaling its insertion in continental subsections (e.g. AfroLatin Amer-

ica, AfricanNorth America) and specific countries (Afro-Brazil).

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By the same token, there is no way to speak of the participation of Africawherever it has flourished after slavery without contemplating the variety of

cognitive operations of discrimination and exclusion we blend under the com-mon term racism. African civilization and blackness bear upon each other; the

place of Africa and the place of race in New World nations are mutually suf-fused in a complex articulation extremely difficult to disentangle. However,part of my contention here is that this articulation varies according to national

framework. The peculiar feelings that are at the basis of racism in each case aredeeply ingrained in the structures of relationships developed through a particu-lar national history. These feelings, when disclosed, have much to say about

the insertion of the bearers of African culture in each particular national set-ting. The idea of a common Africai.e. a transnational, hemispheric notion ofAfricais attractive and strategic, and it is truthful in regard to form, content,

and diffusion when color is backed with some common content. But this idea ismisleading and, above all, inefficient when one is trying to appeal to peoplestill well embedded in their local niches, engaged in their traditional, perhaps

premodern or at least hybrid (Canclini 1989), processes of production ofsubjectivity, entrenched in their own borders of alterity.

An updated examination is needed of two emergent discussions in the lit-erature on the influence of African traditions in the New World. I refer here to

two issues that have an impact on the way we come to understand the insertionof the African presence in the countries of this continent, presenting us with al-ternative avenues for that understanding. Depending on what side we place

ourselves along the axis of these two questions, we come out strolling alongone avenue or the other.

The first of these discussions can be synthetically portrayed as the follow-ing: Is the stated ideal of miscegenation in Latin American countries a mis-

leading myth or a legitimate utopia? The second discussion is as follows: Arethe transnational political identities that are emerging under the pressures ofglobalization representative of the shapes of alterity outside the centers com-

manding the process of their diffusion?To these two questions, a third encompassing concern must be added. We

may reasonably wonder whether it is possible to have radical diversity of cul-tures in a full market regime or, relevant for us here, to have Africa amid

America in a unified regime of economic rules.These three broad questions constitute the indispensable framework in

which one can think of the location of Africa in the nations of the New Worldtoday, and they come about as I examine the presence of Africa within the An-glo and Iberian national formations. I use Brazil and the United States as para-

digmatic examples in my analysis.These discussions are relevant because, first, if we decide that the founding

myth of Latin American nations is mere deception, then we have to endorse the

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notion that only after establishing segregation as the point zero of racial truthcan we initiate a truly antiracist politics and provide a legitimate stand for theAfrican presence in these countries. Conversely, if we see, from a LatinAmerican perspective, segregation coming from the top or bottom, as a dysto-

pia of conviviality, we are compelled to envisage alternative political roads to-ward a society free of discrimination on the basis of race. We also have tostrive for a new consciousness of the pervading African presence in cultureand society instead of a discrete African niche. Whichever choice we make, iturges a discussion of the contemporary trend that counterposes the multicul-tural matrix of the United States, which anchors minority politics in the field ofculture substantively considered, to the now imputed myth of miscegenationand its denounced effacement of pluralism. I contend here that only within awell-understood framework of national formation as idiosyncratic matrix ofdiversity is it possible to assess the fate of the African contribution in every na-tional context in the New World.

Second, if we believe that all experience of alterity must be translated intoidentity politics, we are ready to accept that traditional ways of interactingacross the boundaries of race may be given up without a cost. However, wemay choose not to believe this, to instead remain faithful to the idea that thereis more than one modality of production of an African-related subjectivity andmore than one strategy to defend the reproduction of Africa in the New World.

Finally, if we take the position that no Africa is possible within a full marketregime, with all of its derivations, we have to question our certainties concern-

ing the worth of identity politics in a global world. This latter issue is probablythe most decisive with regard to Africa, race, and politics in the New World.

As an anthropologist, I am compelled, ethically and theoretically, to defendvariety in human solutions, to disclose these solutions, and to claim recogni-tion and respect for them. However, to put it succinctly, if in other cases themoral dilemma has been how to introduce gender within the framework of raceloyalties (see, for example, Pierce & Williams 1996), here my dilemma is howto introduce nation within the African/racial struggle for rights. And I wouldeven say that my difficulties are of greater magnitude, because we live in an

age where the framework of the nation is looked upon and declared negligibleas a variable in a world euphemistically represented as globalized.

THE NORTH AMERICAN MYTH OF SEPARATIONAND ITS CRITICS

In recent years, a handful of publications by North American researchers have

appeared that compare the situation of the African-American population in

Brazil with that in the United States. This generation of studies contradicts and

rejects the views of a previous generation, for which the Brazilian model,

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based on the idea of miscegenation, was considered to bring an alternative and,

in that sense, to have an original contribution to make (Hellwig 1992). Contem-

porary authors not only contest the assumptions of economic determinism and

the preeminence of class to explain exclusion in Brazil (see, for example, the cri-

tiques of Fernandes 1969 in Nogueira 1955, Andrews 1991, and Winant 1994),but they also dismiss the idea of a mulatto escape hatch (initially formulated

by Degler 1971) to suggest miscegenation as a path to social ascension.If a group of scholars, especially but not exclusively Brazilian, have con-

tributed to the critique of miscegenation as a myth, in the precise sense of a de-ceptive representation deployed to preserve the false notion of a Brazilian ra-cial democracy (see, among others, Dzidzienyo 1971; do Nascimento 1978;Hasenbalg 1979, n.d.; Skidmore 1990; do Valle Silva & Hasenbalg 1992; Fon-taine 1985), North American students have increasingly tended to focus on a

comparison of the Brazilian situation with the US situation or, more precisely,to read the Brazilian scene from the North American perspective and experi-ence using the latter as a model (see, especially, Gilliam 1992, Winant 1994,Hanchard 1994). Particularly revealing in this respect is the review by AnaniDzidzienyo presented on the back cover of Hellwigs book (1992): If as it iscommonly argued, the United States is a standard against which other Ameri-can polities are judged in the matter of race relations, then what more deeplyfelt source of insight than the observations of African Americans themselves?

Besides Howard Winant (1994), with his proposal of a racial formation,

where race is a fact that cuts across contextual boundaries, perhaps the most

representative author of this latter group is Michael Hanchard. His views aboutracial politics in Brazil (1993, 1994) and his proposal of a divided, overtly ra-cialized (instead of unified and disputed) public sphere (1996a) have beenforcefully contested in Brazil (Fry 1995a,b, 1996; Bairros 1996). Hanchardhas been engaged in this polemic for a while (1996b,c). To make myself clear,I pick up the parts of Hanchards argument that better reveal my discrepancies

with the position he represents. In line with his perspective, for example, Han-chard regrets that no racially divided Christian churches, in the modalitiesknown in South Africa, pre-Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and the United States, have

existed in Brazil (Hanchard 1994:83). Afro-Brazilians, says Hanchard, didnot develop parallel institutions of the kind AfricanNorth Americans did,and the Candomble religious organization should not be considered as such(1994:18). He also suggests that to look at quilombos (communities of descen-dants of runaway slaves) or other traditional African institutions as a source ofreference and strength is a backward glance (1994:164ff)a glance towarda kind of already lost Euridice, who decided Orpheus's death in the Greekmyth. In considering quilombos as facts of the past, the author grossly disre-gards the contemporary growing struggle of Brazilian maroon populations for

their rights to the land (Leite 1991; Carvalho 1996, 1997). Denying Afro-

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Brazilian religions the status of African institutions, he demonstrates a com-

plete lack of ethnographic sensitivity for the national scene of his research.And one is, therefore, led to wonder why he should so forcefully deny the idio-syncrasies of Brazilian black history and strategies. Moreover, reducing the

whole problem to the development of the public sphere, Hanchard does nottake notice of a lineage of social analysts who have repeatedly emphasized thedualities of the Brazilian normative system, which combines modern civilstandards with traditional premodern relational principles (da Matta 1988, da

Matta & Hess 1995, Soares 1996) and, as opposed to North American prac-tices, puts a premium on solidarity and face-to-face settlements to the detrimentof universal, abstract procedures (Cardoso de Oliveira 1997).

While criticizing what he sees as the culturalist perspective of the leadersof the Brazilian black movementto the detriment of a real immersion in acultural processHanchard asserts that many of the working poor do nothave a hidden transcript, that is to say, a strategic agenda of private, ideologi-cal interests that contradict public articulations of either consent or materialcompliance with dominant actors in a given society (1994:71, italics added).

This belief is well in tune with Hanchards dismissal of Afro-Brazilian culturalinstitutions altogether, to which I referred earlier. One is left speculating aboutwhat is, in this case, the content of the cultural process or the culture of adeeply political process he refers to. One is also led to suspect that the main

proposition of the thesis is the plain transference of AfricanNorth Americanslogans, strategies, and objectives to Brazil.

Hanchards view of culture does not differ much from the very culturalism herejects. The problem with the leaders of the Afro-Brazilian movement is not, asHanchards suggests, that they value Afro-Brazilian cultural symbols too much

but that they value them too little; they are unable to hear the inspirationalvoices that resound in them. As Hanchard says, culture has been taken in amere emblematic fashion in an effort to counteract the constant appropriationof African symbols by the whole of the Brazilian nation and their consequentnullification for a political identity (Hanchard 1993:59). The question, how-ever, is not to reappropriate the culture, in a new act of cannibalism, but, after we

accept that a sound Afro-Brazilian transcript exists, to become able to learn,through an honest act of ethnographic hearing and dialogue, what the voicesinscribed in it have being saying all along. In other words, the move should not

be to infuse new meaning in the emblems, politizicing them, but to look forwhat is encoded in them and where one could find a plausible political strategywithin them. Symbols do not constitute an ornamental, epiphenomenal secre-tion; rather, they convey values, choices, and a metaphorically expressed phi-losophy that all too often contradicts, in its own terms, state hegemony.

In short, a hidden transcript is exactly what the black working poor have in

Brazil. This hidden transcript differs from that of North American blacks,


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though, and I refer to this difference below. However, before moving to thatpoint, I would like to call attention to the weaknesses of the separatist modality

of contestation in black politics, which have been pointed out from severalpoints of view. A critique of the essentialist premise in the understanding of

ethnicity was laid down by Michael Fischer (1986), and the disputable conse-quences of the essentialist injunction on the subject were convincingly argued,for example, by Kwame Appiah (1990b, 1992, 1994). In more radical terms,

the perils of segregation as defensive political strategy has been described byGerhard Kubik (1994) as an assignment proposed by the white to which the

black may be uncritically yielding. The politics of multiculturalism has also

been questioned for putting forward canned, marketable identities of ethnics aslabeled consumers (Segato 1997a,b), where the social value of the citizen andthat of the consumer do not merely converge, but above all become indistin-

guishable from the social value of ethnicity, which ends up by being reduced tothe latter. [When published, ongoing discussions in Brazilian Afro-orientedmeetings about the one-year-old fashion magazine Raa Brasil(Race Brazil),inspired by its North American twin publication Ebony, may come to shedlight on this issue.] More recently, some voices have manifested how a new setof representations of transnational, ethnic identities have been induced by the

influence of transnational agents (Mato 1997) or through the interpellation ofthe national state itself, under the pressures of the globalizing process led bythose same agents (Gros 1997a:5556, 1997b).

Other authors have sensed the imposition of hyperreal or abstract identi-

ties on Indians, African-Americans, and women (Ramos 1994, Mohanty1995). And in influential texts, authors have pointed out the somewhat empty,artificially enforced regime of ethnicity in the United States. Herbert Gans, in

an already classical article (1979), termed symbolic ethnicity the reductionof ethnic traits to an almost merely emblematic function in the modern NorthAmerican scene. And Werner Sollors (1986, 1989) has emphasized how the

North American classification of literary lineages in terms of ethnicity notonly serves to keep borders in place but also is quite devoid of content (in the

United States, the cultural contentof ethnicity . . . is largely interchangeable

and rarely historically authenticated, Sollors 1986:28). The authors madethese statements without even approaching the question of whether whiten-

ing takes place in the United States, because despite the apparent loyalty tothe race struggle on the part of African-Americans classified by descent, onecan still question the obvious and exemplary cosmetic bleaching of the art-

ists of Black Entertainment Television.From still a different set of concerns, Homi Bhabha criticized a dead, inert

idea of diversityin opposition to a dialogical and, of necessity, hybridand lively production of differenceas being at the basis of anodyne [sic],

liberal multiculturalism (Bhabha 1994:34). Peter McLaren (1994) tried to

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break through status quo notions of multiculturalism by suggesting a criticalpractice of it, which would imply a kind of difference in relationship, betterpropitiated in border cultures where a new mestizo consciousness or bric--brac subjectivity could arise. David Hollinger proposed a post-ethnic multi-

culturalist society where double ethnic loyalties would be possible and a mat-ter of choice (Hollinger 1995:21). Finally, writers like Stuart Hall and PaulGilroy have stressed hybridity as an often silenced quality of African diasporicculture (Hall 1996a:472, 474; Gilroy 1994:100).

The main point of my argument here, however, is not merely to pinpoint thepitfalls of racial politics in the United States, but rather to emphasize the sig-nificance of the specific racial politics and formation of diversity (Segato1997a,b) within national contexts as the outcome of particular national histo-ries. Although, as several authors have argued, it would not be correct to re-duce race to ethnicity (see discussion in Goldberg 1993:78), discerning racialconceptions, perceptions, and patterns of discrimination in a national context

provides us with strong clues about the place and role assigned to the Africanpresence in that context. If, perhaps, racisms do not differ much in scope or in-tensity, they do in the cognitive operations they imply. On the one hand, asKwame Appiah (1990a) has shown, they are grounded on implicit theoretical

propositions of various kinds and, on the other, as I contend, on encoded ethnicknowledge accumulated through diverse historical experiences. The paradig-matic cases of Brazil and the United States show that specific modalities of ex-clusion and ethnic conceptions are deeply related.

RACISMS AND THE PLACE OF AFRICA IN THE NEWWORLD: THE ETHNO-RACIAL PARADIGM FROMTOP TO BOTTOM AND BACK

National Constructions of RaceAlthough today the politics of minorities presents a postnational, globalizedtrend very much influenced by the historical experience of African-NorthAmericans, the features of racism are, as Stuart Hall has pointed out, modi-

fied and transformed by the historical specificity of the contexts and environ-ments in which they become active (Hall 1996b:472). So, not only nation can-not be disregarded as a framework for the production of particular forms of ra-cism over time (many authors have already pointed this out, from Harris 1974and Skidmore 1974 to an updated discussion in Sansone 1996). Even more im-

portant today, local politics, strategies, and slogans ought to be shaped out ofthese specificities. Diversity (ethnic or otherwise) is not a fact of nature but a

production of history, where national constructions of diversity played a cru-cial role. In addition, the tensions and discrimination along the lines of diver-

sity have to be understood and dealt with accordingly.


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As far as Brazil and the United States are concerned, their race conceptionsand racisms have been repeatedly reported as different in the literature. It is

generally accepted today that race in Brazil is associated with phenotypicalmark, whereas in the United States race is linked to origin (Nogueira 1985).

Also accepted is that race in Brazil depends on consent, whereas in the UnitedStates race follows the compulsory rule of descent (Sollors 1986). For that rea-son, the North American trend is to abolish ambiguity, whereas in Brazil the

road to ambiguous, negotiated, and changeable affiliation is permanently leftopen. In Brazil, color is open to interpretation (Maggie 1991, Sansone 1996,Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti 1996:19).

Other characteristics place them apart as well. In Brazil, race is not a rele-vant factor in every situation, whereas in the United States it is an ever-present

concern, a visible dimension of interaction, significant and discursively indi-cated in any social setting. For example, race is not a salient, recorded trait oftrade union leaders or of the members of the Movement of Landless Workers,

and introducing segmentation by race into those popular fronts would not onlybe spurious but would also have disastrous consequences. Also, in Brazil, dis-

crimination is never expressed as racism of contingents and enacted as aggres-sion between belligerent groups, as in the United States, but always assumesthe form of virulent interpersonal aggression. Finally, while the Anglo-Saxon

white is distinctly white in racial and genealogical terms and racial mixturewill inescapably signify exclusion from that category, the Brazilian white ispolluted and insecure as a bearer of such status (Carvalho 1988). For a vari-

ety of reasons involving either biological or cultural contamination, no Bra-zilian white is ever fully, undoubtedly white.

These differences are understandable only in relation to the ethnic forma-tion in both nations. As Brackette Williams has shown, the nation has a deci-

sive role in shaping its internal diversity and fractures. She has spoken of theprocess of nation building as race-making (Williams 1989:436; see also Allen1995 for the origin of this structure in the racialization of the Irish by the Brit-

ish). From her observation of countries of Anglo-Saxon colonization (Guyanaand the United States), Williams concludes that racial groups have always

been constructed as a function of the unity of the nation and have been ex-pected to behave, then, as nothing less and nothing more than an ethnic com-ponent, the otherinside, in opposition to the so-believed non-ethnic, domi-nant element (Williams 1993:154). Seen this way, and within the histories

studied by Williams and Allen, the circuit of nation and minority is circular,closed, self-feeding; a twofold, integrated reality; two sides of the same coin.

However, the articulations and the rhetoric of power within the nation andits internal cleavages in the countries of Iberian colonization are not the same.

If we are to analyze, as Paul Gilroy did for England (1991), the ethnic bases for

representing the nation in Brazil, we will have to accept that Brazil describes

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and institutes itself in its official texts as a nation of mixed blood. For example,when Gilroy states that phrases like the Island Race and the Bulldog Breedvividly convey the manner in which this nation is represented in terms whichare simultaneously biological and cultural where the distinction between

'race' and nation is erased (Gilroy 1991:45), he exposes a difference with theBrazilian ethnic paradigm, where the Brazilian race is always presented asmixture, a fable of the three races (da Matta 1984). The representation of thenation puts a premium on blood mixture and a convergence of civilizations,whatever the practices that grow under that facade. Various authors havecalled attention to the role of miscegenation in the whole of Latin America as adeceptive racial ideology (see, for an updated discussion, Wade 1995; see alsoMaggie & Gonalves 1995 for a sophisticated discussion of the Brazilian tri-angle of the three races).

If, from top to bottom, the North American ethnic paradigm is based onseparation under the umbrella of a common, color-blind myth of shared effortand meritocratic reward, in Brazil the ethnic paradigm is based on encompass-ing the other, inclusion is its strong motif, and the myth here is the color-blindmyth of an interrelating people. I call the color-blind myth a unified field of be-lief, a hegemonic ideology or system of values, where everyone in a given so-ciety, independent of that persons position, may find expression. If separationis the lingua franca of the whole society in the United States, from top to bot-tom, relation is the key to access in the Brazilian social environment. To ac-knowledge this difference is not merely doing comparative ethnography but

has important consequences when trying to deploy efficacious strategies forcontestation.

The North American Ethnic Paradigm: Reciprocating the GazeAnalyzing the genesis of the ethnic pentagon that today organizes ethnicity

in the United States, David Hollinger recounts that the image of the melting pot

was initially coined by Israel Zangwill to convey the idea of a social amalgam,

that is, a single outcome from a variety of components. Nonetheless, it was

later reinterpreted under the light of Horace Kallens model of cultural plural-

ism with its analogy of a symphonic orchestra: Each instrument was a distinc-tive group transplanted from the Old World, making harmonious music with

other groups. He emphasized the integrity and autonomy of each descent-

defined group (Hollinger 1995:92). This model prevailed and today takes the

shape of an ethno-racial pentagon formed by African-Americans, Euro-

Americans, Asian-Americans, indigenous Americans, and Latino-Americans

(Hollinger 1995:8). This ethnic paradigm is indeed two-sided: Today it is en-

forced as a way of controlling fairness in the distribution of jobs and other op-

portunities, but it originated from the process of race making described by

Brackette Williams: If the classical race theory of the nineteenth century is


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not directly behind the pentagon, this structures architecture has its unmistak-

able origins in the most gross and invidious of popular images of what makeshuman beings different from each other. Yet it was enlightened antiracism that

led to the manufacturing of today's ethno-racial pentagon out of old, racist ma-

terials (Hollinger 1995:32). Therefore, contestation is formulated, under thatethnic paradigm, in the same language as discrimination. And, as I show later,

it is not as removed from what happens in Brazil as Hanchard and authors of

his generation believe. In Brazil, a paradigm of inclusion runs from the top tobottom of society, emanating from the classes that control the state as much as

from those oppressed by them.However, the main problem with the North American ethnic paradigm is

not merely the consistency of the code of oppression with the code of contesta-tion but rather that all the conflagrating parts strive under the same myth. This

unification of the ideological field has grown steadily over time. So, we have aseparated society but a common set of values whereby today the excluded areno longer protected by an alternative myth setting an alternative array of endsfor life. Destitute from an alternative world, with its proper forms of solidarityand satisfaction, they are left abandoned to a nihilistic outlook (West 1993:17ff). At best, the nihilistic attitude can be interpreted as a practice of resis-tance (De Genova 1995), but always as reactive behavior rather than a positive

proposition of withdrawal into a distinctive life-world. Within the ideologicalframe of the North American nation, no open avenue seems to be left for blackdignity within alternative mores. We may be before a case of separation be-

tween ethos and worldview, where ethos has been reduced to diacritic, em-blematic signs of separation as an interest group no longer related to the den-sity of a specific worldview. With the unification of the ideological field, con-testation becomes plain competition for the same ends.

Commenting on a media production paradigmatic for understanding theunification of the ideological field, Herman Gray states that The CosbyShow . . . appealed to the universal themes of mobility and individualism(Gray 1995:89). It is a separate-but-equal inclusion. In this television world,

blacks and whites are just alike save for minor differences of habit and per-

spective. . . . African Americans face the same experiences, situations, andconflicts as whites except for the fact that they remain separate but equal(Gray 1995:87). This situation is, evidently, the dominant, all-pervading mythof meritocratic individual achievement in the United States. But, contrary towhat the author states, it is not universal. America, as a set of national valuesstamped by its Anglo-Saxon, white foundation, seems to have definitely takenover. Only blackness is retained as a platform for claiming, but the claimsthemselves have turned white.

Cornell West (1993:17ff) has described the nihilism of excluded blacks

in North America and has dated its origins to the postcivil rights era. In this

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sense, nihilism is coeval with the process of inclusion of African North Ameri-cans in the market as producers and consumers of growing importance. His de-

scription of the lack of meaning and purpose, as well as of the self-destructivedrive that has installed itself among poor, marginalizednewly peripheral-

ized, in my own vocabularyblack North Americans is touching. Unfortu-nately, he does not analyze the coincidence between the timing of unprece-

dented access to opportunities by a part of the black North American popula-tion and the fall into the nihilist attitude of the ones excluded from this process.It seems reasonable to conclude that the loss of a truly alternative set of mores,that is to say, the decline of an African-American traditional space, speaking in

properly ethnic terms, is directly linked to the expansion of market rule. Ananalysis of this kind would certainly raise painful doubts about the true charac-ter of the achievements brought about by the struggle of the 1960s, but it wouldnevertheless lead to important, unavoidable questions regarding the kind of

ideological commitments and compromises that came together with new op-portunities. Without a thorough examination of the myth lurking behind thejobs, professions, privileges, responsibilities, and obligations now embracedby blacks, no black North American activist is fully entitled to address Brazil-

ians in the tone adopted by Hanchard and others, lest the self-destructive nihil-ism described by West reaches to the farthest corners, where alterity still has a

place and the negative experience of being at the margins of the rule of themarket has not yet fully taken over.

In his classic essay on the relevance of Gramsci for the study of race and

ethnicity, Stuart Hall forcefully argues against the view that the economicfoundation has a unifying impact on social subjects. In his view, capital does

not make the sociocultural field homogeneous; in addition, it can even prevent

this uniformization: What we actually find is the many ways in which capitalcan preserve, adapt to its fundamental trajectory, harness and exploit these par-

ticularistic qualities of labour power, building them into its regimes. The eth-

nic and racial structuration of the labour force, like its gendered composition,may provide an inhibition to the rationalistically conceived global tenden-

cies of capitalist development. And yet, these distinctions have been main-

tained, and indeed developed and refined, in the global expansion of the capi-talist mode (1996b:436). Halls view may hold true for Britain, the Carib-

bean, or even Brazil. In Britain, particularly, a strong labor movement shares

the political arena with the political awareness of minorities. However, in con-ditions of extreme market enshrinement as one can witness in the United

States, where the imperatives of productivity and profit scarcely leave room

for a residue of gratuity or gift in human social relationships, the full marketeconomy is no longer innocuous for the field of culture. What I mean is that it

is no longer clear whether, under the totalizing shadow of the market (which is

nearly the present situation in the United States), any kind of sociocultural ar-


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rangements can continue flourishing disencumbered. I would say that from thepoint of view of culture, full market rule is monopolistic. Enshrined and madesacred, ruling above any other set of values, the market does not allow for

lesser gods. And other gods are needed to have a plurality of cultures in a radi-

cal sense, a multiethnic society. This situation is so because the economic sys-tem is not, as it is increasingly seen, outside, above, and exempt from the cul-tural realm; rather, the economic system is in itself a cultural choice, inter-twined with other cultural aspects in society.

Adapting Habermass expression, the market economy has thoroughlycolonized the life-world and, in this condition, one does not see where and howvalues other than the maximization of productivity and profit can find a legiti-mate place under the sun. This situation, I think, is new, and it allows for an un-

derstanding of globalization as the expansion of the rules of the market to en-compass all aspects of social life and overdetermine not only locality but alsominority groups. In other words, I cannot envisage how, under this pressure, agroup can subsist bearing a different view about the meaning of resources,their mode of production, and their destination in human life. And divergentconceptions about what resources are and to what end they serve are better in-

dicators of ethnic plurality than those who seize resources in society. WhatStuart Hall calls the differentiated terrain of ideology, with its different dis-cursive currents, their points of juncture and break and the relations of power

between them (1996b:434), should not refer merely to discrepancies with re-gard to who accedes to profit but should also refer to what profit is and how it is

to be obtained and used. Only this refinement would be able to provide for aradical diversity and multiculturalism in a strong sense.

From my Latin Americansituated perspective, my perception is that thisterrain of true cultural dissent is being progressively banished from the social

field and that the United States leads this process, even when its intellectualsand activists disseminate a racial politics based on the particular experience of

blacks in the United States.Moreover, Halls insistence on acknowledging heterogeneity (of class,

gender, race, and so on) within the capitalist economy does not imply that

blacks, just because of the color of their skin, will safely secure a territory ofculture. That is, it does not imply that blackness, by itself, guarantees differ-

ence and ethnicity. When the structures of feeling, producing, communicat-ing and remembering that Paul Gilroy (1994:3) calls the black Atlantic

world cease to be foundational for the constant reproduction of an alternative

(though constantly negotiating and dialogical) niche of culture and becomejust an ornamental residue of a previous difference in the strong sense, a fash-

ionable tribal diacritic set of signs take over. These signs start behaving as mar-ket emblems linking particular ethnically marked merchandise to a population

of ethnically marked consumersin a more constrained and less creative rela-

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tionship between consumption and citizenship than the one proposed byNestor Garca Canclini (1995). This canned ethnicity so characteristic of the

United States does not necessarily correspond to an ethnic discourse, and itdoes not constitute a real alternative to total integration and the thorough eradi-

cation of marks of difference.From the perspective I am taking here, in a context like the North Americanone, ethnic politics within a unified ideological field must of necessity meancompetition for the same resources and not the properly political conflict be-

tween diverging views on resources. This is true for a society where hegem-ony, in Gramscis terms, is totalizing and where, despite outward appearances,diversity, in the strong sense of diverse conceptions about resources, their pro-duction and usufruct has been overridden. Even religion, which usually plays

the role of warranting diversity in this strong sense of content, has been largelyhomogenized behind the facades of ornamental diacritic: In the United Statesof America . . . a particular form of Bible interpretation has served as a ration-ale for the whole country as well as for many ethnic groups (Sollors 1986:39).

Individual dropping out is the only available road to escape.In strictly anthropological, Geertzian terms, a difference exists not only

when a distinctive style or ethos is present under the form of diacritical signsbut also when there is some form (even hybrid from the point of view of thecultural materials it incorporates) of alternative conception with regard to thefinality and meaning of social life, that is to say, a nonintegrated system of val-

ues and worldview. This alternative conception certainly involves priorities

other than maximization of profit and productivity and certainly implies a de-gree of dysfunctionality with the rule of the market (as Hall points out). Con-tinuing with this line of argumentation, when a minority group fights for or ex-

pands access to its rights to a larger share in profit and power, what matters isnot the amount of wealth or power that becomes available to it but to what ex-tent it imposes a change on the meaning and destination of that profit or power.An example of this is provided by Paul Gilroy (1991:32) when he talks about

the new kinds of solidarity and new patterns of communication imprinted bythe participation of women in the English coal strike of 19841985. My point

here is that under certain conditions of extreme pressure by the rule of the mar-ket, as is the case of social movements in the United States today, it becomes

increasingly unattainable for gender and race struggles to preserve such formsof alternative solidarity. The radically diverging values that support them areinevitably receding.

We fall back into the trap of some kind of formulation of a culture of pov-

erty, where, by means of the action of the overpowering rhetoric of the myth

of individual achievement and unlimited profit, poverty is the only thing left as

culture to the blacks who do not participate in the white myth. Where is Africa,

then, in the United States? Shall we accept once and for all the equation of Af-


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rica with poverty? Is there nothing left as African outside of material depriva-

tion? Is there anything at all in between this and its assigned reversal of a

minority-within-a-minority of achievers in white terms? Is politics to be re-

duced to a mere struggle for a share in the profit, while people forget to reflect

on the very nature of profit and satisfaction? Is this not the shipwreck of Af-rica, left over by the American myth? To find an alternative, to find a true terri-

tory of culture, we have to find alternative mythical spaces, with alternative

sets of values, and produce from it a carefully articulated alternative rhetoric: a

politics of radical difference. This myth will not be an encapsulated, solipsistic

myth, because none of the working myths are, but a living one: a myth in rela-

tionship, a negotiating, conversational platform; hybrid by the interlocution-

ary inclusions processed through history; an inscription of ethnic history and

aspirations; and also a commentary on the other, an encoded inscription of

white history in ethnic terms. I contend that in Brazil, as in other Latin Ameri-can countries, radical alterityin these nonfundamentalist, nonessentialist

termsstill exists, and that the Afro-American world continues to be truly di-

verse and diverging and continues to speak of a lively Africa.

The Brazilian Ethnic Paradigm: Repatriating the Gaze

A similar analysis of the Brazilian case will shed light on what I have said sofar. In Brazil, the market has not colonized life to the extent it has in the United

States. Besides the problem that is usually called exclusion or social apartheid,

which alludes to those in the population who live at the margins and under theshadow of the market economy as a periphery in relation to it, an otherpopula-tion exists. This situation does not mean that this otherpopulation is closedupon itself, unrelated to the market economy, but that it is not fully engulfed byits mythsit continues to comply with its own traditional values. By the same

token, it is possible to say that while in some parts of Brazil, those fully en-

gaged in a quest for modernity can be said to be a peripheryeconomically,socially, and culturallyof the technologically developed world, there still is

a cultural other. This otherculture becomes interpreted as a culture of poverty,

exclusively defined by lack and default, only when seen from the perspectiveof the economic centers. Postcolonial writing also sometimes implies that the

periphery is the only space (geographical, cultural, ideological) available for

otherness. But it is important to recognize the existence of an other space,where material indigence may be the case but also cultural density and sym-

bolic wealth of an otherkind. Therefore through the process of globalization,the simultaneous engulfing and peripheralization of the radically otherworldis a growing reality. It is also true that as long as there remain autonomous en-

claves not fully engulfed by the inexorable logic of the market, there will be al-

ternative myths, with incompatible conceptions of resources and exotic no-

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tions of what to do with them and how to reach satisfaction. These conceptions

are often seen by modernizing agents as simply dysfunctional beliefs.The Afro-Brazilian religions are one such set of conceptions and constitute

a very important niche of culture preservation and creativity. These traditions

have inscribed a monumental African codex containing the accumulated eth-nic experience and strategies of African descendants as part of a nation. It alsoholds the record of their perception of that national setting and their place in it.This codex tells us, in its own metaphoric language, not only about religion butalso about the relationships between blacks and the white state (Segato1995a,b). It contains a stable repertoire of images that make up a truly alterna-tive myth, and the forms of conviviality they enforce spread far, affecting thesociety at large, well beyond the niches of orthodoxy where the work of elabo-ration and preservation of this codex takes place. In this sense, this codex oper-

ates as a stable reservoir of meaning from which flows a capillary, informal,and fragmentary impregnation of the whole of society. At certain corners ofsociety, its presence becomes diffuse and tenuous, but it is there.

Evidence of this impregnation was gathered by Yvonne Maggie (1992) inthe courts of Rio de Janeiro, from the trials for witchcraft between 1912 and1945. This research showed that judges and defendants shared a common setof beliefs. It is always visible and at hand for everyone, under the form oftherapeutic services, aesthetic inspiration, as a source of answers about themeaning of the most varied circumstances of life, or even as a symbolic reper-toire to locally process the materials of other religions (I refer here particularly

to popular Catholicism and the varieties of Pentecostalisms proliferating inBrazil; Segato 1997a). A similar idea is supported by Gilberto Velho (1992),when he sees belief in spirits and the experience of possession as the most ex-tensive and agglutinating practice of the Brazilian social scene as a whole. Thisloose (in the sense of not really organic, consistent, or rationally articulated)

penetration in all levels of Brazilian society depends, in turn, on the existenceof enclaves of orthodoxy preserved by the most conservative temple houses.These enclaves do not dominate the cultural scene of the country but areamong the references that secure its heterogeneity in the field of culture. Also,

these enclaves guarantee the nonperipheral kind of alterity whose space is re-ceding in the United States, after the market economy and its own inexorable

precepts took over the black enclaves and made recede positive dysfunc-tional forms of traditional solidarity, gratuity, and gift.

However, as I have contended elsewhere (Segato 1995a,b), the philosophy

and politics espoused by this othercodex cannot be racialized and transformedinto a racial politics. This inability should not be understood as an indication of

weakness, as Hanchard would have it, but as a consequence of strength. Para-

doxical as it may seem, the philosophy contained in this codex resists racializa-

tion because it perceives itself as bigger than race and aspires to universality.


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Significantly, it perceives itself as encompassing, embracing the white. All

whites are seen, sooner or later, knowingly or unknowingly, as subject to its

logic. Its recent expansion toward new, white territories in Argentina, Uru-

guay, Spain, Italy, and Portugal proves this aspiration well founded (Segato

1991, 1996). The introduction of Afro-Brazilian religious lineages into a coun-try like Argentina, where African presence had, as generally accepted by histo-

rians, mysteriously faded away (Andrews 1980), shows the strength of an Af-

rican ancestry not based on commonality of blood, in North American terms,

but on commonality in belief and on philosophical community. Indeed, the

part of Brazil that more forcefully expanded into the so-perceived white coun-

tries of the south in the past few years is the black part. African Brazil is seen

by many there as a source of religion, art, well-being, philosophy, therapeutic

knowledge, and civilizing potential. Black is also an exporting force, through

trade with the south, though informally in most cases, in the paraphernalia re-lated to the cults. The expansive potential of Afro-Brazilian culture and the

ability of its brokers are evidenced by the highly elaborate altars of the newly

formed cult-houses of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where 20 years ago

there were none.The encompassing, universal element of Afro-Brazilian culture is inscribed

in the religious codex as a precept for inclusiveness, preventing, as I said,

racialization and hindering the participation of the bearers of the African tradi-

tion in Brazil in any politics based on an ethnic divide. As a prestigious priest

told me recently, that would be overtly political. Ourase [power] lies some-where else. This inclusive determination could be read as a text expressing

the perception, on the part of Afro-Brazilians, of three historical processes that

are characteristic of the Brazilian formation.The first is the syncretic, pan-African substratum that must have begun con-

stituting itself inside the slave ships during the journey from Africa to America

and continued in the New World, structuring an African environment in Brazil

along the lines of artificially architected religious nations. In this recreation of

Africa in Brazil, openness to individuals of any origin was and continues to be

the rule and, also, the clue to understanding the survival and gradual expansionof the whole system. The second historical process speaks of the thoroughly

mixed breeding that forms the basis of contemporary Brazilian population, in-

cluding the elites, with regard to their racial composition; that is to say, the per-

ception of the formation of Brazilian society through massive miscegenation.

The third speaks of the deep mingling and interpenetration of the European en-

vironment of the landowners by Afro-Brazilian culturemingling that took

place and continues to take place in the intimacy of so-called white house-

holds, starting early in life and long ago in history with the socialization of

white children by black nurses.

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The popular voices that speak in the Afro-Brazilian codex take notice ofthese three processes and transform to their advantage the ethnic, biological,

and cultural mergings that took place in history, turning them into a fundamen-tal piece of their philosophy, as evidence of the strength and scope of the Afri-

can presence in Brazil. If we are to apply the Gramscian view that there areethical, moral, and cultural aspects of hegemony, we conclude that in Brazil,the ethical state has failed to raise the great mass of the population to a par-

ticular cultural and moral level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of theproductive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the rulingclass (Gramsci 1971:258, quoted by Hall 1996b:429). In this sense, the state

was forced to, at least, share this encompassing, ethical function with black en-claves that actively produce and expand African culture through the nation and

beyond.Perhaps we have here a peculiar aspect of what Stuart Hall, in his forceful

criticism of essentialisms [including even the strategic essentialism pro-

posed by Gayatri Spivak (1990:12)], has described as the inherent dialogy andhybridity of black culture (1996b:472, 474) but has, in this particular case, I

believe, transformed into the pillar of its very strength. In its specificity, thiscodex in no case presents the essentialist mystical Africentrismor anti-assimilationist unintelligibility that Paul Gilroy (1994:100) criticizes as a

trait of some hard-line black music styles but hammers precisely on the oppo-site key: its universality. This codex is universal not because it denies its Afri-canness (as in the antiessentialist position also mapped by Gilroy) or because it

is hybrid and dialogical as a product (as Hall and Gilroy say of diasporic blackculture), but because it intends to talk for all and it represents itself as an all-embracing and agglutinating traditionits messages are assumed to be as rele-

vant for an African Brazilian as they are for a Chinese person. Because of thischaracteristic, the codex is capable of survival, growth, and expansion in themost adverse circumstances.

However, at stake here are not these multiple mergings but their perception

and transcription into an encoded knowledge. Charles Lemert, in an article in-

vestigating the dark side of self, reports on a North American clinical case

that can be considered very close to the Brazilian experience. A white, middle-class, North American male discovered in therapy a black caretaker who

played the role of a mother figure in his childhood: David came to realize that,

if he had an emotionally satisfying relation with an adult in his family of ori-

gin, it had been with Annie. . . . Annie was, in effect, Davids mother. David iswhite. Annie is black. So, Lemert wonders: If Annie was Davids mother, in

whatever sense, in what sense is David white? To conclude: This is a ques-

tion about which our culture does not permit us to talk. For David to consider

that in some sense he might think of himself as something other than white,

perhaps even black, is a thought that contradicts strong-we claims at their


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foundation (Lemert 1994:110). And this dilemma is exactly where the dividelies with the Brazilian environment. The African codex in Brazil tells the white

of this dark side (literally and metaphorically) of the whites self by appointingit the tutelage of an African deity, by encompassing it within the African tradi-

tion, by offering it engagement in an African religious genealogy. The problemis that within the North American cultural climate, the self will have to pro-

duce, sooner or later, a narrative of conversion (Sollors 1986:31). That is, itwill be mandatory to opt for a clear and exclusive identity affiliation, eitherwithin a strong-we position (identified with whiteness and universality) or aweak-we position (identified with an ethnic mark). In Brazil this option is not

mandatory or even meaningful, and the possibility of a permanent ambiguitywill remain open. Precisely, the premium is placed on openness. The dark,African self will constantly and explicitly aspire to particularity and universal-ity simultaneously. The model is not mechanical; it allows for ambivalenceand multiple affiliations and places a premium on transits.

Moreover, even though in Brazil any strong sense of self of the white is im-peached by the African codex, blacks do not imitate the movement of the whiteself into a concretion but simply undermine the pretension of purity in ethnicidentity, challenging the blood principle and all racial determinations (Segato

1995b). In this way, the philosophy of the Afro-Brazilian religious codex canbe said to avoid the pitfalls of what Kwame Appiah calls intrinsic racism,with its moral error (Appiah 1990a:12) and its fallaciously restrictive fa-milism. In Brazil, a sense of community and solidarityavailable to all, re-

gardless of originis created by religious genealogies (open to everyonethrough a ritual vow) and the universal value attributed to the orixas to speakabout human personality and predict behavior. Supported by these two pillars,this philosophy counterposes a true alternative to white racist essentialism, set-

ting itself free from the trap this essentialism poses to a black sense of selfatrap that confines it within a rigid, essentialist, substantive definition of self-hood and identity, typical of the monological dominant style of Western civili-zation.

At the same time, the cultural materials are hybrid and malleable them-

selves, as Hall and Gilroy point out, incorporating elements from other relig-ious traditions such as Catholicism, native Indian beliefs, and even, lately,

Eastern religions. The universalistic pretension is matched here by a great dy-namism in the proliferation and appropriation of materials for the symbolic

repertoire. Therefore, with regard to its contents, the codex does not represent

an essentialist position either. However, its originality lies in its militantproposition of an idea of a universal Africa, which, though ever changing, Bra-

zilian and diasporic, can be located as a reservoir of meaning for all. Finally, itnever slips into an Africentric position because of its radically pluralistic out-

look. Of course, the main question remains whether black and white traditions

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exist or if there are only people of different origins participating in varied tradi-tions. The culture I have dealt with seems to be clear in stating that it representsa corpus of knowledge originally created by Africans and African descendantsin the New World but that has been adamant to include in its lineages people

from any ancestry.With regard to the white elites, they are in an extremely fragile position un-

der this flexible, diffuse resistance. Their apprehension of the various merg-ings with the black component has important consequences, to the extent that itcan be maintained that white racism in Brazil is not, as in the United States, theoutcome of a barrier that separates and excludes we from them, that is to

say, a discrimination of two mutually exclusive cultural, ethnic, and social ter-ritories with its political and economic implications. In Brazil, racism denomi-nates a different cognitive operation, whereby a great proximity, intimacy, andeven identity with the black other has to be exorcisedhence the extreme

virulence and passion it sometimes involvesalways on an individual, inter-personal basis and never as a confrontation of one community against another,which is so characteristic of US racist behavior. It is the outcome of an I/thou,intimate interracial relationship that was there and continues to be lurking in

the background of white self-formation; it has to be repelled. In Brazil, racisthatred is the outcome of the horror caused by this very private secret carried byfamilies: the twilight memory of the black great-grandmother, the violently re-

pressed oedipal love for the black wet nurse. Racism in Brazil is a purge that

starts from the inside of the white being, a fear (and a certainty) of being con-

taminated somewhere. It has to do with intimacy and relatedness, not with eth-nic distance and fear of aliens. Whiteness in Brazil is impregnated by black-ness. Whiteness, in Brazil, as a sign of safe, uncontested status, is never fully

achieved, never certain (Carvalho 1988). These complexities would call for apolitics able to touch the Achilles' heel of such a structure, a structure leaningmore on a psychological and status-based premodern (patriarchal) organiza-tion than on a categorical, modern, contractual one.

My analysis takes us, undoubtedly, close to Gilberto Freyres classic thesis

of 1933, also supporting the idea of a Brazil, in his terms, fully contaminated

by the African presencea white Brazil that hides a black spot, a mark of Af-rica in the skin, concealed somewhere, a Brazil where black and white do not

estrange each other to the extent they do in the United States. The ultimate

meaning of this thesis was identified with an attack on modernity and modern-izing forces (Needell 1995). Ricardo Benzaquem de Araujo (1994:133) also

asserts that in Gilberto Freyres account, with the modernization of the eco-

nomic forms of exploitation and the transformation of the traditional slave-owning household (the casa grande) into the modern wealthy mansion (theso-brado), the less patriarchal they grew, the more excludingthey became, turn-

ing into a more conventional type of aristocratic domination, founded on dif-


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ference but also, and mainly, on separation. Therefore, the entrance here intoa full modernity becomes related to a particular kind of race relations that fol-lows the apartheid pattern. The premodern, traditional system, as known in

Brazil, was and continues to be marked by interpersonal hierarchical relation-

ships. These relationships are based on different assumptions and work ac-cording to different systems of rules. Racism, in this sense, is an entirely mod-ern attitude, a correlate of the modern laws that enforce equality and freedom

for all.In the Freyrian model, the Brazilian traditional arrangement for race rela-

tions appears opposite the modern North American landscape, where twosocial groups with clear borders compete for resources of various kinds. In theformer, power is exerted amid promiscuity and intimacy (excess in Ben-zaquem de Araujos vocabulary); in the latter, in open confrontation.

However, several substantial differences exist between my contention here

and what could be perceived as neo-Freyrism; two differences are the mostrelevant for the scope of my argument. First, I point out the existence of a viru-lent racist attitude and feeling in Brazil against people of black color whilesuggesting the examination of the complexities and ambivalences of the sub-

ject of such feelings and attitudes. My focus is on a critique of the kind of men-tal and affective processes that are at stake, and my contention is that the cogni-tive, psychological operations at work in Brazil are of a different kind and em-

bedded in a different structure of relationships than those in the United States.

But my ultimate goal takes me far from Freyres in that I intend this whole

comparative exercise to contribute to the formulation of an adequate politics tofight racism in Brazil. Any good strategy results only from awareness of thisdifference and therefore demands an adequate examination of the peculiar pro-

cesses that lie behind the Brazilian form of racism. The second difference be-tween my thesis and that of Freyre and the neo-Freyrians is that I contend thatthe people identified with the black enclaves of the Afro-Brazilian religiousorthodoxy are themselves claiming that their culture encompasses white cul-

ture. The scope and pervasiveness of African culture in Brazil, according tomy interpretation, are inscribed in the Afro-Brazilian religious codex. There-

fore, although I seem to confirm Freyres idea of Brazil being thoroughly im-pregnated by black presence, I do not see this characteristic as a benign, con-

ceding trait on the part of the landowning elite but as a revindication of blackdiscourse by itself and for itself. Accordingly, in my study of Afro-Brazilianreligions I found that the agents of black culture themselves raise this point,thus changing the ideological sign of this statement. If an equivalent of the soul

food of blacks in the southern United States is absent in Brazil, in the sense thatthe whole of the population eats from it (Fry 1982), this is not the outcome of a

process of expropriation and cannibalization of black symbols by Brazilian so-

ciety at large but is, much to the contrary, the result of a strong African pres-

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ence that has invaded and conquered the white cultural space in an irreversibleprocess. Any wise politics for a racially fair society in Brazil has to take advan-tage of this precedent. If we do not take this piece of popular wisdom and trans-late it into political discourse, into the stuff of which slogans are made, anti-

racist politics will either twist and colonize the Brazilian environment or neverreach a capacity for interpellation able to mobilize people outside the group ofBrazilian black intellectuals who, following the North American agenda, havelost contact with their cultural and social basis.

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