BURNS-changing Racial Attitudes

7/24/2019 BURNS-changing Racial Attitudes

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218

The

Past

epudiated

In ~he twentieth c~ntU?, the thrust of nationalism altered dramati_

caBy. While once the nauonahsts were absorbed in tracing the historie ro

of their country and in glorifying the potential wealth and natural beaur Ot~

their land, later they beca me. mo~e concerned with the future. As ~~e

twenty-first century nears, nationali sts chall enge institutions and beha .

11 d vior

sn roote m an ever more distant colo mal past. They find in nationalism

the motor to prop~l change. That change will take many forms, but it wil

have one goal: national development.

CHANGING RACIAL ATIITUDES

The nationalists .in the twentiet~ century ~ame t~ appr~ciate a long-

neglected or avoided fact: the nch and vaned racial hentage of Latn

America accounte? for th~ region's uniqueness and vitali ty. Unfortunately,

although the Indian, Afncan, and European contributed jointly to the

formation of Latin American civilization, the three groups by no means

enjoyed equality. The Europeans and their New World descendants occu-

pied the highest l eve of socie ty, with the mesti zos, mulattoes, Indians, and

blacks re egated to lower rungs of the socialladder. Without the benevolent

protection of the Iberian monarchs, the position of the Indians and blacks,

if anything, deteriorated in the nineteenth century. Some intellectuals con-

tributed to their misery as well as to national psychosis. In their eagerness

to mouth European ideas, they circulated the specious racist doctrines so in

vogue among Europeans in that century.

The wealth of biological thought in the nineteenth century, the popu-

lar ity of Darwinism and Spencer ianism, and the complex ethnic composi-

tion of Latin America aroused a live y interest in race and racial theories.

Latin America's cultural mentor, France, offered a poisonous array of

pseudoscientific books attesting to the superiority of the Northern Euro-

pean. Wide y read by the end of the century was the social psychologist

Gustave Le Bon, who methodically classified all humankind into superior

and inferior races with the Europeans indisputably at the topo Among other

things, he asserted that miscegenation produced an offspring inferior to

either parent. Another champion of the Aryan, the anthropologist Georg

es

Vacher de Lapouge, minced no words in his chief work,

L Aryen, son

ol

Social, to support the theory of racial significance in cultural deve opment.

In line with his thesis, he characterized Brazil as an enormous Negro state

on i ts way back to barbarism. Bombarded by such influence and inherito

rs

of a sociopolitical system in which the Europeans and their offspring rul~d

while the Indian, the African, and their offspring obeyed, most LaU

n

Americans equated whiteness with beauty, intelligence, and ability. con-

versely, the darker the people the less likelihood they could possess thoS

e

desired characteristics. Intellectuals throughout the hemisphere blarn

ed

The ost epudiated

219

iscegenation for the backwardness and anarc.hy of .Lati~ ~merica. In

~oing so, they condemned their peoples to a feelmg ?f

mferorty _

The rising tide of nationalism caused some Latin Amencan~ to ques

. n those dreary racial concepts. To accept the European doctnnes, they

UO

II

realized would condemn Latin America perpetually

to

a secondary

fin~t' on The ~ationalists concluded that the doctrines were simply anot~er

P

OSl

1 ..

bi L' A

d

. d by the Europeans to humiliate and su ~ugate aun menea.

rneans evise . . d .

d

the Lat

in Americans reiected the Ioreign racist octrmes,

In ue course,

:J.

f

and in so doing they t~ok.a major step toward freemg themse ves rom

European cultural dommauon. ..

In the early twentieth century, the Latm Amencans began to take a

. t rest

in

the Indians who had been cheated, robbed, overworked,

new m e' .

b d

d

nd

massacred throughout the nineteenth century. Distur e

suppresse ,a .

b the rapid decline of the Indian population as well as by the ternble ta es

Yfb tal exploitation of the natives by the rubber barons of the Amazon,

o ru . S . . 1910

rhe Brazilian government created the. In~ia~ ~r~tecuon ervlc~ m to

d

f

nd them and to incorporate their diminishing numbers mto the na-

tional family. The

Aprista

movement appeared in Peru by the end of the

second decade of the twentieth century and spread there~fter to ot~er

countries. Advocating an Indian renaissance, it strove to u~hft the Indian

and glorified America's indigenous past. In 1919, Pre~ldent Augusto

Legua of Peru declared the Indian com~unity on~e agam to be a le~al

corporation. Acce erating change after tak~ng power m 1968.' the reforrnist

military government recognized Quechua m 1975 as an

ocal

language of

Peru along with Spanish. The Indians benefitted handsome y from the

Mexican Revolution. Under the banner of Emiliano Zapata, they fought for

the restitution of their lands. Eventually the Revolution did return some

lands to them as well as offer them an education and a place in the new

Mexican society, Lzaro Crdenas, more than any other Mexican president,

served the Indians: in order to institutionalize his concern, he created the

Department of Indian Affairs in 1936. Unjust biases against America's

Indian past were finally uprooted, and I~dian th~mes beca me r~specta?le

for art literature music and dance. Latin Amencans at last pomted with

justifiable pride ~o thei; Indian past. Still, the lot of th~ Indian in. the

national societ ies remains far from satisfactory. In some reglOns the Indians

continued to disappear rapidly. Such is the case in Brazil, whe.re, by the. end

of the twentieth century, probably fewer than 200,000 Indla~s survlved.

The government has been moving them onto a huge Amazoman reserva-

tio

n

, the Xing National Park, as a means of saving them, but the .cult~ral

and physical shock of the move amounts almost to genocide. Their phght

arouses considerable international sympathy. .

At the same time attitudes toward the Latin Americans of Afncan

descent also underwent change. As the first step, it was necessary to end

slavery. The Spanish-speaking republics abolished it between 1821 and


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The ast epudiated

22

22

The ast epudiated

1.854.The institution lingered on in Spain s Caribbean islands and in Bra-

zil, Tre~endous international pressures bore down on Spain and Brazil to

free their slaves. After midcentury internal pressures welled up. Spain

feared that to manumit (liberate) the siaves would drive the insular land-

owners to declare their independence. Cautiously the Spanish government

abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, freeing approximately 31,000

slaves. The process in Cuba was slower. The Moret Law, passed in 1870but

only published in Cuba in 1872, liberated children born of slaves after

September 18, 1868, although subjecting the freeborn black to a system of

tutelage until eighteen years of age. In 1880, the government ended slavery

but with the proviso that former slaves had to continue to work for eight

years for their former masters. Finally, in 1886, the crown abolished the

tutelage system, freeing all blacks from compulsory labor.

The abolition movement in Brazil was even more protracted. No one

in authority seriously advocated an immediate end to slavery.The economy

could not absorb the shock of so radical a move. The abolitionists therefore

favored a gradual emancipation, to take place over a lengthy period of

time. The emperor, too, counseled the gradual approach in order to avoid

disturbing the economy and committed his prestige to such a course. The

conservative government headed by the Visconde do Rio-Branco enacted

the Law of the Free Womb in 1871, which declared all children born to

slave mothers to be free. At the time there were approximately 1.5 million

slaves and a free population of 8.6 million. The law slowlydoomed slavery

in Brazil. Africa as a source of slaves had been closed since 1850; after

1871, the only other source, the womb, could bring forth no more slaves.

However, patience with the slow results of the Rio-Branco Law wore thin.

Before the end of the 1870s, the slavery question once again confronted the

publicoThe concern for the welfare of the remaining slaves called forth

some forceful spokesmen and prompted the formation of someactiveaboli-

tionist societies.

Several highly articulate African-Brazilians contributed to the leader-

ship of the abolitionist campaign: Jos Carlos do Patrocnio, a persuasive

journalist, wrote ceaselessly for the cause and became a symbol of the

campaign; Andr Reboucas, one of the empires most prominent engi-

neers, organized abolitionist clubs and spoke and wrote profusely in sup-

port of abolition; and Lus Gonzaga de Pinto Gama spent his youth as a

slave and later became a distinguished lawyerwho specialized in defending

slavesin court. He claimed credit for freeing 500 slaves through the courts.

A fiery advocate of immediate abolition, he declared, Every slavewho kills

his master, no matter what the circumstances may be, killsin self-defense.

He also preached the right of insurrection. Given to poetry, he began one

of his better-known verses, My loves are beautiful, the color of night.

The slavery issue forced itself to the forefront of politics asone group

after another favored the abolitionist cause until only the slave owners

Firemenin Havana, Cuba, circa1885.This photograph illustratesa

racialrealitycommonto Latin America,particularlyat t~at per.iod:

theofficers(extremeright and leftof the photo) are white,whilethe

firemenare blackor mulatto.

themselves were left as apologists of a discredited institution. Finally, on

May 13, 1888, to cries of approval from those in attendance, the parlia~~nt

passed the Golden Lawliberating the remaining three-quarters of a million

slaves. When Princess-Regent Isabel put her signature to the law, slavery

finally disappeared from the Western Hemisphere. If the slaves exp~~ted

the Golden Law to transport them to a promised land, they became disillu-

sioned quickly enough. Life continued tobe hard for them. The battle .for

their freedom had ended, but they faced a second struggle, psychological

emancipation from the feeling of racial inferiority derived from long ~e~tu-

ries of slavery.The assumption of racial inferiority was by no means limited

exclusively to the blacks. Whites, too, had to overcome ingrained prejudices

to reevaluate the ability of the blacks and their roles in the Americas.

During the early twentieth century, interest in the African-Latin

American s new struggle as wellas in their contributions to the New World

grew. The new interest was most evident in those areas where ~hepopula-

tions of African descent were largest, the Caribbean and Brazil. In Cuba,

the prolific intellectual Fernando Ortiz began publishing his studies ~f the

African-American as early as 1906. Together with the Afro-Cuban NICOls

Guillen, the originator of the

ngr ismo

school of poetry, he fo~nded t.he

Society for Afro-Cuban Studies in 1926 and thereafter devoted h~mselfwith

increasing fervor to the study of the African-Americans and ~helr cultures.

The intellectual search for black identity did not preclude violence gener-

FIREMEN are Black , and officersi


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The Past epudiated

ated by frustration and injustice. In Cuba in 1912, the Afro-Cuban leader

Evari sto Estenoz , disil lusioned by the fai lure of the isl and's independence to

institute equality of all peoples, organized the Independent Party of Color

to support the Afr ican-Cubans' rights. Regarding the new party as subver-

sive, the government sent troops to disband it, and a race war erupted that

claimed the lives of 3,000 blacks and engendered lasting hostilities.

Meanwhile the concept of Negritude swept the Caribbean. In Haiti

in the 1920s, Jean Price-Mars took up his pen to urge fellow Haitians to

accept their African heritage and to use it as a cultural resource. Aim

Csaire, an outstanding intellectual from Martinique, a Caribbean island

under French rule, whose contributions include the widely read

Return to

My Native Land, defined Negritude as follows:

1 have a lways thought that the black was searching for identi ty. And i t has

seemed to me tha t i f wha t we want i s to establi sh this identity, then we must

have a concre te consc iousness of wha t we are -tha t is, of the fi rst fact of ou r

lives: that we are black; tha t we were black and have a histo ry, a his tory that

conta ins certa in cul tura l e lements of grea t value; and that the Negroes a re

not ... born yesterday, because there have been beau tifu l and importan t

black civilizations .... Therefore we affi rmed tha t we were Negroes and tha t

we were proud of it, and that we thought that Africa was not some sort of

blank page in the history of humanity; in sum, we asserted that our Negro

her itage was worthy of respect, and that this her itage was not relegated to the

past , that i ts values were values that could st il l make an important contr ibu-

t ion to the world.

Generations ofCarihbean intel lec tua ls ha ve pursued the goa l s ofNegritude.

At the same time, the Brazilians looked with clearer vision on their

Afr ican pas t. Afonso Celso refused to accept the negative predictions about

Braz il 's innate infe riori ty. In his blatantly na tional isti c

Porque Me Ufano do

Meu Pas Why 1 am Proud of My Country), Celso proudly affirmed, Today it

is a gene rally accepted truth that three elements contributed to the forma-

tion of the Brazilian people: the American Indian, the African Negro, and

the Portuguese. . . . Any one of those elements, or any combination of

them, possesses qua lit ie s of which we should be proud. H is book con tained

a chapter praising the heroic resistance of the blacks to slavery. The pioneer

of anthropological studies of the African in Brazil, Dr. Raimundo Nina

Rodrigues, worked in Bahia from 1890 to 1905. Although not free of the

prejudices of his day, he felt a great sympathy toward the African-

Brazilians and manifested a lively interest in their condition. He studied the

African cultures in order to identify their survivals in Brazil, and in that

manner was able to indicate more correctly than previously the contribu-

tions of various African civilizations to the formation of Brazil. For exarn-

pie, he disproved the long-accepted idea that the Bantu predominated

among Brazilian blacks by pointing out the strong cultural presence of the

Sudanese groups, particularly the Yoruba, in Bahia. A few years later, an-

The Past epudiated

other scholar, Manuel Raimundo Querino, emerged in Bahia to writeabout

the African-Brazilians, their religions, and their contribution to Brazilian

history. Querino is of special interest and significance because he was Bra-

zil's first black historian, and he has provided a unique and extremely

valuable perspective on Brazilian history. His major historical essay, The

African Cont ribu tion to Brazil ian Civil ization, fi rst reached print in 1918.

It was fitting that the intellectuals of Bahia-an area where the African

always predominated-first discovered the Brazilian blacks and began to

emphasize the heroic role they had played in Brazil's development.

Writers also turned their attention to the same subject. Several novel-

ists of the late nineteenth century, Alusio Azevedo in his O Cortico The

Tenement),

and Adolfo Caminha in his O

Bom Cri oulo The Good Negro),

described at length the Afro-Brazilian as a member of the urban proletar-

iat. In so me of his best novels, Afonso Henriques Lima Barreto raised his

voice to protest the discrimination against the black that manifested itself in

Rio de Janeiro, described it in some of its ugliest aspects, and called for

justice. Menotti del Picchia characterized the Brazilian as a mulatto in his

lengthy poem [uca Mulatto ; it was the first time in Brazilian poetry that a

mulatto appeared as the hero. The more enlightened attitudes toward the

races removed embarrassments that earlier had inhibited or confused the

intellectuals. Thus freed, they became increasingly proud of the nation's

racial amalgamation, which they began to view as an achievement, not a

disgrace.

Gilberto Freyre helped to break the last chains binding the intellec-

tuals to their racial uncertainties when he published Casa Grande e Senzala

The Masters and the Slaves)

in 1933. The national and international acclaim

that greeted his study freed the intellectuals from any remaining cultural

complexes. Freyre's cogent discussion of the creation of a unique, multi-

racial civilization in Brazil opened vast new areas for research and study. In

1934 the fi rst Afro-Brazilian Congress met in Recife, and three years later a

second one convened in Salvador. The papers read during those sessions

and the discussions that followed emphasized the revised opinion about the

blacks and their newly assigned place within the Brazilian family.

The more realistic appraisal of the African presence improved the

black's po s itio n in Brazilian society, but it would be wrong to conclude, as is

so often done, that Brazil knows no racial prejudice. The facts prove other-

wise. Newspapers r egularly ran he lp-wan ted advertisemen ts seeking whites

only. Until well after the mid-twentieth century, both the diplomatic corps

and the naval officer corps remained lily-white. After World War i t was

necessary to promulgate a law to punish overt discrimination. Black cul-

tural and politicalleaders, such as Abdias do Nascimento and Alberto Guer-

rero Ramos, spoke out to denounce subtle but insidious aspects of local

racismo In all fairness, though, it must be pointed out that Brazil probably

has less racial tension and les s racial prejudice than any other multiracial


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224

The ast epudiated

society, past or presento The races mix freely in public places. Interracial

marriage is reasonably common. A more formidable barrier than race may

well be class. Class membership depends on a wide variety of factors and

their combination: income, family history and/or connections, education,

social behavior, tastes in housing, food, and dress, as well as appearance,

personality, and talentoAs it happens, the upper class traditionally has been

and still remains mainly white, the lower class principally colored. The

significant point, though, is that colored people can and do form a part,

albeit a small part, of the upper class, just as whites are by no means

uncommon in the lower classes. Upward mobility exists and education pro-

motes it.With effort, skill, and determination (plus a little luck) class barri-

ers can be hurdled, but it is not easy.

There have alwaysbeen movements afoot among the African-Brazilian

omrnunity to improve the conditions of its members. Often these move-

ments have stressed the value of education as the principal means of raising;

the social and economic position of the black, but on occasion the trend was

to encourage a back-to-Africa migration, a movement noticeable during the

last half of the nineteenth century. A note of black militancy equal to that

heard in the United States or in the Caribbean resounded in the 1980s.

Young blacks showed more of an interest in Brazils African past than the

preceding generations hado

Racial attitudes in the hemisphere have changed considerably during

the twentieth century. The myth of racial inferiority or superiority has been

destroyed. As one result the Indian and the African-American occupy a

more favored position today than they did at the opening of the century.

Everywhere important steps have been taken to eradicate racial prejudice.

However, although much has been accomplished, much still remains to be

done.

The emphatic renunciation of past racism constituted one aspect of

the significant changes engulfing Latin America during the early decades

of the twentieth century. The Mexican Revolution, the rise of a more com-

plex and encompassing nationalism, and the activation of new socialgroups

contributed to the drama, significance, and challenge of those important

decades.

Development

nd

Democracy

rustr ted

The faca de of the National Congress. Buenos Aires, 1973, with

graffiti reading Bourgeois ie Executed- The Workers in Power

Documents

BURNS-changing Racial Attitudes