By Gabriel de Arruda Castro
A new survey by the Policy Institute linked to King’s College London is consistent with the thesis that Brazil is the least racist country in the world.
In 1958, a television program in the United States brought together four exchange students from different countries to talk about life in their homeland.
At that time, racial segregation still existed in much of the American territory, and the discussion about prejudice was one of the main topics of the debate.
Here is a summary of the discussion:
The young woman from South Africa tried to justify the apartheid regime.
The boy from Ethiopia claimed that within his country, his tribe is “superior” to the others – and that he doesn’t care about the other African countries since Ethiopians “have no black blood.”
The Italian student, perhaps because of the recent legacy of fascism in the previous decade, remained silent.
The presenter then asked the fourth participant, a Brazilian student:
“And what is it like in Brazil?”
The young woman replied:
“My country is at an advantage here, because we don’t have any segregation.”
She continues, “We don’t have white and black; we have all forms of colors.”
“In Brazil, there is no question that if someone has 1/8 blood, they are considered black; if they have 1/16, they are white.”
“They are people.”
The idea that in Brazil, the different races lived in a greater degree of harmony than in any other country in the world – was mainly accepted until a few decades ago, when the importation of racial debates from other countries, especially the United States, created an artificial demand for racism.
Academic careers were built – and non-governmental organizations developed – around the idea that Brazil is an essentially racist country.
The Marxist predilection for oppressor versus oppressed antagonisms helped crystallize this approach, translating into public policies such as racial quotas for access to universities and public jobs.
New research seems to prove the young Brazilian woman of 1958 right.
The study by the Policy Institute, linked to King’s College London, is consistent with the thesis that Brazil is the least racist country in the world.
Only 1% of Brazilians affirmed that they would not like to have people of a different race as neighbors.
The country appears in last place on the list, tied with Sweden.
Iran, Greece, the Philippines, China, and Egypt are the most racist countries in the survey.
Brazil and Sweden also share last place on another issue: in both countries, only 3% of respondents said they would not like to have an immigrant as a neighbor.
The survey uses data collected between 2017 and 2022 by the World Values Survey, the leading global reference in opinion polls and one of the only consistent databases that allow direct comparisons between countries since the questions and methods used are the same.
The finding may surprise the militants who, more recently, have stridently defended the thesis that Brazil is a racist country by nature.
But it shouldn’t be.
IN DEFENSE OF MISCEGENATION
In 2007, when the discussion about racial quotas in universities was still simmering, journalist Ali Kamel released a book with a self-explanatory title: “We are not racists.”
The thesis was that Brazil, despite its many problems, was far from having the past of segregation and division by race that marked other countries.
At the time, Kamel was already – and still is – the journalism director of Rede Globo.
But much has changed in the discussion about racism in Brazil.
Left-wing figures, in particular, began to advocate with increasing emphasis the promotion of so-called “identity” agendas – which privilege racial identity, gender identity, or sexual orientation over other characteristics.
Kamel’s argument is by no means groundbreaking.
Systematic racial segregation along the lines of what happened in countries like the United States and South Africa has never existed in Brazil.
The two most influential sociologists in Brazil dedicated a good part of their works to explaining how, since its genesis, Brazil was characterized by a mixture of races – contrary to what happened in the British, French, and Dutch colonies.
In the classic ‘Roots of Brazil’, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda says that at the time of the discovery, the Portuguese were “a people of mestizos” with “complete absence, or practically complete, among them, of any pride of race.”
He explains, for example, that the Portuguese government often tried to encourage the marriage of whites with indigenous people.
As an example, Buarque de Holanda cites a norm issued in 1755 that established that the spouses “shall not bear any infamy (…), being forbidden, under penalty of prosecution, to give them the name of caboclos, or other similar names that may be considered insulting.”
Gilberto Freyre, in turn, developed the idea that miscegenation is a fundamental element of Brazilian identity.
In ‘Casa Grande & Senzala’, he wrote:
“The miscegenation that was widely practiced here corrected the social distance that would otherwise have remained enormous between the big house and the tropical jungle, between the big house and the senzala.”
‘Casa Grande & Senzala’, published in 1933, was considered a revolutionary book because the theme of the division of races, with a certain hierarchy between groups, was the prevailing paradigm.
The idea of “whitening”, not only racial but cultural, was gaining strength while racist theories were advancing in Europe and the United States.
With Gilberto Freyre, a positive vision of race mixing was consolidated.
His thesis became so influential that even one of the main defenders of the black cause in Brazil, the writer Abdias do Nascimento, stated in 1950 that the Brazilian “wide miscegenation” resulted “in a well-delineated doctrine of racial democracy, to serve as a lesson and model for other peoples.”
This does not mean to say that Brazil has not had, in its history, reprehensible cases of unequal treatment between races.
But it does indicate that, in a past in which all peoples had some kind of racial discrimination, Brazil has always distinguished itself by being significantly less racist than other nations.
RACISM INFLATED BY IDEOLOGICAL AGENDA
“I don’t know if we can exactly talk about racial democracy, but one thing is a fact: Brazil was one of the most successful countries in the world regarding miscegenation and mixture of races.”
“This process is at the base of our formation, which includes the search for a national identity that would be an instrument to strengthen our sovereignty”, says sociologist Eduardo Matos de Alencar, Ph.D. from UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco).
Alencar adds that the division of Brazil between whites and blacks (a category that includes “blacks” and “browns”, even those who do not have African ancestry) is an attempt to give shape to the Marxist narrative of oppressed versus oppressors.
Gilberto Freyre’s approach, for example, would not allow such ideological use of races.
“This conception goes against the revolutionary project of the left, which has always seen in racial conflict a potential engine for the class antagonism preached by Karl Marx as the engine of history,” he says.
A Ph.D. from the University of Berkeley and a scholar of Gilberto Freyre’s work, Valéria Costa e Silva says that he never defended the idea that he was free from discrimination and that he dedicated many pages describing cruelties practiced against blacks.
“He is far from advocating that we are a paradise of race relations.”
“He strongly defends that, relative to other contexts, including societies that went through the same process of white colonization with intense use of slave labor, the process of building Brazilian society was less segregationist.
For Valéria, the quota model, for example, reaffirms the separation of the races.
“There is a very strong political-ideological component in this process.”
“It’s almost like an intervention; you can’t discuss it; if you discuss this model, you are already labeled racist.”
“We can’t honestly discuss this model in Brazil,” he says.
More recently, even part of the left has turned against racial identitarianism.
The writer Antonio Risério is one of these voices.
He criticizes “reactionary tribalism” and calls for a return to national identity as the meeting point of Brazilian society.
“To overcome this, it is necessary to recover the sense of nation, openly facing both our crimes and our greatnesses,” he said in an interview with Gazeta do Povo in 2020.
But, it seems, voices like Risério’s remain a minority within the Brazilian left.