Blacks and Human Rights

An odious comparison between the United States and Brazil in the matter of race relations has long been commonplace. The Portuguese had little racial prejudice, and so in its colony, Brazil, there was racial harmony between blacks and whites, in contrast with the prejudice and violence which have prevailed in the United States. The noted Gilberto Freyre actively promoted this thesis, making him a darling of the Portuguese government. In the United States, it was picked up by Frank Tannenbaum, professor of history at Columbia University. When I first went to Brazil in 1944 the weaknesses of this generalization were apparent to me. I visited the home of a white lady where her child was playing with a black. I expressed my pleasure at this racial harmony. She replied : "I want them to play together, but later they will not be able to." Whenever I was photographed with a group of leaders, there was never a black among them. Nonetheless, there was little or no racial violence. Stanford history professor and WAIS Fellow Carl Degler published a classic attack on the Tannenbaum thesis. This was the theme of an interview with him in the WAIS TV series. However, it is undeniable that U.S.-style racial violence has been virtually absent in Brazil. Indeed, there was almost a cult of blackness, notably in regard to carnival and other festive activities, such as the street celebrations in Bahia in honor of the Immaculate Conception. The fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights has awakened a sleeping dog. Brazilian TV has carried stories about protests which are similar to those in the United States. There have been comparisons beween the schooling for whites and that for blacks. A new group called Action claims that black victims of police violence are three times as numerous as whites. This does not take into account the question as to whether blacks are more prone to violence than whites. In Spanish South America by an irony of fate the human rights celebrations coincided with the presence of Pinochet in London. He should have stayed home. While all the ex-dictators of the Southern Cone are targets of criminal proceedings, there is nothing similar in Brazil.

Ronald Hilton - 12/09/98

More on Blacks and Human Rights

     The race issue in Brazil is not black and white. John Wonder writes:
     "I agree totally with your perceptions regarding race relationships in Brazil. I spent nearly five years there, as you may remember. I don't know quite how to express it, but the Brazilian reaction to caucasian-negro relationships is more "nuanced" than the American. The only things I can point out are anecdotal, but they convey a message.
     When I first went to Brazil, I was the executive secretary of a Brazilian-American organization, sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. The Brazilian head of the board of directors remarked concerning a very nice colored boy who was the desk clerk at night remarked "Acho que Jurací é preto demais para servir ao público." (Juraci is too black to serve the public). Not that he was black, mind you, but was simply too black. In another case of a family I was very friendly with, when they had a large party, the grandmother was kept in the kitchen because she was "too" black. This was very typical; blackness was not necessarily bad in itself, but simply too much of it was socially inacceptable in the middle and upper economic classes. I do not know how this squares with all the social activists who cite Brazilian tolerance approvingly."

Ronald Hilton - 12/10/98