Recently, the debate on racism in Brazil has been revived in the press from texts published in some of the country’s main newspapers, such as Sheet.
On January 24, Congolese refugee Moïse Kabagambe was murdered, victim of aggression after collecting late payment for two days of work at a kiosk in Barra da Tijuca, one of the neighborhoods with tourist beaches in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Despite this, it is surprising that there is still doubt about the racist principle at the foundation of the Brazilian nation project.
Racism as a structural element
Since the arrival of the first immigrants, there has been a relationship between migration policy, ethnicity and racism, as Carlos Vainer, Giralda Seyferth, and Jeffrey Lesser, three of the main scholars on the subject, point out.
Already in the Empire, a government decision referred to the conception of the German colony of São Leopoldo for the advantages of “employing free and industrious white people, both in the arts and in agriculture”.
The Republic resumes the objective of a population policy similar to the first experiences of establishing colonies, and took significant steps in the sense that the opening of Brazil to immigration should be reconciled with a eugenics policy.
It is during this period that decrees, through the Service for the Introduction and Localization of Immigrants, are issued with the aim of regulating which immigrants were desired, that is, white Europeans and considered “civilized”.
The relationship between eugenics, whitening policy and immigration, during the Republic, also becomes a question about how to think and build a nation project for Brazil, and what kind of people will be part of this nation.
According to Carlos Vainer, the Brazilian State assigned itself the task of constituting the people and the nationality, with the objective of answering three orders of questions: “1 – the economic need, with trained and disciplined arms; 2 – the eugenic need , of increasing doses of white blood; 3 – the national need, of building a nationally unified and integrated people on homogeneous cultural patterns”.
With the objective of homogenizing the Brazilian social fabric, in order to create a cohesive environment of nationality, even if from an imaginary delirium, State actions that had been carried out since the 1920s were intensified, and which have in government of Getúlio Vargas its upsurge. In addition, concerns began around the so-called yellow threat, in reference to Asian immigrants.
Between mestizo backwardness and the fantasy of Europeanized progress
During the establishment of the nationalization campaign by the Estado Novo (1937-1945), white Europeans still figured as the desired immigrant. Even so, the so-called ‘encystment’, that is, the community closure of European immigrants, mainly Germans, was a factor to be fought. Giralda Seyferth’s studies make an important contribution to this discussion.
In some way, therefore, all immigrant communities, even those of European origin, suffered pressure and dealt with the brutalization of assimilationist policies practiced by the Brazilian State.
In this sense, the Brazilian State begins to act through decrees and laws in the process of selecting the desired immigrants and in the interference of the customs of the colonies or existing communities, as a means of preventing the formation of segregated spaces, and putting into practice a policy of forced assimilation.
However, it is necessary to emphasize that, although the view of the immigrant has been marked by tension and racism, the immigrant always enjoyed a better status than the native Brazilian, or the mestizo Brazilian who carries the marks of unwanted ethnicities: the indigenous and, especially the black. The immigrant largely surpasses the national from the racial and economic point of view (eugenics and productivity), points out Carlos Vainer.
The case of Japanese immigration is illustrative of this tension and alternation in the construction of meanings around an ethnic group, sometimes alternated by deep racism, which came to resemble the African, sometimes by the desire and admiration for his qualities as a good worker: “the Japanese was seen, simultaneously, as the best worker and the most unassimilable of all foreigners – the most foreign of foreigners”, according to Vainer.
Still, for Jeffrey Lesser, the Japanese case would illustrate the clash between the “racial/national reason and the economic reason”. The Japanese, in Brazil, as in other countries of the hemisphere, were seen as a “model minority”.
The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were under the influence of eugenic and naturalist theories of racial improvement, one can read the search for the “whitening” of the Brazilian mestizo population, and the adoption of urban models and new economic parameters.
Both Vainer and Seytferth highlight the permanence of the eugenics concept in the post-1945 context for the project of nation and the construction of meanings around national identity.
We can point out, as an attempt at synthesis, that two biases were constant in this project: the economic one, which has as a backdrop the desire to transform the country into a developed nation; and, implied in this desire, the notion of ethnicity, with the eugenics project, of whitening the local ethnic component.
On a concrete historical level, this social-cultural-ethnic equation was translated into the institution of a modernizing project that, theoretically, would leave behind the marks of a rural structure inadequate to the industrial aspirations of the new national elite.
In its genesis, our elite is based on the “manor culture”, the maintenance of privilege, luxury consumption used as a demarcation of social and class boundaries and a polarization between regional political interests.
The modernization policies consisted in the end of enslaved work and opening for the attraction and reception of European immigrants destined to perform salaried work and support the process of mechanization of crops. Thus, the aim was to promote in the direction of progress: economic development and national ethnic “reformulation”.
This movement is ratified and receives new imaginary grafts over time. The current picture of migration in Brazil reveals a change in the panorama in the new flows of foreigners arriving in the country, with the increase in Latin American and African immigration, with a significant presence of Asians, especially the Chinese.
This new framework renews questions about migration in the country and imposes new perspectives, however, it maintains ethnicity as a latent issue, since we currently receive a contingent of people whose visibility and interest need to be constantly negotiated.
In this sense, we remember that the struggle for ethnicity reveals a racist past in deep harmony with the Eurocentric eugenics discourse and that would make us blind to a multiplicity of active and creative minorities in the local territory, both in the past and in the present.
