Other Research
Freyre’s Illusion of Racial Democracy
In the twentieth century, a scholar by the name of Gilberto Freyre began to portray Brazil as being founded on ideals that the interbreeding of different racial groups, or miscegenation, had created a society where racism did not exist.[i]This common held belief of miscegenation became a foundation for Freyre’s overall concept of “racial democracy.” The idea of “racial democracy” in Brazil was rooted in the belief that miscegenation would be able to whiten the Brazilian population. Freyre suggested that:
Brazilian society is, of all those in the Americas, the one most harmoniously constituted so far as racial relations are concerned, within the environment of a practical cultural reciprocity that results in the advanced people deriving the maximum of profit from the values and experiences of the backward ones, and in a maximum of conformity between the foreign and the native cultures, that of the conqueror and that of the conquered.[ii]
Freyre’s utopian vision was framed by both Brazil’s racial history and his own increasing global awareness to claims of racial equality, especially within the United States.[iii]He propagated the illusion of a “racial democracy” in an attempt to obscure the reality of social inequality. Upper-class elites used the idea of a “racial democracy” to silence the dissenting voices of those considered to be degenerates. Attempts were made to racially purify the population of Brazil to standards of social superiority during the early twentieth century. Historical scholar Jeffery D. Needell argues, “Freyre has been charged with principal authority for the myth of racial democracy, an enduring element in Brazil’s national self-image.”[iv]Freyre became the man who would lead the way in developing a new twentieth-century image for Brazil.
Brazil’s new image was developed by an elite group of citizens who created standards for normality in order to produce a perfect society. Élites sought to foster an atmosphere of conformity through new social standards. Those who did not fit into this model society were considered a social disease, which if left untreated, would result in widespread immorality; destroying the basic foundations of Brazilian society. Values were placed on individuals based on race, sexuality, and economic status. The light-skinned elites wanted to not only impose their values but also their skin color through interracial breeding. Joao Batista de Lacerda, a leading Brazilian physician, and anthropologist, argued that “in the course of another century the mixed bloods will have disappeared from Brazil. This will coincide with the extinction of the black race in our midst.”[v]The ultimate goal of the Brazilian elite was to whiten the population and remove the perceived degenerate dark-skin lower-class population.
In this thesis paper, I argue that the persecution of homosexuals in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century contradicts any idea of “racial democracy” or racial equality. As evidence to my argument, I offer a brief discussion of the racial history of Brazil, and then I analyze components of Freyre’s idea of a “racial democracy.” In the last section, I demonstrate how the perceived “degeneracy” and real persecution of homosexuals in Brazil contradicted any idea of “racial democracy” or social/racial equality.
Historical Racial Context of Brazil
In order to understand how an environment of racism evolved, the historical culmination of different racial groups in Brazil must be understood. To the new European settlers, a race was defined by skin color, not science or ancestry.[vi]In 1500, the Portuguese colonizers arrived in Brazil and began to farm and colonize the land. From the initial settlement of Europeans, the native Indians were considered both innocent and childlike based on their lack of clothing and a presence of body art.[vii]The elite Jesuit settlers gathered nomadic natives and instructed them in the ways of the Roman Catholic Church.[viii]
Brazil evolved into a commercial power during the 1600s as entrepreneurs took advantage of the wealthy sugar industry. As the labor need grew, Christianized Indians became enslaved to the European settlers.[ix]The native labor solution was short lived as European diseases killed off many of the native workers.[x]Since indigenous populations constituted much of the labor force in the sugar industry, the colonists quickly imported cheap African slave labor to sustain their economy.
Slavery was certainly not new to the Portuguese, who already had an established tradition of cheap African slave labor.[xi]Few of the elites felt that slavery was wrong, the majority of whites believed that the primary purpose of Indians and Negroes was to serve in the workforce. By 1850, over 3.6 million Africans had been enslaved in an economy shifting over time from sugar to mining to cattle rearing and eventually to growing coffee.[xii]During the abolition of slavery, the influx of African slave labor became detrimental to Brazil’s racial unity in the late nineteenth century.
During the mid-1700s, the king of Portugal, in opposition to the Catholic Church, encouraged the people of Brazil to “populate themselves” by “join[ing] with the natives through marriage.”[xiii]Many of the Portuguese who colonized Brazil believed that “a brown people may be superior to a white people.”[xiv]JoséBonifacio, a leader in the early struggle for independence in Brazil, believed in creating a democratic community where “the Spaniards would intermarry with the natives and make of both peoples one of the best commonwealths in the world and perhaps one of the most Christian and peaceful.”[xv]Influential men, like Bonifacio, would lay the foundation for the further expansion of Brazil into the South American hinterland.
Two primary means of colonization existed during the 1800s. Either a family lived on a plantation and established a permanent home, or they roamed the frontier, continuously migrating beyond the centralized cities into foreign lands. These pioneering men claimed many native women for themselves, often by force. Similarly, plantation owners used their slave labor to fulfill their own sexual desires.[xvi]In certain regions, the population’s mixed racial background was the result of this sexual conquest and sexual promiscuity. Freyre demonstrates that both “migratory men” and “plantation master[s]” were able to “have as many women as one wished, besides the legitimate ones he had brought from Portugal.”[xvii]
| Fig 1.1 |
As the abolition of slavery progressed throughout the Americas, the Brazilian elite counted on science to establish their racial superiority. Concern fostered over how race would affect the future development of Brazil. Those in power turned to a science of racial improvement called “eugenics.”[xviii]Eugenicists assumed that social problems began at the bottom of the racial-social hierarchy—“that the poor were poor because they were unhygienic, dirty, ignorant, and hereditarily unfit.”[xix]These scientists believed that a sexually permissive “negro element,” transporting “in its veins the impulses of an insatiable sexual heat,” would produce degenerates within Brazilian society.[xx]
Eugenics in Brazil made the connection between science and social ideology. This concept is publicized in a 1930s American eugenics advertisement, shown in figure 1.1. The couple in the image is faced with two paths that begin with either “education” or “ignorance.” They are encouraged to replace the old fashion theories with modern scientific facts to achieve lifelong happiness. Verifying that one another is eugenically sound; the couple is ready to improve the human race through breeding.[xxi]Government officials in Brazil encouraged this ideology by enacting eugenic marriage laws.[xxii]
Brazilian eugenics was conditioned by its racial situation. Elites and scientists in Brazil were widely cited for their theories of “Negro inferiority, mulatto degeneration, and tropical decay.”[xxiii]Scientists throughout the United States and Europe also confirmed the idea that “tropical climates like Brazil’s weaken human biological and mental integrity,” thus; the Brazilian population was assumed to be biologically degenerate.[xxiv]Early twentieth century historian Paulo Prado reinforced this idea by stating that, “The climate, the men free in their solitude, the sensual Indian encouraged and multiplied the unions of pure animality. The edenic impression of [Portuguese colonists] was heightened by the enchantment of the total nudity of indigenous women.”[xxv]Freyre believed that the sexual excess of the Portuguese was a gift in that it allowed for the greatest form of cultural achievement through a combination of Portuguese, African, and indigenous traits.[xxvi]He argued that Brazil was unique because it formed a tropical Portuguese civilization in the New World.[xxvii]The themes of tropical and racial degeneration were shaped in the early nineteenth century and remained a fact to many scientists well into the “revisionist” period of Freyre in the 1930s and 1940s.[xxviii]
Brazilian scientists discounted any idea of biological degeneracy by claiming that their country could be “whitened” and purified through the mixing of whites and nonwhites. This idea stemmed from the belief that white genes were superior, dominant, and not susceptible to being weakened by climate change. Eugenicists concluded that over a few generations this racial mixture would eliminate the black population completely.[xxix]It was predicted that by 2012, the Brazilian population would be 80% white, 20% mixed, and zero percent black.[xxx]
During the early-twentieth-century, scientists in Brazil attempted racial purification with a different mindset than those in North America and Europe. For example, Europeans attempted to “fix” homosexuals by removing their testicles and grafting new ones on from a “normal” man.[xxxi]Similarly, government officials in the United States began to promote the sterilization of homosexuals as a cure for “sexual deviancy.”[xxxii]Conversely, the Brazilian medical establishment opposed the sterilization of individuals for any reason.[xxxiii]Brazilian scientists relied on a natural process of racial interbreeding to solve their social problems. Scholar Nancy Leys Stepan argues that the Brazilian “eugenics movement was ‘about’ race because it focused on the diseases that were seen as specially prevalent among the poor, and therefore mainly black or racially mixed, population.”[xxxiv]Many elites saw it as their duty to remove this “social disease” among the poor during the 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1930s Gilberto Freyre had built on the idea of eugenics to create a new identity for Brazil.
Freyre’s Claim to “Racial Democracy”
The theory of racial purification over generations continued into the early 1930s when Brazil decided to pursue an idea of racial harmony and unity.[xxxv]In 1933, Gilberto Freyre began to transform the idea of miscegenation from a derogatory connotation into a positive national symbol for Brazil. For example, Freyre wrote in The Masters and the Slaves that “The friction here was smoothed by the lubricating oil of a deep-going miscegenation, whether in the form of a free union damned by the clergy or that of regular Christian marriage with the blessing of the padres and the instigation of Church and State.”[xxxvi]The “friction” Freyre refers to is the racial tension that existed during the colonization of Brazil. He argued that Brazil had eliminated discrimination based on race through both promiscuous and church sanctified sexual relations.
This claim that Brazil had accomplished an easy unification of Europeans, African, and Indian peoples and cultures created a new national ideology for the country. Freyre argued that Brazil had become liberated from the racism that was plaguing parts of Europe and North America. The idea of a “racial democracy” would become a central aspect of Brazil’s national identity, granting it scientific, literary, and cultural status well into the 1980s.[xxxvii]As for the 1930s, Brazil would be marked by the “desire to create a homogeneous consciousness of nationhood as the basis of social and political life.”[xxxviii]Elites believed that the only way to create this unity in thought was through a cultural means of whitening Brazil.
Although the ideals Freyre put forth have merit in an attempt to unify the country and prevent future racism, they didn’t change the way society treated those already deemed second-class citizens. In reality, his ideas created a larger gap between citizens society deemed “normal” and those thought to be “degenerate.” Freyre failed to fully understand the struggles of dark-skinned men and women who were labeled “inferior” by society. This failure to comprehend the lower class caused Freyre to make false assumptions about the lives of many Brazilian citizens.
In his book, Brazil: An Interpretation, Freyre undermines the violent repercussions a slave-based economy had on mixed-race Brazilians. He insists that Brazilian slaves were also considered by many Europeans to be “fairly treated” and “as happy as children.”[xxxix]Freyre doesn’t seriously acknowledge that the “mixed-race generations” he refers to in his twentieth-century writings were a product of sexual violence during a period of slavery. Instead, he argues that slaves were treated more humanely in Brazil, than in any other country.[xl]He insisted that Brazilian masters were “less cruel,” and he boasts on how many Negroes were educated alongside the master’s children.[xli]Freyre created the illusion that dark-skinned slaves had been given a similar social status to their white European masters. This illusion created a marginalization of the role Afro-Brazilians performed during the construction of the nation.[xlii]
Any negative undertones that may have coupled with the idea of miscegenation did not alter Freyre’s underlying commitment to the whitening of Brazil. Reformers throughout Latin America allowed the “mulatto” and “mestizo” to be constructed not as degenerates, but as multi-racial agents in a long-term project of national whitening.[xliii]Elite writers, intellectuals, and politicians sought to hide Brazil’s distinction of being the very last slaveholding power in the southern hemisphere, abolishing slavery in 1888. With large state revenues from the coffee boom, Brazilian statesmen were able to finance massive European immigration. The increase in European wealth and immigration caused Brazilian slaves to be further marginalized into a lower class.[xliv]The elites found their ability to uphold interconnected racial and social superiority through limiting the social and political equality of blacks and mulattos within the new republic.[xlv]
| Fig 1.2 |
Brazilian artwork became another facet for the elite to portray their ideas of racial superiority. A poster encouraging the citizens of Sao Paulo to donate their valuables to fund a civil war demonstrates the racial presuppositions of the elite. The poster, shown in figure 1.2, portrays a non-photographic representation of an Afro-Brazilian who appears elderly, frail, and a “relic of the past.”[xlvi]The artist who created this portrait hid the elderly Afro-Brazilian man in the corner of the poster. The poster reflects the elites’ view of a dark-skinned individual’s ability to contribute to society. Observations of this poster indicate that the items the light-skinned individuals are donating to help fight the war are large and expensive. On the other hand, an observer cannot determine what exactly the Afro-Brazilian is donating to the cause; his donation appears to be small and irrelevant. This poster from 1954, shown in figure 1.2, demonstrates that Brazil was not a “racial democracy.” The “comedic” depiction of the Afro-Brazilian man draws significant parallels to racist art and films produced in the United States during the mid-twentieth-century by major companies such as Warner Brothers.[xlvii]This poster runs contradictory to Brazil’s claim of being at the forefront of eliminating racial discrimination.
| Fig 1.3 |
Homosexuals: The Scapegoats of Brazil
A case study of homosexuals in Brazil during the twentieth century reveals little change in the social-racial hierarchy that had existed throughout the nineteenth-century. The social aspects of the homosexual community reveal that darker-skinned homosexuals were associated with a lower social class. Historical documents reveal that the level of persecution and punishment of homosexuals was dispensed in a greater amount towards those with darker skin. The color of a homosexual’s skin determined the way society responded to their “sexual degeneracy.”
Within the first 100 years of Brazil’s colonial history, the Office of the Holy Inquisition had outlawed promiscuous sexual activity, more specifically sodomy, since 1553. The Church considered both partners whether man or woman, penetrator or receptor, to be considered sodomites. Between 1587 and 1794, the Inquisition registered 4,419 denunciations; of the total, 394 went to trial and thirty were burned at the stake.[li] The Church created a constant fear for anyone with homosexual desires until 1830 when the president eliminated all references to sodomy from the law.[lii]Yet, the changing of laws had little cultural effect, it was still difficult for homosexuals to socialize with one another and express themselves intimately. This history lays the foundation for how the institutions of church, family, and state viewed homosexuals regardless of racial classification.
I aim to demonstrate in this section how the significant evidence of discrimination and persecution of homosexuals contradict Freyre’s claims of racial and social equality. Lower and middle-class homosexuals could not bear to have their families find out about their tendencies; at the same time, there was no way they could afford their own private residence to have privacy.[liii]These lower class homosexuals would often meet up in parks at night to cruise for partners. Public indecency codes often landed men in prison who were caught by police.
The accusation alone of any type of homosexual activity was enough to land an individual in jail for at least the night. Any male who was perceived as wearing a woman’s garment, engaging in any type of prostitution, or engaged in a relationship with a minor could be arrested. Even though homosexuality was not a crime, the police and courts had the ability to enforce its beliefs on the community.[liv]Gay men, especially those with low incomes and who were often dark-skinned, had to risk a lot.
Using homosexuals as a scapegoat for social problems has proven to be a powerful tool throughout centuries to unite diverse groups against a common social enemy. Scientists used the “degeneracy” of homosexuality to unite the multi-racial Brazilian population against a common threat. As a consequence, the threat to society shifted from race to sexuality. Homosexuals became a more visible threat as urbanization allowed them to congregate in cities such as Rio de Janeiro. Derogatory terms such as puto (male prostitute), and fresco (fairy, faggot) indicated the hatred homosexuals faced within their community.[lv]
Medical and legal experts believed the outburst of homosexual behavior was a result of the modernization of Latin America.[lvi]Popular films and magazines promoted a sense of independence and sophistication among women. The fashion industry reflected this idea as “changes in fashion triggered widespread uneasiness about the apparent ‘masculinization’ of women and ‘feminization’ of men.” Gender roles appeared blurred as new ideals challenged the traditional roles of the family.[lvii] This challenge to the traditional family forced many men to lead intricate double lives. Many had to leave their hometowns and moved to new urban centers to avoid bringing shame and embarrassment onto their families.[lviii]
Some homosexuals could obtain anonymity in urban areas because they were persecuted and discriminated against relative to their racial identification and class status. Lighter skinned homosexuals were considered “mentally ill” while darker skinned homosexuals were considered “criminals.” Similarly, in the United States, “medical pronouncements on gender roles were succored by race- and class-based configurations of homosexuality (and vice versa).”[lix]American scientists resonated Brazil’s belief that warmer climates ultimately produced a biologically weaker individual.[lx]Americans from the southern areas of the United States who often have darker skin were thought to be more vulnerable to “sexual deviancies” resembling homosexuality. This comparison debunks Freyre’s claim that Brazil had become superior to the United States with regards to race relations.
Wealthy families had the opportunity to “treat” homosexuality as a mental illness. The father of a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer in Rio de Janeiro had his son committed to the Pinel Sanatorium because the young man was “obsessively concerned about his looks,” spending “four or five hours in the bathroom fixing himself up” to go out at night. His medical report indicated that he had been using lipstick, a toupee, and shaved his abdomen and chest hair. The administering physician ordered six weeks of electroshock treatment to correct his behavior. [lxi]
A similar case took place in 1935 when a twenty-five-year-old private schoolteacher named Napoleao was admitted to the Pinel Sanatorium. His father suspected he had an intimate relationship with his roommate Joao. Letters written by Napoleao to Joao imply that there was indeed an intimate connection between them. Napoleao’s battle for freedom was not just with his family, but society as a whole. He hired a lawyer and petitioned for his release, only to be met with the testimony of medical experts who defended his medical treatments. Eventually, after nine months Napoleao was released and deemed “uncured.”[lxii]
Upper and middle-class doctors supported the intervention of the state in scientifically solving social ills.[lxiii] Napoleao’s experience was only a mild example of how far some scientists would venture to cure homosexual behavior. Some scientist’s believed that if re-education proved unsuccessful, the next step would endure surgical therapy.[lxiv]For many upper-class homosexuals the mental hospital was a simply a place to contain and control their behavior; individuals from middle and lower classes with darker skin usually ended up in jail.[lxv]
In contrast to the upper-class white men, black gay men were criminalized. Many men not only faced being disowned by their family but also a loss of freedom through institutionalization. Scientists would attempt to “fix” the homosexual in an effort to restore social order. Government officials labeled homosexuals as prostitutes, murderers, and child molesters.[lxvi]Society viewed same-sex desires as a disease that began with effeminate mannerisms and ended with full-blown insanity.
Initially, scientists tried to link homosexuality to a hormonal imbalance through many racially biased experiments. Leonidio Ribeiro, a faculty member of the School of Medicine, sought to find a relationship between sexuality and physical appearance. His research, political in nature, would allow the government to issue a national identification card. He organized the National Congress on Identification and set up the Laboratory of Criminal Anthropology to conduct scientific experiments on criminal identification. His research and methods were biased in nature against Guarani Indians, Afro-Brazilians, and homosexuals.[lxvii]Leonidio Ribeiro was credited with developing “the defining criterion for sexual classification, and, hence to the creation of heterossexualidade [meaning heterosexuality], bissexualidade [meaning bisexuality], and homossexualidade [meaning homosexuality] as new categories in Brazilian sexual thought.”[lxviii]
Ribeiro, rising as a member within the Brazilian elite, held to the validity of his findings until his death in 1976. In his 1932 study, Ribeiro had the Rio de Janeiro police force round up 195 “professional” homosexuals to be photographed and measured. It is not entirely clear what a “professional” homosexual entitled. The majority of men picked up were labeled a “domestic professional,” which entailed a cleaning position, a common stereotype of homosexuals. Seventy-five percent of the men picked up by police were characterized as flamboyant and effeminate, descendents of poor to working-class families.[lxix]
The study that Ribeiro conducted used thirty-three black and mixed race men who had been convicted of murder to set an anthropological standard for a ”criminal body”. Reprinted photos from Ribeiro’s published work Homosexualismo e endocrinologia,show naked homosexual men “with feminine aspects” lined up to be studied. The majority of the homosexuals who were rounded up by police to be photographed had dark skin. The trunk of each individual’s body was measured in relationship to his arms and legs. Ribeiro never came to a definite conclusion on what characteristics homosexual men had. Yet, from the men that he studied, it would appear most men deemed “homosexual” were “underweight men of normal height with longer than normal arms and legs, and a shortened thorax.”[lxx]One-third of these men were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Most of the men that were rounded up by police declared professions typically associated with women.[lxxi]
Corruptions by government officials would also add to the invalidity of Ribeiro’s study. Middle and upper class white men who were caught in this police roundup would have had the money, connections, or social positions to avoid incarceration. Corruption was widespread among police officials. It was common for police to arrest homosexuals and keep them detained for weeks to have them clean up the station.[lxxii]Police officers would often expect bribes from the wealthy families of those accused of homosexual crimes.[lxxiii]Another common practice among police officers was to hold those charged with same-sex offenses until they lost their local employment, forcing them to flee the area.[lxxiv]
Ribeiro also declared a link between homosexuality and sadism (sexual gratification through the pain of others). He noted, “The known cases of sadism do not occur among excessively masculine individuals, as is the popular notion, but rather among those of effeminate organization.”[lxxv]To support his claim, Ribeiro referenced the alleged killing of three young boys by Febronio Indio do Brasil. Ribeiro defines Febronio racially as a dark skinned, a result of mixed-Indian and Afro-Brazilian genetics. The racial mixture presented by Ribeiro implied degeneration. The argument Ribeiro made evokes a racial anxiety of “dark, sinister forces preying on the purity of innocent, white Brazilian youth.”[lxxvi]This highly publicized report was used to characterize all gay men as further threatening Brazilian society and culture.
The University of Sao Paulo medical school also used images of race, crime, and sadism to create the illusion of homosexual danger in society. One specific example was of a lesbian woman who was caught dressing as a man. This “curious case of feminine homosexuality” was labeled as “sick” because of her intent to assume a masculine identity and aggressively seek out female partners. Yet, what was more concerning to the public was that the woman was an Afro-Brazilian lesbian who only liked white women. If the lesbian had been white, citizens would have perceived the situation as less frightening. This emphasis that was placed on her race reinforced the idea that linked darker skinned people to perversion.[lxxvii]
Many Brazilian intellectuals embraced both the inferiority of dark-skinned races and the degenerate nature of homosexuals. Inconsistencies within Brazilian medical research on race, crime, or homosexuality were never confronted; instead, intellectuals praised each other and cited their “findings” in various journals. [lxxviii]Much of Freyre’s work agreed with Brazilian “experts” on the subject of sexual “inversion.”[lxxix]Yet, Freyre doesn’t discuss any specific social implications of homosexuality; he does discuss his own sexual experimentation in his diary Tempo morto e outros tempos:
Since I have been here in England I have been courted not only by beautiful young English ladies but also by young blond men. I feel like a sort of dark-skinned Romeo surrounded by blonde women and Juliets of every kind…In Oxford it is not strange to see a young man dancing with another young man: in these dances Port wine is continuously imbibed, because the English believe that Port wine is the best of wines. These are dances that sometimes end with plenty of hugs and kisses. It is true that this behavior is not as common here as it was in post-war Germany. There the myth of “a superior race” developed a sort of sexual masochism in young German men, even in the more superior ones, who loved to be “punished” in practices of sexual bondage by dark skinned “exotic” men. In Oxford, what you find is a type of Greek platonic friendship between young men. Sometimes they could be a homosexual. But it seems like a transitory homosexual.[lxxx]
Freyre’s racist beliefs are revealed through a comparison of his personal journal entries and his academic writings. In Freyre’s book, TheMasters and The Slaves, he argues that the primitive Brazilian tribes were commonly full of effeminate males and sexual inverts. He argued that the actions of these dark-skinned “effeminate males” were due to innate or acquired perversion.[lxxxi]Freyre recognizes his own homosexual desires for educated upper-class white men in his journal. He portrays these white homosexual men in a positive manner, suggesting that even those who hold to a “homosexual” identity are most likely only in a “transitory” state of their sexuality.
His journal entry also gives insight to his fascination with the sexuality of colonial masters and slaves. In his journal, he refers to white homosexuals being sexually attracted to dark skinned homosexuals in practices of sexual bondage. Similarly, Freyre believed that the promiscuous sexual domination of white men with black women was the key to creating a better Brazilian character. Freyre argued that, through social and biological evolution, racial diversity would gradually be erased through progressive whitening.[lxxxii]In 1940, Census Bureau officials bragged that they “remained faithful to the most honorable tradition of modern Brazilian civilization, that of racial equality,” and resisted the “racist aberrations” that were “spreading through the world.”[lxxxiii]These officials presented a biased presentation of Brazil’s population by altering the data to forge certain results.
In addition, Freyre also linked homosexuality to domesticated slave positions in colonial Brazil. Freyre commented that:
Occasionally there were male Negros who were unsuited for hard labor but who were without a rival in the preparation of culinary sweets and confections. These latter [male slaves] were always very effeminate; and some of them even wore beneath their man’s clothing a woman’s lace-trimmed smock set off with a rose-colored ribbon, while about their necks were strung feminine trinkets. They were great chefs of colonial times, as they still are today.[lxxxiv]
Freyre implied, that both in past and present times, a select number of poor black men are born with an innate set of excellent cooking and cleaning skills. The commentary that blacks are still chefs today contradicts the idea of social whitening in Brazil. Instead, Freyre demonstrates the view of the social elites by implying that Brazilian men who have been “whitened” would rise above the status of a domestic servant. Freyre’s argument that homosexual black men are born feminine reaffirms the inferiority of dark-skinned races. His ideas also support the studies conducted by Ribeiro on dark-skinned homosexual men in Brazil, another example of how inconsistencies in racial studies were ignored during the early-twentieth-century.
The hypocrisy of Brazil’s image as a “racial democracy” began to be exposed during the 1950s when UNESCO sponsored a group of scholars to discover solutions to ethnic conflicts. Unfortunately, these studies found “racial prejudice among white middle-class Brazilians and severe disparities in income, employment, education, and housing between whites and people of color.”[lxxxv]Many of the Brazilian elites refused to recognize this problem until the Census Bureau carried out a national household survey in 1976. The agency revealed “a clear pattern of discrimination against persons of color, both black, and mulatto.”[lxxxvi]
In modern-day Brazil, the majority of blacks, mulattos, and whites still believe in many key facets of “racial democracy.” They believe that an individual’s education, class status, and even luck come before one's racial classification. [lxxxvii]Gilberto Freyre’s ideas of racial equality have deeply impacted the modern-day Brazilian race relations. As Brazil enters the twenty-first century, many dark-skinned individuals struggle to end racial discrimination, fighting some of the same issues their grandparents fought.
Over the past century, racial equality has occurred at a stagnant pace in Brazil. The treatment of dark-skinned homosexuals in Brazil demonstrates how race and class status determined how society treated an individual who was labeled “degenerate.” Eugenics throughout the nineteenth century in Latin America allowed societies to change those they deemed “degenerate” and “unfit.” Brazil demonstrates that attempts to “speed up” the evolutionary process are often meet with disastrous consequences.
[i]Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006), 45.
[ii]Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study of the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nded. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 83.
[iii]Jeffery D. Needell, “Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre,” The American Historical Review100, (1995), 51.
[iv]Ibid., 52.
[v]Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 78.
[vi]Telles, Race in Another America, 1.
[vii]Bradfored E. Burns, A History of Brazil, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 15.
[viii]Ibid., 29.
[ix]Ibid., 35.
[x]Ibid., 37.
[xi]Ibid., 37.
[xii]Telles, Race in Another America, 24-25.
[xiii]Ibid., 25.
[xiv]Gilberto Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 21.
[xv]Ibid., 27.
[xvi]Burns, A History of Brazil, 33-34.
[xvii]Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation, 37.
[xviii]Nancy L. Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 46.
[xix]Ibid., 37.
[xx]Sean P. Larvie, “Queerness and the Specter of Brazilian National Ruin,” ed. Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies5 (1999), 532.
[xxi]B. G. Jefferis, and J. L. Nichols, Safe Counsel or Practical Eugenics, ed. Jeffery L. Nichols, 14th ed. (Naperville, IL: J.L. Nichols & CO., 1930), 11-17.
[xxii]Edwin Black, War Against the Weak : Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 245.
[xxiii]Nancy L. Stepan, “Eugenics in Brazil,” ed. Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams, (New York: Oxford UP, Incorporated, 1990), 114.
[xxiv]Telles, Race in Another America, 26.
[xxv]Larvie, A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 531.
[xxvi]Ibid., 536.
[xxvii]Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 167.
[xxviii]Stepan, Eugenics in Brazil, 114.
[xxix]Telles, Race in Another America, 28.
[xxx]Ibid., 29.
[xxxi]Gregorio Maranon, The Evolution of Sex and Intersexual Conditions, trans. Warre B. Wells, (New York: Greenberg, 1933), 168-169.
[xxxii]Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation - Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, (New York: University of California P, 2005), 23.
[xxxiii]Stepan, Eugenics in Brazil, 124.
[xxxiv]Ibid., 126.
[xxxv]Telles, Race in Another America, 32-33.
[xxxvi]Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 182.
[xxxvii]Telles, Race in Another America, 33.
[xxxviii]Stepan, Eugenics in Brazil, 141.
[xxxix]Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation, 47.
[xl]Telles, Race in Another America, 25.
[xli]Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation, 51.
[xlii]Barbara Weinstein, “Racializing Regional Difference: Sao Paulo versus Brazil, 1932,” Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, by Nancy P. Appelbaum, ed. Anne S. Macpherson and Karin A. Rosemblatt, (New York: University of North Carolina P, 2003), 238.
[xliii]Anne S. Macpherson, “Imagining the Colonial Nation: Race, Gender, and Middle-Class Politics in Belize,” Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, by Nancy P. Appelbaum, ed. Anne S. Macpherson and Karin A. Rosemblatt, (New York: University of North Carolina P, 2003), 111.
[xliv]Weinstein, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 239-240.
[xlv]Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 45.
[xlvi]Weinstein, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 248.
[xlvii]“Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs -1942,” Dailymotion, 15 Apr. 2007, 17 Dec. 2008 <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1pyaz_coal-black-and-de-sebben-dwarfs-194_music>.
[xlviii]Weinstein,Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 252.
[xlix]Telles, Race in Another America, 41.
[l]Jose Olympio, ed. Brazilian Medical Contributions, (Rio De Janeiro, 1939), 151.
[li]James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil, (New York: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 20-21.
[lii]Ibid., 21.
[liii]Ibid., 22.
[liv]Ibid., 22-23.
[lv]Ibid., 26-27.
[lvi]Ibid., 28.
[lvii]Ibid., 68.
[lviii]Ibid., 281.
[lix]Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics : Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism, (New York: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 90.
[lx]Ibid., 98.
[lxi]Green, Beyond Carnival, 104.
[lxii]Ibid., 107-109.
[lxiii]Ibid., 110.
[lxiv]Ibid., 126-127.
[lxv]Ibid., 131.
[lxvi]Ibid., 46-47.
[lxvii]Ibid., 71.
[lxviii]Richard Parker, “Masculinity, Femininity, and Homosexuality: On the Anthropological Interpretation of Sexual Meanings in Brazil,” Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior, ed. Evelyn Blackwood, vol. 11, 3/4, (New York: Haworth P, Incorporated, The, 1986), 158.
[lxix]Green, Beyond Carnival, 71-72.
[lxx]Ibid., 117.
[lxxi]Ibid., 253.
[lxxii]Ibid., 91.
[lxxiii]Ibid., 159.
[lxxiv]Ibid., 253.
[lxxv]Ibid., 123.
[lxxvi]Ibid., 122.
[lxxvii]Ibid., 124.
[lxxviii]Ibid., 125.
[lxxix]Ibid., 112.
[lxxx]Susan C. Quinlan, Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-speaking World, (U of Minnesota P, 2002), 79-80.
[lxxxi]Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 119.
[lxxxii]Sue A. Caufield, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Brazil, New York: Duke University Press, 1999.150.
[lxxxiii]Ibid., 151.
[lxxxiv]Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 460.
[lxxxv]Caulfield, In Defense of Honor, 151-152.
[lxxxvi]Skidmore, Brazil, 208.
[lxxxvii]Ibid., 209.
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