Brazil’s myth of racial democracy rested on romanticized slavery apologetics

Evidence

From this culturalist commitment Freyre drew the central raceless implication that Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by no “racial problem.” This racelessness, in turn, was bound up with Freyre’s deeply questionable revisionist historical assumptions. These included claims of “soft slavery” (escravidao suave) and benign or “good masters” (o bom senhor), humane Portuguese colonialism, and “marvelous accormmodationism” of “slave to master, black to white,” a “luso-tropical gentleness” and “carefreeness” among the Portuguese colonizers. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 113

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM theme of ideology laundering historical violence — parallels the romanticization of sacrifice and ritual. Also likely connects to De Lissovoy’s work on the racialized grammar of state.

Related

• 1950s Brazilianists declared no race problem despite documenting rampant racism (similarity 0.81)
• Brazil’s racial democracy enshrined mixing while secretly indexing superiority to white European stock (similarity 0.80)
• Brazilians held normalized race prejudice alongside a proud tradition of racial equality (similarity 0.79)
• Brazilian slavery extended to white enslaved people, disproving race-based definitions (similarity 0.79)