Brazil’s racial democracy enshrined mixing while secretly indexing superiority to white European stock

Evidence

In the Brazilian case the project of “racial democracy” has been most explicit. It has meant celebration of a new, miscegenated “Brazilian” race amalgamating the prevailing populations of Europeans, Africans, and Indians into a novel composite lauded as the best of all three groups, of their worlds. The standards of this newly crafted “race,” biologically and culturally, politically and economically, however, were seen to be set by and on the terms of white European descendants. Thus even as the Brazilian project of racial democracy took itself to be opening up to hybridity and its virtues, the terms of engagement and elevation, success and satisfaction remained deeply indexed to the presumptive superiority of European stock. Those not European were to be lifted up – elevated – through racial mixing with Europeans, newly solicited immigrants from continental Europe. European immigration was to be dramatically expanded so as to dilute the local ethnoracial impact of such mixing, biologically and culturally comprehended. Fool’s gold mixed in the right proportions with high-quality gold on this picture produces, well, a distinctly national treasure, a precious “mettle” Freyre would later call a “new race.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1062

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘racial democracy’ really meant in practice — celebration of miscegenation while preserving white-European standard-setting.
• XREF: Connects to the logic of ‘desired assimilation’ in racial governance; resonates with arguments in ‘tragic mulatto’ and whitening-ideology scholarship.