Brazilian planters’ racial myths of docility were shattered by slave revolts.

Evidence

In other words, those peoples who had in the most early era of the colony’s development as a plantation and mining economy served as the source of labor were seen as pliable and naturally agrarian; those whose recruitment coincided with the region’s beginning of urbanization and secondary manufacturing were also naturally inclined to those niches to which they were disposed. And, as we have already suggested, the collective myth denied the possibility of African resistance to slavery through its reliance on manageable characteristics: “docility” and “enterprising.” This was made possible, perhaps, by the fact that “the basic form of slave resistance” up to this moment had been quilombos, a habit that physically removed recalcitrant Africans from the society of whites. But though the legend is still maintained in some circles of Brazilian intelligentsia, in the first third of the nineteenth century it was shattered. By the mid-nineteenth century, Joao Pandia Calogeras comments, “The Negroes came to be regarded as a dangerous element in the population, a menace to the lives and safety of their masters.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 760

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the mechanism from Parable of the Sower and Things Fall Apart where colonizers’ comfortable myths are shattered by resistance from the ruled.