JAN 21 — The offspring of inter-racial marriages may now have their “race” hyphenated. The decision to offer this option has reignited calls from some quarters to do away with race categories altogether.
A reader suggested that Singapore should emulate Brazil’s cross-colour conviviality, which experts attribute to a longstanding official policy of silence when dealing with race. Thus, racism does not exist in Brazil, she argued.
Brazilian exceptionalism began in 1889 and 1891 when the government burnt all documents pertaining to slaves. In this way, half a million slaves emancipated in 1888 entered a society that already had large numbers belonging to a hybridised race (mulatto). With few white women around, the Portuguese colonialists took local ones. Over time, there was a large mulatto population, giving rise to much racial ambiguity. Today, the mulatto may describe himself or herself as claro (light complexion), moreno claro (medium-dark complexion), moreno (dark complexion), pardo (brown), and so on.
In such a context, rigid racial segregation was difficult, so the authorities did not categorise people based on their descent or ancestry. To this very day, race is not used in official Brazilian data collection, analysis and discussion. If we did away with race as Brazil has done, my reader argued, racism in Singapore too will disappear.
But is Brazil’s “racial democracy” real? Its southern regions are relatively white or light-skinned while the north and north-east are relatively darker. And significantly, there are very high levels of inequality: Non-whites fare badly in educational achievement, vocational earnings, career progression and life expectancy.
While blacks and mulattos dominate in music and sports, whites rule in most other fields, especially commerce and industry. Little wonder Brazilians themselves generally regard a fairer skin as better.
This idea of racial democracy was first promoted in the 1930s by Gilberto Freyre, especially in his rambunctious work entitled Casa-Grande & Senzala, translated as The Masters And The Slaves — a romanticised account of sugar-mill towns that were practically owned by one white man, who was, in effect, the patriarch of his black workers, first slaves, then servants.
Freyre argued that the Portuguese were less racist than other colonialists. Their Iberian-Catholic tradition facilitated the establishment of a “polygamous patriarchal regime” where “widely practised miscegenation tended to modify the enormous social distance between the Big House (Casa-Grande) and the slave hut (Senzala)”.
This racial mixing resulted in so many shades that discrimination based on ancestry became well nigh impossible. This then led to a racially harmonious society. In Brazil, therefore, social classes are economic, not racial, Freyre argued.
Today, riled at the socio-economic disenfranchisement they suffer in Brazil, black activists pooh-pooh this idea of a racial democracy. A job advertisement requiring someone with “good appearance”, they point out, is understood to mean a white person.
In the 2006 Race In Another America: The Significance Of Skin Color In Brazil, Professor Edward Telles paints a nuanced account of the current state of race affairs in Brazil. A sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Telles documents the shift in public opinion, from one that subscribed to the myth of racial democracy to one that perceives a racially divided society.
While Brazil’s rates of inter-marriage and residential integration are high, this is true only among the poor. Thus, while there might be a racial democracy for 80 per cent of people, the privileged class remains irrevocably white. Telles finds that the inequality between whites and non-whites in Brazil is far worse than that in the United States.
Abject poverty among non-whites has led to crime that is so bad regular police patrolling the streets have to don bulletproof vests daily. According to Time magazine, 6,000 were shot and killed in Rio de Janeiro last year — 1,000 by the police.
Since the fairer-skinned are more privileged, many have “self-whitened”, Telles notes. More blacks are self-identifying as brown while more browns are self-identifying as white. Hence, parents of one colour may have offspring who self-identify with a lighter colour.
Despite being shorn of official race categories, there is hyper-consciousness about fine gradations of skin colour. These gradations have to do with how much African ancestry one has. There is a deep structural racism in Brazil that is only minimally covered over by the fig leaf of a seemingly friendlier system of colour stratification.
Because there are no legal categories of race in Brazil, there are also no laws to combat racial discrimination which undeniably exists. By contrast, official practice in Singapore leads to bright-lines among the races. But the very same laws that inscribe these lines also make it possible to recognise and address racially discriminatory practices.
In this way, having legal categories of race may not be so pernicious after all. — The Straits Times
*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
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