AHC/WI: Jim Crow in Brazil

[NibiruMul]

Brazil is known for being racially diverse. Although racism was definitely part of Brazilian history, it doesn't share the same racist history that the US had. Race mixing was always common there and when slavery was ended, all racial laws were abolished.

Suppose that instead of being a heavily racially mixed society, Brazil chooses not to embrace its indigenous and African history and instead follows a racial history more akin to that of the US or South Africa. In this timeline, Brazil develops a culture of racism akin to that of the Jim Crow-era South, interracial marriage is criminalized, a one-drop rule becomes prevalent, racial segregation is common, and it adopts a policy of only allowing white immigration (thus Brazil has a much smaller Japanese population in this timeline).

What do you think Brazil would be like if it had been an ultra-racist society like the US had been?

What do you think would be a good POD in this timeline?

 

[Vinization]

I have no idea what kind of POD is required to generate something like this, but things would be extremely different, and yet at the same time not so much. Our ridiculously high level of miscegenation allowed us to sweep our racism under the rug, with intellectuals such as Gilberto Freyre saying that we lived in a so called "racial democracy".

In fact, I would argue that we're still a segregated society to this day, under an unofficial Jim Crow. The crushing majority of the people who live in our favelas are blacks, as are most of the people that are killed by our military police force everyday. You can bet that, in a big development project that requires the removal of several homes, black people will get the short end of the stick everyday.

As for the POD, maybe a different colonizer? Though that wouldn't really be Brazil, would it?

 

[Vinization]

@AdrianoChika @ByzantineCaesar @Gukpard @Lusitania @Miguel Lanius @olavops

One of these guys might be able to help you out.

 

[Gabingston]

...a one-drop rule becomes prevalent...

I don't think it could happen in Brazil, pretty much every White person there has some degree of African and/or Amerindian ancestry.

 

[ByzantineCaesar]

There would have been a slave revolution. The single most essential difference between Brazilian and Anglo-Saxon slavery was the availability of manumission. The Brazilian slavery system only worked because slaves could have a reasonable expectation of freedom; if not for them, at least for their children. Therefore, you had this escape valve to relieve social tension at the same time as you had a significant population of black freedmen (c. 20% of the population) who were okay with slavery. The flexibility of slavery is why Brazilian slavery was so “successful”. It “failed” when the system became more rigid with the end of the foreign slave trade in 1850, when manumission likewise became much rarer.

In order to have Jim Crow-like rules in Brazil you must have indentured servitude as the pre-slavery workforce and a considerably harder frontier that prevents expansion. The reason that black slavery was introduced in the Caribbean and Virginia was that indentured servitude was creating social tension. Picture this: white people are brought in from Europe on contracts promising plots of land after their period of servitude was over. Eventually, free plots of land will run out and you will have a large white unemployed population causing social trouble because, well, they need employment or self-sufficient property. Black slavery fixed that. It was permanent, so you don’t have a large group of unemployed people after a few years of service making trouble. Furthermore, it created a sense of solidarity and security encompassing the white population (and thereby erasing the perception of social inequality) in the context of a deeply militarized society in which the heavily outnumbered whites ought to stick together in order to maintain the majority black population oppressed and in chains.

Brazil didn’t have indentured servitude. Black slavery was introduced almost immediately, from the 1560’s onwards. You need to delay the introduction of black slavery. However, this means radically altering the evolution of the Portuguese colony in Brazil, as plantations were incredibly important for territorial expansion (in the sense that they settled and fortified the land) and plantations only work on a large scale with an enslaved workforce, because of the violence of daily work and the need for quick replenishment of the workforce.

So, if Jim Crow is introduced in the 19th century, you have a slave revolution like in Haiti because the black freedmen will now side with the enslaved black population rather than the white masters.

 

[BELFAST]

Some confederates did more to Brazil.

Confederados - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Carter In Brazil

 

[FleetMac]

SNIP

...but they didn't practice Jim Crow even in their communities. In fact, Eugene Harter wrote a book on them (which is sourced in that Wikipedia link) which expanded on them integrating into Brazilian society in Sao Paulo state, at no point practicing racial segregation anything close to Jim Crow.

 

[Gukpard]

Some confederates did more to Brazil.

Confederados - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Carter In Brazil

As @FleetMac said, these people didn't praticized Jim crown in Brazil, in fact they even miscigenated with their slaves and are by all means a Brazilian subculture, not the same CSA from the USA.

Now, it pains on my heart to tell this, but I think both @ByzantineCaesar and @Vinization will agree that Brazil had a push towards something like this during the early 20th century... The dictator Arthur Bernardes was applauded when he declared that Brazil would be a white nation soon as the whitening process continued...

In 1930, shortly before the 1930 revolution placed Vargas in power, a law was passed limitating the Jewish immigration to Brazil, and as the radicalisation grew in the 30s the whitening process was restarted, and on some places like Sao Paulo, it only ended with the 1964 coup...

So I believe that the way to get something like Jim Crow is by having things to go similar until just before the new state coup, but have Vargas to refuse to be a dictator, thus allowing someone like Francisco Campos (leader of the pro axis faction of the government), or Marshall Dutra, or other far right figure to take over and make it a proto fascist government and segregate the whites and mestizos from the black population...

 

[Lusitania]

The issue was that Portuguese were not like British they did not have the same attitudes to race. Portuguese were intermixing from moment the country was founded. Even bringing in hundreds of thousands of people from Southern US will not change country demographics to point of instituting south Jim Crow policies.

 

[FleetMac]

The thing is, it took some very specific and not-really-inevitable political developments to occur in the United States that allowed Jim Crow to flourish the way it did. In fact, one may consider that Brazil got lucky in a way that the U.S. did not in terms of longstanding racial unrest boiling over. That being said, I've said on many occasions that race relations in Brazil is NOTHING close to a racial democracy in on-the-ground truth, to the point that I consider both countries to be separate sides of the same coin in this regard. Some may point to Brazil's colonial history as some proof of racial tolerance, but I don't think that's much comfort to the many descendants of raped and exploited slaves in Brazil any more than those in the Southern U.S.

It's not a matter of playing the blame game of course, I'm just pointing out that I don't think this is as unbelievable a concept as some may think; South Africa developed apartheid, despite being a firmly white-minority country with a sizable mixed-race community, so I don't think mestizaje/mestiçagem would make much or any difference. That being said, it would take a social movement during the late 19th Century (when scientific racism and branqueamento were very in-vogue in Latin America and elsewhere) for such a system to arise, prior to that I don't think it'd really be a major force in Brazil or much elsewhere.

 

[Gabingston]

As @FleetMac said, these people didn't praticized Jim crown in Brazil, in fact they even miscigenated with their slaves and are by all means a Brazilian subculture, not the same CSA from the USA.

They did in the U.S. too, it's just that the mixed-race offspring were absorbed into the general black population rather than forming a third group like in Latin America.

 

[Gabrielico]

Another interesting thing is how the idea of a "white nation" was seen through different methods in Brazil and the US.
The US, through Jim Crown, One-drop rule and general culture sought to separate whites from blacks and the mixed were lumped with them. It was hoped that "pure" whites would outbreed the blacks.
While in Brazil the branqueamento/whitening movement sought to erase blacks through intermarriage, until their children were "white".
This painting(https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branqueamento_racial#/media/Ficheiro:Redenção.jpg), the Redemption of Can exemplifies well this line of thought. Black grandmother, mulatta/mixed daughter and white grandson and son-in-law.

 

[Lusitania]

What you might need to accomplish the theme of this thread was a different group colonize Brazil. Not sure if the Dutch or French had gained control of Brazil in 16th century if attitudes and culture would of been different enough for Jim Crow type of laws and attitudes?

 

[Gonzaga]

If I'm not mistaken, Jim Crow could only be practised in the USA because there were already policies regarding the separation of blacks and whites and enforcing the "whiteness" of population before it (the one drop rules). It's very hard to pull it off in Brazil since so much of the elite had mixed ancestors. We are the country of "hypocrisy", not of "rules": if you were rich, influent or powerful enough, you would be considered as white and that's it, even when you clearly was treated as black before. Look at the examples of Machado de Assis and Nilo Peçanha, it was considered bad form to talk about how "morenos" they were, despite the prejudice they suffered earlier in their careers, when they weren't so important. So even someone as black as André Rebouças would be treated "as white" because he was a member of the elite with connections. Actually, a very interesting reading are Rebouças' memories about his experience while travelling to the USA and how surprised he was to the level of prejudice against him there (to he point he couldn't find hotels or go the opera, something he was used to do in Europe).

 

[FleetMac]

If I'm not mistaken, Jim Crow could only be practiced in the USA because there were already policies regarding the separation of blacks and whites and enforcing the "whiteness" of population before it (the one drop rules).

None of which were really enforced laws prior to the 1870s though, even with the legal precedent set by partus sequitur ventrem (which may predate the U.S. but was itself a near-run thing, and part of why I think it's important to understand why demographics and views thereof evolved the way they did in Anglo-America and Latin-America, instead of just writing it off flippantly as 'that's just how they do things'...there's always concrete reasons why such trends evolve on such a large scale). Even South Carolinian Representative (and former Confederate soldier) George D. Tillman lambasted the notion of segregation as a legal norm in 1895, at a time when such hardening of racism was waxing mightily. And while there wasn't really a "middle" racial category between white and black in the U.S. to the same degree as Latin America, it wasn't unheard of for mixed-race persons to end up considered 'white' as well as 'black', so it's not as if social mobility was impossible for persons of color. It's worth mentioning that the ratio of white-to-not white in the U.S. had always vastly leaned to the former rather than the latter, whereas the inverse was kind of true in Brazil/Latin-America for reasons of settlement patterns and logistics.

It's very hard to pull it off in Brazil since so much of the elite had mixed ancestors. We are the country of "hypocrisy", not of "rules": if you were rich, influent or powerful enough, you would be considered as white and that's it, even when you clearly was treated as black before. Look at the examples of Machado de Assis and Nilo Peçanha, it was considered bad form to talk about how "morenos" they were, despite the prejudice they suffered earlier in their careers, when they weren't so important. So even someone as black as André Rebouças would be treated "as white" because he was a member of the elite with connections.

As well-understood as this phenomenon was, I have to ask; how many dark-skinned (by Brazilian standards, at least) persons actually managed to 'rise' in social status as described? I hear this all the time, but given how portraits and pictures of Brazilian politicians, nobles, officials, magnates of note, etc. don't really reflect any significant mixed-race heritage on appearance, it doesn't seem to have actually happened all that often to me.

Actually, a very interesting reading are Rebouças' memories about his experience while travelling to the USA and how surprised he was to the level of prejudice against him there (to he point he couldn't find hotels or go the opera, something he was used to do in Europe).

Given the statement above, Rebouças, Assis, and José do Patrocínio seem rather prominent in their non-white appearance by comparison, which doesn't seem to support said experience being all that noteworthy in a statistically relevant way.

 

[Quintuplicate]

Didn't millions of Europeans move to Brazil?

 

[Gabrielico]

Didn't millions of Europeans move to Brazil?

Yes they did. Many Portuguese, Italians and Germans, the last two in larger numbers in the 19th century. South Brazil is overwhelmingly white, and the Southeast is majoritally white as well, with mixed people close behind.

 

[Peppe]

Didn't millions of Europeans move to Brazil?

Only on the late 19th and early 20th century as an way of "whitening" the population by either marrying blacks and having whiter children or simply making a larger percentage of the population white (the Southwest has a majority white population because of that).

 

[Lusitania]

We need to understand the history of Jim Crow laws. They were brought in after civil war after union had emancipated all black and have them voting rights. Now union abruptly left, leaving white southerners alone to try and limit black power. So the Jim Crow laws were instituted limiting or eliminating black voting rights.

Therefore Brazil circumstances are completely different. They are not a democracy where everyone has a vote. The elite and powerful had completely control of the country and were never in jeopardy of loosing power.

 

[Gonzaga]

As well-understood as this phenomenon was, I have to ask; how many dark-skinned (by Brazilian standards, at least) persons actually managed to 'rise' in social status as described? I hear this all the time, but given how portraits and pictures of Brazilian politicians, nobles, officials, magnates of note, etc. don't really reflect any significant mixed-race heritage on appearance, it doesn't seem to have actually happened all that often to me.


Given the statement above, Rebouças, Assis, and José do Patrocínio seem rather prominent in their non-white appearance by comparison, which doesn't seem to support said experience being all that noteworthy in a statistically relevant way.

Well, quite a few, actually, at least before the great European immigration from the 1890's. They were certainly not "numerous", - and of course, the great majority of blacks were extremely poor and lived in rural areas - but there was an influent mixed race and black urban middle class in cities as Rio, Salvador and even São Paulo in the late Empire, most of them sons or grandsons or former slaves, who could ascend in society due to connections. They were teachers, lawyers, journalists, public workers... It doesnt mean they didn't suffer prejudice in competition with whites for jobs, but they existed and some were successful. But this world would collapse after the Abolition of Slavery and the coming of the Republic, when the government intensified the "whitening" of the population by bringing immigrants. If you look at photos of public teachers in Rio from the late 1880's to the 1910's, you'll always find black women and men among them. After the 1920's, they disappear, mostly replaced by sons and daughters of European immigrants (or even immigrants themselves).