Racial Democracy Revisited: Afro-Brazilians and the Silencing of Race in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil

This paper traces the Brazilian ideological construct known as “racial democracy” to the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Institutionalized from the 1930s onwards, “racial democracy” was conceived to deny the existence of racial prejudice in Brazil and to explain this absence through a benign system of slavery or a widespread process of miscegenation. I will show how “racial democracy” came to be articulated in the nineteenth century through three processes: the silencing of “race” or what nineteenth-century writers called “incident of color”; the birth of the mulatto, who rhetorically lacked African ancestry, and posed as neither black nor white; and the “nonracial humanism” of African descendants who in the 1830s condemned racism, and for the first time since Brazil's independence publicly unveiled the exclusion of men of color from government. White bureaucrats hoped to end talks about peoples' race to undermine the unfolding of another Haitian revolution and produce a lasting state rhetoric of inclusion—one that would demarcate the space for Afro-Brazilians within the cultural realm and outside state politics.