Defining and Denouncing Racial Discrimination in Brazil: The Debate Surrounding the Katherine Dunham Case

In 1950, African-American dancer Katherine Dunham was denied a room at the Hotel Esplanada adjoining the São Paulo Municipal Theater where she was to perform. The incident received unusually intense interest from the press and from politicians, shaping the passage a year later of the Afonso Arinos law barring racial discrimination in public sector employment and public accommodations. The Dunham case is puzzling, though. Why did this incident of discrimination receive such widespread attention when black guests were commonly denied hotel accommodations in Brazil? And what does the intense debate generated by this case demonstrate about perceptions of racism and discrimination? What does it reflect about the patterns of antiracist activism? This paper examines these questions through a reading of newspaper accounts, Katherine Dunham’s papers, and diplomatic correspondence. My aim is to understand the ways in which debates about racial discrimination in the press served as spaces for defining the nature of racial discrimination in Brazil. The Dunham case assumed an outsized prominence because she was a U.S. performer. Dunham and many Brazilians considered racism a U.S. problem rather than one shared in Brazil. The Esplanada Hotel incident offered an opening for defining and denouncing Brazilian discrimination.