By Emília Viotti Costa.
This essay is repeated elsewhere; I got it from Chapter 9 of
Costa, Emília. Da Monarquia à República: Momentos Decisivos. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2007.
In English, this essay is entitled "The Myth of Racial Democracy." I found it referenced in Júnia Ferreira Furtado's book called Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century. In her essay, Costa discusses how "social scientists and historians operate on the level of social mythology and they themselves, whether they like it or not, help destroy and create myths. In the process, the "truth" of one generation very often becomes the myth of the next. Studious North Americans, for example, today can talk about the myth of the self-made man. Nevertheless, for many of those who lived in the United States in the 19th century (and perhaps for many today) it corresponded to their experience of life, and it wasn't simply a dream that helped the common man confront his daily frustrations. The myth helped reduce social conflict, that is clear. But it also impelled men to great enterprises, some successes and others failures. It was a part of the American reality, just as real in traditional experience as money, work, and hunger" (368).
While Costa argues that the "self-made man" wasn't a part of the reality in Brazil, but that the myth of racial democracy has been equal in creating possibilities while denying actual reality. Showing data on education that anyone could look up, the disparity in access to wealth based on skin color is striking. To repeat the quote above more succinctly, she notes how "a powerful myth, the idea of a racial democracy - that to a certain point regulated the perceptions of the lives of Brazilians of Freyre's generation - turned into, for a new generation of social scientists, a ruined and discredited myth" (368).
The concept is interesting; in today's world there seems to be a battle for dominance over truths. Do we save time and call them tomorrow's myths? The implication here is that the moment we write something down it becomes myth, even the social scientists, like it or not. So, this would make Júnia Ferreira Furtado's book on Chica da Silva simply another in a long line of myths about her. The previous works on her have been debunked for inaccuracies; are we simply waiting for another set of criticisms to take Furtado's place? I am still struggling to make sense of this, but it seems to me that where one is located in ability to make myths is key; just because something is "truth" doesn't mean it will gain any traction. Take the question of vaccinations in the U.S., for example. The study that was debunked about a link between autism and vaccinations has been so thoroughly shown to be a fraud, but it continues to live on through public discourse and affect the way all of us make decisions about whether or not to vaccinate and how.
Costa proposes a way of looking at racial democracy, that it was a response to the theories of racial hierarchy in Europe, so "confronting the theories that highlighted the superiority of the white population and the inferiority of mestizos and blacks, the Brazilian elite - a minority of whites, some of hwome were not sure of the "purity" of their blood, surrounded by a majority of mestizos - didn't discover a better solution than to located their hopes in the process of "whitening" (branqueamento)" (371). Prejudice then became based on color and not origin, as in the U.S. (Ibid.)
This is an excellent read, and the rest of the book looks appears to be very interesting as well. If you don't read Portuguese but are looking to know more about Brazil's racial landscape, this is a good place to begin.
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