By LEONARDO SACRAMENTO*

A materialist critique of the idealism of integralist replication by Felipe Maruf Quintas

Felipe Maruf Quintas wrote a reply to the article I published on the site the earth is round about Borba Gato and the proto-fascist defense of the statue by Rui Costa Pimenta and Aldo Rebelo. In the article, based on historical data, I distinguished the bandeirante, or rather the sertanejo, from bandeirantismo. I explained that the sertanejo of the XNUMXth, XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries is a historical fact distinct from bandeirantismo, the racialist movement of the São Paulo elite created in the early XNUMXth century. Apparently, judging by his passionate defense of Borba Gato, Quintas did not understand the distinction. Or maybe he understood, but he trampled on it in the name of seeking some pamphleteer coherence for the Fifth Movement, a proto-fascist movement headed by Aldo Rebelo and ardently defended by the author.

His reply is, above all, a passionate defense of the “legacy” of Borba Gato and the bandeirantes, as did Rui Costa Pimenta and Aldo Rebelo. He claims that my article contains “historical falsehoods”. Unfortunately, he did not address the “falsifications”, pointing out, item by item, what would have been the methodological, sources or analysis error that he would have committed. Objectively, he did not dwell on the data presented. Nevertheless, the “historical falsifications” of Quintas were so many that I was forced to enumerate them. Let’s go to Quincas’ “falsifications” and “historiographical” and methodological errors:

I asserted that the São Paulo of the 1922th, XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries did not exist as projected by XNUMXth century Paulistas. Quintas, in contrast, only states that São Paulo as a captaincy encompassed “Minas Gerais, Paraná, Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Rondônia”, which would have expanded “São Paulo at the same time that it expanded the Brazil, demonstrating the importance of São Paulo for the construction of Brazil and Brazilianness”. This was the only contestation, an apologetic statement that, in practice, reaffirms the data I worked on in the distinction between sertanejos and bandeirantismo as a political and supremacist movement in the XNUMXth century. By the way, as I said in a quote, that was exactly what Júlio de Mesquita Filho said in the Comunhão Paulista manifesto, published in XNUMX – therefore, Quintas agreed with Júlio de Mesquita Filho's assertion. The author only reproduced the Bandeirantista myth of Afonso de Taunay, Alfredo Elis Junior and Júlio de Mesquita Filho to oppose a text that was constructed to oppose it.

Then, the author states, when trying to attack the distinction between sertanejo and bandeirantismo, that I would have said that bandeirantismo would be an illegitimate movement for having “late fabulation”, which he did not say. I didn't say it was illegitimate - that term is not in the text. He said there was a mythologizing, which is something completely different. Myths, obviously, are not illegitimate if they are accepted social facts, as it was for the intellectual elite of São Paulo in the 1920s and it is for Quintas. To this end, the author states that the “adopted criterion”, that of “late fabulation”, would also apply to the quilombos, Zumbi dos Palmares and Tereza de Benguela.

But why, in this respect, does the author put Zumbi dos Palmares and Borba Gato in the same basket? Because, for a defender of the Fifth Movement and the bandeirante myth, there is no element of class struggle. While the enslaved and the quilombagem, as Clóvis Moura recalls, were the constitutive elements of the class struggle in slavery, Borba Gato, as well as the captains of the bush, were the constitutive elements of repression. Therefore, for the author, repression and freedom constitute equality in the construction of nationality, and not antagonistic poles. There would have been no class struggle in slavery. Or, in a more coherent hypothesis with its construction, there would have been, but of the Paulistas against the Portuguese, not of the enslaved Africans against the Brazilian slavers and the Portuguese Crown – therefore, Africans are seconded, in the author's sense. Slavery is resoundingly ignored in his text. It will be seen later that Quintas has a negative appreciation of the quilombos.

The author disagrees with the statement that links bandeiranteism with supremacism, even with the data brought about northeasterners and blacks in the text, which were ignored. In exchange, he merely stated that progressives like Manoel Bonfim would also have praised “bandeirantismo” – note that here he confuses bandeirantismo as a XNUMXth-century political movement of the XNUMXth- and XNUMXth-century sertanejo once again. Unfortunately, he does not mention how Manoel Bonfim would have praised and how this praise would contribute to a “progressive” project. The author is not contextualized. And this is an epistemological confusion of the author. The author confuses memorialists of the time with scientific historiography.

Manoel Bonfim wrote a book with the eugenicist Olavo Bilac, through Brazil, in 1921. In this book, the authors seek a common past that could link Brazilians. Ediógenes Aragão Santos and Regina Maria Monteiro^[1], in an article about the book, conclude that the authors seek three objectives: territorial delimitation, the existence of a common past among Brazilians and the communion of national feelings. For the authors (2002, p. 29), in the work “the concept of civilization, like the concept of work, is coated with a positive meaning, whose main characteristic is the absence of conflicts. There is no resistance. Thus, after the submission of the indigenous person by the bandeirante, a peaceful coexistence is established between them. According to Carlos, Diogo Álvares, Caramuru, 'lived a long time among the Indians, marrying a girl from the tribe'. Although the authors use the word domination to qualify the relationship established between the bandeirante and the indigenous, the text builds an image of a harmonious relationship”. Manoel Bonfim must be analyzed, not quoted uncritically, as he was steeped in the projection of national construction in the 1920s, his involvement in the bandeirante myth making sense. I recommend reading Chapter III of the work by Bilac and Bonfim, entitled the old african, practically a Freyrian libel of racial harmony. Bonfim's quotation, in turn, is coherent for Quintas insofar as class struggle and conflict do not exist.

The author endorses in his text the relationship of the absence of conflicts in Caramuru, transferring it to Borba Gato and the bandeirantes, transformed into peacemakers: “Definitely, there is no poetic license to justify the seventeenth-century caboclo Borba Gato, who lived peacefully for about 20 years among indigenous peoples, to be taken as an icon of a policy of attracting European labor that took place centuries later”, he stated (my emphasis).

Quintas confuses a memoirist with a historian and an object to be analyzed with uncritical idolatry, fully reproducing the thinking of memoirists from the 1920s. August 2021 debate. In short, quoting an author from 1920 cannot be a means of refuting a debate in which he does not participate. It would be up to Quintas to carry out the analysis, which was not done. For him, the mere citation of the title of two works by Bonfim, linking it to the term “progressive”, was enough.

Olavo Bilac founded the Liga Nacionalista de São Paulo, in 1917, through the isolated faculties, which would be grouped into the University of São Paulo in 1934. The Liga Nacionalista de São Paulo defended the triad school, vote and military service, and had in its deliberative council and directors Monteiro Lobato, Amadeu Amaral, Nestor Rangel Pestana and Júlio de Mesquita Filho himself.^[2] Quintas should try to understand, in his reply, who and how the elite behaved, including the proximity between what he called “progressives” and conservatives – in practice, everyone knew each other, since they belonged to the same class origin and attended the same reduced spaces for the reproduction of symbolic capital, sharing common political and epistemological elements. Perhaps he would understand why Anísio Teixeira proposed to write the Manifesto of the Pioneers of New Education, in 1932, with Fernando de Azevedo, a reactionary conservative who defended a specific education for the poor, as I explained about the São Paulo Public Instruction Survey.

Then he quotes Getúlio Vargas, who would have praised the bandeirantes. Nothing more coherent. Getúlio was a convinced eugenicist, ideologically close not only to Italian fascism, but to Arianism, absolutely in vogue in Brazilian society with Oliveira Vianna, who had published The evolution of the Brazilian people as official Brazilian government analysis of the 1920 Census. We repeat: official analysis. Incidentally, Aryanism was a constitutive element of the pre-modern movement, as can be seen in Canaan, by Graça Aranha, the protagonist who gave weight and legitimacy to the Modern Art Week of 1922. In 1936, Hitler sent a team of doctors to assess the racial purity of German immigrants in Espírito Santo. The German State believed that Germans living in the state of Espírito Santo were not of mixed blood because they were geographically isolated, unlike the Germans from the south, who did not pass the Nazi seal of Germanic purity. The idea was to study whether the Germanness did not change with the warmer environment. The study was intended to promote German colonization in Africa. Doctors Gustav Giemsa and Ernst Nauck, who were received with pomp by Getúlio Vargas, concluded that “Espírito Santo presents, in particular, the dimension and possibility of recognizing the presuppositions under which this can occur in a sensible way and of making the experiments carried out are useful for the question of eventual possibilities of colonization in some colonial countries”.^[3] Getúlio, at the time very close to Germany, since he was Brazil's third commercial partner, not only received the team of Nazi doctors, but also provided structure for the search from racial adaptation in a tropical environment to the Nazi colonization of African territories.

The 1934 Constitution, enacted by Getúlio, required the “encouragement” of “eugenic education” (Article 138, paragraph b) to federal entities. The Estado Novo applied, as is scientific consensus, eugenic education as a State Policy.

Getúlio Vargas and Júlio de Mesquita Filho were very close after the 1932 Revolt, which allowed the Paulistas to appoint the intervenor, Armando de Sales Oliveira, and found the University of São Paulo in 1934. They were partners in the repression of communism until 1937 Therefore, the citation of 1938, in the Estado Novo, at the height of the “eugenic” construction of the Brazilian, as Vargas defended both in the Constituent Assembly and in the Constitution, and in its ideological proximity to Nazi-fascism, reinforces the data of “eugenic miscegenation” that would be improved by white and European immigration. It is strange and disconcerting that the author thought that Vargas and some of his quotations would oppose supremacism, the bandeirante myth and the eugenic formation of São Paulo. Really disconcerting.

To reinforce this data, as soon as World War II ended, Getúlio enacted Decree-Law no. 7.967, according to which it established the criteria for the entry of foreigners to Brazil, whose main criterion should “preserve and develop, in the ethnic composition of the population, the most convenient characteristics of its european ancestry” (emphasis mine). Shortly after the end of World War II, Vargas returned with exclusively European immigration, claiming that Brazil would have, at that moment, “European ancestry”, due to its preserve it. To preserve means, according to the Aurélio dictionary, “to conserve”. On the other hand, you only keep what you own. Therefore, for Vargas, Brazil was “European”. Quintas ignores what Vargas did as president, policy builder, to reinforce his memoirist attachment, with sparse and out of context quotes. For the author, Vargas must have decreed without reading.

The author, as a good memoirist of memoirists, cites Cassiano Ricardo as an undisputed source. In addition to being the creator and signatory of the Green-Yellow Manifesto along with Plínio Salgado, he founded the Bandeirismo movement, after the break with Plínio Salgado. His Anhanguera magazine fabled the bandeirantismo as the constitutive element of the Brazilian. Therefore, once again, the citation reinforces the link between the bandeirante myth and conservatism. It is at this point that Quintas is located. A nationalist man like Cassiano Ricardo who supposedly broke with Integralism, without breaking with its ontology and epistemological construction, which treated Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda as thinkers of national unity, without paradoxes, conflicts, class struggle and “ Jacobinisms”, as Cassiano Ricardo said in the Green-Yellow Manifesto. Therefore, the uncritical citation of Quintas remains proto-fascist, insofar as the author reflects an “anti-Jacobin” nationalism with naturally Luso-Brazilian roots.

And it is here that we enter into the greatest historiographical falsification of Quintas. He says: “Sacramento’s criticism is even less convincing when it associates the valorization of bandeirante movement with the supposed “whitening” eugenic racism of the immigration policy of which São Paulo was one of the main beneficiaries between the second half of the 20th century and the first half of the XNUMXth century. XX. There is definitely no poetic license to justify the seventeenth-century caboclo Borba Gato, who lived peacefully for about XNUMX years among indigenous people, to be taken as an icon of a policy of attracting European labor that took place centuries later”. According to the author, São Paulo was the main beneficiary of the immigration policy, which I agree with, because that is what I wrote, but then, in a conceptual and centuries-old confusion, the author indicates that as for the “immigration policy” – that’s good which notes that it was a “policy” –, I would have indicated that Borba Gato was taken as “an icon of a 'policy to attract European labor'” – it is good to note, once again, that there was a state policy of attraction of “European” labor. Turns out I didn't make that statement.

The author accomplishes this centuries-old conceptual confusion by suppressing the distinction I made between sertanejos and bandeirantismo. As Borba Gato would have lived “peacefully” among the indigenous people (the Caramuru myth), and as “the bandeiras were intrinsically Mamluk and indigenous”, the comparison would not make sense. The object of the text is exclusively the production of the XNUMXth century. Furthermore, even if they are “miscegenated”, as Quintas likes, the racial construction whitens according to the political projection made. A very simple example for Quincas to understand the sociological process is the case of Jesus Christ, the real Jew with dark skin versus the mythified Roman Catholic, white and Europeanized with red beards.

Borba Gato and others are, not coincidentally, whitened, as well as Tiradentes, who was idealized close to Jesus Christ centuries after his execution, or the Egyptians, who, for Nina Rodrigues, constituted the only “white empire” in Africa, proving that Africans did not have cognition compatible with the highest degree of human development. The data brought by the author reinforces the whitening power processes, despite his intention.

Quintas concludes: “Without the Indians, there would be no flag, because, as it was basically movement to the interior, it was the indigenous people who best knew the routes, trails and intermodalities of transport (land and river) to access the sertões”. However, the author has the atypical thesis, lacking in data, that the indigenous people willingly guided the sertanejos. As it was willingly, indigenous people were synthesized in the sertanejos as if they were a single identity.

Quintas ignores the types of flags: the flags of the seizing type, for capturing indigenous people in order to sell them as slaves; those of the prospector type, for the search of precious stones or metals; and those of sertanismo by contract, to fight indigenous and Africans. In order for his argument to appear coherent, he ignores the capture and contract flags, treating prospecting as the only ones. This is the main characteristic of the liberal-conservative and fascist movements in defense of bandeirantismo: ignoring the capture and contract flags to glorify prospecting flags, inventing a nationalist protagonism for the bandeirantes over the constitution of the national territory and, thus, eliminating violence and class struggle. With this falsification, the bandeirantes became the founders and peacemakers of the country, those who united all races in a peaceful and voluntary way.

At this point, Quintas is once again reactionary. In many passages, he makes explicit the idea that the sertanejos were peaceful, unlike the “quilombolas”, who “abducted indigenous women” for “forced sexual intercourse”. He ignores, therefore, that Quilombo dos Palmares itself was destroyed by the bandeirantes on contract with the Portuguese Crown. Incidentally, the main client of the bandeirantes was the Portuguese Crown, which refutes their apologetic ideology that the bandeirantes naturally clashed with the Portuguese. The data reinforces the thesis defended in the text that the Fifth Movement is an anti-black racist movement, rooted in white identity, as it understands that blacks are an exogenous element to national development, and blacks and their culture should disappear or be incorporated into an idea that he would be a “mixed” Brazilian with a white predominance. This is exactly what the São Paulo eugenicists defended.

The data on the sexual violence of the quilombos was brought by the author through an uncritical and decontextualized quotation, taken as truth, by Roquette-Pinto, who sought to prove that miscegenation was not something harmful, confronting Nina Rodrigues. Roquete-Pinto was responsible for organizing the national data that would be presented by João Batista de Lacerda at the Universal Congress of Races, in 1911, in London. For Roquette-Pinto and João Batista de Lacerda, Brazil would get rid of blacks in 2012, leaving 17% of indigenous people. Here is the divergence with Nina Rodrigues: while he believed that black people disappeared, Nina believed that they did not. In Congress, she defended that “the white mass that arrived in Brazil was practically annulled by the black wave that the Portuguese had been moving from Africa for more than 300 years” (text by Roquette-Pinto in Congress). In short, “the union of these three 'races' would have, in his opinion, formed a varied mixed-race population (mulatto, caboclo, cafuzo), which would always tend to revert to the white type, driven by natural selection and the constant increase in new immigrants. coming from the European continent”.^[4] It is strange and embarrassing for Quincas to ignore Roquette-Pinto's positions and quote him as if he were in favor of natural miscegenation, when he was a great advocate of European immigration as a means of improving Brazilians. Roquette-Pinto defended white immigration precisely to eliminate the African element. As Quintas' positive references are to eugenicists, it is concluded that he is probably adept, to some degree, of eugenics.

But the author, who alleges that there is no process of formation of a “eugenic race from São Paulo”, states that “another fact that contrasts with the assertion of bandeirantismo as 'white supremacism' was that bandeirantes helped in the fight against European elements exogenous to the formation Brazilian half-breed”. The “Brazilian mestizo formation”, preserved by the bandeirantes against the “English pirates” and the “Dutch invasions”, was the confession of the defense, in essence, of a national “eugenic race”. For this reason, Quintas and the Quinto Movimento are openly opposed to any agenda of the black movement, including classifying themselves as black, leaving both to classify the bandeirantes as peaceful and the quilombolas as violent, since they did not interact in the “mestizo formation”. Brasileira” for preserving the Quilombados. Nevertheless, there remains the confession of the “Brazilian mestizo formation” in opposition to foreignisms, which, in the Fifth Movement manifesto, is not the Dutch, but the identity of the Brazilian black, for Aldo a foreignism imported from the USA against mulattoism, a typically produced national.

According to the author, “there is also no empirical basis in the author's observation – out of date with the subject of his own article – that subsequent immigration policy aimed at 'disappearing with the black'”. Extemporaneous is not: the article I wrote was about the 1950th century; Quintas did not understand to undertake the defense of the bandeirante legacy of the XNUMXth, XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. However, let's get to the facts: the author, a doctoral student, is defending that all scientific production since XNUMX, inaugurated by Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes, with Whites and Blacks in São Paulo, are wrong. And the issue here is not the fact that he is a doctoral candidate and not a doctor, but that he belongs to the scientific community and denies a vast production, such as those of Octavio Ianni, Clóvis Moura, Petrônio Domingues, Viotti da Costa, Guerreiro Ramos, Robert Conrad, Abdias do Nascimento, Thomas Skidmore… As well as ignoring Vargas' Decree, the author ignores Decree n. 528, of June 28, 1890, which prohibited the immigration of Africans and Asians. Article 1 totally prohibited African and Asian immigration, or rather, it allowed freedom of entry “for individuals who are valid and able to work”, free from convictions in their country, “with the exception of indigenous peoples from Asia or Africa”. The indigenous people are the yellow ones and the black ones. Brazil played a vanguard role in the construction of a racial immigration legislation, since the USA started the construction of its racial immigration legislation only in 1917, ending in 1924. Nazi Germany finalized it in 1936.^[5]

São Paulo, seeking to highlight the distinction between indigenous peoples from other continents and whites, created its own legislation, State Law n. 356, of 1895. This law authorized immigration from all continents, as long as they were “of the white race”.^[6] The law released immigration from almost all of Europe, with a clear predilection for Germans and Scandinavians, while on the American continent it released only “Canadians from the province of Quebec” and the “island of Puerto Rico”, already under US jurisdiction; and on the African continent only for the “Canary Islands”, a set of seven tiny islands colonized by Spain, which still has jurisdiction over them. However, Quintas ignores it. As the scientific production from 1950 to the present day denies, since “there is also no empirical ballast [...] that the immigration policy aimed to 'disappear with the black'”, not least because its references are from people who believed in the disappearance of the black, the laws must not have existed. Or if they existed, they must not have been applied by the Paulistas, even if they were made by them. It is a historiographic flat earthism.

This distinction generated a diplomatic crisis with the US in 1921, when the Brazilian-American Colonization Syndicate intended to establish a colonization of black Americans in Mato Grosso – remembering that there had been a colonization of southern white Americans in Americana (SP), Santa Bárbara D'Oeste (SP) and surroundings after the Civil War. Congress proposed a law explicitly prohibiting the immigration of blacks, made by Cincinato Braga, deputy of São Paulo, close to Júlio de Mesquita Filho. Tiago de Campos Melo brought a copy of a newspaper from Rio de Janeiro at the time: “But because we do not cultivate prejudice, it should not be concluded that we can accept a reprehensible immigration from the eugenic point of view, and dangerous, at least, from the social and economic point of view. More or less educated, with a long tradition of hatred, North American blacks would bring to our midst a division of races that we do not know, in addition to profoundly disturbing the slow process of melting and purification that we have been carrying out for four centuries. The fact that we are a semi-desert country, in need of a foreign arm to exploit and enhance our riches, does not mean that we should open our doors to everyone who knocks. We can and must choose the immigrants that suit us, as all countries do, starting with the United States. The black person is as undesirable, under those relations that we have already mentioned, as the Asian person” (“As Imigrações Indesiráveis”, O Jornal, 30.7.21).^[7]

Realize that it is the black who institutes the racial division, as Aldo Rebelo does and his critique of “black identity” against what Quintas called the “Brazilian mestizo formation”, peacefully produced by the bandeirantes. Coelho Neto, the pre-modern nationalist writer who studied the constitution of a Brazilian nationality, wrote the following about the immigration of North American blacks: “[…] it would be ingratitude to reject it. But to lend ourselves to receiving the rubbish with which America threatens us, which goes around sweeping from its territory with squeamishness of cleanliness what it considers filth […] not that! […] Fortunately, there were those in the Chamber who protested against the affront, which is nothing else than the project of the dollar capitalists, who, skimming America from what pollutes it, cast the infamous waste over Brazil. Let's not get carried away by mushy sentimentalism: the case is not for pity, but for repulsion and active” (“Repulsa”, Jornal do Brasil, 31.7.21).^[8] So nationalism was anti-Black. At the time, political groups argued that, as blacks in Brazil were disappearing, including blacks would consist in destroying the “Brazilian mestizo formation”, which was on the way to becoming white. Furthermore, they thought that Brazilians were not racist, and that black Americans carried, in themselves, racism against Brazilians (“Brazilian mestizo formation” that was moving towards whitening) – which argument coincided with Aldo Rebelo’s defense and the critics of “black identity”, no?! It turned out that black Americans were prohibited from entering Brazil through an ordinance that gave full power to diplomacy, with the formal refusal of the Itamaraty. In addition to the article by Tiago de Campos Melo, there are two books that the author can read, although they were published after the 1950s – to be more precise, recently – and could be classified as works “without empirical ballast”, if they prosper. the memoirist historiography: Ideal immigrant: the Ministry of Justice and the entry of foreigners in Brazil (1941-1945), by Fábio Koifman and The invention of Brazilianness: national identity, ethnicity and immigration policies, by Jeffrey Lesser. The first deals with the great Vargas and his policy that transformed Brazil, alongside Argentina, into a kind of Nazi and Fascist paradise, especially after Decree-Law n. 7.967, which allowed the entry of people who preserved the “European ancestry” of the Brazilian one month after the end of World War II.

I even quoted Karl Monsma in a brilliant research on blacks in São Carlos, with the creation of groupings that mirrored the KuKuxKlan. Nothing was refuted, just ignored – a historian “without ballast” for Quintas. The author denies scientific production to reaffirm his defense of the non-existence of racism, class struggle and whitening, in the name of defending the “Brazilian mestizo formation”, which would have been consensual and peaceful, led by the bandeirantes, without rapes and genocides . This is an essential feature of the Fifth Movement. In addition to being proto-fascist, it is also a denialist movement, like any movement with feet in fascism.

He followed with his reasoning that contested (sic!) Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes and all the others: “From 1851 to 1931, around 1,5 million Italians entered Brazil, 1,3 million Portuguese (Portugal being one of the original centers of Brazilian education), 580 Spaniards and 200 Germans (Ribeiro, 2006, p. 222). Considering that the Brazilian population, in the same period, jumped from about 8 million inhabitants to approximately 35 million, with ample spontaneous miscegenation and without having had any 'final solution', no extermination policy or physical removal of the black population, no it can be said that the attraction of Europeans had the deliberate purpose of 'whitening' the country”. Of course, the author is taking into account that immigrants did not reproduce, only Brazilians did. He also doesn't know how to calculate: the sum brought by himself corresponds to an impressive 10% of 35 million and 44% of 8 million. Another point is that Darcy Ribeiro's data are outdated, because, according to the Bulletin of the Land, Colonization and Immigration Board, from 1937, in São Paulo alone, from 1827 to 1929, there were 2.522.337, with only 37.481 from 1827 to 1884. Therefore, there were 2.484.856 Europeans in just 44 years, in the state alone,^[9] a quantity almost five times greater than the population of the city of São Paulo in 1920, which would only be surpassed in the 1950s. the São Paulo elite introjected a projection over the other regional elites – yet another extremely simple methodological error by Quintas. Memorialists tend to have little appreciation for quantitative data and for variables, such as temporal and territorial ones.

According to the 1940 Census, there were 1.203.111 whites in the capital (the population doubled in 20 years with the European immigrant policy). There were 63.546 blacks and 45.136 browns. Altogether, blacks and browns represented 8% of the capital's total population, registering 11 whites for every black in the city of São Paulo. By way of comparison, in the 1886 census, the population of the city of São Paulo had 36.334 whites, 6.450 pardos, 3.825 pretos (the original term that will be classified here as preto) and 1.088 caboclos. In all, there were 10.275 blacks (blacks plus brown), which gave a ratio of 3,5 whites for every black. But the Census already indicated that, of the total number of whites, 11.731 were European immigrants. If immigrants were removed in order to have a closer relationship with the society that preceded the European immigration policy, we would have 2,3 whites for every black in the city. Thus, from 2,3 whites for every black to 11 whites for every black, there was an increase of 478% in fifty years in the white pole over the black pole, which is explained by an immigrant policy based on whitening, a scientific consensus confessed by Quintas. The author's confusion, in addition to mixing Brazil with São Paulo, is not understanding and/or not knowing how to treat quantitative data in absolute and proportional terms in the light of cohorts and variables, which is simplistic in scientific work.

The author also categorically states, once again without data, that there was no decrease in the number of blacks in São Paulo. However, Petronio Domingues^[10]notes that, between 1918 and 1928, there was a negative vegetative growth of blacks in the city of São Paulo, that is, more people died than were born because “it fluctuated from 1,93% to 4,8% per year”. Therefore, while the state immigration policy only allowed the entry of whites, with state funding, blacks died at a higher rate than they were born, which was verified and naturalized as something positive by Alfredo Elis Junior and Roquette-Pinto, the latter used by Quintas to claim, in a reactionary and racist way, that bandeirantes were peaceful and Africans in quilombos were violent. Therefore, his existential question whether “wouldn’t the reduction of the statistical black contingent in São Paulo at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, pointed out by the author, be a consequence of miscegenation without the entry of new African contingents?” it's nothing more than diversion. Especially because the author does not ask himself why new “African contingents” did not enter, prohibited by law, when only European contingents entered, in addition to not presenting any data that corroborates this question thrown to the wind.

The author cites the Land Law to try to prove that racialization does not exist in immigrant policy – ​​for him, nothing was the result of racialization in the 18th century, only the black movement of the 1878st century that embraces it. However, the author omits or is unaware of, which causes strangeness due to the citation, article XNUMX of the Land Law, which finances, at the expense of the National Treasury, the arrival of immigrants: Treasury a certain number of colonists free to be employed, for the time that is scheduled, in agricultural establishments, or in works directed by the Public Administration, or in the formation of colonies in the places where these are most suitable; taking in advance the necessary measures for such colonists to find employment as soon as they disembark”. The article induces the replacement of enslaved labor by free labor through the replacement of blacks by whites, which is reinforced precisely by the Paulistas in the Agricultural Congress of XNUMX, when their bench defended the exclusive use of European labor, while the benches mineira and carioca defended the use of national labor, even defending the use of Chinese labor, a proposal rejected by the paulistas. The Paulistas won! The author, strangely, also ignores this data from the text.

All data, such as those worked by Monsma, fully indicate that European immigrants had access to land, either through state agrarian reforms, or through purchase after accumulating monetary capital, which was obviously impossible for enslaved and free Africans. Quintas also claims that the Italians made a lot of effort, citing, in an absolutely pathetic way, “D. Mariza's grandparents” – Lula's ex-wife. São Paulo exclusively offered a scholarship to every arriving European immigrant, which had existed since 1887, but which was regulated by law in 1889. from farming, having entered the Provincial Inn on May 1th of the last year onwards, they will receive provincial assistance in the following proportion: For older ones – 8$70; hairs 000 to 7 – 12$35; hair from 000 to 3 years – 7$7”.^[11] Therefore, European immigrants, in addition to receiving services related to the Hostelry of Immigrants, received financial aid, scholarships. In fact, they made an effort, but with objective conditions completely different from those of enslaved and free Africans, these prisoners under the mantle of legislation on vagrants and capoeiras, such as the Ventre-Livre Law, the Sexagenarian Law and the Criminal Code of 1890, specifically Article 399. This repressive apparatus was radicalized by Decree n. 6.994, of June 19, 1908. One cannot forget the Report produced by Rodrigues Alves, in 1888, which facilitated the immigrant “the acquisition of land to have his services at hand”, so that they could become “ smallholder”, which, in fact, happened, especially in the state of São Paulo. And, as you can see, this is a State Policy, which, formally, was forbidden to blacks, as it was exclusive to European and white immigrants. It is a consensus of researchers in the field.

Finally, the author compares the bandeirantes who enslave and kill indigenous peoples with the “French and Russian revolutionaries”, confusing, once again, as he did with the Quilombos, repressive violence with revolutionary violence. He makes this confusion because the class struggle does not exist in his vocabulary. It fails to realize, or ignores, that, for blacks and natives, more than half of the working class, the bandeirantes and bandeirantismo, the latter strictly defended by sects such as the Fifth Movement, the PCO and neo-Nazis – see Borba’s graffiti in a mural of Marielle Franco by a neo-Nazi group –,^[12] they are closer to the Russian and French Monarchies and their bourgeoisies. In a sense, retort is a gigantic fallacy of false analogy.

The data brought are part of the research carried out, which will soon be published in a book. However, the data cited here are public, already worked on by other authors, absolutely accessible.

The author recommends that I carefully read Aldo Rebelo's book, The Fifth Movement. Li. It is a proto-fascist libel with a nod to Integralism, militaristic and full of conspiracy theories. In his manifesto, there is no class struggle, a category that Aldo abandoned some time ago. The working class is replaced by the State, the Armed Forces and by an uncritical nationalism that would be attacked by blacks with their identity, in defense of the “Brazilian mestizo formation”, which is, in the state of São Paulo, formally white. Like a good eugenicist, the Quinto Movimento e Quintas consider the black identity contrary and conflicting to the “Brazilian mestizo formation”, a foreignism, as defended by Aldo Rebelo. Quintas cites exclusively eugenicists, such as Bonfim, Roquette-Pinto, Vargas and Cassiano Ricardo, who occupied important positions in the Estado Novo, such as the director of the State Department of Press and Propaganda in São Paulo. The manifesto hopes, like a good reactionary conservative, that blacks do not assume they are black, but mulattos and mestizos, like Bolsonaro towards his blacks, Sérgio Camargo and Hélio Silva. It invokes the Armed Forces to fight against environmentalists and the black movement, ignoring that they are responsible for the possibility of dismemberment of Brazil, with its incredible submission to the North American Armed Forces.^[13]The dismemberment is alluded to by Quintas as a result of identity as opposed to the natural miscegenation and without violence of the bandeirantes (sic!), which would pave the way for the action of foreign forces, such as the US, for which the Brazilian officers, defended by Aldo, were submit. The speech is an ode to irrationality, also explained by Rui Costa Pimenta when he relates bandeirantes with the non-dismemberment of territory in the XNUMXth, XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.

The author ends his text with a “Viva Borba Gato!”, which was also written by the neo-Nazi group. He is not mistaken, as, like Aldo Rebelo, he defends an integralist, conservative, supremacist and reactionary libel, constructed as a power project by the ruling class of São Paulo in the 1920s, in a deliberate action by the newspaper group The State of S. Paul and groups that supported Integralism and bandeirismo, a conservative dissidence. He should just be more coherent, either assuming the incredible coincidence with the neo-Nazi group, or shouting “Anauê, Borba Gato!”.

Graffiti by a neo-Nazi group on the mural in honor of Marielle Franco.

*Leonardo Sacramento He holds a PhD in Education from UFSCar and is president of the Association of Teaching Professionals of Ribeirão Preto. Book author The mercantile university: a study on the public university and private capital (Appris).

Notes

[1] SANTOS, Ediógenes Aragão Santos; MONTEIRO, Regina Maria. The Brazil of Olavo Bilac and Manoel Bonfim: the political construction of a national identity through teaching. Pro-Positions, vol. 13, N, 2 (38) – May/Aug. 2002.

[2] On the subject, see Silvia Levi-Moreira (1984). Available inhttp://www.revistas.usp.br/revhistoria/article/view/61361/pdf_5.

[3] SILVA, André Felipe Cândido da. The trajectory of Henrique da Rocha Lima and Brazil-Germany relations (1901-1956). Doctorate in History of Science and Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, 2011, p. 678.

[4] SEBASTIÃO DE SOUZA, Vanderlei; SANTOS, Ricardo Ventura. The Universal Congress of Races, London, 1911: contexts, themes and debates. Bol. Mus. For. Emilio Goeldi. Science Hmm., Bethlehem, v. 7, no. 3, p. 745-760, Sep.-Dec. 2012, p. 756.

[5] WHITMAN, James Q. Hitler's american model: the United States and the making of Nazi Race Law. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2017.

[6] DECEM, Rogerio. Shades of “yellow”: the genesis of discourses about orientals in Brazil (1878-1908). São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas, 2005, p. 114.

[7] GOMES, Tiago de Melo. Problems in Paradise: Brazilian Racial Democracy in the Face of Afro-American Immigration (1921). Afro-Asian Studies, v. 25, no. 2., Rio de Janeiro, 2003, p. 315-316.

[8] GOMES, Tiago de Melo. Problems in Paradise: Brazilian Racial Democracy in the Face of Afro-American Immigration (1921). Afro-Asian Studies, v. 25, no. 2., Rio de Janeiro, 2003, p. 320-321.

[9] DOMINGUES, Petronio. Blacks with white souls? The ideology of whitening within the black community in São Paulo, 1915-1930. Study afro-asian. 24(3), 2002.

[10] DOMINGUES, Petronio. An untold story: black people, racism and whitening in post-abolition São Paulo. São Paulo: Editora Senac São Paulo, 2004, p. 270.

[11] DOMINGUES, Petronio. An untold story: black people, racism and whitening in post-abolition São Paulo. São Paulo: Editora Senac São Paulo, 2004, p. 69.

[12] View https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2021/07/escadao-marielle-franco-em-sp-tambem-foi-manchado-de-tinta-vermelha.shtml.

[13] View https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/02/21/general-brasileiro-sera-subordinado-ao-exercito-dos-estados-unidos.