By ALIPIO DESOUSA FILHO
Author introduction to newly released book
In Brazil, the miscegenations that produced and produce the Brazilian mestizo (“in the soul and in the body”, it has been said[I]) and that produce forms of consciousness and practices that have the logic of mixtures, junctions, approximations, have been, throughout history and up to the present, conceived as threats to hierarchies and separations of class and status, as much as threats to distinctions and the separations of (imagined) “races”.
Seen as, simultaneously, breaks in the “separations” of “class” and “race”, miscegenations were, continuously, attributed to the popular classes, as a true atavism of their individuals, not being associated with the habits of those from the “extras”. from above.”
Thus, disqualified as “habits of common people”, “customs of the lower classes”, distrust in relation to miscegenation produced not only its contempt, on the part of sectors of the dominant class, the middle class and certain social elites, but , mainly, gave rise to what I call “racist elitism”, which, in Brazilian society, exists as an ideology that guides dispositions to act that oppress people, groups and social classes due to their ethnic, regional and class origins.
For racist elitism, individuals from the popular classes (“mixed race in body and soul”; here, with contempt, and not as positive recognition) mix “what must remain separate”, defying “rational principles”, “codes of civilization ”, “good manners labels” etc. These would be social layers obstinate in practicing “undesirable approximations” between values, rules, beliefs, etc., and, equally, between social classes that “cannot be confused”, ideologically divided into “superior” and “inferior”, and immediately also conceived as “mixtures” of different “races”, that’s when the alarm of racist elitist discrimination goes off.
This is because, in the social inequalities and hierarchies that exist in Brazilian society, those who see themselves as “superior” do so by imagining themselves to be “socially and racially superior”; and, thus, having to equip themselves with everything (signs of distinction, from speech to dress, spaces, possessions, etc., to which they cling like the roots of ivy cling to walls) to ensure separation in relation to other classes who, while not being “superior”, are conceived as “socially and racially inferior”. So when class becomes “race” and “race” becomes class – an intersection that produces what I call racist class snobbery.
I could say, racist elitism is practiced by people with social prejudices in relation to black, indigenous, mestizo and white people from the popular classes, all of whom are summarily condemned to the lowering of their social status due to their class condition and skin color, and to whom Atavistic habits of miscegenation are attributed, disturbing the “order of things”. Associating “class” with an imagined “race”, for this elitism, anyone who is not (the imagined) “white” of the presumed “higher classes” is ideologically situated as belonging to “lower classes”, because the class origin in the so-called “ popular classes” and black, mestizo or indigenous skin color indicate an inferior place in the class structure of society; with which social distinctions and discriminations are established that produce daily violence against mainly the poorest, affecting the vast majority of mestizos and poor black and white people in Brazilian society.
But how can we explain the distrust and contempt for miscegenation that gave rise to such elitism in a society that was strongly constituted by miscegenation, from its beginnings, and in which, to a large extent, conceptions of the world, forms of consciousness and ways of being and acting Are they practices of mixing people, ideas, codes, values, uses, that is, practices of bringing together and not separating, carried out without discomfort by the vast majority of society?
An apparent paradox, but dispelled when we know that, in Brazilian society, the ideas and practices in force (currently and in the past) in the actions of the dominant class, sectors of the intellectual and political elites, and sectors of the middle class, as well as through the actions of the various social powers, which excel in “separations” of all kinds, are reproductions and updates of the discourse and practices of the European colonizer, who, right at the beginning of colonization, expressed his contempt for mestizajes and Brazilian mestizos (accused of not having the “notions of distinctions”).
A production of slave owners, rulers, missionaries and travelers that was assimilated and became common sense for certain social sectors of Brazilian society, notably intellectuals. As I will demonstrate later, a speech that “made the minds” of scholars and was also assimilated, almost without repair, by university researchers, notably in the areas of human sciences. The existence of miscegenation practices as a way of social action in Brazilian society, from its beginnings to the present, has not prevented the simultaneous emergence of distrust, pessimism and contempt.
While racist elitism corresponds to the ideology of separations of “what cannot be confused” (mainly “classes” and “races”), and with which the imaginary about structures, institutions and social relations remains the same, the miscegenation corresponds to the practices of junctions and approximations (of individuals, classes and groups in the use of spaces and circulation of bodies, values, beliefs, rules, etc.), whose symbolic effects represent – although not necessarily – new senses and meanings in the imagination/imaginary social. But the symbolic effect of the junctions and approximations – in their practical materializations – is such, in the space of an authoritarian and hierarchical society like Brazil, that it has made miscegenation an object of curses, derogatory representations and repressions, as they represent the breaking of the separations that the (dominant) ideology seeks to make us believe that they are “necessary”, “immodifiable”, “irreplaceable”.
Racist elitism carries with it what I call “miscegenation of miscegenation”. An identity malaise that affects the class sectors mentioned above, due to the discomfort caused by miscegenation, as well as social-cultural practices that promote junctions where elitist ideology acts to institute and maintain separations. Discontent that also takes the form of self-disgust among certain sectors of the elites and sectors of the dominant and middle classes, for knowing that they are also mixed race (in body and soul), even if they deny it. A psychic phenomenon produced by mental coercion operated by the racist elitist ideology that these classes support and put into practice.
This elitism, which has been constituted since the times of Brazil as a Portuguese colony, growing in the mud of its permanent updating, as a disdain for mestizajes, the mestizo and the popular, has reached our days. And perhaps it found its most public, shameless and crude expression in recent political years in Brazil, with what came to be called “Bolsonarism”, an extreme right-wing ideology. This does not mean that it has not previously manifested itself politically and in many ways or that it is only an attribute of the political extreme right or conservatives.
Racist elitist snobbery is much more widespread in Brazilian society. For just one example, in an imaginatively progressive environment such as universities, manifestations of this racist elitism frequently occur through the attitudes of professors and students, disguised in a thousand euphemisms, mannerisms, deictics and salamis. The reader will find these topics covered later by me.
Discontent regarding miscegenation, class snobbery, racist elitism... all of this was born and developed as practices of economic, social, political and intellectual elites and members of the dominant class or middle class, which continually produced the disqualification of unions and approaches that correspond to miscegenation practices, as I use the term, and disqualification of the Brazilian mestizo human, inferiorized as “morally ambiguous”, “weak”, “a hybrid devoid of the qualities of the races it mixes”, of “inferior class ”, stigmatized as someone who has the habit of non-“virtuous” and “irrational” practices of mixtures and approximations, expressions of “passions”, “lack of common sense”, “inculture”, “incivility”.
Elites and sectors of classes with the power to say and do that dedicated themselves to transmitting, to society as a whole, their identity discomfort in relation to miscegenation, through various means, spreading beliefs and representations that disqualify the miscegenation practiced in everyday life – the which includes these elites themselves; but they do everything to disguise the fact that they are also mixed race in body and practices. Miscegenations that would be “obstacles to the economic, social and cultural development of Brazil”, cause of its “delay” in relation to “modernity” and because we are not a society with the “strong institutions” of the intended “developed and civilized societies”.
The stigmatization of miscegenation as “practices of the people”, and this perceived as the “popular classes” that practice unwanted unions, mixtures and approximations, ideologically united, in the same thought, conservatives, powers of all types (political, military, ecclesiastical, etc. .), liberals, “modern” politicians, presumably progressive intellectuals. The motivation, less or more revealed, has always been to prevent “the people” from remaining in the habits of miscegenation (the senseless, inconvenient and unwanted mixtures), which would keep them in irrationality, ignorance and backwardness.
Although it has strength, the ideology of separation has not managed, at least until now, with its fantasy of the “end of miscegenation”, to keep the “two Brazils” away from meetings in order to prevent all contact, exchanges, rapprochements, “contagions”. Anthropologies or sociologies of everyday life in Brazilian society provide an extensive account of exchanges, gatherings, mixtures, convivialities, communications and amalgamations between individuals from different social classes, different ethnic groups or different status segments. Examples abound in economic, religious, cultural and sexual practices, highlighted and analyzed by various studies, yesterday and today.
Thus, the image of a “mestizo Brazil”, which I use as the title of my book, is nothing more than an allegory, aiming to bring to the surface the ghost of certain elites and certain sectors of the middle class and the dominant class that act to disqualify it. as the inferior and undesirable portion of Brazil, which would also be a threat to the presumably non-mestizo Brazil, the country of the “superior strain” – soon fantasized as “strain of European origin”, “without foot in the kitchen”, “without mixtures”.
The thing is, for the racist mentality, mixing an Italian man with a Swedish woman is not miscegenation; This only occurs when there is a mixture of a European man with an African or Asian or Latin American woman; or also when “mixtures” of “drops of blood” from dissimilar social classes occur. Mestizo Brazil, therefore, is not any specific region, nor a highlighted part of society, but a set of dispersed practices and comprehensive forms of consciousness performed in everyday life by its largest portion, if not all of it.
However, the thesis according to which our miscegenation habits resulted from the fact that we are “a people who copied their worst customs from the Portuguese colonizer” became common social, academic and “scientific” sense, including the “custom of mixtures”. , the “propensity to equate classes and “races”, the “disregard for the habits of distinctions and separations”.
This was not how the essayist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, in 1936, pessimistically described the formation of Brazilian society, defending the thesis that we copied from the Portuguese “their incoercible tendency towards the leveling of classes” and their “complete absence […] of any pride of race”?[ii] Amazing, isn't it?! Yes, the author highlights that we inherited from the Portuguese colonizer the “absence” of distinctions between classes and the absence of such “race pride”. The reader will have the opportunity to see my analysis of this idea and others that the author thought in the part of this book that I highlighted for the criticism of interpretations of Brazil carried out by him and other of our interpreters.
This is how I will summarize the maxim of racist elitism in its discomfort in relation to miscegenation: let us assert the “pride of class and race that we lack”, which, due to its lack, as a result of colonization, Brazilian society is disturbed ( and irresolute!), because the primitive atavistic drive of the mixtures that her “people” rejoice in practicing prevails in her, threatening the “necessary” and “irreplaceable” separations! For this racist elitism, it is advisable to maintain distances, separations, class and “race” distinctions, as they imagine to be the case in societies that would have reached “civilized standards”, “standards of urbanity”, “modernity” (sic). .).
For everything they represent, miscegenation is a victory against racism. The very notion of miscegenation is an antinotion (or antidote) to the racist notions of “race”, “purity” and racial “superiority”, as well as to the racist pretensions of “racial improvement” (and it is also said to be “moral improvement” by "race"). Because, in the human encounters of individuals from different peoples and ethnic groups, it is not possible to arbitrarily establish the prevalence of one or another genotype or phenotypic variation, biology is responsible for doing its beautiful work, giving birth to the most diverse human types.
In this sense, the struggles of indigenous and black Brazilians (but not only) against racism are found in the practices of miscegenation of approximations, junctions, unions, against every ideology of separation and elitist “pride of class and race”, allied to a greater extent. strong anthropological and historical background.
Based on an archeology of (the) colonizer's discourse and the analysis of the ventriloquism of this discourse by certain Brazilian intelligentsia, I seek to criticize and demonstrate how, in Brazilian society, the disregard for miscegenation as practices of exchange of diversity was historically constituted, of mixtures, syncretisms, junctions, approximations, stigmatized as “popular culture”, “custom of common people”.
And, simultaneously, how this disregard for miscegenation and the popular people becomes the origin of a racist elitism of certain sectors of the intellectual, political and economic elites, the dominant class and the Brazilian middle class, haunted by the (imagined, fantasized) or real) threats to the separations and distinctions of class and “race”, seeking to offer a contribution to the understanding of the phenomenon in Brazilian society.
Over time, the colonizer's discourse of denying Brazilian society due to its mixed race and its people means that, even today, these sectors suffer from discomfort with their own culture and identity. The colonizer went from one end to another in his representations of the new land and its people – from paradise to hell or from an innocent and good people to an incapable and incorrigible people – and these sectors, at least so far, do not seem willing to review these representations, maintaining considerations about the people from the perspective of their contempt.
Perhaps this is the explanation for the maintenance, in Brazil, of a system of society that is deeply authoritarian and repressive towards the popular classes. In its actions, a society that maintains the idea of a “disordered” and “incorrigible people”, deserving of permanent distrust of the State apparatus, the various social powers (military, political, ecclesiastical…) and everyone.
The authoritarianism and violence of police action in the various states and cities, the judicial and prison systems that have been maintained, until now, strongly aimed at the condemnation, repression and incarceration of the poorest, whether black, white or mixed race, are examples of the way in which Brazilian society uses the State apparatus to exercise repression and control of the popular classes.
There is no doubt, based on all the data, we have one of the police forces that kills the most in the world. Killing has become public policy in the conceptions and practices of Brazilian police forces. But the targets of this public policy of killing, applied by the Brazilian police apparatus, are mostly the bodies of the poorest: those whose class already makes them belong to a “race” or their “race” already makes them belong to a class. And everyday life demonstrates it: “class” and “race” are killable…
Racist elitism has social inequality itself as its material and ideological infrastructure, and mechanism of existence and repetition: a starting point to make the game of its social, symbolic and political exclusions work. Social inequality in all its intersecting forms: income, class status, education, intellectual level, access to consumption, gender identity, sexuality, etc.
O status ideologically demoted people due to their “lower class” status is just the tip of the line to lead to all sorts of discrimination: carelessness in service, derogatory opinions, offensive utterances, hate speeches, insults are thrown to humiliate the poorest more easily compared to those more favored by resources and social status. And if other conditions are added to this first, such as the cases of poor women, gays, lesbians and transsexuals and black or mixed race people, it is so much worse.
Recently, the country began to talk about “structural” or “institutional” racism. It is important to point out that we do not have institutional racism in Brazil. There are no laws that institutionalize racism in the country; Today, we do not have the institution of apartheid. The concept of “structural racism” is only thinkable if it is not confused with the idea that it is something structured with state, legal support. However, with the caveat, we can conceive the existence of a structural and structuring racism of social relations in Brazilian society, since, with the elitist and racist malaise in relation to miscegenation and the popular so ingrained, it truly structures mentalities, attitudes , actions, which also includes, but without legal support, practices of State agents.
In the recent national elections, in 2022, the xenophobia of certain parts of Brazilian society manifested itself openly, and clearly in relation to people from the Northeast, supposedly due to their electoral choices. This is not a recent fact, although its greater visibility in the most recent voter campaigns in the country. But it becomes a mistake to understand the xenophobic insults, hurled at Northeasterners in elections, as being just part of national “political disputes”. The elections are just one of the occasions in which the racist elitism of parts of Brazilian society manifests itself, when it even takes the explicit form of the hate speech of regionalist xenophobia.
But, still on the subject of elections, I cannot help but remember what happened in the elections to choose the President of the Republic, in 1994, when the racist elitist mentality expressed itself in arrogant terms to disqualify the candidacy of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, competing for the position with sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. During the campaign, a Brazilian actress said this during a lunch with FHC supporters: “in this election, there are two options: vote for Sartre or choose a plumber”[iii].
In the same campaign, French sociologist Alain Touraine declared: “if Cardoso does not win the election, Brazil risks sinking into chaos and violence.”[iv] Well, the international of racist elitism works and doesn't waste an opportunity: it puts voices from inside and outside the country into action. Racist elitism has no homeland!
It is also no coincidence that certain parts of the ruling class, the middle class and the Brazilian elites, until now, remain strongly distanced from a project for a democratic society in Brazil. The fear of losing class status feeds the panic-dread of these social strata with the simple alternation, through elections, of divergent political groups in the political control of the State.
The democratic model of choosing rulers and political representatives is being called into question and its permanence is threatened, as it is seen as a risky mechanism that can favor the “coming to power” of social and political forces that modify their privileges. Although they speak “in favor of democracy”, they consider it a danger: a threat to the preservation of institutions and policies that these parts of society maintain as if they were immodifiable and irreplaceable.
Racist elitism is so incompatible with democracy that mere public policies of social inclusion by this or that government are hauntingly dubbed “communism” by segments of the ruling class, the middle class and certain sectors of the elites. And the fact is not recent in Brazilian history. The horror of policies that aim to improve the living conditions of the many who are excluded is such that there is hostility to actions to prevent them.
Born from the contempt for mestizo and popular Brazil, racist elitism produced a disregard for the social inclusion of those who are excluded from almost everything in social life, due to structures, relationships and policies produced and maintained by this elitism itself.
*Alipio DeSousa Filho, social scientist, is a professor at the Humanitas Institute of UFRN.
Reference
Alipio DeSousa Filho. Disdain for mestizo and popular Brazil: genealogy of racist elitism in Brazilian society. Santos, Editora Intermeios, 2024, 160 pages. [https://l1nq.com/uMmub]
Notes
[I] This is a statement by Pernambuco author Gilberto Freyre, in Casa Grande and Senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1990, p. 283; the complete passage is: “every Brazilian, even the white one, with blond hair, carries in his soul, if not in his soul and body […] the shadow, or at least the tinge, of the indigenous or black person”
[ii] NETHERLANDS, Sérgio Buarque de. Brazil roots. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1990, p. 22.
[iii] As reported, the phrase was uttered by actress Ruth Escobar. See Folha de S. Paul,“Intellectuals criticize actress Ruth Escobar”, edition of August 6, 1994.
[iv] In an article published by Folha de S. Paul, “Cardoso and the birth of Brazil”, is what sociologist Alain Touraine wrote. Folha de S. Paul, edition of July 31, 1994.
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