By CELSO FREDERICO*

The field of culture is pre-political and, historically, has only produced frayed forms of social integration. It is necessary to rescue politics, the defense of democracy and social emancipation.

Talking about multiculturalism at a time like this? Until recently, it was a central theme in the political projects of progressive governments, but, suddenly, the changing winds in Brazil brought an unexpected regression and the frank debate on multiculturalism went into quarantine. Public policies for social inclusion were shelved and, in this unfavorable situation, we witnessed angry reactions such as the destruction of statues of historical characters linked to slavery.

We suffered a crushing defeat and, therefore, it is not convenient to act like a pig and goad those who are under attack today, much less supply ammunition to the despicable executioners. The rise of Bolsonarist fascism, however, brought unexpected news to the opposition forces, and this obliges us to a reflective process of self-criticism and redefinition of struggle strategies.

When talking about multiculturalism, there is no way to escape a basic question: how should different cultures coexist in the democratic State of law that today, with great difficulty, we try to defend?

There are at least two possible answers. The first emphasizes cultural and ethnic differences and then proposes the “struggle for recognition” of such differences as a way of compensating for inequalities and enabling social integration that preserves differences. This answer is guided by a cultural logic.

The second, on the contrary, shifts the emphasis from culture to the socioeconomic sphere. Therefore, it calls for a public policy that favors integration into the labor market as a condition for realizing citizenship and values ​​common to society. It aims, therefore, to prevent cultural differences from hardening and endangering democracy.

Each answer points to different paths: either one considers the nation as a set of different ethnic groups or one bets on an assimilationist vision that values ​​hybridity as constitutive of nationality and citizenship. Thus, in the political field, the opposition between the particularist rights (of the so-called “minorities”), defended by the various social movements, and the universal rights of the citizen, established with the French Revolution of 1789, is updated.

Strong arguments are used in this dispute by the two currents. Defenders of particularism are right when they denounce the abstract character of a universalism centered on the false idea of ​​citizenship that proclaims that all men are equal before the law even though they are unequal in real life. Universalism is called by militants of multiculturalism in the United States by the acronym WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant).

Defenders of universalism, in turn, are right to criticize the exaggerated emphasis on particularist interests, stating that they prevent democratic coexistence and understanding between men.

We are, therefore, facing a confrontation that permeates the field of culture, politics and philosophy.

struggle for recognition

The struggle for recognition, before being raised by multiculturalism, had its origins in France, when a political movement, the war for the liberation of Algeria (1954-1962), had strong repercussions on the then hegemonic existentialist philosophy.

The anti-colonialist war in Algeria brought the ideas of Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon to the existentialist intellectual universe. At the same time, thinkers linked to existentialism attended Alexandre Kojève's courses, dedicated to Hegel's philosophy. One of the themes that aroused the most enthusiasm was the dialectic of master and slave, present in the phenomenology of the spirit. These two figures of consciousness engage in a struggle for recognition. With this abstract reference, philosophical reflection met political action.

The writings on colonialism by Memmi and Fanon had a strong impact on the French intelligentsia who were protesting the war in Algeria. Fanon, for example, emphatically stated that the main weapon used by the French was the imposition of an image on the colonized peoples – an evidently negative and derogatory image of the colonized that, once internalized by him, blocked the possibilities of the struggle for emancipation. The first task, therefore, should be the struggle to change this image, a struggle for self-awareness and recognition.

In this cultural and political environment, Sartre similarly observed that “the slave sees himself through the eyes of the master. He thinks himself as Other and with the thoughts of the Other”. The gaze thus emerged as the central theme of existentialist philosophy, then dealing with the dialectic of recognition. Through the gaze of the other, reification takes place: being looked at transforms us into an object.

Simone de Beauvoir was a pioneer in the study of the female condition with the publication of the book the second sex. One of his sources is also Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Always educated to fulfill certain roles set by the patriarchal society, the woman internalizes these roles and lives to represent them, losing her self-determination and becoming a “being-for-another” that seeks, mechanically, to correspond to the image that the man waits for her. But, in doing so, she alienates her identity by transforming herself into a caricature of what she imagines the Other expects from her or, in the author's words, she becomes the Other of the Other.

According to her, the feminist movement emerged to fight against the alienation of women, a fight that begins with the criticism of the social roles that are imposed on them and the recognition of equality between the sexes.

From then on, social movements aimed at reversing the image of inferiority became widespread. The struggle for recognition initially consolidated civil rights: women obtained the right to vote and blacks obtained anti-racist laws. The democratic State, thus, began to implement the policy of universalism, enshrining the equality of all citizens.

In a second moment, the struggle for recognition underwent a transformation: the “recognition of equality” gave way to the struggle for the “recognition of differences”. The democratic State, then, faces a new challenge: to deal with the particularist claim of “collective subjects”, in a legal order that makes the isolated individual the bearer of universal rights.

Cculture and politics

The struggle for recognition, as expected, collided with the Eurocentrism that guides school curricula. In Brazil, during the PT governments, in parallel with affirmative actions in the educational field (Prouni, quotas, etc.), the discipline “Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture” was instituted in primary and secondary education. The critique of Eurocentrism and the rescue of African culture and its enormous importance for the formation of nationality are correct and necessary initiatives.

But it is always good to guard against the possibility of “culturalizing” social life, since recognition now concerns not the rights of so-called minorities, but the preservation of a distant cultural legacy. Therefore, one runs the risk of replacing universal history with fragmented histories, centered on valuing cultures relegated to oblivion (African, indigenous) and their protagonists (“subjects”).

The material basis of society then gives way to cultural traditions; the economic cycles that marked the unfolding of our history (sugar, coffee, rubber, etc.), is replaced by the anthropologizing study of the cultural legacy. But how to understand colonialism and slavery without talking about commercial capitalism? The desistance of the teaching of history results in a complete dematerialization of the real, an autonomization of culture, an idealization of “living places” and the alleged subjects with their “knowledge” and “doings”.

At the same time, an angry movement to revise the “official history” developed. The anti-racist demonstrations that took place in the United States in May-June 2020 began the destruction of statues that enshrined characters linked to colonialism. The destruction of the statue of Christopher Columbus (the “invader” of America, and no longer the “discoverer”) was followed, in several European countries, by attacks on characters linked to colonial expansion, slave traders, or who expressed ideas racists, like Churchill, Father Antônio Vieira, etc. But, it is necessary to establish a difference: Churchill, did not deserve a statue for his opinions about blacks, but for his decisive participation in the victory against Nazi Germany, and Father Antônio Vieira, among other things, for having written his sermons, a work of indisputable aesthetic value and a reference for rhetoric studies.

The existence of bloodthirsty characters, enemies of the human race, however, should not simply be erased or replaced by "resistance heroes", because what is most important is the education of the new generations who need to know the atrocities of the past so that this don't repeat yourself. Better, therefore, would be to collect such characters for a museum where they would be references for history classes.

As for erasure, it should be remembered that acts of vandalism are made to be reproduced by the media. In this way, they involuntarily make visible those characters that the visual pollution of cities has condemned to invisibility. The figure of Edward Colston, the British slave trader, “has not gained such fame since the seventeenth century,” says a report in the Folha de São Paulo of 12/06/2020, now, however “the slaveholder leaves for another incarnation, now immaterial”

The echoes of these iconoclastic movements were soon heard in Brazil, in the picturesque discussion about the need or not to remove the statue of Borba Gato, an aesthetic monstrosity, whose form seems to me to be very appropriate to portray the cruel imprisonment of Indians for slavery (“ descents of Indians”). Less picturesque and more destructive is the attempt to banish from literature authors considered silent on slavery, such as Machado de Assis, whose reading has already been advised against by anti-racist militants. Or even Monteiro Lobato, the preferred victim of “political correctness”. Should Lobato's books be withdrawn from circulation or should new editions be “corrected”, suppressing racist references? None of these alternatives educate.

back to universal

On the theoretical level, which at times duplicates what is happening in social movements and at times provides subsidies to militants of multiculturalism, underlies a conception of the world that refuses the universal in the name of “micro-narratives” – the history of blacks, women, gay etc. Proximity to postmodernism, with regard to the critique of “great stories”, makes the existence of a universal history shared by all unfeasible. Some authors use the expression “cognitive ghettos” or “apartheid progressive” to critically characterize the proposal; others point to the ideological proximity to liberalism and the vision of a democratic society in which differences are accommodated, each one in their own corner. Zizek, in turn, speaks of “inverted racism” when pointing to the “dangerous slogan”: equal, but separate, which seems to him the “idea of apartheid ".

The confrontation between culturalism and the democratic ideal resurfaced in France a few years ago. The axis of the debate was the use of religious symbols (specifically, the burqa) in public and secular schools. After several years of heated discussion, the French government enacted a ban. There was no lack of good arguments on both sides: the criticism of state intolerance that turns a blind eye to other cultures and persecutes Muslims: it speaks of universalism, but it is at the service of a particular; or, at the other end, the defense of secularism threatened by fundamentalism – a fanatical identity that wants to impose its particularism on everyone.

Again, the dialectic between the universal and the particular reappears. I cite another example that I witnessed. In a city on the coast of São Paulo, a group of neighbors discussed what had happened: a mason, who provided services to all, had been accused of having raped a mentally handicapped boy. They were all outraged. Then, a social worker intervened: “we need to understand that he is a caiçara and that, in his culture, this is not so serious”.

It is evident that cultural diversity and its peaceful coexistence within the democratic State must be respected, but this presupposes a common political culture that must be accepted. Different cultures do not live in isolation, but in contact and, above all of them, are the rules of coexistence sanctioned by law. For this reason, rape, no matter how “serious” it may be considered in caiçara culture, cannot be tolerated. Likewise, in the name of cultural diversity, the stoning of adulterous women is not acceptable.

It was for these reasons that the French government banned the wearing of the headscarf in public schools. The prohibition is based on the principle that immigrants must accept the secularity of the State: whoever emigrated to France has made a choice and, therefore, must share the existing rules of coexistence in that country.

The struggle for recognition, like any confrontation with political dimensions, had as one of its disastrous and unforeseen results an odious reaction, also supported by an essentialist and particularist vision: xenophobia violently resurfaced to defend racial “purity” (and the defense of jobs), through “ethnic cleansing”. On the one hand, it generated segregation and, on the other, racial hatred. In the United States, the attack on the twin towers in 2001 revived Islamic extremism and racist intolerance against foreigners. Angela Merkel, a year earlier, had announced: “multiculturalism has failed”.

It is time, therefore, to review the critique of the universal, the starting point of multiculturalism. The denunciation of “abstract universalism” and its conception, according to which “the law is equal for all”, rightly notes that it equalizes the unequal and imposes an alleged uniformity. Such conception goes back to the Enlightenment, which, conceiving men, generically, as rational beings, did not pay attention to individual differences. Against this leveling, romanticism opposed, exalting the singularity and placing it in opposition to the universal.

The dialectic arose to overcome this antinomy. Hegel asserted that there is no unbridgeable abyss between the universal and the singular, nor a relation of exteriority, since the singulars are constitutive parts of the universal and this is incarnated in singular beings (just remember the “universal man” of the Renaissance and the “ typical characters”, of the realist novel). One cannot, therefore, confuse the dialectical conception of the “concrete universal” with the leveling vision of the “abstract universal”.

According to Hegel, the latter must be understood as an initial, immediate manifestation of the concept of universal, still abstract, empty, indeterminate. For this reason, Hegel introduced into his dialectical concept the successive determinations that enrich the universal and that are its constituent moments. In this way, particularities can finally recognize themselves, harmonically integrating themselves into the universal and consciously becoming parts of it without, however, losing their specific qualities.

The universal, for the dialectic, is not a night in which all cats are gray, nor does it imply the cancellation of the inherent qualities of singulars, which, stripped of those, would be forcibly integrated into an alleged undifferentiated unity. The dissolution of the diverse into the monotony of the One is an old accusation leveled by critics of Hegelianism. Marx came out in defense of Hegel, stating that the primacy of the general over particulars did not mean the dilution of these “under a general principle".

Such dilution is present today in the false universality of the so-called globalization. On the one hand, it put the Nation-State in crisis, that institution which, according to Habermas, enabled the affirmation of politics as the road that would pave access to the true universal. On the other hand, it imposed in its place an alleged universal: the consumer society.

Now, yes, one can speak of pasteurizing homogenization in a world populated by false equivalences: the different commodities, emptied of their use value, equated by the abstract exchange value; individuals belonging to different social classes named indistinctly as “citizens”; and, finally, the latter transformed into “claimants” consumers who fight on apparent equal terms for their “rights” in a market that, cynically, enshrines “consumer sovereignty”.

This brutal contrast between the universalism of the market and the fragmentation of identities present in multiculturalism has led several authors to seek a link between these two phenomena. Zizek, for example, turns to Lacan to see multiculturalism as a symptom of contemporary capitalism. Along the same lines, the psychoanalyst Conrado Ramos found: “multiculturalism becomes a symptom of postmodern and neoliberal policies that fragment the consumer society by multiplying targets mass groups whose adherence it is up to propaganda to summon, in the name of differences”. Thus, “democracy, tolerance, political correctness, respect and equal rights sustained by multiculturalism are only possible in fact within the abstract and universalizing relations of the market”.

Outside market relations, however, the mass of private individuals is concentrated, not desiring subjectivities, but stable jobs. Within the market, the different social classes coexist, struggling not for the recognition of their differences, but for the possession of the wealth produced by social work. Multiculturalism, on the contrary, replaced contradiction with diversity.

If the field of culture, as Habermas said, is pre-political and, historically, has only produced “the frayed traditional forms of social integration”, then it is necessary to rescue the dimension of politics, democracy, republican ideals, social emancipation , for that is where the universal can progressively realize itself.

For this reason, some authors, returning to the dialectical conception, prefer to speak of “concrete universalism” to account for a process through which the law can produce equality for all. Only in this way is it possible to leave “small politics”, the cultural fragmentation of individuals who do not understand each other, towards “great politics”: the fight against economic exploitation, the primary source of inequality and conflicts against the forms of social discrimination of differences. .

In Brazil: multiculturalism as a public policy

Multiculturalism as a public policy implemented by the State made its entrance among us at the seminar on multiculturalism and racism, held on June 2, 1996, during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. For the seminar, organized by the Ministry of Justice, several Brazilian intellectuals and North American Brazilianists were summoned to Brasilia to discuss the introduction of affirmative actions in the country. The centrality of the racial issue, as expected, obviously suggested a comparison between Brazil and the United States.

Monica Grin, in an essay dedicated to the seminar, draws attention to a fundamental question that alerts us to the simple copy of the North American experience by asking: “if there are in the Brazilian social order the rightful “racial subjects” for whom they should those policies should be addressed. Thus, the question most incisively posed in the Brasília debate was: what is the ontological status of “race” in Brazil? Are there “racial” subjects? That is: do social subjects define and perceive themselves based on a clear racial division?”.

Asserting that, like in the United States, there would be “racial subjects” among us, as some of the intellectuals present, as well as some currents of the black movement, intended, results in the politicization of differences and a racialized conception of social life. It is a matter here of the transposition of an American problematic of race-conscious – awareness of blackness as a prerequisite for the struggle for compensatory policies aimed at reducing inequalities. But in Brazil, on the contrary, awareness emerges as a result of state action that intends to create “social subjects” to be included through compensatory focal interventions (the targets, as they say in English).

Against this importation of a problem from a country that has nothing to teach anyone about the racial issue, the seminar had the lucidity of Fabio Wanderley Reis: – “What is the society we aim for in terms of racial relations? The answer, in my opinion, is clear: we want a society in which people's racial characteristics come to be shown to be socially irrelevant, that is, in which opportunities of all kinds offered to individuals are not conditioned by their inclusion in this or that racial group. If we pay attention to the original meaning of the term “discrimination”, used as something reprehensible when it comes to races, we see that it refers precisely to the fact that racial traits are or are not perceived or taken as relevant: we want a society that does not “ discriminate” or “perceive” races, that is, that it is blind to the racial characteristics of its members”.

The creation of “racial subjects” in Brazil collides with the specificity of a context that has nothing to do with the United States. The “gradation” between “races” establishes a continuum that blurs the rigid differentiation between whites and blacks existing in the United States, expressed in the old law of one-drop rule according to which a single drop of black blood inherited from ancestors is enough to classify the individual as black.

On the other hand, the non-existence among us of a black bourgeoisie demonstrates that the racial issue and the social issue have merged. For this reason, Fabio Wanderley Reis considered “clearly odious, in the general conditions that characterize the vast destitute layers of the Brazilian population, the pretension of establishing discrimination between races as a criterion for the State's social promotion action. It should be considered that it is precisely at the base of the social pyramid, where the most important potential targets of the State's social effort are obviously found, that racially diverse populations mix and socially integrate, not to mention the most intense occurrence of miscegenation itself”.

We find a similar reasoning in the participation of the Brazilianist George Reid Andrews when remembering, based on data, that affirmative action, in the United States, is a policy that “benefited mainly, or exclusively, the black middle class; did little or nothing for the poor class”. It is not surprising, then, says the author, “that the black movement in the 1980s was largely led by members of this social stratum; it is also not surprising that some of these activists have called for the adoption of government programs inspired by the experience of affirmative action in the United States”.

Thus, it took an American intellectual, who is by no means a Marxist, to remind us of the mistake of seeking references for our ills in the American example. He still had the audacity, in a seminar opened by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, at the height of neoliberalism, to remind those present that the only government program in the world that reduced racial inequalities was the Cuban one, which eliminated racial differences in health, life expectancy, education and employment. And this was only possible because government action was not limited to skin color, but to the promotion of the poorest sections of the population.

The imposition of the racial agenda led Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant to write an angry critique of the “export” of categories originating in North American territory that, dehistoricized, were incorporated by social movements and the academic world. This is the case, among others, of multiculturalism. Referring to Brazil, they ask: “what to think of these American researchers who go to Brazil to encourage the leaders of the Black Movement to adopt the tactics of the Afro-American movement in defense of civil rights and denounce the category pardo (intermediate term between white and black, which designates people of mixed physical appearance) in order to mobilize all Brazilians of African descent from a dichotomous opposition between “Afro-Brazilians” and “whites” at the very moment when in the United States individuals of mixed origin Are they mobilized so that the American State (starting with the Census Bureau) officially recognizes “mixed race” Americans, ceasing to forcibly classify them under the exclusive label of “blacks”?

As for the academic world, Bourdieu and Wacquant openly denounce cultural imperialism: “what the great American foundations of philanthropy and research play in the diffusion of doxa North American within the Brazilian university field, both in terms of representations and practices. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation finances a program on “Race and Ethnicity” at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as the Center for Afro-Asian Studies (and its journal Estudos Afro-Asiáticos) at the Candido Mendes University, in order to favor the exchange of professors and students. In order to obtain its sponsorship, the Foundation imposes as a condition that the research teams comply with the criteria of affirmative actions in the American way, which raises thorny problems since, as has been seen, the white/black dichotomy is at least risky to apply in Brazilian society”.

One of the central points in the “American way” of dealing with the problem is the critical stance towards our intended racial democracy. Such democracy is not true, therefore, it would be up to the black movement to denounce the imposture and hypocrisy.

There is, however, another way of facing the question, the one suggested by the best anthropology that understands Brazilian racial democracy as a myth. And a myth is neither true nor false. First of all, it is a vision of the world, a collective yearning, a principle of social integration, a product of collective consciousness. The myth, therefore, is a story, a dream, which reveals deep social aspirations and latent values. Therefore, the mere denunciation is innocuous, not least because one of the characteristics of the myth is its permanent self-transformation.

Lévi-Strauss claimed that myth is a “native philosophy” whose object is “to provide a logical model to resolve a contradiction”. In a free interpretation, aware of the existence of contradiction, this anthropological thesis can be compared to Fernando Pessoa's definition: “the myth is the nothing that is everything”. Undoubtedly, the myth is nothing, because it indicates an emptiness, an absence; but, what is more important, it projects a future of reconciliation, a new totalization that welcomes and overcomes differences. In the case that interests us: an a-racial democracy in which the skin color of individuals will finally be an insignificant characteristic.

logic and politics

Singularity is an old companion of anarchism. Just remember Stirner, author of The one and only property (Martins). The exaltation of the individual expels the particular and turns the universal into a collection of loose and undifferentiated individuals or, as Hegel would say, an “atomistic multitude of individuals together”. The young Marx, by the way, noted that Stirner believed that these individuals together maintained purely personal relationships with each other, that is, non-mediated relationships: he discarded the particular by ignoring that personal relationships take place within class relationships. What is particular, however, are the social determinations that are lost in the unilateral emphasis given to singularity.

In current times, we are witnessing the flourishing of neoanarchism present in youth social movements and cyberactivism. One of its most elaborate theoretical manifestations can be found in the work of Toni Negri, especially in his cult of the “crowd”, defined by him as “a multiplicity of singularities that cannot find unity in any sense”. Society, as can be seen, emerges there as a collection of loose individuals who refuse any mediation, any individual, that represents them in the political sphere (unions, parties, etc.).

The second category is the particularity that logic traditionally understands as a mediation, which, by overcoming atomism, can allow access to the universal. But that can also block this possibility. There are several examples. Just think of “workerism”, that economicist conception that prevents workers' consciousness from overcoming corporatism and transforming itself into political consciousness. Or, then, the infamous “professional ethics”, a corporate ethics, particular, that exists independently of the ethics common to all individuals.

“Affirmative action”, with its emphasis on the particular, often clashes with universal interests. Social inclusion aims to repair injustices. When trying to implement restorative public policies, advice like this comes up: between two equally qualified candidates vying for a job, one black and the other white, the choice should fall on the former. With this ethical principle, justice is sought, even when the white candidate is as poor, or poorer, than the black.

This justice focused on the particular, however, opens a split within society, provokes a contrary reaction and intensifies prejudice. We are here facing a problematic form of social inclusion centered on “positive discrimination” (or, “inverse discrimination”), which reinforces a separatist policy that produces resentment among the non-included. The same thing applies to racial quotas at the university, a half-baked intervention that does not solve social exclusion, since it is only a localized, palliative action, a way of doing justice by drops, in a country where 53% of inhabitants consider themselves black and brown.

Today, what we see with the rise of Donald Trump and Jair M. Bolsonaro is the “return of the repressed”. Large sectors of the middle classes in both countries openly, without any itch, resent the “unpleasant” presence of hitherto marginalized segments. In the US, according to polls, Trump was the favorite of the white working class, “tired” of fighting for life and living with the rise of so-called minorities. The repressed hatred of blacks, gays, feminists exploded without disguise.

Resentment, this “cold passion”, this “reactive force”, entered the public sphere with force. The middle class, squeezed between the affluence of the elites and the rise of the poor, chose to identify itself ideologically with the haute bourgeoisie, turning its frustration and hatred against the latter.

The new situation that has opened forces us to return to the inopportune theme of multiculturalism and rescue “great politics”. If petty politics, as expressed in the affirmation of identities and the cult of differences, remained a prisoner of the particular, Politics with a capital P can progressively lead us to the universal. This is about the political action that induces men to overcome their singular limitations and the mere particularity that characterize them, in order to identify themselves with the human race.

In the democratic rule of law, public policies should move in that direction. In the Brazilian case, overcoming particularity has in its favor the myth of “racial democracy”, considered by many only as “hypocrisy”. But hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue. There is something important and virtuous in this Brazilian myth that should serve as a reference for building a substantive democracy, without adjectives, in which a person's skin color will no longer be an object of pride or discrimination.

*Celso Frederico is a retired senior professor at the School of Communication and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Essays on Marxism and Culture (Morula Editors).

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