Read an Excerpt
Diploma of whiteness
Race and social policy in Brazil, 1917-1945
By Jerry Davila Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3070-9
Chapter One
BUILDING THE "BRAZILIAN MAN"
"How will the body of the Brazilian man, the future Brazilian man, be? Not the vulgar or inferior type, but the best example of the race? What shall be his height? His volume? His color? What will be the shape of his head? The form of his face? His physiognomy?" In 1938 Minister of Education and Health Gustavo Capanema directed these questions to a group of anthropologists and nationalist intellectuals. He wanted to get to the bottom of a problem that was beginning to bother him: the statue of the "Brazilian Man" he had commissioned to grace the entrance of the new Ministry of Education and Health (MES) building looked racially degenerate rather than virile and Aryan, as he imagined Brazilians would evolve.
Capanema was troubled by the appearance of this sculpture because he envisioned the new MES headquarters as a statement on Brazil's future and on the role of the government in shaping it. The two themes that expressed Capanema's vision failed to meet in the sculpture. First, the "Brazilian Man" was to symbolize the outcome of the racial and social engineering that was Capanema's special responsibility. As he explained to Getulio Vargas when he commissioned the piece, the sculpture would specifically be the "Brazilian Man" because the MES "is dedicated to preparing, toforming, to crafting the man of Brazil. It really is the 'ministry of man.'" Second, the degenerate figure clashed with the modernist building.
In contrast to the sculpture, the building was a huge success. Capanema brought together French modernist architect Charles Le Corbusier and young Brazilian architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to design a modernist structure that earned international acclaim. Indeed, the design made such an impact, especially in the United States, that years later Nelson Rockefeller reassembled the team to design the United Nations building. The MES building design did its job: it cast the ministry as a portal to Brazil's white future, a future forged through public education. For Capanema, the MES building was proof that Brazil was finding its identity, defining itself as the nation of the future-no longer a weak nation that imitated stronger ones. To the contrary, it was now the foreigners who would imitate Brazil.
The statue of the "Brazilian Man" would complete the allegory by showing that public education would make Brazilians white and strong, worthy of their bright future. According to Capanema, "the building and the statue will complete each other in an exact and necessary manner." Yet the figure of the "Brazilian Man" that sculptor Celso Antonio rendered from the stone represented everything Capanema hoped Brazil would leave behind. The figure was a caboclo, a racially mixed backwoodsman. To make matters worse, this caboclo was barrigudo (paunchy). The sculptor, Celso Antonio, justified his work by stating that as he looked about Brazil, that is what he saw. This figure was the average Brazilian man. Seemingly, he had neglected the allegorical significance of this monument to Brazil's future, a future that was white and strong.
The scientists were all in complete agreement. Edgar Roquette Pinto, director of the National Museum of Anthropology, advised against choosing any of the racial types that in his view would sooner or later disappear. Instead, the figure should be white and Mediterranean to represent the phenotype to which "the morphological evolution of the other racial types" is headed. Jurist Francisco Oliveira Vianna agreed, replying that the sculpture should reflect "not only the whitened types which will result from the Aryanizing evolution of our mixed-bloods, but also the representatives of all the European races among us." Juvenil Rocha Vaz, a professor at the Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine with extensive public health experience, reminded Capanema that this question "exuberantly" demonstrated the need for more federal research grants, and he agreed that although no final type had emerged from the "racial melting pot," the figure should nonetheless be white.
The agreement between Roquette Pinto, Oliveira Vianna, and Rocha Vaz takes on added meaning in considering their diverging scientific philosophies. Roquette Pinto was the leading proponent in Brazil of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas's antiracialist thesis that there were no such things as superior or inferior races, and that people should be measured instead by their level of culture. By contrast, Oliveira Vianna, a reactionary social policy advisor to President Vargas, believed in outright Aryan biological superiority, a racialist position echoed by Rocha Vaz. Yet as they envisioned Brazil's future, the differences in their approaches ceded to a consensus about the nation's ills and their remedies. Oliveira Vianna, Roquette Pinto, and Rocha Vaz, like the mainstream scientific, social scientific, and medical community as a whole, held faith in Brazil's white future and the role of public education and health in creating it. Although there continued to be debate over the nature of blackness, degeneracy, and the possibility of racial improvement, there was consensus on the meaning and value of whiteness-consensus that expressed itself in masculine virtues of virility, strength, and courage, in Europeanness, and in the agreement that this was the race of Brazil's future.
Acting on the advice of his scientific advisors, Capanema spelled out for Celso Antonio the racial criteria the "Brazilian Man" must meet, requiring that the finished sculpture be reviewed by a special committee. According to Capanema, this committee "cannot be composed of international authorities, because the exam will mainly determine whether the figure matches the Brazilian type under development, and therefore only national specialists will be qualified to render judgment." Celso Antonio refused, and he lost his commission for the sculpture. Capanema sounded out another artist, this time making his racial politics more explicit: the sculpture should be "a solid figure, strong, Brazilian. Not a pretty boy. A swarthy type of good quality, with an appearance bespeaking intelligence, elevation, courage and capacity to create and to accomplish."
Soon, the disagreement between the minister and Celso Antonio spilled into the newspapers. A Nota agreed with Capanema, declaring that "the artist has committed a crass historical and ethnographic error in imposing a caboclo as our national type." Like Capanema's technical advisors, the writer concurred that although "there does not yet exist a definitively fixed Brazilian type," the sculpture should be white rather than the other groups being assimilated. Another commentator, M. Paulo Filho, writing for O Correio da Manha, saw the debate as a conflict between aesthetic ideals and contemporary reality, stressing that Celso Antonio simply created what he saw. Still, the commentator concluded, "the Brazilian man they both imagine does not yet exist."
The fact that the minister, doctors, anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists all imagined the ideal Brazilian would be white is not surprising-Brazil's elite had projected idealized images of the nation's whiteness and Europeanness for generations. What is surprising is these scientists' unwavering determination to use the adverb "yet" in describing Brazil's racial makeup. Each one of the commentators awaited the moment when Brazil would finally be white (which might take as long as two hundred to three hundred years, according to Paulo Filho). Responsibility for achieving whiteness fell to Gustavo Capanema's Ministry of Education and Health. The statue of the "Brazilian Man," which was never completed, stood as testament and tribute to the work of educators and scientists in reaching Brazil's racial destiny.
BRAZILIAN EUGENICS
How were teachers and scientists supposed to create this future "Brazilian Man"? The answer, some felt, was through eugenics, the practice of "improving" the human race physically and mentally by manipulating genetic traits, primarily through controls on the act and context of procreation. Between the world wars, Brazil was a nation seduced by the idea that science could be the ultimate arbiter of social relations. This cause was championed by the growing caste of scientists and social scientists who claimed jurisdiction over social policies and promised capable and impartial application of foreign scientific theories to Brazil's national problems. Nearly every national problem had a racial subtext: Brazil's mixed-race and nonwhite underclasses were, by all accounts, culturally backward, and by some accounts racially degenerate. Eugenics could solve both of these problems.
As Nancy Stepan has argued, in the early decades of the century "soft" and "hard" camps of eugenicists debated whether a population could be genetically improved by strengthening health, hygiene, and education, or whether genetic improvement could be achieved by limiting the gene pool. This division loosely followed the division between the genetic theories of Lamarck and Mendel. Lamarck maintained that the behavior and environment of parents could shape the genes of offspring: tuberculosis or alcoholism, for example, would produce degenerate babies. By contrast, for Mendel genetic material could not be altered in the course of a lifetime. "Soft" eugenics allowed for racial improvement through attention to health, environmental influences, cultural values, and the circumstances of reproduction. "Hard" eugenics did not allow for the modification of traits, and focused instead on the elimination of undesirable traits through control of reproduction.
In the interwar historical context, the difference between Mendelian and Lamarckian genetics had practical and moral implications for the practitioners of eugenics. Eugenicists who favored Mendelian genetics tended to focus on preventing reproduction, at times through forced sterilization. Because the Mendelian approach implied the fixity of race, its use in whitening Brazil would have meant somehow preventing half of the country's population from ever reproducing. Instead, Brazilian eugenicists followed their intellectual compass and embraced a French Lamarckian genetics, which promised the most immediate and positive returns. This opened the path for modifying the traits of the existing population. If "Brazil is an immense hospital," as public health advocate Miguel Pereira declared in 1916, it can be cured.
Who were the eugenicists? Brazilian eugenics was advocated by a confederation of doctors, scientists, and social scientists who were united by their nationalist desire to see Brazil brought back from the brink of degeneracy provoked by the mixture of races and cultures and by poverty and uncivilized and unhealthy customs. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, these individuals began organizing associations to advance eugenics and address eugenic issues. The first, the Sao Paulo Eugenics Society, organized by Renato Kehl, included as its secretary the sociologist Fernando de Azevedo who later conducted reforms of the school systems of Rio de Janeiro (1926-1930) and Sao Paulo (1933-1934). Eugenics, Fernando de Azevedo observed, "called for the elimination of poisons, not people." Anthropologist Edgar Roquette Pinto, who participated in the Rio de Janeiro school system administration (1931-1935), was both a member of the Eugenics Society and the related Mental Hygiene League, for which he edited the journal Saude (Health). Afranio Peixoto, the doctor and legal medicine pioneer who directed the Rio school system from 1917-1922, was also a member of the Mental Hygiene League.
Associations like the Eugenics Society, the Mental Hygiene League, the Biotypology Association, and the Pro-Sanitation League had overlapping memberships and worked as a lobby for an expanded state role in addressing the causes of degeneracy. The members of these associations were public intellectuals who came from Brazil's elite, and they found in eugenics a language that allowed them to converse across disciplines and to stake a claim for their disciplines as the bases for social policy. As they sought to consolidate their respective fields, they succeeded in making them the basis of a range of federal, state, and municipal programs of not only education and health but also areas of public action such as government hiring, criminological practices, military recruitment, and treatment of the insane. Through their creation of these programs and of the educational instruments that trained their technicians (by the 1930s formal teacher training throughout Brazil included varying degrees of the eugenic disciplines of sociology, psychology, hygiene, physical education, and puericulture, the science of pre- and postnatal care), these eugenic pioneers assured that the core sciences of eugenics would be widely taught and practiced.
Brazilian eugenicists differed from those in other countries in the degree to which they drew eugenics out of the laboratory and into public policies aimed at improving the physical and medical state of the population and reshaping their cultural values. There were two reasons for the unique public role of eugenics in Brazil. First, it provided the emerging scientific, medical, and social scientific authorities with a shorthand for explaining ideas of racial inferiority and defining strategies for managing or ameliorating that inferiority. Second, eugenics armed this group with a scientific solution to what was basically a social problem. Contemporaries believed science transcended politics, thus policies framed in eugenic language depoliticized debate over racial norms. Moreover, the prestige of science meant that eugenic programs competed effectively for resources.
Beginning with the public health and hygiene movement of the second decade of the twentieth century, policies meant to whiten the composition of the population through European immigration began to share space with new policies meant to whiten behavior and social conditions. The consensus among policymakers was that schools were the front lines in the battle against "degeneracy." Educators turned schools into eugenic laboratories-places where ideas about race and nation were tested on and applied to children. Eugenics became the rationale for expanding and allocating educational resources. Curricular and extracurricular practices were wed to eugenics in ways that continue to resonate today. To give one example, physical education and fitness became so fundamental to "perfecting the race" that a generation later sports announcers would declare that scoring four goals in one game made the soccer star Pele "racially perfect."
The eugenicists enshrined their goals in the ideal of a raca brasileira, or "Brazilian race." The raca was a work in progress-a common ethnicity that all Brazilians would belong to once they shed inferior cultural and hygienic conditions. Teachers taught students that being a part of the raca was the key to citizenship and success. In practice, this meant behavioral whitening: that is, discarding African and indigenous cultural practices. Even Brazilians not of European descent could be members of the raca. Elite concern over the "eugenic perfection of the race" meant the allocation of resources to mitigate some of the effects of poverty on children. The promise of balanced lunches and health care were major reasons parents sent their children to school, as shown in the records of parents' correspondence with public officials. While the idea of a raca brasileira may not necessarily have meant much to the public, the programs that the raca inspired linked elites and the poor in a common enterprise that had lasting repercussions on the definition of race in Brazil.
The educational projects of eugenicists, which took root in the 1920s and gained their fullest expression during the Vargas era, shed light on one of the most paradoxical questions about modern Brazil: How did the idea that Brazil was a racial democracy become the nation's guiding myth for the better part of the twentieth century, especially in face of such visible racial inequalities? The trick that allowed both Brazilians and foreigners to have accepted this idea lies in the way the practice of eugenics submerged the management of racial hierarchy within social scientific language that deracialized and depoliticized the image of Brazilian society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Diploma of whiteness by Jerry Davila Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
