THE PORT RAIL: Racial issues played out differently in other countries

The Tuscaloosa News
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Frank Tannenbaum’s (1893-1969) classic study of slavery in Mexico, "Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas," was published in 1947, and it compared slavery and the end of slavery both in Latin America and the United States, and the consequences.

How do Latinos/Hispanics feel about race?

The question of race, such a painful and rancorous illness in American society, has not played out the same in other countries with similar historical backgrounds. Research exists that provides many examples of people of mixed racial backgrounds moving up through the political, economic, and even social ladders of Latin American society in the past two centuries. Carl Degler, another historian, labeled this phenomenon the “mulatto escape hatch” in his book "Neither White nor Black: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States."

Why was Brazil thought to be a “racial democracy” of sorts while the United States was fighting its way out of segregation? Both countries had had large African slave populations — Brazil’s much larger than America’s — both had emancipated the slaves in the 19th century, both were functioning republics, both were colonized by European settlers, and, so, why such different racial trajectories?

The difference was the “mulatto escape hatch,” or the ability of people of mixed races in Brazil to rise up through the ceilings of race, such as existed in the U. S., and integrate into Brazilian society without the stigma of color or background following them.

There are quite a few mestizos (descendants of Indian and white/European unions) and even occasional mulattoes (whites and blacks) and Indians (Benito Juarez in Mexico for example) who have risen to the top of the political heap in Latin America, especially in those countries — Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico — with significant Indian and/or mestizo populations.

There is a tendency, however, for the old white elites — whether Spanish, or heavily influenced by Italian, German, and other immigration streams — to still control power. I remember, for example, Brazilians at some time touting their racial democracy, and some wag noted that the Brazilian Foreign Service was still lily white. That was some years ago.

What is different in Latin America is that the barriers that some think (endemic racism, 1619 Project, etc.) separate whites from blacks in this country don’t exist, or are very watered down, in Latin America. This begs the big question, of course. Why is this?

One, the stigma of slavery wasn’t necessarily associated with the color Black in Latin America. Indian slavery was also widely practiced, while slavery itself had been long imbedded in Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) societies since the times of the Romans all the way through to the conquest of the Americas.

Frank Tannenbaum explored this theme in "Slave and Citizen." His thesis was that slavery was not associated with the color Black in Latin America, because slavery had at one time or another snagged all people — white, Black, Indians, barbarians, Romans, etc. — in its snare. Once free, they were free. Roman gladiators, for example, were slaves. They were from all across the Roman Empire. It was not their color that got them into, or out of, slavery.

So, slavery in Latin America, descended as it was from Roman and Hispanic culture, did not carry the stigma associated with the color Black. Fast forward from Roman times to the early 17th century when the first African slaves arrived in the English colonies in 1619. They were Africans.

Slavery as a system had long ago ended in England. But when it was recreated in the colonies, it was largely associated with new African slaves coming across to work the plantations of the English colonists. Slavery and Blackness became intimately associated in minds of English colonists who eventually morphed into Virginians and New Englanders and Carolinians, and they carried this cultural baggage right through Independence.

Furthermore, the Roman Catholic Church insisted that all Africans, even those coming freshly off the ships, be baptized, and brought into the faith, even if it wasn’t entirely understood by the African slaves. This too had the effect of fomenting a sense of equality — even if it was just a spiritual equality — among slaves and free people in Latin America.

In the colonies, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, which predominated in the large slaveholding states of the southern colonies, was reluctant to extend the full benefits of Christianity to the slave community.

Other streams of Christianity, the Quakers for example, argued against such discrimination and led in the charge to emancipate all slaves, but even among Christian worshippers, slaves and free people worshipped separately.

In fact, look around you today. Blacks and whites do worship occasionally together, but, as the old cliché goes, the most segregated hour of the week is Sunday morning.

A brilliant book by the Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), "The Masters and the Slaves" (1933), stated that it was precisely the plantation system which threw everyone together with miscegenation practiced widely across the board. It softened the distance between master and slave and so contributed to the peculiarities of Brazilian racial relations.

So, there you have it. It is complicated, and can be argued and discussed from many angles, such as the one of economic exploitation, but that perhaps for another day. It is not simple, and demands we look beyond ourselves, at other cultures with similar circumstances that help us understand ourselves.


Larry Clayton
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