Howard Winant

Rethinking Race in Brazil

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenario 13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenario , organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President Jose Sarney. This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro—Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration ( Descomemoracāo ) of the Centenary of Abolition’. 1 The repudiation of the centenario suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological – are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?

Racial politics in contemporary Brazil

CONTENTS Introduction Michael Hanchard Free African Brazilians and the State of Slavery Times Richard Graham Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil Michael Hanchard Ethnic Boundaries and Political Mobilization among African Brazilians: Comparisons with the U.S. Case Edward E. Telles Racial Democracy and Racial Identity: Comparing the United States and Brazil Howard Winant Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations Micbael Mitchell Women and Racial Inequality at Work in Brazil Peggy A. Lovell Notes on Racial and Policied Inequality In Brazil Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva The Black Movement and Political Parties: A Challenging Alliance Benedita da Silva My Conscience, My Struggle Thereza Santos Blacks and Political Power Ivanir dos Santos Contributors: Index

Race and racism: Towards a global future

Abstract There is a deepening and worldwide contradiction in the meaning and structure of race and racism. The age of empire is over; apartheid and Jim Crow have ended; a significant consensus exists that the concept of race lacks an objective basis; and yet the concept persists, as idea, as practice, as identity, and as social structure. This suggests that the global racial situation remains not only volatile but also seriously undertheorized. Five key racial problems of the twenty-first century are stressed: (1)Nonracialism vs. Race Consciousness; (2)Racial Genomics; (3)The Nation and its Peoples; (4)Race/Gender/Class “Intersectionality”; and (5) Empire, Race, and Neoconservatism. A radical pragmatist approach is proposed, stressing the ineluctable link between racialized experience and racialized social structure. This argument, that racial hegemony has not been secured, draws on the DuBoisian legacy as well as racial formation theory. Because racial rule is essential to rule itself, these contradictions are destined to deepen, not diminish.

SYMPOSIUM On West and Fenstermaker's “Doing Difference”

Black shale formations occur in different geological environments throughout the geological record. Black shales are of interest in exploration, since they host a wide range of polymetallic ore deposits, as well as barite and phosphorite. Many of these mostly low-grade prospects are becoming economically profitable due to recent developments in ore processing, such as bioleaching. Both scientific results into the genesis and environmental issues related to mining and processing of black-shale hosted ores will be a major focus of this session.

Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias

We were at first surprised by the extensive critique of our 1994 book by Joe Feagin and Sean Elias. Although we do not know Elias, we have great respect and friendship for Joe Feagin and have learned from his insightful work on race and racism over the years. We have shared conference panels with him and endorsed his books (and he ours). In 2009, we published a somewhat critical but also appreciative review of Feagin’s Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge 2006) in Contemporary Sociology (March 2009). Elias subsequently wrote a critical response to our review (September 2009). Maybe this is payback? After surprise came intrigue and excitement: we realized that this was a great opportunity to examine racial politics, race theory and the dynamics of racism in the USA today. In their criticism of our work, Feagin and Elias have posed numerous crucial issues for that discussion. Let us have that debate. Their essay has an overly tendentious tone and sometimes misreads and misinterprets our book. Still there are many points of agreement between the racial formation and systemic racism theories. Where we disagree most strongly is over our respective understanding of racial politics. Feagin and Elias focus so intensely on racism that they lose sight of the complexities of race and the variations that exist among and within racially defined groups. In their ‘systemic racism’ account white racist rule is so comprehensive and absolute that the political power and agency of people of colour virtually disappear. Indeed, the ‘white racial frame’ (Feagin 2009) is so omnipotent that white racism seems to usurp and monopolize all political space in the USA. Yes, ‘counter framing’ is present, but it appears marginal at best, unable effectively to challenge the pervasiveness, persistence and power of white racism. Since Feagin and Elias dismiss ideas of ‘racial democracy’ tout court, their perspective makes it difficult to underEthnic and Racial Studies, 2013 Vol. 36, No. 6, 961 973, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.715177

The Modern World Racial System

As THE WORLD LURCHES FORWARD INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, there is widespread confusion and anxiety about the political significance, and even the meaning, of race. In this chapter I argue that, far from becoming less politically central, race defines and organizes the world and its future, as it has done for centuries. I challenge the idea that the world, as reflected by the national societies I compare, is moving “beyond race.” I suggest that the future of democracy itself depends on the outcomes of racial politics and policies as they develop in various national societies and in the world at large. This means that the future of democracy also depends on the concept of race, that is, the meaning that is attached to it. Contemporary threats to human rights and social well-being—including the resurgent dangers of fascism, increasing impoverishment, and massive social polarization—cannot be managed or even understood without paying new and better attention to issues of race. This chapter attempts to provide a set of conceptual tools that can facilitate this task.

Race, ethnicity and social science

The contours and complexities of race and racism continue to confound the social sciences. This problem originates in the historical complicity of the social science disciplines with the establishment and maintenance of the systems of racial predation, injustice and indeed genocide upon which the modern world was built. All the social sciences originate in raciology and race management, a fact that is rarely acknowledged. A critical reappraisal of ‘mainstream’ social science’s theoretical and methodological approach to race is therefore overdue. The Ethnic and Racial Studies Review is the right venue for this rethinking. Andreas Wimmer’s distinguished oeuvre provides an appropriate ‘case’ of the tendency that this editorial essay seeks to revise. Concentrating on Wimmer’s 2013 Ethnic Boundary Making, whose publication was the subject of a highly laudatory 2014 issue of ERS Review, this essay criticizes the book as an instance of the problematic social science approaches mentioned.

The Dark Matter: Race and Racism in the 21st Century:

Race and racism may be termed the ‘dark matter’ of the modern epoch. Race was invented along with the modern era. It was central to the liftoff of capitalism, a big bang itself. The dark matter then – the darker peoples of that time – was not complete: in fact they were not invisible as ‘matter’, as something that mattered. They were invisible as people. Empire, slavery, augmented state power, and the dialectic of enlightenment as well, can all be seen as racial dynamics in which absolutism’s grasping and violent claws tore at these ‘others’, seeking to dominate their bodies and their lands. Today the ‘dark matter’ persists in the form of disregard from above. An institutionalized forgetting of the meaning of race (‘colorblindness’) disguises this coercion and violence, these assaults, this war. Race and racism also continue from below, as matters of resistance and as frameworks for alternative identities and collectivities.

The Dark Matter

The field of sociology has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the subject of race. The term ‘sociology’ was first used in the USA by George Fitzhugh in his Sociology for the South: The Failure of Free Society (1854), a romantic defence of the slavery system and denunciation of the dawning industrial capitalism in the USA. Since then, the sociology of race has been linked to every major trend in the discipline, notably social Darwinism, Chicago School pragmatism, structural-functionalism, neoconservatism, and the Marxist left, both old and new. This is hardly surprising, since there is nothing more constitutive of American society than the theme of race. Still these ‘schools’ have all made a hash of race studies to various extents, often because they looked at the subject from one or another lofty ivory tower. William Du Bois’s pioneering work on race was dismissed by the sociological mainstream for nearly a century before he was belatedly canonized in the 1990s. Other early pioneers are still waiting for recognition: Monroe Work, Kelly Miller, William Monroe Trotter and Alain Locke among them. There are other reasons as well for the field’s difficulties with race. Like all (yes, all) social sciences disciplines and much of the humanities, sociology was imbued with racism from its early days. If Fitzhugh alone does not make that clear, perhaps such other founding fathers as William Graham Sumner or Edward Alsworth Ross can pitch in and help. And looking at our fellow social scientific disciplines, we need only invoke psychology’s early interest in the racial dimensions of intelligence, political science’s tense encounters with racial exclusion and disenfranchisement (Taylor 1996; Smith 2003), anthropology before Boas, the economics of empire, and so on the list is a long one. So, while I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on Emirbayer and Desmond’s Race and Reflexivity (2012), I want to point out that the paper’s principal purpose is to reframe the discipline of sociology, not to provide a new sociology of race. The problem of Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 4 April 2012 pp. 600 607

Contesting the Meaning of Race in the Post-Civil Rights Period

There were two senior proms in May 1991 at the Brother Rice High School, a Catholic college preparatory academy in Chicago – an official one that was virtually all white and, for the first time, an alternative, all-black prom.Popular music, in this instance, provided the rallying point for racial consciousness and self-segregation. The trouble began when a white prom committee announced that the playlist for the music to be featured at the prom would be based on the input of all the members of the senior class. Each student would list his or her three favorite songs, and the top vote getters would be played