Race and Education in Brazil

At the end of the twentieth century, Brazilian universities, both public and private, began to implement affirmative action and quota programs to promote the more equitable inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in higher education. For the country with the largest population of African descent outside of Nigeria, this development was a stunning turnaround from a century in which, despite glaring racial inequalities, much of the public and in many cases even the state proclaimed that Brazil was a racial democracy—a racially mixed paradise free from intolerance and discrimination. What is all the more notable is that these new policies do not respond to a perceived social need to compensate for errors in the past. Instead, these policies are based on a growing perception that racial inequality is an ongoing facet of Brazilian society, reproduced by cultural values, economic factors, and the functioning of public and private institutions. The relationship between

race and education is central to this emerging national debate on discrimination and its remedies in Brazil, and analysis of the history of race and education sheds light on the mechanisms that have sustained and reproduced racial inequality in this society so central to the African diaspora.

Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1992) offers a way of thinking about the role of race in American society that helps understand the relationship between race and education in Brazil. Higginbotham suggests that race functions as a "metanarrative"—that once race enters as a factor into a society, cultural values, social policies, and political discourse are all shaped by race (p. 252). Until 1888 Brazil was the largest slave-holding society in the Americas, receiving nearly half of all the slaves brought from Africa. As in other slave-holding societies, Brazilian masters contrived to withhold literacy from their slaves, and across the country, until the end of slavery, local legislation was repeatedly passed to prevent the education of slave children. But the institution of slavery influenced Brazilian society in a number of indirect ways as well. It propelled Brazilian elites to remain closely identified with Europe both through economic ties and through cultural and social values. These ties were so intense that from the colonial period through the end of the nineteenth century, these elites endeavored to educate their sons and daughters in Europe. While Brazil's monarchs established law, medical, engineering, and military academies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first full university was not founded until 1922.

Through the nineteenth century, education at all levels remained almost exclusively the province of those who could provide for themselves, so only a few Brazilian cities offered even limited public instruction. Catholic institutions provided much of the education available until the twentieth century, both for Brazil's small, predominantly white elite and for a small number of free blacks, mulattoes and lower-class whites who received instruction in religious charities. Those few free people of color who received a full elementary education or all or part of a secondary education—almost always at the hands of religious institutions—became a part of a small educated semi-elite and occupied such positions as teachers, clerks, or accountants. Others received a vocational apprenticeship and worked in vocational trades. Until the turn of the twentieth century, Brazilian education mirrored the social hierarchies framed by the slave regime. In the absence of a large, lower-class free white population, the large immigrant waves of the turn of the twentieth century also created some interstitial opportunities for those few free people of color who were able to attain an education, even if only at the primary level.

The rise of public education in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century had everything to do with racial thought. It emerged from the racial thinking of elite, typically white Brazilians who envisioned transforming a nation they increasingly perceived as backward. These Brazilians, drawn from the ranks of doctors, social scientists, and other educated professionals, were modernists and progressives who envisioned remaking Brazil through vigorous action by the state. For these self-styled "educational pioneers," education could be the means of effecting a particular type of social transformation. They began to revise a long-held view adopted from international intellectual currents of the late nineteenth century that held that black and racially mixed peoples were racially inferior. Instead, they promoted a view gaining international currency that rejected scientific racism and instead viewed what they called "degeneracy" as a condition associated with race but tied to environment.

This public education combined vocational training to support industrialization, a nationalist curriculum designed to "Brazilianize" the population, and a host of psychological, anthropological, sociological, medical, and hygienic measures intended to build a future "Brazilian race" freed from perceived degeneracy (Dávila, 2003). These measures were inspired by eugenics—a movement within the human sciences that envisioned "improving racial stock" either by preventing the reproduction of perceived degenerates, as occurred in involuntary sterilization programs in the United States and Nazi Germany, or by seeking to increase the "robustness" of individuals with the hope this would be transmitted to their progeny. The educational model created by this movement was a paradoxical experience. On the one hand, this logic served to make education increasingly available to all Brazilians, and disproportionately extended opportunities to those of African descent who had been so systematically excluded in the past. It came with varying degrees of health care, assistance with meals, and dental service. On the other hand, this educational model relied on testing and tracking students based on their perceived potential—a standard that was applied through a reading of health, hygiene, and psychological adaptation to learning. This mentality carried over to the curriculum, which emphasized Afro-Brazilian passivity in the face of slavery and reproduced pejorative stereotypes. One of the leading high-school history texts of the mid-century, for instance, listed Afro-Brazilian contributions to Brazilian society as: "Superstition, love for music and dance, a certain 'creole negligence,' heroic resignation in the face of misery, a fatalistic and lighthearted attitude in regards to work" (Serrano, p. 164).

The results of this model, developed and implemented between the world wars, was a form of de facto racial segregation. This segregation was based on the classification of students of color as medically, psychologically, and sociologically problematic. At the same time, the number of teachers of color declined as the profile of new teachers changed. Whereas some Afro-Brazilians gained teaching positions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based on their education, new standards of professionalization and the entrance of affluent white women into the workforce diminished the space for Afro-Brazilians to gain the training that would net them teaching jobs. The outcome of decades of institution building in public education in the first half of the twentieth century in Brazil was a network of school systems that reached increasing numbers of Brazilians, including Brazilians of color. Paradoxically, it was an educational system that reproduced prevailing beliefs about the cultural and social inferiority of Brazilians of color and did so within an environment that conceded or withheld opportunities based on socially constructed conceptions of merit. Perversely, as educators increasingly relied on social-scientific and medical measures to define students, it became easier to imagine that race was not an explicit factor shaping educational opportunity. In other words, the sublimated role of race in public education, as in other facets of Brazilian society, made it easier to assert that race was not a factor in Brazilian social inequality—that Brazil was, indeed, a racial democracy.

During the second half of the twentieth century, education in Brazil underwent another transformation that again held considerable significance for the nation's race relations. Increasingly, affluent and predominantly white parents withdrew their children from public schools and used their purchasing power to secure private education. The upper- and middle-class disengagement from public primary and secondary schools stigmatized these educational spaces, which became synonymous with the education of the poor and nonwhites. Under these conditions, support for public education waned and resources were drained. In yet another paradox, the decline of public education involved a decline in teacher wages, which propelled affluent women out of the profession and reopened its doors to teachers of color, though under increasingly precarious and less prestigious conditions.

This Brazilian experience with regard to race and education is paralleled by that of other societies in the Americas. National identity myths celebrate race mixture in societies as diverse as Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. This belief in a national ethos of race mixture softening social lines belies a long and lingering history of exclusion and inequality. Yet, in Brazil, a movement for racial equality that organized in the opposition to that country's military dictatorship (1964–1985) gained ground in both local and national government during the process of redemocratization, which it used to advocate for compensatory action by the state as well as to promote racial solidarity among Afro-Brazilians, movements that have begun to redraw the relationship between race and education.

See also Education in the Caribbean; Education in the United States; Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean; Identity and Race in the United States; Race, Scientific Theories of

Bibliography

Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. 2 (winter, 1992): 251–274.

Serrano, Jonathas. Epítome de história do Brasil, 3d ed. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: F. Briguet & Cia., 1941.

jerry dÁvila (2005)