Mulatto Escape Hatch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brazil and the United States were the two largest slave-holding societies of the New World. However, differing racial dynamics characterized each context during those years and continue to do so. Carl Degler offered an explanation for the contrasts in his 1971 book Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. He posited the existence of a “mulatto escape hatch” in Brazil, or a space ceded to mulattos amounting to an intermediate social position between whites and blacks. In his words, “In Brazil the mulatto is not a Negro, whereas in the United States he is” (p. xviii), a distinction that provides “an escape from the disabilities of blackness for some colored people” (p. 178). This position challenges traditional views of Brazil as a racial democracy, that is, where there is no discrimination against persons of any degree of African ancestry. On what historical grounds did Degler base his theory of the mulatto difference in Brazil and what were and are its supposed consequences?

The possible existence of an escape hatch in Brazil rested on the recognition of intermediate categorization for persons of mixed racial heritage, in contrast to the gradual adoption of the “one-drop rule” in the United States (i.e., where any “noticeable” African ancestry means assignment to the black race category). Degler’s explanation for these diverging developments included more frequent racial intermixing in Portuguese America. This dynamic resulted from both the imbalanced sex ratios among Europeans in Portuguese America (where European women were scarce) in comparison to British America (where many early settlers came as families) and the higher social position of European women in British America that afforded them more control over the sexual exploits of their husbands. In addition, Degler noted that manumission rates were higher in Brazil than in the United States, especially for mulattos. These factors meant that whereas in the United States the boundary between free and slave populations was more generally coterminous with that between whites and blacks, in Brazil the free versus slave distinction was crosscut more significantly by skin tone. Hence, the all-encompassing and caste-like definition of blackness in the United States was made more difficult in Brazil.

The contrasting definitions of blackness were further strengthened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas both colonial societies practiced slavery, de jure racial discrimination ended in Brazil with slavery’s abolition in 1888. In contrast, in the United States, after the abolition of slavery in 1865, the nation moved toward a re-entrenchment of de jure race-based discrimination that lasted into the 1960s. Color distinctions gradually became obsolete in a U.S. society ruled by black codes and Jim Crow segregation. The all-encompassing one-drop rule strengthened its hold as the twentieth century progressed and was even officially adopted by the U.S. census at least from 1930 to that century’s end. In contrast, the Brazilian census has employed intermediate or mixed-race categorization since its inception in 1872.

As to the consequences of a racially intermediate category in Brazil, Degler presents evidence that there may have been some mulatto advantage in colonial years (e.g., higher manumission rates). Some research also suggests a modest amount of advantage for lighter-skinned individuals among those of African ancestry in contemporary Brazil in terms of select socioeconomic indicators (Telles 2004), although others argue that there are no real differences among Afro-Brazilians (Silva 1985). If a space of relative privilege does characterize some mulattos in Brazil, however, it is a space much closer to that occupied by blacks than by whites (Telles 2004). Interestingly, Edward Telles further argues that the advantage of lighter skin tone for persons of African ancestry is much more clearly the case in contemporary U.S. society than in Brazil. Earlier, Verna Keith and Cedric Herring revealed the same, positing that lighter-skinned blacks in the United States not only received some relative privilege compared to darker-skinned blacks during the years of slavery (e.g., higher manumission rates), but that patterns of relative advantage continue today in terms of education and income. Importantly, they claim that the present-day disadvantage of darker-skinned blacks is not a historical artifact, but results from continuing “greater discrimination against darker blacks” (Keith and Herring 1991, p. 775).

Despite some findings of a lack of evidence for significant mulatto advantage in Brazil, a preference for intermediate categorization continues among a large majority of Brazilians of some African ancestry. That preference may reflect a symbolic escape from the stigma of blackness. That is, the actual existence of the mulatto escape hatch may be less important in Brazil than the belief in its existence.

As to other consequences of intermediate categorization in Brazil, researchers hold that it hampers the construction of ethnic consciousness and solidarity among Brazilians of varying degrees of African ancestry that might otherwise be mobilized against racialized inequality. The U.S. African American community is surely the counterexample. An emphasis on individual strategies for social mobility (as opposed to collective) may further condition that solidarity in Brazil. Additionally, class identities in Brazil may be more central in the minds of poor Brazilians of all colors, further challenging the mobilization of clear racial divisions. Lastly, intermediate categorization may be implicated in the continuing stigma that is attached to blackness, resulting in a type of psychological trauma for mulattos whose disadvantage flows in part from their nonwhiteness but who adopt nonblack identities.

Traditions of intermediate categorization (and perhaps many of their consequences) are predominant in other countries of Latin America that have significant African-descent populations, including Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. As Degler and others have pointed out, the United States may be the exceptional case in terms of its historic adoption of the “one-drop rule” for categorizing individuals of African ancestry. However, racial classification patterns are in flux in both the United States and Brazil. Ironically, for example, the United States institutionalized a type of multiracialism in its 2000 census with the “mark one or more races” option, while Brazil is discarding multiracial categorization for the identification of Afro-Brazilian beneficiaries of its new affirmative action strategies in higher education.

SEE ALSO Democracy, Racial; Mulattos

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Degler, Carl N. 1971. Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Keith, Verna M., and Cedric Herring. 1991. Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community. American Journal of Sociology 97 (3): 760–778.

Silva, Nelson do Valle. 1985. Updating the Cost of Not Being White in Brazil. In Race, Class, and Power in Brazil, ed. Pierre-Michel Fontaine, 42–55. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies.

Telles, Edward E. 2004. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stanley R. Bailey