In his foreword Charles Wagley introduces Florestan Fernandes with his typical warmth and professional penetration, that make one eager to see what this Brazilian sociologist has to say. From the opening pages it is apparent that the author combines historical competence and the expert use of census and survey data with a subtle grasp of the psychosocial problems which almost immobilized the Negro as he was thrust from the dependence of slavery into the competitive society of São Paulo.
A major service of this work is its definitive devastation of the myth that social distinctions in Brazil are based solely upon class. Thus “the lower the class, the darker the skin,” is more than an unfortunate historical coincidence. Fernandes observes that after abolition of slavery (1888), the Negro served no further political use and was discarded. In the São Paulo area, to which this study is limited, the white immigrant largely replaced him in agricultural and urban pursuits. Society grew economically competitive and developed a class system within which whites might rise; yet it retained its seignorial attitudes and behavior toward the Negro. Thus marginalized, his identification with a substandard and deviant lifestyle produced the stereotype which is a component of white prejudice. However, discrimination was not ideologized and systematized; on the contrary, the egalitarian ideology archly contrasted racism—such as that of our Southland—with Brazilian tolerance (“Some of my best ancestors . . .”).
Many social scientists, while recognizing the social advantages of whiteness in Brazil, have not seriously considered the disparity in life chances between whites and blacks, particularly in the more modern areas. Studies of race have concentrated principally upon the Northeast, with its darker population, greater retention of seignorial tradition, and relative equality of lower-class whites and blacks. Even the monumental works of such men as Gilberto Freyre, Donald Pierson, and Edson Carneiro have strengthened the identification of the Negro with musical, artistic, culinary, religious, and sexual aspects of the culture, at the expense of his chances for economic and social participation. Artur Ramos was aware of this, and in the fifties Jacques Lambert observed that “this literature of ‘the good Negro’ is not without danger to Brazilian unity, for it places the racial problem on cultural terrain” (Os dois Brasís, p. 102). Florestan Fernandes, in the work reviewed here, locates this problem within its socio-historical context.
The first three chapters cover the period from 1900 to Brazil’s twentieth-century watershed, the rise of Getúlio Vargas in 1930. They present the Negro’s unsuccessful entrance into the competitive urban society. Chapter Four delineates the development of Negro social movements centered in São Paulo during the thirties. The following chapter, “The Egalitarian Forces of Social Integration: 1940-1960,” etches the ironical failure of the protest movements in the face of white indifference, while paradoxically industry opened places for more and more Negro workers. “The Negro penetrated the social order, not as a group or racial category, but as individuals among the multitude of wage-earners in almost all kinds of work” (pp. 236-237). The negative implications of this individualism are a major element in the final chapter. Advances by Negroes are “fragmentary, unilateral, and incomplete,” for they are made in a society in which rational competition is still accompanied by racial discrimination. “The structures of the class society have not thus far succeeded in eliminating in a normal way pre-existing structures in the area of race relations” (p. 444).
Text and footnotes abound in historical references and in insights which illumine the problems of race everywhere: inequality as the cause more than the result of discrimination, the cycle of black anomie and white prejudice, the crucial importance of life-style in a class society, and so on. In analyzing the failure of the Negro protest movements, Fernandes observes: “In order to employ nonconformity and conflict as constructive techniques, it is imperative that behind the men involved there be patterns of social solidarity that are sufficiently integrated” (p. 227). It is significant of the nature of Brazilian society that “black solidarity,” in the sense of Negroes polarized against “the society,” was never attempted on any significant scale. As Fernandes puts it, Negroes have been “whiter than the whites” in pressing the latter to apply sincerely the theoretical ideals of the society.
The translation is excellent and the editing judicious. Even so, some lapses are inevitable. On p. 65, “polity” should be “policy” and “exceeded one seventh” should be “exceeded by. . ..” On p. 71, the second sentence in paragraph two should read, “socialization of the human agents which compose the masses ...” or some less cumbersome equivalent. Errors in the name, “Associação dos Negros Brasileiros,” on p. 235 are carried over into the index. There should be some indication of the large portions which were omitted, such as the final sections of Chaps. IV and V (Chaps. I and II of Vol. II in the original). Reference is needed also to the major sources of demographic data and interpretation employed in an omitted section (pp. 92-101 of Chap. I, Vol. I), upon which the author bases important conclusions.
Even with the removal of some illustrative material, many charts, tables, and footnotes, and two complete sections, portions of the work are over long. Chap. V, comprising over a third of the book, is far too repetitive of themes which were well documented in Part I, and includes large amounts of fascinating but dispensable case data on those themes. The complexity of the material in this chapter demands clearer arrangement and well-defined divisions.
There is a glossary, and the bibliography, with over three hundred entries, will prove a windfall to many a Latin Americanist.
