Comparisons between Brazil and the United States are attractive in the field of Afro-American studies. The impressive physical geography of both states coincided with their predominant role in the history of the American slave plantation society. Africans and slaves constituted an important factor in the southern United States and the Brazilian Northeast. Finally, slavery ended with the Civil War in the United States in 1863 and in confusion in Brazil in 1889. One demographic consequence of the experience of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves was that Brazil and the United States ended up with approximately 80 percent of all Afro-Americans in the hemisphere. But the general statistics mask the fact that while Afro-Brazilians constitute nearly 40 percent of Brazil’s national population, Afro-Americans account for less than 10 percent of the total population of the United States.
Toplin’s collection of eight essays describes the apparent contrast between slavery in Brazil and the United States, the process of abolition, and the local problems affecting the integration of the Black population in the present period. Five of these essays have already appeared in sources as diverse as The Black World (Chapter 7), the Journal of Black Studies (Chapter 6), Civil War History (Chapter 5), The Luso-Brazilian Review (Chapter 3), and the Journal of Southern History (Chapter 2).
They were written over a period of ten years, but unfortunately the revisions claimed by the author do not demonstrate an improved understanding of the subject. Toplin is good at factual narration; he is less so at analysis. His work follows closely the position put forward in 1971 by Carl Degler in Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, which magnified the crucial variable of the mulatto escape hatch. Informed historians did not find that theory persuasive in 1971, and are inclined to be less charitable in 1981.
Freedom and Prejudice abounds with annoying shortcomings. Its data base is limited, often antiquated, and unreliable. A discussion of contemporary American racial attitudes relies heavily on Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, researched before the Second World War. Discussions of Brazil and the United States in Chapter 5 are incongruously juxtaposed, encouraging the idea that in the United States the abolition process resembled that of Brazil (rather than viceversa) and that Brazilians were isolated from the rest of the world. The author’s explanation on page 36 that “for purposes of consistency my references in this essay will use the most familiar present-day forms: Negro and Mulatto,” reveals a singular incapacity to understand his subject and a singular insensitivity to Afro-Americans. But Toplin’s inability to keep up-to-date on political taxonomy and nomenclature is the very least of his problems here.
