Non-myth traits

racial democracy

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Redemption of Cam, by painter Modesto Brocos, 1895, oil on canvas (199 x166cm).

 

Quilombism, transculturation, racial eugenics and "racial democracy" are some of the ideas addressed by Abdias Nascimento, Clóvis Moura and the documentary about Beatriz Nascimento, Orí, by Raquel Gerber (1989), dealing with the history, formation and effects of systematized necropolitics against black population. One of the structuring dimensions of racism present in the history of Brazil is the proposal to whiten the population, similar to Modesto Brocos' painting, Cam's redemption, exposed for the first time in 1895. According to Moura,

The height of the campaign to whiten Brazil comes exactly at the moment when (black) slave labor is discarded and replaced by wage labor. This raises the dilemma of the past and the future, of backwardness and progress and of blacks and whites as workers. The first would represent animality, backwardness, the past, while white (European) was the symbol of orderly, peaceful and progressive work. In this way, there was only one way to modernize and develop Brazil: put the immigrant worker in the place of black people, rid the country of this passive, exotic, fetishistic and dangerous burden caused by a Christian, European and moriger population. (MOURA, 1988, p. 79).


In fact, the occurrence of Brocos' painting is concomitant with the period mentioned by Moura, where the black slave is discarded by a workforce that would be the standard of a progressive worldview, leaving the black population to submit to the whitening process. . This perspective of white supremacy was also strongly supported by eugenic science, as reported by Moura when citing the importance of scientist Nina Rodrigues in confirming the figure of black people as inferior to white people.

Racial eugenics even more dramatically insularized the Brazilian black population into a social, political and economic apartheid, its effects can still be felt today in the broadest aspects of society, but particularly in the field of art, this clash appears to be on a trajectory of inversion of this perspective by some black artists and curators who fight for equity in the appreciation, exhibition and expansion of art collections by black artists in the country.

Exemplo disso é o trabalho da artista Rosana Paulino, que trabalha com os conceitos de eugenia e do racismo biológico em suas obras, a artista se apropria de imagens de mulheres negras, símbolos de um holocausto catastrófico desde os mares atlânticos até o interior das terras do Brasil. Rosana denuncia em sua arte o apagamento secular de uma cultura e um povo arrastado de suas terras, de suas riquezas por uma alucinação branca. Para Moura, o projeto de aniquilação racial funcionava pelas vias da aculturação de modo muito bem orquestrado, planejado de forma a narrar a vitória branca frente ao atraso do negro, segundo o autor, 


All conceptual manipulation aimed to demonstrate how in this cultural contact the dominated peoples suffered the influence of the dominators and this would result in a synthesis in which the dominated would also transmit part of their standards to the dominator who would incorporate them into their basic cultural structure. With this, acculturated people would benefit. It was as if there were no structural social contradictions that hindered and/or prevented the cultural patterns of dominated ethnicities or people from being institutionalized by the dominating society. That is, religion, clothing, cuisine and family organization would no longer be seen as standards belonging to minorities or dominated groups and become dominant standards. (MOURA, 1988, p. 45).


For Abdias Nascimento, this same issue of historical erasure present in Rosana Paulino's work is configured as an act of resistance that needs to be thought of based on the premise of maintaining the capitalist system and its consequences of racial appeasement. In the author's words:

We black people have been forced to forget our history and our condition for far too long. Why should we be still, silent, and forgive or forget the holocaust of countless millions - one hundred, two hundred, three hundred million? - of Africans (men, women, children) coldly murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped by European criminals during slavery and after? Or should we not cry out or complain, cooperating with the slavers of yesterday and today, since for Europeans, slavery constituted the "necessary step" towards the foundation and development of capitalism, and this was the obligatory step towards "paradise" socialist? (NASCIMENTO, 1980, p 21).


Nascimento aprofunda sua visão a respeito do racismo como um projeto de genocídio da população negra onde percebemos a ressonância de sua definição na obra (imagens 4 e 5) de Rosana Paulino ao abordar o racismo científico numa perspectiva que incorpora o massacre para revelá-lo no plano de suas imagens ressignificadas com silenciamentos em bocas costuradas, corpos torturados e maltratados pelo delírio da supremacia branca, o negro como cobaia sociológica. Abdias Nascimento define o racismo como: 

 

[...] the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another. Such superiority is conceived both in the biological aspect and in the psycho-sociocultural dimension. This is the dimension usually neglected or omitted in traditional definitions of racism. The scientific theoretical elaboration produced by white European culture justifying the enslavement and inferiorization of African peoples constitutes the eminent example of racism never known in the history of humanity. Racism is the first contradiction in the path of black people. To this are added others, such as the contradiction of classes and sex. (NASCIMENTO, 1980, p 165).


The displacement that Rosana Paulino's work gives us dialogues with the perspective of Clóvis Moura and Abdias Nascimento and alerts us above all to the systemic continuity of the fascist itineraries that are outlined in contemporary Brazil, the relevance of their artistic proposal is a tear from the myth of racial democracy and an unavoidable and urgent denunciation of an immanent quilombism that highlights differences and subjugates the history of celebrating Brazil's history without black people.

In the video below, the artist talks about her work and the poetic stitching of memory around the erasure of history and the black body in Brazil.

How to cite:

To cite this page from the Sonhos entre Pedras website as a source for your research, use the text below: LIMA, André Luiz de Araújo. tears in the myth of racial democracy, 2023. Available at:<Rasgos no mito da democracia racial | Sonhos entre Pedras/> . Accessed on ...(insert date).

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André de Araújo Lima

Master in Education and Diversity,

photographer, visual artist and teacher

EMAIL: 

contact@dreamsbetweenstones.com.br