The spectre of Haiti: structural antiblackness, the far-right backlash and the fear of a black majority in Brazil

Abstract

This article situates the far-right backlash in Brazil within the larger Latin American context, including its colonial legacy, leftist governments’ failure to deliver promises of inclusion, and the US–China geopolitical dispute over the region’s strategic natural resources. By situating Bolsonaro’s electoral victory within these dynamics, our analysis presents an alternative to two common perspectives. First, studies of the region’s political moment and of Brazilian society in particular do not pay enough attention to institutional and everyday racism, and instead focus mostly on comparative analysis of governmental policies and social class dynamics. Second, critical perspectives that take into account racial inequalities are often not attuned to structural dynamics of gendered antiblackness, and instead present racism as a broad set of practices that negatively affect non-white people in related manners. Our context-specific analysis of the electoral reemergence of the far right in Brazil aims at contributing to an understanding of persistent dynamics of racial inequality within the region as part of a long, enduring and foundational odium of Black people.

Keywords:

• Gendered antiblackness
• Haitian Revolution
• Brazil
• Worker’s Party
• liberal democracy

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Third World Quarterly for their insightful comments. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Center for Latin American Studies (University of Cambridge, Feb 2019) and featured as Op-ed in the NACLA Newsletter. One of the authors would like to thank José Carlos Freire, Laurie Willis and Graham Denyer-Willis for their sustainable engagement with some of the ideas presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 South China Morning Post, “Brazilian Leader Woos Donald Trump.”

2 Seligman, “US Military Targets Growing.”

3 See Ruckert, Macdonald, and Proulx, “Post-Neoliberalism in Latin America”; Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg, “Latin America’s Left Turns.” For a discussion on the continuities between ‘postneoliberalism’, pink tide, and the current far-right backlash, see, respectively, Da Costa, “Decolonial in Practice”; Ravindran and Hale, “Rethinking the Left”; and Hale, Calla and Mullings, ̈Race Matters in Dangerous Times;” Freire, “Una nación para pocos.”

4 See for instance Birdsall, Lustig and McLeod, “Declining Inequality in Latin America”; Saad-Filho, “Mass Protests Under ‘Left Neoliberalism’”; Fortes, "Brazil’s Neoconservative Offensive,” 217–220; Ellner, "Latin America’s New Left”; Hunter and Power, “Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash.”

5 For a critique of the troubling place of Blacks in the scholarship on racism and racial relations in Latin America, see Hale, “Racial Eruptions”; Moreno and Saldivar, “We are not Racists”; and Arocha, “Etnia y guerra.”

6 See for instance Novo and Shlossberg, “Introduction: Lasting and Resurgent Racism”; Ravindran, “What Undecidability Does”; Kröger and Lalander, "Ethno-Territorial Rights.” In the case of Brazil, research on racial inequalities usually employs a conceptualisation of racism that elides the country’s history of antiblackness. See Cardoso, "O fim do arco irís”; Paixão, "Desenvolvimento Humano e as Desigualdades Étnicas no Brasil.”

7 On the specificity of antiblack implicit sentiments and their corresponding institutional practices, see Eberhardt et al., “Seeing Black,” and Goff et al., “Not Yet Human”; Vargas, Denial of Antiblackness.

8 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Waiselfisz, Mapa da violência.

9 eg Pinho and Vargas, Antinegritude; Flauzina, “Corpo Negro Caido no Chao”; Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness”; J. Alves, Anti-Black City; Rocha, “De-Matar”; R. Oliveira and Garcia, “Marielle, presente!”; Bledsoe, “Racial Antagonism;” Da Silva and Larkins. “The Bolsonaro Election.”

10 Franco, “UPP: a redução da favela a três letras.”

11 Bledsoe, “Racial Antagonism,” 168.

12 Ibid.; R. Oliveira and Garcia, "Marielle, presente!”; Vargas, “Taking Back the Land”; Harrison, “Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy.” On racial formations of security, see also J. James and Alves, “States of Security”; and Amar, Security Archipelago; Rocha, “De-Matar.”

13 Waiselfisz, Mapa da violência; Vargas, “Black Disidentification.”

14 Pereira, Ethno-Racial Poverty.

15 See Bledsoe, “Racial Antagonism”; Ravindran and Hale, "Rethinking the Left”; Hale, Calla and Mullings, "Race Matters in Dangerous Times.” J. Alves and Vargas, “Antiblackness and the Brazilian Elections;” most recently, see also Da Silva and Larkins. “The Bolsonaro Election, Antiblackness, and Changing Race Relations in Brazil,” and Freire, “Una nación para pocos.”

16 Scholars have identified these electoral dynamics in the previous three presidential elections, when the poor and the Black massively supported the Workers’ Party. See Vargas, “Black Disidentification,” 5.

17 El País, “Bolsonaro divide o Brasil.”

18 Guimaraes, “De novo preconceito contra nordestinos.”

19 Bolsonaro also attacked the quilombolas, stating that “they don’t serve even to procreate.”

Cited in Bledsoe, “Racial Antagonism,” 166.

20 Boadle, “Brazil’s Rousseff Says.”

21 NACLA, “Lula’s Legacy in Brazil.”

22 Kingstone and Ponce, "From Cardoso to Lula."

23 Pereira, Ethno-Racial Poverty, 9.

24 Ibid., 12.

25 Ibid., 12.

26 Fortes, “Lawfare Unmasked in Brazil.”

27 Hunter and Power, “Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash.”

28 Nugent, “Far-Right Presidential Candidate.”

29 G1, “Bolsonaro comenta morte.”

30 To arrive at this formulation, we initially draw from Lewis Gordon’s theorisation of antiblack racism, which he defines as a form of bad faith: “The racist is a figure who hides from himself by taking false or evasive attitudes toward people of other races. The antiblack racist is a person who holds these attitudes toward black people." Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 94.

31 George Yancey’s study in the US argues that while indisputably Latinxs and Asians face discrimination, and in certain contexts experience greater levels of prejudice than Blacks, the Black positionality is of a unique kind, irreducible to that of nonblack groups: “Because nonblack racial groups can avoid the label of being “black”, they can eventually be given a "White" racial identity’. ‘It is the rejection of African Americans’, Yancey continues, ‘rather than the acceptance of European Americans that shapes this hierarchical structure’. Yancey, Who Is White, 15, 72, 76, 71, 81.

32 On transgenerational racial patterns of occupational status and wealth, see Hasenbalg, Discriminação e desigualdades raciais no Brasil; Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth.

33 Hasenbalg, Disciminacao e desigualdad racial no Brasil; Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth.

34 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

35 Eberhardt et al., “Seeing Black.”

36 Ibid.

37 Franco, “UPP: a redução da favela a três letras”; J. James and Alves, “States of Security”; Waiselfisz, Mapa da violência; Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, “Atlas da Violencia 2018.”

38 Vargas, Denial of Antiblackness.

39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.

40 Vargas, Denial of Antiblackness.

41 See, for example, N. Oliveira’s work on favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Niterói, “O caso do estado e as questões raciais.”

42 Ibid.; Alves, Anti-Black City.

43 Flauzina, “Corpo Negro Caido No Chao”; Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Report on Black People.

44 Franco, “UPP: a redução da favela a três letras,” 106.

45 Ibid., 91.

46 Ibid., 41.

47 Borges, Salvador: Cidade Túmulo.

48 Historian George Lipsitz remarked on how the United States’ possessive investment in Whiteness, particularly when confronted with what seems like undue advantages to the non-White, often responds with a combination of resistance, refusal and renegotiation. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.

49 Abu-Jamal, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, 7–10.

50 White rage, Anderson argues, may not appear in the form of lynching mobs or other spectacular forms of violence, but it will actualise its antiblack disposition. Anderson, White Rage, 5;

51 Forum Brasileiro de Seguranca Public, “Segurança Publica em Números.”

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.; G1, “Numero de pessoas mortas pela policía no Brasil.”

54 Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança, “Atlas da Violencia 2018”; Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Report on Black People.

55 C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins, 88.

56 For an overview of the (ambiguous) effects of the Haitian Revolution on the other colonies, see Geggus, “Sounds and Echoes of Freedom.”

57 Cedric Robinson shows that such fears were mostly unfounded since, even in victory, Blacks seldom inflicted on their former captors the same levels of brutality to which they were subjugated. See Robinson, Black Marxism.

58 Chalhoub, “Medo Branco de Almas Negras,” 104 (our translation); see also De Azevedo, Onda negra, medo branco.

59 Duarte and Queiroz, “A Revolucao Haitiana e o Atlantico Negro”; D. Alves, “Rés negras, juízes brancos.”

60 Martins, “Mortalidade Materna”; De Castro Cerqueira and de Moura, "Vidas perdidas e racismo no Brasil”; Theodoro, Jaccoud, and Guerreiro Osório, "As políticas públicas e a desigualdade racial”; D. Alves, "Rés negras, juízes brancos.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaime A. Alves

Jaime A. Alves teaches Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

João Costa Vargas

João Costa Vargas is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of, among other publications, The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).