Race Barriers Broken
By WILLARD PRICE
NATIONS beset with the problem of race-relations might well study Brazil. " Here, nobody white, nobody black, all Brazilian," was the way a Rio news- boy expressed it. In Brazil we see the merging of the four great world colours, yellow, brown, black and white, into the most nearly complete synthesis of racial strains that the world has seen in historic times. Brazil appears to be evolving a human race. The Indian represents both the yellow and the brown, the one from Mongol sources, the other from south-east Asia. The black came from Africa. The Portugese with some help from other Europeans have contributed the white. And now, as the pure-blood Indians, their numbers reduced from some two million to perhaps three hundred thousand, retreat into the back country, their place is being taken by multi- blooded men whose veins run with many traditions and climates. They can bear tropical heat, for some of their ances- tors came from equatorial Africa. The Indian in them already understands the jungle.' Thanks to their European forbears, they are creators and builders. This intermarriage of talents, exploding once again the theory of " racial purity " which has so often been upset by the results achieved in the cross-breeding of animals and cross-breeding of plants, was peculiarly possible in Brazil. Here all the conditions were right for it.
The Portuguese had little race-prejudice, for they were them- selves a blended race. The people of Portugal had not only combined many Mediterranean strains, but they , had drawn heavily upon Africa. The Portuguese naturally carried his lack of prejudice—or shall we say his prejudice in favour of a dark skin ?—to the New World. He was at once attracted by the Indian women, the more so because he had not brought a woman with him from Portugal. The early Portuguese migrations were male only. Four hundred years of Moorish domination had not been enough to teach the Portuguese to want to " work like a Moor." But the American wilderness could not be tamed without work. Indians were enslaved, but they proved unsatisfactory. They could slip away too -easily and lose themselves in the forest. They too frequently became unruly and ate their masters. Moreover, Jesuit priests objected to enslavement of the Indians because they were sons of God. They suggested importation of African blacks, who had no souls and were not sons of God. Perhaps they would acquire souls if they could be brought under the benign influence of Christian masters. What a noble enterprise, to ransom these poor pagans from heathen bondage ! The word ransom sounded good to everyone concerned, and the slave-trade became known as the " commerce for the ransom of slaves."
In three hundred years nearly eight million blacks were brought in. In 1850 the traffic was stopped, and in 1888 Princess Isabel of Brazil abolished slavery. This heroic act cost her the right to sit on the Brazilian throne. Outraged slave-owners rose in protest, and Brazil became a republic. It must be said that the masters had usually been kind to their slaves. The latter had generally been treated as members of the household. When the master was cruel, it was because he was cruel by nature, not because he hated a black skin. There was no racial antipathy. The children that slave-women bore to their masters ate at the family-table, and shared on almost equal terms with legitimate sons. They and their mothers were given freedom. Dark children studied with the white, were provided for upon their father's death, and when they them- selves died were buried with masses and flowers like any proper member of the family.
Some sports-clubs and hotels bar colour, but try not to get caught at it. A hotel that entertains Americans, Englishmen or Germans is inclined to report every room full when a person of colour wishes to register. But-in general the negro is more fairly treated in Brazil than in any other country outside Africa. On the Senate-floor negro senators receive and deserve full respect. They bring their dusky wives to State functions. The fact that a store-window may display a lovely dress on a black or brown dummy does not prevent the white customer from going in and buying the dress. Nor does the worshipper in a church where the Virgin Mary and the saints are represented by black statues find reverence any the more difficult on that account. The colour is simply not noticed. Intermarriage of black and white depends upon class status more than upon colour. A highly-educated negro will not marry an illiterate white, and vice versa. In Rio a blond rubicund German woman introduced me to her husband. He was a very dark negro. But he was also the brilliant Brazilian psychiatrist, Dr. Juliano Moreira.
Consideration for the negro is based upon respect for his character. There are quite as many different grades of Africans as of Europeans, and Brazil was fortunate in receiving the better grades. Many of the negroes carried to Brazil in the slave- ships were of peoples, such as the Sudanese, possessing a high degree of culture and character. They were sometimes superior to their masters, most of whom had no education. "The truth is," says the historian Gilberto Freyre, "in the slave sheds of Bahia in 1835 there were perhaps more persons who knew how to read and write than up above, in the Big House." In this respect conditions were quite different from those in the southern United States. Many of the Brazilian negroes had been educated in Moslem schools. Theirs had been an agri- cultural economy...and they were prepared to teach tropical agriculture to the Portuguese. They had raised cattle, and Brazil was a potential cattle-country. They were experienced in mining metals, and Brazil was full of metals to be mined. They brought with them musicians and entertainers, and teachers who tutored Portuguese children. They had a tremen- dous capacity for work and phenomenal physical strength. Portuguese land-owners, frail from lack of exercise, could not but admire the black man who could pick up a load of three hundred pounds and walk off with it. The rigorous natural selection, which wiped out four negroes for every one delivered to Brazil, meant the survival of the the fittest.
Brazil has two hard nuts that she must still crack and assimi- late. One is a close-knit German community in the south, and the other is a colony of some 300,000 Japanese. Both are racially exclusive, and it will be a long time before they are merged with other Brazilians. But it must come in time. The power of Brazilian amalgamation will be too much for them. Even the Jews have lost their identity in Brazil. Except for those who have come recently, they have long since inter- married and turned from Jews into Brazilians.
It is this steadily improving "raza cosmica," as the Brazilians like to call it, that is advancing to the conquest of the world's last great undeveloped frontier, the Amazon basin, an area nearly as large as the United States. Having known all climates. this cosmic race is prepared for any sorts of climate the Amazon can offer—and it can offer many. It will not succumb to new diseases, for there are no diseases it has not experienced. It has inherited a willingness to work and the necessary physical strength. Perhaps its most valuable asset is confidence in its own democratic spirit—a confidence that conies hard in countries where racial discrimination weighs heavily upon the national conscience. Since Brazil is the largest of all Latin American States, the richest in strategic resources, and the closest to Europe, the Communist infiltrators give it particular attention. Their greatest handicap is lack of the racial issue. Without that string to their harp, they have difficulty in stirring up inter-group antipathies in Brazil.
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