10
Race making from above and below also has been an interactive process in Brazil. If legal racial domination elsewhere reinforced racial identity and provoked protest among blacks, then did the relative absence of such official domination in Brazil reduce the salience of racial identification and restrain mobilization there? Certainly a minimum of identity formation is an essential basis for mobilization, prior to the influence of resources or opportunities. Without consolidation of an identity, mobilization is less likely. Indeed, Brazil’s racial order has not been challenged by assertions of black solidarity and protest comparable to the anti-apartheid or civil rights movements. Despite significant discrimination, racial democracy has engendered more muted protest, suggesting that state actions are more consequential for race relations than informal social practices. This general argument can be assessed against Brazilian experience, as a negative test of the patterns found in South Africa and the United States.
That there has been rising black protest in modern Brazil demonstrates that racial identity and mobilization are not simply reactions to state policy. Instead, Afro-Brazilian solidarity has built upon particularly strong cultural and religious traditions and been reinforced by evident discrimination and inequality. Identity has been asserted and protests pressing the state to act have been made. But as elsewhere, state policy has often shaped particular outcomes. For instance, state receptivity has provoked more moderate forms of mobilization, and greater repression and hardening of state policies have produced greater militancy. Brazil thus also gives us a positive way of testing the patterns suggested in the other two cases.
Constrained Afro-Brazilian Solidarity under Racial Democracy
Brazilian experience both before and shortly after abolition demonstrates a tradition of black protest as well as some constraints. Slaves continually imported in large numbers retained social and cultural ties augmenting a vibrant tradition of revolts and quilombos. To contain such unrest, nineteenth-century Brazilian authorities encouraged large-scale manumission, creating an intermediate category of freed slaves, often mulatto. More preferential treatment for these intermediaries discouraged nonwhite solidarity, with some freed slaves even resisting the end of the slave trade out of fear that decreased supply would lead to their own reenslavement. By the 1870s, some freedmen supported slavery in general as a way to ensure their greater privilege.1 In response to earlier protests, the authorities had learned to dampen the potential for further mobilization through differential treatment, co-optation, and the projection of prospects for mobility.
Brazil’s post-abolition racial order did not impose official racial domination. Brazilians instead claimed to live in essentially peaceful relations, for instance avoiding the lynchings and race riots seen elsewhere.2 A more critical view, that of Anani Dzidzienyo, suggests that “the official Brazilian ideology of non-discrimination, by not reflecting reality and indeed by camouflaging it, achieves without tension the same results as do overtly racist societies.”3 The relevant point is that the ideology of racial democracy and absence of official Jim Crow or apartheid had the effect on Afro-Brazilians of “numbing them from the inside . . . barring almost definitively any possibility of their self-affirmation, integrity or identity” (Abdias do Nascimento).4 Informal discrimination did not consolidate identity and protest comparably to what official exclusion provoked elsewhere.
Comparison with official segregation in South Africa and the United States clarifies the argument. In the absence of legal racism, informal discrimination via customs and consensus is less defining, less explicit in its origin, and more difficult to challenge.5 With no defining or unifying legal racial order, Afro-Brazilians were “compelled to face prejudice in a state of great psychological confusion and without the means to group themselves into integrated racial minorities.”6 As described by Afro-Brazilian historian Clóvis Moura, “ourbiggest, fundamental problem is a lack of united identity.. . . [A]ll is fragmented here.”7
State policies encouraged such fragmentation by constructing diverse categories and using them in a manner that discouraged racial solidarity. Since 1890 the official census has categorized Brazilians as black, white, and at least two intermediate groups, with the latter growing proportionately and thereby “scientifically” validating whitening.8 No strict biracial boundaries were enforced, and racial categories were not used as the basis for segregation or other forms of racial domination that would have contradicted the image of fluidity. Instead, the state embraced a cultural focus on “color” more than “race,” thereby reinforcing the salience of a wide array of physical differences rather than potentially antagonistic larger groupings. Surveys consistently found multiple self-identifications reflecting the physical variations produced by generations of miscegenation.9 But while such a physical continuum has been forced into dichotomous categories by state policies and practices elsewhere, this has not occurred in Brazil. Multiple identities have been allowed and encouraged, avoiding polarized conflict inconsistent with the prevalent ideology of tolerance.
Brazil’s racial democracy encouraged submissiveness to a social order in which there is no legal racial domination against which identity formation and mobilization can be targeted. Brazil’s inclusive yet rigid social hierarchy was preserved amid party rivalries, transitions between democracy and authoritarianism, and growing class competition. As a result, many Afro-Brazilians long accepted notions of their own inferiority reflected in the established white value-based hierarchy, seeking incorporation and advancement within that hierarchical order more than they challenged it.10 To advance in that hierarchy, “lots of blacks don’t want to be black,” and “every black wants to be white.”11 Racial identity was rejected as an impediment to purportedly open mobility, rather than embraced as a basis for challenging blocked mobility. Jobs are still advertised with a preference for “a good appearance,” which means white, encouraging blacks to hope for economic advance through passing and a denial of racial distinction.12
Rather than seeking to advance collectively, Afro-Brazilians tended to seek incorporation as individuals and to avoid any racial identification that would constrain them. Black hopes for advancement through denial of race effectively incorporated Afro-Brazilians in a pact of silence that long preserved the informal racial order.
The relative lack of consolidated racial identity and its debilitating effect on collective action are indicated by the divisions the social order encouraged among Afro-Brazilians. As long as most blacks believed in racial democracy and in the possibility of individual advancement, they tended to see other blacks as potential competitors more than fellow victims of discrimination. Class divisions and alienation thus curtailed the prospect of racial unity, for instance with the rare successful black often disclaiming any racial association, identity, or protest.13 Such class division tended to reinforce and be reinforced by overlapping physical distinctions. Lighter-colored peoples, marginally more likely to rise to the middle class than darker, sought to distance themselves from blacks and even themselves mistreated blacks.14 In the absence of enforced segregation, racial unity across class was elusive. Most Afro-Brazilians long saw their deprivation as a reflection of class status rather than race. They sought redress within the union movement and from the corporatist state, rather than through protest.
The relative absence of unified racial identity among Afro-Brazilians has been remarkable, given the commonality of Afro-Brazilian experience. General inequality in Brazil has long remained among the most marked in the world. And though studies of racial distinctions were long suppressed, recent analysis demonstrates that such general inequality has consistently followed race lines of informal segregation and discrimination. For instance, the average income for whites in 1976 was double that of nonwhites, a greater differential of income by race than in the United States.15 Afro-Brazilians are still disproportionately unemployed or employed in lower-skilled and lower-paying job categories, and generally receive lower wages than whites.16 Whites are eight times as likely to be employers than are blacks, and one-third as likely to be manual laborers.17 Such differences between nonwhites and whites are vastly greater than any differences between mulattoes and blacks.18 Accordingly, Afro-Brazilians tend to have a shorter life expectancy, and are more likely to live in distinct neighborhoods reinforcing lower-class status.19
Socioeconomic inequalities in Brazil have not been the result of official racial segregation, but reflect long-standing informal discrimination. State policies did exacerbate inequality, for instance with the earlier selective encouragement of white immigration displacing black labor, but such official discrimination was not applied domestically. Income differentials in part reflected lower levels of literacy and education among Afro-Brazilians. Among Afro-Brazilians, the proportion who can read is roughly half that of whites, and the porportion who complete nine years of school is less than one-third that of whites. The result is higher black unemployment or lower-paying jobs and residence in poorer neighborhoods.20 But statistical studies have demonstrated that up to half of the lower economic status of Afro-Brazilians cannot be accounted for by education or jobs held, and can be attributed to racial discrimination.21 Thus, while the adage that “money whitens” may be true, it is largely irrelevant, as few Afro-Brazilians have gained the resources to enjoy such fluidity.22
The persistence of inequality was not by itself sufficient to provoke a high degree of racial identity and mobilization. The lack of legal racial domination was highly consequential. Though black fates are linked, they were not generally so perceived. Deprivation according to race did not engender corresponding levels of solidarity or protest comparable to that in South Africa or the United States. Certainly inequality and experiences of informal discrimination were and are widely recognized among Afro-Brazilians, but in the absence of formal rules enforcing such inequality, many long believed that their own lack of advancement was due to other causes, such as lack of education or their own failings.23 Racism was rarely blamed, though such an explanation of poverty would be less self-damaging and is commonplace in the United States and South Africa.
The myth of racial democracy was the major impediment to black identity formation and mobilization.24 Even for blacks, the psychological investment in this myth has been profound: “when you are black and poor, you think your problems are due to being poor. That is more comfortable, since I can be not poor, say if I win the lottery, but there is no escape from being black” (activist-official Carlos Alberto Medeiros).25 To retain hope, racism was underemphasized, even by its victims. As a result, few blacks saw any need for racial separatism or activism that might reinforce a distinct identity.26 And as “whites say there is no racism, they give no support to black movements.”27 Not surprisingly then, efforts at racial mobilization were stunted, small in number, and deprived of white allies.28 Race long did not provide an identity, issue, or basis for mass action.
Afro-Brazilian Activism Emerges
Despite the constraints of racial democracy and purported mobility, black Brazilian identity has been asserted and mobilized, particularly during transitions in state rule. With the consolidation of corporatism, such activism sought promised inclusion. Gradually, as discrimination and limits on advancement remained, activists turned to more aggressive assertions of racial identity and grievances. By the late 1980s, amid democratization and industrialization, the image of racial democracy was ever more contested. Still, the lack of official racial domination reinforcing racial identity left the Afro-Brazilian movement to form such an identity more fully for itself. Cultural and essentialist distinctions were asserted, gradually forcing the Brazilian ruling elite to reconsider the implications of national inclusion.
Those Afro-Brazilian movements that have emerged have been constrained by both economic factors and political context. As was initially true in the United States and South Africa, Brazilian racial movements have begun with the black, urban, emergent middle class.29 Not only do wealthier blacks have access to education, international influences, and the resources with which to begin such mobilization, but they are less likely to attribute lack of mobility to being poor. “When you are not poor and still facing problems, then (racial) consciousness is unavoidable” (Carlos Alberto Medeiros).30 As a higher proportion of the black middle class lived in the more developed Southeast, much black mobilization has been centered there, though the overall proportion of blacks is higher in the poorer Northeast.31 And reflecting this small elite base, much black protest long remained a “revolution within the order,” relatively respectful of the well-entrenched social hierarchy in which blacks hoped to advance.32
The first major post-abolition black movement in Brazil was the Frente Negra Brasileira, founded in 1931 during the height of state efforts to construct an image of racial democracy. Inspired by discussions in the newspaper Clarim da Alvorada, the Frente established its own newspaper in 1933, A Voz da Raça. It advocated equal rights through assimilation, at least among the literate black elite suffering from rising deprivation during the Depression.33 This elite focus limited the Frente to a relatively small constituency – those who could read the newspapers and expected greater advancement; there were fewer than six thousand members in its largest chapter in São Paulo. And the moderate tone of the Frente reflected the interests of a black elite more eager to become part of the social order than to challenge it.34
The Frente remained highly patriotic, claiming allegiance to “God, country, race and family,” in that order, and disclaiming any form of separatism.35 Though divided, it remained largely loyal to the regime of Getúlio Vargas (provisional president, 1930-4; constitutionally elected president, 1934–7 and 1951–4; dictator, 1937–45), who had provided the “climate of a general opening” in which the Frente had grown.36 And consistent with its patriotism and support for Vargas, the Frente embraced racial democracy, calling for its more complete elaboration.37 Rather than challenge the racial order, the Frente reaffirmed it.
By 1936 the Frente was sufficiently confident of being accepted into the Brazilian mainstream to transform itself into a political party. The following year, Vargas seized dictatorial power and banned all parties. Just short of the fiftieth anniversary of peaceful abolition, organized Afro-Brazilians had affirmed their loyalty to the state. Official edict then subordinated the most prominent black association to the emerging corporatist order, in which race was not a category of representation. According to the state, black needs would be met together with the needs of all Brazilians, and would not require any separate mobilization or efforts.
During the restored democracy of 1945 to 1964, others took up where the dismembered Frente had left off. Learning from the banning of 1937 to avoid party politics, Abdias do Nascimento and his followers instead focused on an assertion of black culture. Most notably, his Teatro Experimental do Negro used drama to “redeem black African values,” as a sort of informally political “group therapy.”38 According to do Nascimento, the purpose was “to assert African heritage. .. . People didn’t have an identity.. .. First we must say ‘I am black,’ and increase visibility, to facilitate mobilization.”39 But again, do Nascimento’s efforts remained relatively elitist in encouraging “negritude” among the small black middle class of Rio de Janeiro. He purposefully avoided any class rhetoric that might have attracted a wider following but would have diminished the focus on race and culture.40
Do Nascimento’s focus on African culture was part of a more general trend felt among all Afro-Brazilians, who had retained ties to African culture from slavery. But such a focus remained double-edged in its assertion of a distinct black culture and in its demands for the incorporation of such distinctiveness within a heterodox Brazilian national culture. Samba, macumba, umbanda, and candomblé had all retained and reinforced aspects of African culture. But these practices had also gained white followings and emerged as symbols of national unity encouraged by Vargas and his successors.41 By the 1940s, the Brazilian state had sought to control these cultural expressions, for instance by subsidizing carnaval (the Brazilian Mardi Gras), already generally inclusive and hierarchical, and mandating “pro-Brazilian” themes in the carnaval competitions.42 Such penetration worked the other way as well, with umbanda groups and leaders serving as patrons able to negotiate for state services, thus reinforcing the social hierarchy at least as much as they challenged it culturally.43 Even the African religious aspects of umbanda were merged with Catholic symbolism in a process of synchronism, and generally avoided party politics. Separate black associations within the Catholic Church, aimed at helping to stem falling church popularity, were similarly incorporating. And by the 1970s, the Black Soul movement, which tried to provide for a separate cultural expression, was also controlled and highly commercialized.44 Afro-Brazilian culture was continually folded into a Brazilian culture celebrating tolerance consistent with the ideology of racial democracy.
If purely cultural expressions remained somewhat ambivalent between asserting racial distinctiveness and incorporating with the overall population, the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) finally broke through to somewhat greater militancy and a national following in the 1970s. The MNU was based on local centros de luta coordinated by a national executive and annual congresses; though informed by events in the United States, it remained a response to local conditions of continued repression and inequality that had finally raised skepticism about the validity of racial democracy.45 With the reforms and initial mobilization for democracy of the late 1970s, in which the MNU played a role, gradual opening allowed for criticism of racial democracy to be expressed more openly than previously. But continued repression forced the MNU to retain a focus on culture while at the same time “legitimating the struggle against racism.”46
The major thrust of the MNU was to work for black self-esteemand to establish that racial discrimination and “marginalization” was a fact of life that had to be challenged. Though often combined with Marxist analysis, race remained the central issue of the movement. And just proclaiming race a national question was a radical stance in Brazil.47 Still, the focus on asserting black solidarity attests to a recognition that such racial identity remained unsolidified. The “individual solution” of integration and advancement advocated earlier by the Frente was rejected in favor of a more conflictual approach, focused on ideology rather than mass mobilization.48 The state had left the terrain of identity formation to activists, but also thereby restrained mass mobilization.
The strengths of the MNU also suggest its limits. The movement was and has remained relatively intellectual, elitist, and middle-class, with fewer than two thousand active members.49 At its height in 1982, none of the MNU’s candidates for public office was elected, suggesting a general view that it was too elistist and “too advanced” to gain broad popularity.50 Its ideological concern appealed to elites but not others, particularly after the economic decline of the 1980s raised more concrete concerns than those it addressed. Given its intellectual and cultural focus, the MNU did not mobilize and has failed to gain popularity in the favela slums and among the large population of illiterates.51
With the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, mobilization around race could potentially be directed into electoral politics. The constituency of such electoral efforts was expanded by the 1985 abandonment of a literacy requirement for voting.52 For instance, 31.9 percent of the 1988 candidates for Salvador’s municipal offices were Afro-Brazilian. Out of thirty-five positions, five blacks were elected, though most of them generally denied the existence of racial discrimination and sought support among both blacks and whites by avoiding any explicit racial identification.53 Such denial was particularly evident in Bahia, where Afro-Brazilians remained reluctant to identify themselves and their interests in racial terms even when they were in the majority.54 According to do Nascimento, “all the [black] politicians are afraid to use race. The ones who use this speech are the target of repressive forces . . . [and] the great part of blacks don’t want racial discourse. The number of conscious people is very small.”55
An exception to this avoidance of race issues was offered by Rio de Janeiro’s Benedita da Silva, elected to the National Congress as its first black woman in 1986 and later elected to the Senate. Her explicit denunciations of racism have directly challenged the image of racial democracy. But as a politician she remained concerned about explicitly addressing racial issues, recognizing that the myth of inclusion was still widely believed by her own constituency. Da Silva acknowledges that racial identification can be more of an electoral impediment than a useful base of support:
When we use race, we have more difficulties. . . . In Brazil, it doesn’t help to use race; the identity is not strong. . . . Even blacks say we have no racism. . . . [They say] we are poor, not because we are black. . . . In my campaign it was the intellectuals who raised the question of race.56
Certainly, the general lack of any explicit use of racial politics to win votes in a setting of tremendous inequality remains striking.
The avoidance of race by most candidates for elected office was consistent with the platforms of most left-leaning parties and organizations. While the Workers’ Party (PT) has put forward prominent blacks for election, including Benedita da Silva, the party itself has avoided any strong commitments on race, seen as divisive and a deflection from the primary focus on class. The PT’s leader, Luiz Incío “Lula” da Silva, has been criticized by black activists like Luis Alberto for “having a consciousness of class and not a consciousness of race.”57 This bias follows that of the increasingly powerful unions out of which the PT emerged. The major union federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), officially supported the black movement, while at the same time retaining a focus on class. Only in the 1990s did CUT explicitly condemn racial discrimination.
There have been some party organizations willing to engage the subject of race. The Partido Democràtico Trabalhista (PDT), influenced by prominent black members such as do Nascimento and Joel Rufino dos Santos, has been eager to appeal to the strong black popular culture movement in Rio and elsewhere. The PDT has “recognized the race issue as central,” included a condemnation of racism as one of the key planks of its platform, and advocated socialismo moreno (brown socialism), mixing race and class rhetoric.58 But other leftists have argued against the idea of socialismo moreno. According to Benedita da Silva of the Workers’ Party, her party advocates “just socialism. There is no color to socialism.”59
In general, the Brazilian left has remained primarily focused on class issues or gender, seen as a more likely basis for mobilization than race. Popular ambivalence about racial identity and the resulting unlikelihood of winning votes with such an appeal justifies fears among leftists that race would divide classes.60 Afro-Brazilian activists complain that the left “sees us as paranoid, fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist.”61 By contrast, issues of gender have been more readily adopted by the left.62
Despite these fundamental constraints, assertions of Afro-Brazilian identity and protest have been on the rise, significantly contesting the dominant racial discourse. Activists have challenged the assumption that the state is an inappropriate site to voice racial demands, countering official views of the state’s tolerance with the argument that the apparatus of government has been deeply involved in the maintenance of racial distinctions.63
To apply pressure on the state, activists have had to confront the impediments of lingering legacies of racial democracy. Most notably, in 1991 a campaign was launched by a coalition of black activists to encourage Afro-Brazilians to identify themselves as black on the upcoming census, in an effort to consolidate a racially defined pressure group. The long tradition of “whitening,” inclusion, and social disincentives to black self-identification was challenged. This effort became a “battle over where the boundaries of national identity end and where those of distinct racial identities begin.”64 Whereas the South African and U.S. government had reinforced such boundaries, in Brazil activists faced an uphill struggle to consolidate racial self-identification on which further mobilization could build. To meet this challenge, activists turned to essentialist claims of African origins,65 trying to counter long-entrenched images of a physical continuum diluting racial identity.
A focus on African roots among black activists again built upon interpretations of cultural activity as an assertion of racial consciousness.66 But culture can be used to reinforce both domination and resistance. Afro-Brazilian activists have tended to assume that assertions of African culture are a central component of resistance and identity formation. For instance, they have highlighted the history of the quilombos as evidence of such African resistance. But the state has consistently sought to absorb such cultural assertions. The result has been that expressions of African culture have given many activists the sense that they are mobilizing, without posing a real challenge to the state or informal racial order. For instance, the leader of the largest African cultural group in Salvador, Bahia, OLODUM, embraces the use of culture as “an indirect route” to political activity and assertion.67 Yet there remains little evidence that such cultural activity has produced greater political assertiveness or power, even in Bahia where blacks are the majority; it may instead serve to reinforce the official Brazilian image of inclusiveness.
For all of this ambivalence and ideological constraint, the rising discourse about race has been acknowledged by the state. Officials have moved to incorporate any proto-movement among Afro-Brazilians. For instance, the centenary of abolition was widely celebrated in 1988. President Sarney used the opportunity to embrace the African component of Brazilian culture. The general tone of the celebration remained self-congratulatory about Brazil’s racial democracy, despite the efforts of activists to use the occasion to highlight continued discrimination and inequality.68 As an example of more substantive reform, state and provincial offices established to represent Afro-Brazilians have both acknowledged a racial distinction and promoted incorporation. For instance, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the PDT established a Secretariat for the Promotion and Defense of Afro-Brazilians headed by do Nascimento. The Secretariat supported plaintiffs in cases of racial discrimination. Critics have suggested that this agency was largely ineffectual and was actually intended to co-opt activists within state functions.69 And constitutional guarantees of equality and policies of affirmative action have since been hotly debated, with President Cardoso in 1996 acknowledging the need to explore such policies without committing to implementation.70
What is striking about recent efforts to address Afro-Brazilian concerns within the reestablished Brazilian democracy is the extent to which this incorporation has followed traditional patterns. Brazil has long remained a hierarchical society of cordial clientalist relations, in which everyone is expected to know his or her place.71 All are at least theoretically included in the social order, and encouraged to participate, particularly as individuals, not as more potentially disruptive groups.72 The tradition of pluralist democratic practices was not strong in a rigid form of democradura.73 Thus, as Afro-Brazilians have increasingly asserted their identity as a group and raised demands for participation and redress, the political system has moved to incorporate them, if only to avoid any disruption to the most highly prized traditions of national unity and social peace.74 Such compromise has been primarily aimed at containing potential disruption, rather than inviting more fundamental change. That the social order is maintained amid considerable levels of violence, including the murder of black street children and police brutality, somehow does not diminish the belief in a working order.75
Given the large population of Afro-Brazilians, their inclusion is essential for more general democracy. But this requirement was long met by maintaining the myth of racial democracy rather than by making it a reality. By avoiding explicit rules of segregation and categories of exclusion, Brazil maintained the myth, constraining racial identity formation and potential conflict. Even activists ironically concede that “the only thing Brazil got right was race” (Januário Garcia).76 For instance, given the lack of formal segregation, “it is hard to go to the favelas and talk about racism, since blacks and whites live there together.”77 Without a more fully consolidated, widespread, and assertive racial identity, continued informal discrimination and inequality remain relatively unchallenged and without redress. In this sense, racial democracy has worked; the myth has been lived.
This context has presented a major challenge to those activists who seek to mobilize Afro-Brazilians. With no formal rules of racial domination, Brazil’s social order has been maintained without presenting an explicit target for identity formation that might otherwise have provided an external basis for mobilization and redress. This has presented activists with the difficult task of seeking to consolidate such an identity unilaterally, which in the United States and South Africa had been enforced by state policy and could be exploited by popular leaders. Thus, the greatest task and achievement of the Movimento Negro has been to establish the fact of racism.78 Consumed by this task, the movement has been largely unable to move beyond it to actually organizing much in the way of mass action. As a high-ranking black police official, Jorge da Silva, notes, “there has never been a riot here,” or for that matter any other form of major collective action focused on race per se.79 Class mobilization has long been more prominent.
Afro-Brazilian mobilization has occurred, but on a small scale and primarily focused on ideology and identity consolidation. When the state was receptive to such efforts, black activists remained relatively moderate in tone, seeking fulfillment of the promise of racial democracy, as with the Frente or more recent electoral politics. When the state was more repressive, activists became more militant, as with the MNU at the end of the dictatorship in the late 1970s. And under democracy, Afro-Brazilians have pressed for redress. But even these variations occurred within the overriding context of constraint. Only during political crises or transitions did these black movements emerge, for instance at the start of the Vargas regime, during the abertura (democratic opening), and with the shift toward democracy in the late 1970s and thereafter. During most of the past century, the social order has not been so open, state rule has been more firm, and little black mobilization has emerged to puncture the image of national unity.
Comparative Overview
Black protest relates to nation-state consolidation built through racial domination; the state-led process of race making proves to be double-edged. Official policies of exclusion according to race have drawn boundaries solidifying subordinated racial identity, which then forms a basis for collective action in response to shifting state policies. Such identity formation is prior to and necessary for the logic of resource allocation and political opportunities to produce social movements. Formal exclusion so defines and unifies who is subordinated, building on past solidarity and inviting pressure for inclusion. Racial domination thus punished its victims, but also reinforced and legitimized racial identity and protest, by which subordination could be and has been challenged to gain the expected rewards of formal inclusion. The relative lack of such legal racial domination, as in Brazil, appears less hurtful in a direct sense, but also constrains the prospect for racial identity, mobilization, and redress even when cultural and informal discrimination still provide some basis for racial identity and protest.
This general argument is affirmed by the linkage between levels of racial domination and of identity consolidation and protest responses. The South African state, founded after the Boer War and strengthened by British support, inflicted early, pervasive, and nationwide segregation. Opposing racial identities and efforts at protest emerged quickly, gaining strength over time. In the United States Jim Crow was established locally while the central authority remained weak and withdrew. Under such circumstances, racial identity and protest emerged more gradually and long remained regionally divided. In Brazil, with no legal segregation, racial identity and protest long remained muted despite persistent inequality. Yet, in all three cases, activists reinforced racial identity as a basis for potential mobilization, evoking images of past solidarity and building on existing networks to overcome divisions.
Given relative identity formation, the timing and tactics of black mobilization were also tied to shifts in state policies, in turn reflecting varying efforts to encourage white unity through racial domination. When states reinforced such domination, blacks saw no hope of redress or escape from repression, and mobilization was limited. When white unity had been consolidated, reforms by the state tended to invite more moderate black activism, often aimed at integration. Reversal or failure of reforms provoked more militant responses, often aimed at separatism. Both reform and repression were turned into opportunities for mobilization, taking different but related forms. This is not to suggest that state policy in itself was fully determinant of opposition responses. For instance, black identity and protest predated official racial domination. Demography was also relevant to outcomes. South Africa’s black majority gave the ANC confidence that inclusive democracy in itself would bring substantive redress, without requiring continued racial distinctions. As a result, the ANC long has been committed to nonracialism. At the same time, the use of force by the minority regime to hold onto power diminished commitments to Gandhian nonviolence. In the United States, the African-American minority was less confident that democratic inclusion in itself would bring redress, and nonracialism was not widely adopted. Violence was used at times, but often seen as illegitimate in the context of possible democratic change. And in South Africa, the United States, and Brazil, rising industrialization and migration also shaped black protest, though arguably such development rested upon the preservation of a polity and stability in which growth and migration were possible.
Protests eventually forced those legal changes at which they had aimed. Apartheid and Jim Crow were abandoned, not by revolution but by protest that raised the specter of instability and thereby forced reconfiguration of the nation-state into more inclusive official forms, though discrimination remained. Elites saw the most pressing challenge to stability shift from intrawhite conflict to black protest against racial domination. In South Africa, the end of apartheid came only with massive popular protest, forcing a fundamental change and the creation of a new political form. In the United States, blacks remained a minority, regionally divided, and yet often more confident than South Africans that rhetorical guarantees of equality would eventually be enforced within the existing polity. Their powerful protest was sufficiently destabilizing to force federal authorities to intervene against Jim Crow. A new political order was not necessary or enacted; instead, blacks were at least officially admitted into the existing order. And in Brazil, more limited black protest has brought somewhat greater incorporation long promised by the state.
This overview provides a corrective or refinement of earlier theories of social movements applied to race. Most notably, racial identity must be consolidated before this identity can be turned to action. And in this process, state policies have notably enforced lines of race on which identity has been built. Deprivation, resources, or opportunities in themselves do not establish such an identity and basis for protest and may be present without provoking protest. In the absence of state-imposed segregation, such identity and mobilization may be weaker. Only when identity is consolidated does the logic of response to structural conditions apply. Deprivation or absence or reversal of reforms angers. Economic advance, reforms, and resources mollify, provoking more moderate protest. But again the state plays a major role in these processes, heightening or alleviating deprivation, diminishing or providing resources, and creating opportunities by race-specific policies. Not surprisingly then, black protest generally emerges during periods of transition in state rule and race policies, when there are perceived openings or fluidity. But its emergence and strength depend upon the consolidation of identity and solidarity of a group then able to act for itself.