4
How were later race relations influenced by the extent to which blacks and whites mixed during colonialism and slavery, and the subsequent treatment of “mixed race” peoples? To answer, it is necessary to examine both the early historical record and debates, and how mulattoes were treated and categorized after slavery and colonialism were ended. If such practices varied over time in each country, then the determinacy of miscegenation will appear less certain.
How miscegenation shaped race relations has been most prominently explored in attempts to explain post-abolition Brazil’s lack of racial domination and conflict. Analysts have suggested that this “exceptionalism” was the result of greater “cross-race” mixing in Brazil. Descendants of Africans and Europeans commingled in Brazil in extraordinarily high numbers. Their mulatto offspring were treated as an intermediary population both before and after abolition. This mixing and social fluidity supposedly made it impossible for Brazil to develop a strict biracial order, thereby also diminishing the prospect for racial conflict. I will address each of these arguments for Brazil, and in comparison with South Africa and the United States.
The high degree of miscegenation in Brazil was the result of historical circumstance, not cultural predilections. Though Freyre and others argued for a Portuguese Catholic tradition of racial tolerance dating back to contact with the Moors, no consistent Luso-tropical laxity toward miscegenation is evident. Portuguese settler colonials in Africa cohabited with blacks extremely rarely.1 But the Portuguese came to Brazil initially for conquest and trade, rather than to settle, and few women were brought along.2 Indeed, the Brazilian crown explicitly forbade Portuguese women from migrating to Brazil as early as 1732, so as to encourage growth of the small population at home.3
Reproduction and heterosexual pleasure for males depended upon their finding a female. As most women in Brazil were of darker skin than the Portuguese males, “cross-racial” sexual practices developed accordingly, disregarding official prohibition. Though the state and Church condemned miscegenation as against nature, the pope’s power over nature proved as limited as that of the crown. Official, religious, and even early literary condemnations of miscegenation went unheeded, much to the dismay of the racist writer Count Gobineau, posted as a diplomat in Brazil in 1869–70.4 Brazilians of African and European descent cohabited, with sexual preferences shaped by necessity, resulting in a “cult of the rnulata” among Portuguese males. This desire was further inflamed by the relatively low proportion of imported slave women, making any woman highly prized.5 Portuguese domination was extended even into the realm of sex – black women were “taken.” And the simple demographic fact of close to equal proportions of people of European and African descent made miscegenation all the more likely than where Africans were a clear minority or majority.
The results of this mixing were dramatic. In 1818, Brazil’s population of 3.5 million was categorized as 60 percent black and 10 percent mulatto. By 1890, the census showed 41 percent mulatto nationally, breaking down regionally to 24 percent mulatto in the Southeast and 48 percent in the rest of the country, with approximately 6 percent of officially registered marriages in Salvador being between whites and blacks.6 The fourfold increase in the mulatto population during the empire indicates a high level of miscegenation. There was no “hypo-descent rule” that might have otherwise forced a biracial categorization of mulatto offspring simply as black, no matter how small the proportion of their African ancestry. Such biracial categorization was perhaps unlikely to be imposed by the Portuguese, whose own earlier mixing with the Moors had produced a darker self-image than elsewhere in Europe.7
Brazil’s early lack of precise color lines allowed for the emergence of an intermediate category, reflecting physical mixing.8 Many blacks welcomed the prospect of social advancement for their children by mixing with whites. Lighter-skinned offspring were more highly prized than darker, with those black women producing lighter children praised for having “clean stomachs.”9 Reflecting these preferences, the black population diminished proportionately as the number of mulattoes increased. Blacks and whites embraced miscegenation and mulatto offspring, not seen as a diluting of the white race but as “whitening” all Brazilians. The resulting mixture was widely celebrated as a social strength, as was true elsewhere in Latin America.10 The alternative interpretation argued by Count Gobineau – that such mixing was a source of weakness – was clearly unattractive in the Brazilian context.
Pre-independence Brazil did not recognize mulattoes idly, for doing so provided a population that could and did serve an economic role between white masters and black slaves. The burgeoning population of mulattoes, often themselves recently freed from slavery, worked as craftsmen, soldiers, overseers, and slave catchers. As such, they filled vital functions that whites were too few and unwilling to pursue.11
The emergence, social acceptance, and intermediate position of numerous mulattoes in Brazil have been used to explain the lack of formal discrimination in both the pre- and post-abolition eras. Carl Degler argued that the possibility of blacks’ social advancement through miscegenation provided “an escape hatch” from subordination.12 Given such fluidity, biracial segregation would have been difficult to construct. Mulattoes were supposedly too well off to be discriminated against as blacks. And as mulattoes became more numerous, demarcating them into a common category with blacks would have risked the construction of a larger antagonistic group and potential conflict. Instead, mulattoes were absorbed, or at least encouraged in the belief that they could be “whitened."
Given tremendous racial mixing, Brazilians supposedly could not devise a way of clearly distinguishing one group from another, which prevented systematic discrimination.13 Biology intruded on any attempts at biracial social engineering. Brazil’s “consciousness of, and concern for, physical appearance has thus paradoxically militated against the drawing of precise color lines between distinct groups."14 With race defined as an identity associated with physical difference, emphasizing such physicality of “color” where there was much mixing undermined any artificially strict distinctions of race.
Analysts have concluded that there were no effective racial distinctions, but the historical record undermines such an inference. Imperial Brazil recognized not a biracial but a three-way racial division, and discriminated accordingly, albeit often informally. The necessity for intermediaries was projected as the virtue of social fluidity, though the reality was not all that fluid. Mulattoes were stuck in a clearly demarcated intermediate position. As such, they were often better off than enslaved blacks, but still suffered from significant discrimination. They were marginalized with blacks, and distinguished from blacks only if freed.15 For instance, after 1850, mulattoes could no longer serve as officers in the Guarda Nacional.16 The mulattoes themselves well understood how they were circumscribed; they joined black revolts and movements, but at the same time reinforced their marginal superiority by avoiding marriages with blacks.17 Whites also observed the racial stigma, steadfastly avoiding being reclassified as mulatto.18
Brazil’s “mulatto found the door ajar.” But focusing on the door of social advancement being partly open to mulattoes ignores the greater extent to which the door remained “not fully open."19 To scholars from the United States, conditioned to believe that racial order must be bipolar, a tripartite order seemed to violate the precepts of racialism, and was described as prefiguring later tolerance. But such a three-way division of racial groups was consistent with Brazil’s social structure, for “in a hierarchical society, it is easy to reflect intermediate categories."20 And the resulting hierarchy did divide people according to color in a segmented continuum, with darker peoples worse off. As Degler acknowledged, “Brazilians are not colorblind,” but simply recognize a somewhat greater “array of terms and gradations” than the white-black divide of the United States.21
Gradations of racial discrimination remain evident in Brazil. With a few notable exceptions, mulattoes are largely underprivileged. The “escape hatch” has either closed or never existed. Indeed, Degler himself did not provide any statistical evidence of black mobility beyond simply demonstrating the level of miscegenation. Brazilian culture remains inclusive. But recent scholarship has established that the difference in socioeconomic status between mulattoes and blacks is insignificant in comparison with the relative privilege of whites, whose average income was about twice that for nonwhites both in 1960 and in 1976.22 Such evidence reaffirms that Brazil constructed an informal racial order that was highly discriminatory against blacks and browns. Earlier patterns of inequality were maintained, with just enough mulattoes advancing to encourage belief in mobility. But the small number of mulattoes in prominent positions during the empire all but disappeared thereafter. Continued popular belief in “the mulatto escape hatch” appears to be based less on material conditions than on an ideological project encouraging assimilation. Miscegenation did not produce mobility, but the myth of such mobility did dilute potential conflict.
The pre-abolition United States also faced the question of how to categorize mulattoes, although they existed in smaller proportion than in Brazil. With a larger settler population than Brazil and a more equal sex ratio among both blacks and whites, miscegenation occurred less frequently. Whites were not eager to encourage an increase in the mulatto population. In particular, white women purportedly protected their interests in the family structure by insisting on the exclusion of mulattoes from accepted white society.23 By the mid-eighteenth century, six of the thirteen colonies outlawed interracial marriages, and after the mid-nineteenth century the offspring of interracial unions were generally categorized as blacks, even if they had only “one drop” of African blood.24 Unlike in Brazil, few of the intermediate category of mulattoes filled the economic roles of craftsmen or overseers, with these functions jealously guarded by the larger number of nonslaveholding whites.25 To protect whites’ interests, manumission was rare and miscegenation discouraged precisely to avoid increasing the sort of intermediate population that emerged in Brazil.
Discouragement of miscegenation does not mean that there were no peoples of mixed ancestry in the United States. Prohibitions proved unable to curtail sexual practices, with offspring subject to categories that changed over time as the biracial order was refined. Between 1620 and 1850, approximately 7.7 percent of slaves were described as mulatto.26 In 1850, 11.2 percent of the black population were categorized as mixed-race, rising to above 12 percent ten years later.27 And during the last decade of slavery, the number of mulattoes in bondage reportedly increased by 67 percent.28 Though the total number of mulattoes remained much smaller in the United States than in Brazil, the growing number of freed mulattoes provoked the larger number of poorer whites to push for a more rigid divide.
Only when abolition undermined slavery as the basis for social distinctions was a biracial order fully elaborated. As early as 1850, white Americans became increasingly concerned about the rising number of mulattoes as a threat to the racial order and to white privilege. The “one drop of blood” rule served to resolve this threat by defining and marginalizing the mulatto population together with blacks, subordinated by race rather than bondage. The resulting polar divide made it more difficult for light-skinned blacks than for later European immigrants to “pass” into a higher status, reinforcing both discrimination and black solidarity, extended even to so-called mulatto elites.29 For instance, the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the extension of the black racial category even to a person seven-eighths white. Such extreme Jim Crow segregation forced Americans with any African ancestry together as fellow victims of racial domination. By the early twentieth century, most self-described mulattoes saw their fate as forcibly tied to the African-American community.
With segregation applied to anyone with the least African ancestry, the earlier distinct status of mulattoes was largely forgotten. Brown Americans disappeared as a separate category absorbed into black Americans. After the 1910 census recorded 21 percent of blacks as mulatto, the category of mulatto was excluded from the census.30 Legal efforts to curtail race mixture remained on the books, for as late as 1967 sixteen states still had laws against miscegenation. Though the categories have been fluid, between 75 and 90 percent of African-Americans now are estimated to have some white ancestry, with those with “lighter skin” generally better off.31 However, the biological fact of mixing became largely meaningless during most of this century, for social and legal practice enforced a biracial division, distinguished from Brazil’s triracial order. Race was established and changed by official categories, not by nature.
The early history of South Africa also brought significant miscegenation. The original Dutch settlers on the Cape, few in numbers and even fewer in numbers of women, engaged in extensive mixing. “Marriages and extra-marital intercourse between Europeans and liberated full-blooded female slaves were forbidden."32 Nevertheless, “during the first twenty years of settlement [on the Cape] three-quarters of the children born to the [Dutch East India] Company’s slaves had white fathers.” Between 1688 and 1807, about a quarter of “the founding marriages” of Afrikaners “involved one spouse, usually female, who had some known degree of nonwhite ancestry."33 The offspring of such unions were accepted as and among whites, for instance with “dark-skinned” Simon van der Stel serving as governor from 1679 to 1699. Coloureds in South Africa were long able to advance socially, passing as whites and not as a distinct third category as in Brazil. In “an atmosphere of racial fluidity and public mixing,” a traveler in the early nineteenth century, arriving in British-dominated Cape Town, might “wonder if he had taken the wrong ship and ended up in Brazil by mistake."34
A distinct “coloured” identity developed gradually in South Africa. The salience of this category was reinforced by varying official policies of relative privilege and of heightened discrimination, which from opposite directions demarcated coloureds as such. By 1861, coloured children in the Cape were “effectively banned from the public schools,” though other forms of early official discrimination remained rare or uneven.35 Natal and Cape coloureds could vote, while those in the Afrikaner republics “never had the vote at any stage."36 After the Boer War, coloureds sought exemption from rising discrimination; a distinct coloured population was recognized as such for the first time in the 1904 census.37 Eager to win over allies, the new Union government did provide the 10 percent of Cape voters designated coloured with representation by four senators, though these had to be white.38
The Union and later Republic of South Africa continued to distinguish coloureds with both greater privilege than blacks and less than whites, thereby hoping to encourage coloured loyalty and to discourage them from aligning with the African majority. In the 1920s Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog advocated better treatment for coloureds. In 1943, the Smuts government established a separate Coloured Affairs Department, with threatened discrimination provoking “coloured leaders in Cape Town to seek closer cooperation with Africans."39 To head off such a realignment, in subsequent years some segregation laws were explicitly not applied to coloureds.40 The National Party, after its 1948 victory, removed coloureds from the white voting role, but also sought to appease the coloureds with “labor preference” rights in the Cape after 1954.41 In 1976, the government’s Theron Commission advocated that coloureds be subject to reduced segregation and receive more equal wages, access to universities, and direct representation, but these recommendations were not immediately implemented.42
Despite some accommodation to coloureds as such, the logic of apartheid gradually led to increased discrimination of coloureds together with Africans, pushing these two groups toward a stronger alliance and convergence. Coloured per capita income remained much closer to that of blacks than to that of whites.43 Recognizing increased discrimination against them, in 1955 the South African Coloured Peoples’ Organization joined the Congress Alliance, reinforcing an emerging accord between coloureds and Africans as common victims of apartheid. Despite some reluctance, by the 1970s coloured students were joining Africans and Asians in the Black Consciousness movement, redefining themselves all as blacks and rejecting the divisive categories of Pretoria.44 In the 1980s, the coloured population of close to three million was subject to continued discrimination, though still enjoying a higher average salary than Africans.45 The discrimination proved salient, with most coloured organizations affiliating with the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front organizations in large numbers. The distinctive coloured identity inscribed in official regulations seemed to have all but faded into joint opposition. But while many coloureds remained committed to a joint black identity, their distinctiveness had not vanished, in part due to some continued privilege. In the landmark 1994 election, many Cape coloureds expressed their fear of African majority rule and the loss of their relative privilege by voting for the National Party, which had encouraged such fear.
Miscegenation produced “mixed race” populations in Brazil, the United States, and South Africa. But historian Carl Degler implied that particularly extensive “mixing” in Brazil vitiated strict racial categorization and discrimination. Marvin Harris suggests that in the absence of sharp distinctions, “systemic discrimination cannot be practiced,” and conflict is thereby avoided.46 This argument overlooks both Brazil’s categorization of blacks, mulattoes, and whites as such, and the significant discrimination suffered jointly by blacks and the intermediate group. Contrary to Harris’s reasoning, a particular form of discrimination was practiced in Brazil, with racial categories established accordingly. The lack of later racial conflict suggests that the myth of fluidity did take hold. It does not prove that there were no effective racial categories of discrimination applied to blacks and mulattoes.
Comparative analysis further undermines the argument that miscegenation in itself precludes categorical discrimination and domination. This argument implies that substantial mixing in South Africa and the United States should have militated against the imposition of strict segregation in those countries. But the large number of mulattoes in the United States and South Africa did not prevent construction of increasingly biracial categories. Instead, South African and U.S. authorities gradually resolved physical ambiguities by drawing strict racial boundaries. Mixing was a “problem” requiring “solution,” as it was in Brazil. In South Africa, “the problem of how to tell where colored ended and white or African began"47 was resolved by official edicts, which themselves varied over time and ultimately failed to “define explicitly who is coloured."48 In the United States, the categorization of mulattoes was similarly fluid. Tocqueville assumed that, “it is the mulatto who forms the bridge between black and white; everywhere where there is a great number of mulattoes, the fusion of the two races is not impossible."49 But this “Brazilian option” was not followed in the United States, where blacks and whites were not fused, but mulattoes and blacks were.
To some degree, the United States and South Africa pursued opposite “solutions” to the mulatto “problem.” According to writer Gertrude Millin, “South Africa, in short, classes with the white any person who can conceivably pass as white, where America classes with the Negro any person who can conceivably pass as Negro."50 The South African white minority bolstered its numbers with coloured allies, at least for a time. The American white majority was more confident of its ability to dominate a black minority. There was little interest in an alliance with mulattoes. But demographic proportions were not consistently determinant. The categories of such strategic calculations were themselves fluid, as were the calculations themselves. And in both South Africa and the United States, mulattoes were eventually excluded from most rights, though the interests of a white minority and majority intuitively should have produced opposite outcomes. Most startling is that even the white South African minority, pursuing racist ideology to its extreme, eventually discriminated against and alienated the coloureds. Being outnumbered did not preclude drawing lines of exclusion against former intermediaries.
Racial categories per se remained particularly fluid as long as slavery served as the primary social distinction. A person was either enslaved or free. The dividing line of bondage was firmly entrenched in law and social practice. As long as only and most Africans were slaves in the United States, racial categorization remained of secondary importance. The relatively “closed character of slavery in both South Africa and the United States” allowed for little manumission and produced less mixing, setting “the stage for a two-category pattern of race relations” that emerged once slavery was threatened and then abolished.51 During the transition period, mulattoes were recognized as a distinct category, further demonstrating that shifting definitions followed historical developments rather than fixed distinctions. In Brazil, where slavery was less “closed” and miscegenation occurred to a greater extent, the mulatto population was larger and more widely recognized as a distinct group, serving necessary economic functions. After abolition, the mulatto category remained in place, though this population was subject to discrimination. The higher proportion of Brazilian mulattoes was significant but did not preclude categorization.
No doubt the higher level of miscegenation in Brazil would have made a biracial order more difficult to impose than elsewhere, though the Brazilian state was certainly capable of such an imposition, given its evident ability to manage social change. Biracialism would not have been impossible given sufficient will. Miscegenation by itself did not preclude an official racial order, which in the United States and South Africa was constructed biracially despite physical variation, and in Brazil was constructed as a more fluid triracial divide.
Degler argued not only that miscegenation in Brazil made strict racial categorization impossible, but that mixing also led to greater social fluidity vitiating racial segregation and domination. Yet even in Brazil, mobility was more celebrated than real, particularly in this century. Mulatto mobility was largely a myth aimed at appeasing the intermediate group, which was actually less privileged than implied by that term. And in South Africa and the United States, where post-abolition racial segregation and domination were imposed, there had been some early degree of mobility. Lighter-skinned American blacks and South African coloureds continued to enjoy somewhat higher economic status than blacks even after abolition. But by the early twentieth century, in both South Africa and the United States the relative privileges and distinction accorded to mulattoes were eroded by official racial domination. For instance, in the United States after 1850, the “one drop rule” defined mulattoes as blacks, subject to Jim Crow segregation as it emerged later in the century. Miscegenation was not determinant, but was instead purposefully ignored in order to preserve an emerging “collective racist fantasy” of a bipolar division of black and white.52 South Africa never abandoned the intermediate category of mulattoes to the same extent as in the United States. But legal South African discrimination did increasingly subordinate coloureds together with Africans, provoking a gradual alliance of these victims of apartheid as blacks. Informal discrimination also affected mulattoes in Brazil, but in the absence of official biracial domination, the mulatto category remained more salient and a combined Afro-Brazilian identity was thereby discouraged.
If miscegenation in itself did not consistently determine the possibility or form of racial categories, nor determine the prospects for mobility, it cannot be said to have preordained the prospect for racial domination. Though people often believe and act as if race is physically determined, shifts of beliefs, categories, and practices demonstrate the contrary. Racists believe that physical distinctions are fixed, but racial orders are fluid and contingent. Biology itself draws no strict boundaries of racial categories, nor can it account for historical variations in how such boundaries were used. Mixing in itself is not determinant of where the lines of racial distinction are drawn by society. The real issue is how miscegenation was interpreted and offspring categorized. These outcomes were not preordained by mixing, but were instead the result of purposeful policies and changing predilections. Put simply, the common fact of miscegenation cannot account for the emergence of a biracial order in the United States and to a lesser extent in South Africa, as contrasted with the triracial order and image of “racial democracy” that emerged in Brazil. Demographics and the level of miscegenation did influence these outcomes, but not consistently. And differences of degree in miscegenation cannot account for differences in kind of later racial orders and conflict.
Physical differences in themselves do not explain social outcomes. Instead, socially constructed discrimination itself creates racial categories, varies, and reinforces solidarity accordingly. Such categorization and domination “had not much to do with objective economic and demographic factors, but rather, with subjective ones."53 This critique lies at the heart of modern assumptions about race as situational and not primordial. We must look beyond the biological fact of miscegenation to why continuous physical variation was forced into strict biracial categories or an informal triracial order. The results of this difference were profound. Biracial categories were used for dyadic domination and inflamed antagonism. Informal triracialism was not.
Implications
Colonial and religious legacies, slavery, and miscegenation demonstrate that social constructions of race were evident in the early history of Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. These practices took different forms, but authorities consistently reinforced forms of discrimination, often justified by religious differentiation. Slavery itself may not have been initially associated with race per se, but its practice was racially distinguishing and defended accordingly. Rules about miscegenation and the treatment of “mixed race” peoples clearly referred to and encouraged ranked racial categorizations. In this sense, racial orders were evident by the nineteenth century, providing a foundation on which later social constructions could be and were built. Assumptions of primordial difference were prevalent, entrenched in institutions and culture, and given scientific credence.
This overview also demonstrates the fluidity of early images of race. As nature drew no sharp demarcations, distinctions understood as primordial took different shapes and meanings. Discriminatory practices and categories imposed according to physical differences varied by place and time, even within each of the three cases. Racism arose most explicitly when slavery was challenged or abolished, with the distinction on which domination rested shifting from that of being a slave to being black. The categorization and treatment of mulattoes also shifted within each country. In Brazil, and to a lesser extent in the United States and South Africa, mulattoes or coloureds were accorded distinct status by mid-nineteenth century when slavery was nearing extinction and whites were eager to find allies or intermediaries. This distinct category had either effectively been collapsed into a catch-all black identity in the United States or was gradually eroded in South Africa. The mulatto category was preserved within Brazil’s “racial democratic” order, informally triracial rather than formally biracial. But even there mulattoes were increasingly subject to discrimination. Changing boundaries of races were not explicable by reference only to biological fact.
By comparing three major cases, it is difficult to see how most of the early historical experiences summarized here by themselves determined the divergent official racial orders that would emerge during the twentieth century. All three contained significant aspects of racial discrimination, but this commonality cannot in itself account for the difference in post-abolition legal racial orders as they emerged. Brazil’s denial of such early discrimination as the basis for later tolerance cannot be sustained. The United States and South Africa, by contrast, constructed distinct social orders consistent with earlier racial discrimination. Prior experiences and legacies appear too similarly discriminatory to explain these dramatic differences in subsequent outcome. While it is always difficult to explicate counterfactuals, it is certainly possible to imagine Brazil having developed a racial order more similar to that of the United States or even apartheid South Africa. Yet this was not the case. Nor did comparable early discrimination produce identical racial orders in South Africa and the United States.
If early historical practices were not as different as later policies, can this later divergence be attributed to cultural differences? Portuguese Catholicism supposedly inspired more hierarchical inclusion (despite Church practices of exclusion), while British or Dutch Protestantism encouraged rigid exclusion of the “nonelect” from the liberal order. But the Portuguese were not always tolerant and inclusive, as indicated by their colonial practices in Africa. And both South Africa and the United States in particular periods included mulattoes as intermediaries in an effective racial hierarchy. Cultural distinctions were then not consistently evident, and changed over time. Nor were such distinctions uniform within religious traditions. Protestant Afrikaners and English in South Africa, or Southerners and Northerners in the United States, differed considerably in their “cultural” assumptions about race and treatment of Africans. Religious doctrines justified different views at different times and among different groups. Culture was itself variable.
The implication is that early history and culture did not automatically determine the future. Prior discrimination did establish pervasive social inequality. But it did not preordain the later legal order, which either reinforced such discrimination or hid it under a cloak of tolerance. Instead, early historical facts were interpreted in varying ways consistent with these distinct outcomes. As such, history was brought forward through the prism of later pressures. In the United States and South Africa, the dark light of past discrimination passed through this prism in a relatively straight line to racial domination, taking different forms. In Brazil, the line was refracted, so that looking back through the “Luso-tropical” prism gave the appearance of a more tolerant and “humanitarian” past than had been the case. Current practice was justified by historical myth. This difference was not due so much to the past as to the difference in those prisms through which it was seen. As we shall see in the next section, culturally informed historical interpretations were shaped by particular emerging political and economic pressures and experiences. Later we shall see that post-apartheid or post–Jim Crow race relations were also not fully determined by prior history. Paths from the past crucially depend on how that past is interpreted.
Post-abolition developments of a racial order did diverge, most notably with the relative lack of formal racial domination in Brazil. To explain that divergence, it is necessary to turn to an analysis of the dynamics of race making in the newly formed South Africa, the reunited United States, and the Republic of Brazil. Those dynamics in turned shaped interpretations and manipulations of the past to justify the new order. Only the legacy of greater colonial unity and stability in Brazil, contrasted with violent division in South Africa and the United States, proved persistently determinant. In the United States and South Africa, the issue of how to treat Africans exacerbated ethnic and regional conflicts among whites, and gave rise to racist ideology and practice. In Brazil, there had been a stronger and more centralized colonial state, no vying ethnic fragments, and less regional tension over slavery spread throughout the country. As a result, the social hierarchy was less shaken by peaceful abolition, the polity inherited less deeply entrenched major fault lines, and no explicit racist defense emerged against more liberal challenges. These differences, tied to the degree of internal conflict, shaped how the issues of race were later addressed. The level of such internal conflict presented distinctive political situations that could not be purposefully reinterpreted and instead proved decisive.