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Reviews
| Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. xvi + 365 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth).
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Always rejected by some whites, affirmative action is under increasing attack in the United States. At the same time, affirmative action, though controversial, is expanding in Brazil. To understand these divergent realities, I strongly recommend G. Reginald Daniel's new book, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States. Daniel has written a timely and impressive study of race, color, identity, and power in the United States and Brazil. |
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Through a sustained comparative historical overview of the two countries, Daniel demonstrates that they have important similarities and differences in their racial hierarchies. The most significant historical similarity concerns the creation of a white supremacist and colonialist racial order based on African slavery. This foundation is the template for all later racial dynamics. The most important differences are the ternary racial project in Brazil and the binary racial project in the United States. Daniel properly emphasizes that the one-drop rule in the United States forced blacks of different complexions and multiracial ancestries to be identified as one collective racial group. On the contrary, Brazilian elites and mass society historically recognized intermediate identities between blacks and whites including morenos, mulatos, mestiços, and pardos. |
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Drawing on the work of many authors, especially sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, historian Carl Degler, and political scientist Melissa Nobles, Daniel shows how both the ternary and binary classification frameworks were used to oppress people of African ancestry and create unjust racial orders perpetuating white privilege. He examines the evolution of race relations, combining a progressive critique of racial categories in both countries with a defense of African Brazilian identity in Brazil and multiracial identity in the United States. |
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The main strength of Daniel's analysis lies in his examination of historical and contemporary efforts of mixed people in the United States to challenge their official marginalization by the black-white binary classification. Passing, blue-vein societies, triracial isolates, and Louisiana Creoles of color are past examples of multiracial people attempting to avoid the negative consequences of white supremacy and "to escape the social stigma of blackness" (p. 170). More recently, mixed-race people have formed support groups and entered the political process. They have demanded and achieved official recognition throughout the country at the local and state levels. As a result of grassroots organizing and political lobbying, multiracial movement activists forced the federal government to allow citizens to check more than one racial category on the decennial census. As an adviser and board member of several mixed-race organizations, Daniel benefited from participant-observer status as activists attempted to get the term "multiracial" added to the national census as a distinct racial category. |
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Overall, Daniel makes a convincing, though incomplete, case that race relations in Brazil and the United States are becoming more alike. Black activists in Brazil have adopted a broad African Brazilian identity to include all people of visible African ancestry similar to the one-drop rule prevalent in the United States. Multiracial activists in the United States have campaigned to have their separate identity acknowledged and included in the census and popular culture as does the system of racial categorization in Brazil. |
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One question for Daniel is whether the growing Latino and Asian American populations in the United States complicate his convergence thesis. Also, Daniel gives exaggerated emphasis to the challenge that passing represented to American binary racial classification. Would a more impressive challenge for light-skinned blacks have been to embrace black identity, since blacks were arguably the most discriminated against and stigmatized social group in America? Despite these questions, Daniel's book is a significant contribution to the study of comparative race relations and will force scholars of Brazilian and American history to investigate more thoroughly the complex interaction of color, racial identity, and political activism.
Ollie Johnson
Wayne State University
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