Carl N. Degler - Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States

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Degler, Carl N

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The Pulitzer Prize for History, 1972

The Bancroft Prize, 1972

The Albert J. Beveridge Award, 1971

NEITHER

MACMILLAN PUBLISHING CO.. INC.New York

COLLIER MACMILLAN PUBLISHERSLondon

Copyright 1971, Carl N. Degler

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may bereproduced or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage andretrieval system, without permission in writing fromthe Publisher.

Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

866 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022

Collier-Macmillan Canada, Ltd., Toronto,Ontario

Library of Congress catalog card number:73-130946

PRINTING 12 13 14 15 16 YEAR 0 12 3 4

To Bernice, Bill, Erick, and Kirk Deglermy Brazilian relatives in the United States

Brazil is Hell for Negroes,

Purgatory for Whites, andParadise for Mulattoes.

Like many other books, this one began as aminor inquiry; the most that was expectedto appear in print was perhaps a shortarticle in a scholarly journal. As a historianof the United States who is interested inslavery and black history, I intended onlyto study the validity of the relationship between slavery and race relations that FrankTannenbaum twenty years before had advanced in his book Slave and Citizen. As Iexplain in some detail in the pages thatfollow, Tannenbaum traced the absence ofsegregation and of the United States brandof racial hostility in Latin America to differences in the institution of slavery in thetwo places. Ten years ago, in writing aboutthe historical origins of racial prejudice inthe United States, I myself rested my judgments in part on Tannenbaums comparison.In short, like Tannenbaum, I accepted theidea that slavery in the United States differed from the form in Latin America.

Over the past decade, however, a number of scholarly criticisms of Tannenbaumsinterpretations of Latin American slavery

have appeared. As a result, I undertook to examine some of therelevant scholarly literature myself. The more I looked into thehistory of slavery in areas of the New World outside of the UnitedStates, the more confusing the comparison became. Consequendy,about five years ago I decided to abandon the pursuit of selectiveevidence on the nature of slavery in Latin America as a wholeand to study slavery in a single South American nation. I choseBrazil because it is the only country in the New World thatrivaled the United States in size and in the importance of slaveryin its history.

Even after that decision had been made, though, a book wasstill far from my intentions. It is true that the decision necessitated my learning to read Portuguese and to work my waythrough a number of the many books that Brazilians and othershave written on the history of Brazil. Even then my questionremained relatively simpleto find out whether slavery in Brazildiffered substantially from that in the United States. Behind thatquestion, though, lay a larger oneand in my mind, the moreimportant onenamely, how does one account for the differencein race relations in Brazil and the United States? For, as the firstchapter endeavors to make clear, the differences are indeed striking. Yet as I read more and more about Brazil, with whose history and culture I became enamoured, I found that my questionbroadened. What had begun as a relatively circumscribed exploration of slavery in Brazil and the United States expanded toinclude contemporary race relations in the two countries. Thatexpansion is part of the reason why almost a third of the followingpages are given over to an examination of the similarities anddifferences in contemporary race relations in Brazil and theUnited States. Quite candidly, another reason Chapters III and IVare as full as they are is that I found the nuances of race relationsin Brazil so complex and yet so simple, so different from, and yetso similar to, those in the United States that I wanted to set themdown on paper, if only to clarify my own thoughts on the subject.