Beyond Race Ventriloquism: Narrating Brazilian White Supremacy

In the twentieth century, Brazilian intellectuals and commentators frequently invoked the United States to argue why the former was superior to the latter when it came to race relations. Jim Crow water fountains, nooses, and burning crosses became common tropes contrasted with fanciful descriptions of interracial romances, soccer, and Carnival celebrations. White men typically cast themselves as the spokesmen for the entire nation while decrying any negative interpretation of Brazilian racial inequality as “cultural imperialism.” As Brazilian literary scholar Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey notes, these white Brazilian male narrators acted “like a ventriloquist: the body belongs to the Other, but the voice is his.”

Accusations of “cultural imperialism” or “reverse racism” made Black and Indigenous critiques of Brazil’s racial system publically unpopular, especially in moments of political change (1946 - 1988). Now, in the twenty-first century, Brazilians are revisiting their Black intellectuals previously left at the margins, Black women included. Surveying the critical thought of feminist-activist Lélia Gonzalez, working-poor chronicler Carolina Maria de Jesus, and psychoanalyst Virgínia Leone Bicudo, I highlight how these Black women utilized their writing to narrate a historical analysis of modern Brazil without having to use the term “white supremacy.” I argue that terms like “racial democracy” or “white supremacy,” elusive and slippery when deployed to contrast Latin America with the United States, may be besides the point. Gonzalez, Jesus, and Bicudo’s voices provide a history of Brazil without the white male ventriloquist, demonstrating how and why the particular conditions and processes of racial subjugation, not the terms, matter most.