The brown Dino and the invisibilization of miscegenation – 11/30/2023 – Marcos Augusto Gonçalves

The Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, now appointed to the Federal Supreme Court, will no longer be a white man on the court. Dino, as we know, declares himself brown. According to the current criteria, he is part of the group of black people in Brazilian society. Blacks are the sum of blacks and browns.

In the IBGE classification of race or skin color, which is adopted in the Census and other surveys, Brazilians can declare ourselves white, brown, yellow, indigenous or black. There is no expression black as an alternative.

The majority group, whether or not the results of this year’s survey are confirmed, have been brown people. According to the 2022 Pnad (National Household Sample Survey), 42.8% of Brazilians consider themselves white, 45.3% declared themselves mixed race and 10.6% black. It is possible that the Census will show variations in relation to these percentages, but browns and whites will continue to be the two largest population groups based on race or skin color.

But if those who declare themselves black are a minority, why is it often said that black people are the majority in Brazil? Or that the majority “declare themselves black”?

Intellectuals and activists from affirmative action movements to combat racism have produced historical and sociological arguments to consider that brown people, a category of non-whites, are, after all, Afro-descendants. With the blacks, they would form the group of blacks. In this decision, enshrined in the Racial Equality Statute, there is also a bit of politics.

In one fell swoop, miscegenation became invisible and miscegenation lost prominence as the majority and characteristic feature of the Brazilian population, as proposed by defenders of theories about miscegenation. Finally, a comfortable majority of blacks was guaranteed, a term semantically very close to blacks, as opposed to whites, in a practically binary racial equation, closer to the United States.

The brown person began to be invested with a certain negative charge, almost a sociological pariah, an ethnic lumpen, child of colonial rape and pusillanimous when deciding on his identity. His redemption is to erase miscegenation and make it affluent in the black category. The topic is intricate, there is no doubt – and we haven’t even talked about those who descend from Europeans and indigenous people.

Trying to erase the miscegenation of the Brazilian human landscape is a herculean effort, but perhaps strategic and rewarding for a perspective that derives from academia and American racial thought, with much to offer in the fight against racism, but rooted in different terrain.

The attempt to shove, by force, resistant realities into ready-made schemes, which do not fit very well, is not new. To stay in the 20th century and among us, intellectual sectors of the left dedicated themselves to forging a fanciful feudalism in the country’s history to comply with Marx’s doctrine.

Ultimately, the nuance, complexity and singularity of a historical experience that should be taken into account in the search for arrangements and proposals for understanding and overcoming racism in Brazil are lost, no pun intended.

As for Dino, although in the statistics he ends up being officially counted among the black majority, he is often treated as white and does not seem to encourage black people. Maybe he doesn’t have dark enough skin, maybe his hair is a little too straight, like that of native peoples or Europeans, or maybe it’s because he had access to social and material conditions identified with white privilege. Probably because of the combo.

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