The Political Economy of Race: Comparing the Deep South

United States and the Northeast of Brazil

Honors Capstone

By Andrew Menefee

Written in fulfillment of the General University Honors Requirement at the American

University

Professor Clarence Lusane

Spring 2013

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Abstract:

This paper explores the persistence of racial inequalities in the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil. Both countries share similar patterns of racial inequalities. Blacks continue to suffer lower education rates, higher mortality rates, and earn less income. The geographic dispersion of the Black population in both Brazil and the United States today mirrors the historical geographic dispersion of slavery in each country. The Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil contain the majority of the Black population and these regions remain underdeveloped compared to other regions. Both regions have a shared history as part of the plantation complex, an economic order controlled by oligarchic elite. This paper asks how do racial inequalities impact development? Drawing on Sokloff and Stanley Engerman, this paper argues that initial inequalities during slavery persisted because government institutions reproduced the deprivation and poor quality of life associated with slavery. This paper employed a comparative historical approach to compare the implementation of education and medical services in the post-abolition period in the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil. The conclusions demonstrate how state services supported the cultural hegemony of white elite and excluded Blacks. The 'invisible' nature of systemic disparities, which become accepted as normal, makes it harder to create reform. This examination of the roots of systemic inequalities helps explain why racial inequalities have remained so durable. These conclusions have implications for comparative race relations and international development. These conclusions can be applied to other countries to support structural explanations for persistent underdevelopment in post-colonial societies.

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Contents

Section I:

Introduction 5

Literature Review 12

Definitions 18

Research Question 18

Hypothesis 19

Research Design 19

Section II: Comparing the Political Economy 21

Theory 21

Origins of the Plantation Economy 27

Plantation Economy and Abolition 31

The Deep South U.S.

Cultural Hegemony 33

Social Relations of Production 42

Forces of Production 49

The Northeast of Brazil

Cultural Hegemony 51

Social Relations of Production 59

Forces of Production 63

Conclusion 65

Section III: Comparing States Services 66

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State Services in the Deep South US

Education 68

Health Care 72

State Services in the Northeast of Brazil

Health Care 76

Education 81

Discussion 84

Conclusions 85

Study Limitations 85

Study Strengths 86

Implications for Future Research 87

Bibliography 90

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Introduction

When studying race in the United States scholars often take a domestic perspective and draw from a political-science approach examining the political exclusion of African-Americans and the struggle for the vote, or a sociological approach examining the plight of African-Americans in urban ghettos. This paper considers racial inequalities from an international development perspective. International development as a field refers to the multi-disciplinary approach addressing the question of how to improve human quality of life. The field refers mostly to the institutions that arose after World War

II, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which focus on alleviating poverty and improving living conditions. Traditionally, the field of international development confines its geographic focus to what is termed the “third- world,” or previously colonized countries. In order to understand how solutions addressing poverty can be implemented, scholars of international development in the

1960s and 1970s put forward various theories explaining how societies change. How theories of international development interpret history serves an important purpose, because in order to alleviate poverty it is important to understand why countries have not progressed. Scholars must understand how colonialism, a common factor in many developing countries, functioned and through what avenues did it impact societies.

International development focuses on identifying the dynamics of change and is holistic in that it encompasses issues such as governance, healthcare, education, gender equality, infrastructure, economics, human rights, and the environment. Applying an international

5 development perspective to race and examining how societies modernized while maintaining racial inequalities may offer a new perspective as to why a social group continues to suffer a lower quality of life. In turn, this conceptualization of racial inequality may help policy makers better understand the causes of racial inequalities and have a better context for proposing solutions.

The object of this paper is to explore how racial inequalities persist in societies.

Race is closely tied to colonialism because it is a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination. The experience of colonialism put one group in power over another and allowed the dominant group to control access to resources and opportunities. In colonies, the different groups were often demarcated by an identifying feature, such as skin pigmentation. Race is a social construct which has a colonial origin and character, but this construct has persisted and remained durable after the end of colonialism. Racial inequality then is a remainder of an element of coloniality, proof that race still matters. This paper will trace how racial inequalities persisted after slavery ended.

The subject of this paper is the Deep South United States and the Northeast of

Brazil. Examining case studies drawn from a sub-regional comparison highlights similarities that would not be noticed if scholars relied solely on aggregate, national comparisons. The regions of the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil represent an interesting case study because these regions contain the highest concentration of poverty within two of the world’s leading economic powers. These are the regions where plantation economies were first established and racial hierarchies

6 created in the Western Hemisphere. Implicit within this comparison is that there is interplay between the course of a society’s development and racial inequalities.

Comparing regional inequalities and racial inequalities in the U.S. and Brazil from a lens of international development highlights how the developed world shares similar processes of “underdevelopment” with third-world countries. Eve Bratman uses the term

“Third World” to describe current geographies of subalternality.1 By making the object of her argument Washington D.C., Bratman argues that conditions of “third-worldality” persist outside the scope of what is traditionally considered to be the field of development. She suggests that an outward, international focus in the field of international development has led development practitioners to miss important domestic development problems close to home. To make her case, Bratman analyzed several conditions of 'third-worldality” consistent with a legacy of colonialism in Washington

D.C., including political exclusion, inequality, and socio-economic segregation.

The term “third-world” refers to countries which share persistent poverty and high rates of inequality, which are a colonial legacy. In sum, “third-world” refers to countries which are considered underdeveloped. A UN report found that “major cities in the United

States, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington DC, Miami, and New York, have the highest levels of inequality in the country, similar to those of Abidjan, Nairobi, Buenos

Aires, and Santiago.’ Based on Bratman’s criteria, it can be argued that the Deep South, a region within the world’s foremost economic power, the United States, displays characteristics of a third world country.

1 In the field of post-colonialism, the term subaltern describes groups who are excluded from a society’s power structures for political representation and do not have a voice in their society. In describing “history told from below,” the term subaltern is derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci.

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The South contains higher levels of poverty and inequality compared to other regions of the country. The South contains 9 of the 10 poorest states.2 Southern states exhibit pockets of extreme inequality and the poorest communities suffer from a lack of even basic infrastructure. Up to 90% of houses in Lowndes County, Alabama, have no sewage systems.3 Structural factors such as poverty and a rural population complicate the delivery of health services. The federal government has declared that all of Alabama’s 55 rural counties have a shortage of physicians. In a survey of rural health clinics, 40% with a staffing vacancy had trouble recruiting a replacement. This requires rural residents to travel a distance for care. One Mississippi woman said, “I travel 75 miles to see my doctor. Sometimes I get help from the Department of Health social worker… But she has nine counties to cover all by herself.” In turn, poverty, a lack of infrastructure, and poor health services correspond to higher disease rates. The South contains 3 of the 5 states with the highest diabetes rates, and 3 of the 5 states with the highest stroke rates.4

Especially concerning, the South has a disproportionate incidence of HIV/AIDS.

HIV/AIDS is spreading in the Deep South among marginalized communities. In

2011, the South had 8 of the 10 states with the highest AIDS diagnoses, and 8 of the 10 states with the highest HIV death rates.5 An investigation found that Mississippi “leave[s] people with HIV/AIDS without treatment at rates comparable to those in Botswana,

2 Reif, Susan, Kristin Lowe Geonnotti, and Kathryn Whetten. "HIV infection and AIDS in the Deep South." Journal Information 96.6 (2006). 3United Nations Report. United Nations General Assembly Special Report on the Right to Clean Drinking Water and Sanitation. August 2, 2011. 18th Session Human Rights Council. 4 Reif, Susan, Kristin Lowe Geonnotti, and Kathryn Whetten. "HIV infection and AIDS in the Deep South." Journal Information 96.6 (2006). 5 Southern, A. I. D. S. "Coalition.(2012)." Southern States Manifesto: Update 2008: HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in the South (2012). 8

Ethiopia, and Rwanda.”6A state health official said, “save yourself a transatlantic airline fare to a developing country. Just come to Mississippi.”7 The disease is concentrated largely in poor African-American communities. Though they represent 30% of the Black population (compared to 12% nationally), 70% of the reported cases in the Deep South were African-American.8

The health inequalities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Deep South are an illustrative example of the troubling fact that in the post-civil rights South and United

States, the Black community continues to be excluded. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the

Deep South -“its blackness, and the way it has intersected with civil rights, drug abuse, policing, religion, sexuality, sin, and virtue” offers a fresh conversation on race which can change the lives of people in both rural and urban America.9 Similar to many third-world countries, the persistent high economic and racial inequalities of the Deep South are rooted in the regions’ colonial past.

The Deep South states experiencing the highest rates of the disease share a common history of an agrarian economy based on plantations and slave labor.10 Graphic evidence of this connection is displayed here:

Image 1 shows the dispersion of HIV/AIDS by county in the Deep South U.S.11

6 Human Rights Watch. Rights at Risk. State Response to HIV in Mississippi. http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0311web_0.pdf 7. Ibid. 8Reif, Susan, Kristin Lowe Geonnotti, and Kathryn Whetten. "HIV infection and AIDS in the Deep South." Journal Information 96.6 (2006).p.971. 9Levenson, Jacob. The secret epidemic: The story of AIDS and Black America. Anchor, 2005.p. 273. 10 McKinnon, Jesse. The Black Population, 2000 Census Brief. U.S. Department of Commerce. Economics and Statistics Administration. U.S. Census Bureau. August 2001. 11AIDS VU.org. Slide Sets: Regional Maps: Southeastern United States. Rates of person living with HIV Diagnosis by County, Southeastern U.S., 2009. http://www.aidsvu.org/downloadable-maps-and-resources. 9

Image 2 shows the dispersion of slaves by county from an 1860 U.S. Census.12

Professor Bronwen Lichtenstein, who has researched HIV/AIDS in Alabama, argues this is not a coincidence. “The Southeast was a colony with slaves, and the region can't get over its racial history. Things haven't changed… because the social structure is the same."13 Other activists working to address HIV/AIDS in the Deep South have made similar allusions to the Deep South’s “third-worldality.” Journalist and filmmaker Lisa

Biagiotti was inspired to make a documentary on HIV/AIDS in America’s rural South

12 United States Census. Distribution of the slave population in the South, based on 1860 census results. Originally published in 1861. https://www.census.gov/history/www/reference/maps/distribution_of_slaves_in_1860.html 13 Citation to be added. http://deepsouthfilm.com/333090 10 because while writing about HIV in Jamaica, she noticed “a lot of similarities between the South and Jamaica in terms of their religious and cultural traditions and the legacy of slavery.”14

Brazil shares the same patterns of racial inequalities, though they are more sharply evident, than the United States. The education gap between Blacks and whites grows as the number of years in school increases. Only about half as many Afro-Brazilians go to high school compared to whites.15 Six times as many whites go to post-graduate studies compared to blacks. In 1998 fully twice as many blacks as whites lived in absolute poverty.16 One percent of blacks as opposed to 4 percent of whites earn more than 10 times the minimum wage.17 Race serves as a parameter to what jobs most Afro-Brazilians have access to; “eighty percent of employed black women are concentrated in manual occupations; more than half of these are domestic servants.”18

The Northeast of Brazil contains the majority of the Black population and remains underdeveloped compared to other regions of the country. Geographically the dispersion of the Afro-Brazilian population today mirrors the historical geographic dispersion of slavery. Officially about 45 percent of the overall Afro-Brazilian population “is concentrated at about 70 percent in Brazil's [Northern and Northeastern] regions.”19 Here the continued practice of slavery and semi-slavery is by no means uncommon. Rural labor union officials and community leaders who try to organize rural workers are

14Citation to be added. (aumag.org/wordpress). 15Hamilton, Charles V., ed. Beyond racism: race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Lynne Rienner Pub, 2001.p.116 16 Hamilton, Beyond Racism. p.113. 17 Ibid. 18Ibid. p.114. 19 Ibid. p.109. 11 commonly assassinated. There were about a 1,000 such murders between 1964 and

1986.20 Illiteracy rates are the highest in the poor and mostly Black Northeast.

Literature Review

Explanations within the field of international development:

The transition from colonial slavery to modern societies that contain racial inequalities was a dynamic process. International development theory provides a framework for analyzing paths of modernization. Most international development theories which attempt to explain the persistence of poverty and underdevelopment can be categorized as either structural or cultural arguments. Structural arguments look to explanations rooted in the structure of societies which shape behavior and are often determined by underlying economic forces. These arguments are derived from Karl

Marx’s theory of historical-materialism. Marx argued that an analysis of how changes occur in society must begin with examining how people produce material necessities. In turn, this mode of production produced certain types of relationships between people.

Barrington Moore (1966) traced three divergent patterns of social class development, and argued that power relations created by the mode of production in an agrarian society determined the path to modernization. Moore focused on social classes as the crucial unit of analysis and examined how class development and political outcomes contributed to state development. Moore’s work examined the power relations within states, but did not focus on the power relations between states.

20Ibid. p.110. 12

World-systems theory provided an analysis of how strong states, through the connections of global capitalism, directed the course of development within weaker countries. Immanuel Wallestein’s model of the global capitalist system divided the global division of labor into three zones, the European core, the periphery, and the semi- periphery. Each zone by virtue of its participation in the world market is considered to be capitalist. The colonies in each respective zone contained a different internal social organization. A country’s economic zone, its distance from the core, corresponded to a different economic purpose that benefited the core countries. Therefore, a country’s economic position and role within global capitalism determined the social structures of the society.

Studies of slavery were applied to world-systems theory. Geographic conditions allowed for mono-cultural crops on plantations which were associated with particular paths of colonization. The Caribbean plantation system, despite relying on slave labor, it was argued, was an integral part in the peripheral zone of the capitalist system.21 Sidney

Mintz referred to plantations as “factory-fields.” Plantations were connected through the forces of consumption and production to the world market. The commodities supplied by tropical plantations led to increased mass-consumer among the proletariat of the industrial revolution in Europe. Consumption created incentives to expand colonization, bringing more land and people into the global trading system. To meet the demand of increased consumption, political elites supported seizing more colonies, establish more plantations, and import more slaves. Slavery and racial inequalities were originally created to facilitate the division of labor in world capitalism. The spread of global

21Classical Marxist logic held that slave societies, instead of being an integral part of the global capitalist system, represented a “pre-capitalist” era. 13 capitalism was interrelated with colonialism and the spread of plantations located in the peripheral.

Explanations for persistent inequality in countries and between countries which have been offered have often focused on institutions in areas related to growth, such as the security of property rights, prevalence of corruption, structures of the financial sector, and investment in public infrastructure and social capital. What determined whether institutions contributed to growth or to perpetuating inequalities?

Geographic conditions were associated with particular paths of colonization, which in turn translated into the establishment of different types of institutions. Colonial societies based on large-scale agriculture, such as sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations, tended to be very unequal because planter elites had economic incentives to maintain a cheap work force. Elites did not want to invest in public infrastructure or social capital.

Sokloff and Stanley Engerman argue that initial factors shaped during colonialism, such as landownership, had lingering effects because government policies and other institutions tended to reproduce them. In societies that began with extreme inequality, elites were able to establish rules, laws, and government policies which continued to benefit the elite, and maintain a high degree of inequality, over a long period of time.22

Critics of structural arrangements contend that culture plays the most important role in determining changes in human society. This argument can be traced back to Max

Weber, who argued that the culture of the Protestant work ethic led to capitalism. This argument persists today. Douglass North (1988), for example, agreed institutions are important but attributed the development of the United States and Canada to a heritage of

22 Sokoloff, Kenneth L., and Stanley L. Engerman. "History lessons: Institutions, factors endowments, and paths of development in the new world." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14.3 (2000): 217-232. 14

British-culture which created institutions more conducive to growth. He believed the most important factors to be religion or national heritage. Cultural explanations for persistent poverty have led to theories such as a culture of poverty theory. Edward

Banfield, for example, argued “people were poor because they have a defective culture.”23 This debate has often become politicized, with advocates of such theories accused of “blaming the victim.”24

This paper accepts the argument advanced by Sokloff and Stanley Engerman that initial conditions were reproduced by elites because it served their economic interests.

However, culture also played a role. Racism was influenced by economic factors, but it also operated in the cultural arena of a society. In his book More Than Just Race: Being

Black and Poor in the Inner City, William Julius Wilson traced the independent contributions of social structure and culture and how they interact to shape and reinforce poverty in urban ghettos. This arrangement, combining economics and culture, is actually closely related to arguments by Max Weber about race which, instead of critiquing Marx, was a more sophisticated extension and realistic application of Marxist ideas. Classical

Marxist logic held that the 'economic rationality' of capitalist market relations would sooner or later prevail and transform the previous social relations, replacing racial struggles with class struggles. This obviously does not explain the reality of the persistence of racial inequalities in former colonies around the world. Weber argued that social groups closed off access to economic resources, but utilized identifying markers

23 Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard University Press.1993. p.3. 24 Wilson, William Julius. More than just race: Being black and poor in the inner city (issues of our time). WW Norton, 2009. p.3. 15 such as religion or race to identify group boundaries.25 Stuart Hall has called this a theoretical convergence from arguments which began from either the Marxist or

Weberian pole of the debate.26 Hall argues that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony updates Marxism for the 20th century by demonstrating how culture and structure inter-mix.27 This paper approaches the continuation of racial inequalities from a structural approach that examines how the economic structure was re-enforced by cultural factors.

Racial Inequalities in Rural Areas:

Many sociologists in both Brazil and the United States have studied race in urban areas, in ghettos or shantytowns that are deprived of resources. Far fewer studies have examined how racial inequalities have persisted in rural areas. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a growing interest in comparative slave studies of the Western Hemisphere. Far less attention was paid to comparative post-abolition studies. However, this in many ways represents the moment most deserving of study. How societies incorporated former slaves into communities, or failed to do so, set the basic course of racial inequalities for the modern era. In the United States, a content-analysis study of articles from Rural

Sociology since 1936 shows that the topic of rural poverty reached a high of 3 percent in the journal’s first decade and then declined to virtually nothing in the 1980s.28

25 The South-African sociologist John Rex is generally credited with re-introducing Weberian ideas to racial theory. See for example Rex, John. (1980). The theory of race relations: A Weberian approach. In M. O’Callaghan (Ed.), Sociological theories: Race and colonialism (pp. 117-142). Paris: UNESCO. 26 Hall, Stuart. "Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity." Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (1996): 411-40. 27 Ibid. 28 Tickamyer, Ann R., and Cynthia M. Duncan. "Poverty and opportunity structure in rural America." Annual Review of Sociology (1990): 67-86. p.69 16

The deepening socioeconomic and cultural isolation of urban ghettos described by Wilson (1987) has been the experience of generations of the rural poor, especially in the South, where rigid social stratification has kept them out of the mainstream. Thus, understanding the circumstances of the rural working poor who are trapped by tight labor markets, or probing the chronically dependent poor in remote and isolated areas, can deepen our understanding of the poor in both urban and rural areas.29

This paper addresses race in societies that were traditionally more rural and underdeveloped compared to the national norm and will focus its analysis on the post- abolition period.

In comparing the Deep South U.S. and the Northeast of Brazil, Thomas Skidmore asked the question:

“First, should we compare entire nations or only regions?...Could we match, say, the Brazilian Northeast and the American South? Such regional comparisons would undoubtedly be enlightening, as noted earlier. Readily accessible regional data, however, are not easily available for Brazil.”30

When attempting to compare the Deep South U.S. and the Northeast of Brazil, more studies on poverty and racial inequality in Brazil have been conducted since Thomas

Skidmore wrote on this topic in 1972. The change in the scientific literature, especially evident since the late 1980s, reflects a growing recognition in Brazilian society that such racial inequalities are embedded in society, which previously denied that such inequalities existed. Another reason for the lack of comparative research at a sub-regional level has been the scarcity of racial data for Brazil. No national census was taken in that country in

1910 or 1930, and the censuses of 1900, 1920, and 1970 contain no information on

29 Ibid. p. 70. 30 Skidmore, Thomas E. "Toward a comparative analysis of race relations since abolition in Brazil and the United States." Journal of Latin American Studies4.01 (1972): 1-28. 17 race.31 Studies examining the impact of structural variables such as agrarian production on school performance in the U.S. have received greater attention in the Deep South U.S. than in Brazil. Horace Mann Bond’s Negro Education in Alabama (1939), stressing how economic factors influenced education, remains a landmark in the literature. In Brazil, and especially the Northeast where agriculture has historically been important for the economy, the country’s schooling performance remains unexplored. Naritomi et al.

(2007) offers one of the first attempts to compare periods of Brazilian agrarian production with institutional quality and provision of public goods. Few, if any, comparative studies of the Northeast of Brail and the Deep South U.S. have been conducted.

Definitions:

The definitions of the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil have changed overtime. The Northeast of Brazil includes nine states: Alagos, Bahia, Ceara,

Maranhao, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Piaui, Rio Grande do Norte, and Sergipe.32 In this paper, the Deep South refers to six states of the Confederacy where plantation slavery was most prevalent, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South

Carolina.

Research Question:

31 Andrews, George Reid. "Racial inequality in Brazil and the United States: a statistical comparison." Journal of Social History (1992): 229-263.p.230. 32 Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. p.6. 18

The plantation economy survived and adjusted after abolition. Today, the Deep

South and the Northeast of Brazil contain racial inequalities many years after slavery ended. How did social re-organization following the abolition of slavery contribute to the persistence of racial inequalities? How did the persistence of racial inequalities in a society impact the development of a society or country?

Hypothesis:

This paper, focusing on the plantation societies of the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil from the mid-19th century until 1940, examines how the social structures created during this time period contributed to the persistence of racial inequalities.

Hypothesis: This paper argues that racial inequalities persist because in societies that began with extreme inequalities, elites established social structures which continued to allocate resources along a basis of race.

Research Design:

This paper compares the post-abolition society of the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil. Comparative historical studies highlight aspects which are not inherent to a society and culture but instead are the result of similar social processes.

It is a method of social science that examines historical events in order to create explanations that are valid beyond a particular time and place. After examining similarities and the differences between the case studies, a casual explanation for the

19 phenomena is proposed based on the information. Past scholars who have employed this method include Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Barrington Moore, Jr., Theda

Skocpol, and Charles Tilly.

Many scholars and historians have remarked on the similarity of the Deep South and the Northeast of Brazil. The historian James Cobb pointed out suggestions that the

South may have more in common with Latin America than with the North are older than the Republic itself. A hierarchical social system and a dependence on plantation slavery caused many observers that the South was less like the southernmost part of the United

States than the northernmost outpost of the “extended Caribbean” or the “American tropics.”33 In the same vain C. Van Woodward wrote, “Few know what went on in the backcountry, the depressed sugar country of the northeast, Brazil’s counterpart of the

American South.”34 J.R. Mandel wrote:

In this way the U.S. South is dealt with as part of what Charles Wagely has called Plantation America, and it is argued that its problems of poverty and underdevelopment came from the same sources as did underdevelopment in such places as Guyana, Barbados, and the northeast of Brazil.35

In the second section of this paper, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and a historical-materialist analysis is utilized to examine the three most important variables of change in a plantation society. This paper compares the change of these variables over time. These three variables determined the course of change in each society. After noting the changes or stability of the plantation society this context is used to compare the creation of social services, specifically healthcare and education.

33 Cobb, James C., and William Whitney Stueck.Globalization and the American South. University of Georgia Press, 2005. p.94. 34 Woodward, C. Vann. “The Price of Freedom.” What Was Freedom's Price? Essays. University Press of Mississippi, 1978. p. 109. 35 Mandle, Jay R. The Roots of Black Poverty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978. 20

Section II

Comparing the Political Economy

Theory:

Before comparing the implementation of state services, it is necessary to compare the two societies of the case studies. Both economic factors and cultural factors impacted the development of Brazil and the United States. Constructing an analytical model can assist analysis by capturing the dominant variables in a society and demonstrate how they interacted. In the Marxist framework of historical materialism, the mode of production is placed at the center of analysis. In the classic understanding of Marxist political economy offered by Maurice Dodd two variables are considered the component elements of the mode of production. They are (1) the forces of production, representing the state of technology and the stock of plant and equipment and (2) the relations of production, a concept which includes the ownership of the equipment and the social relations between men which resulted from their connections with the process of production. Hobswam expands on this narrow conception of the base to include the “the complex set of mutually dependent relations among nature, work, social labor and social organization.”36

Capitalism can exist in societies which combine free labor with certain forms of coerced labor. Corresponding to this, in such societies there will be political structures which combine parliamentary democracy with other forms of political representation or more than one form of citizen status. In order to understand the relations between the different levels of a social formation, one must use additional concepts besides solely the

36 Katznelson, Ira. Marxism and the City. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992.p 83. 21 economic. Cultural questions are assigned to a superstructure. The superstructure of a society includes its culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, and state.

The relationship between the base and superstructure has attracted many interpretations over the years. G. A. Cohen argued there is a functional relationship between the superstructure and base. The base determines the superstructure, which in turn has autonomy of its own to stabilize and hold together the base. The relationship between the base and superstructure was not one-directional. Marx believed that not only did ideas grow out of social existence, “but that they also took on a life of their own and had a feedback effect on the dynamic of the society.”37 This causal relationship is not made clear when it is assigned only a superstructure role.

The social structures in the society which create racial inequalities can be mapped accordingly:

Superstructure Cultural Hegemony

Base structure Social Relations and Forces of Production

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony contends that a dominant class alliance wins over the whole social formation, not only at the level of political and ideological leadership, but also in civil, intellectual and moral life, over civil society as well as the state. The superstructure’s relationship to the base allows the ruling elite to dominate a culturally diverse society by imposing a worldview that is becomes pervasive throughout society. The status quo becomes accepted as natural and inevitable, rather

37 Mandle, Jay R.The roots of black poverty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978. p.5. 22 than as an artificial social construct that benefits only the ruling class. The result is that cultural hegemony reinforces social control by allowing a ruling elite to dominate a culturally diverse society without resorting to constant coercive violence. However, cultural hegemony has a dialectical relationship between power and resistance, a simultaneous double movement, each contributing to defining the other.38

The entire ideology of the social block is cemented and unified. Gramsci defines ideology as a conception of the world which has produced a cultural movement or a form of practical activity. This ideology is elaborated into everyday forms of consciousness affecting the broad masses of society. It is an ideology which touches the practical, everyday, common sense, and organizes human masses and creates the terrain on which men move and become conscious of their position. In its everyday form it is manifested as popular thought. There is never one, single, unified and coherent dominant ideology which pervades everything. There co-exist many systems and currents of philosophical thought. The relations of power among these ideologies form a discourse. It is clear that racism has critical ideological components. According to Gramsci's conception of ideology, racist ideologies may be filled with contradictions and be fragmentary in nature.

Anti-racist struggles must be fought in the ideological arena as well as the political and economic.

Societies built on racial hierarchies use cultural hegemony to maintain dominance throughout society. Power is dispersed and hegemony is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society and the state. Gramsci's conception of the state and the role it plays in maintaining hegemony is worth special consideration. The state is the point of

38 Persaud, Randolph B. Counter-hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. SUNY Press, 2001. p. 49.

23 condensation at which hegemony over society as a whole is exercised. However, Gramsci moved beyond classical Marxism which viewed the state as reducible to the coercive instrument of the ruling class. The state is not simply a coercive and administrative apparatus; it is also educative and formative. Every state, Gramsci argued, is 'ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class.'39 Gramsci connects his concept of cultural hegemony to the traditional Marxist question concerning the needs of the ruling class. In essence, Gramsci argued that the educative and formative aspects of a state perpetrate cultural hegemony and the interests of the ruling elite.

Cultural hegemony maintains control over society without direct violence or coercion, but it may at times develop into cultural violence. States educate and shape the great mass of society to a level that meets the interests of the elite. In social formations with different definitions of citizen and both free and coerced labor, there will be different levels that elites believe are appropriate for different classes of citizens. An agricultural elite has an incentive to invest in a low level of education and culture to maintain a cheap labor force. This tolerance by one group of society of persistent poverty and inequality afflicting another group is characterized by Johnn Galtung as cultural violence.

According to Galtung, cultural violence in society renders systemic inequalities and even direct violence as reasonable by changing the moral code of an act from wrong to either acceptable or correct. Similarly to Gramsci's description of cultural hegemony as a pervasive worldview, cultural violence is described as a permanence remaining basically

39 Hall, Stuart, Critical dialogues in Cultural Studies. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, and David Morley, eds. Routledge, 1996.p.429,

24 unchanged for long periods of time.4041 Cultural violence works through the psychological mechanism of internalization.

A cultural hegemonic ideology of racism prevalent throughout society constrained

Blacks at the center of concentric circles of oppression. At the center of this oppressive society, Blacks were denied freedom of movement within the labor market and prevented from having the freedom to achieve other opportunities. When slavery ended, the slave owner's position in society was no longer protected by law or custom, nor did he have the mechanism of slavery to compel a cheap work force. In this situation, racial categorizations in social hierarchies became perhaps more important because, as Van den

Berghe argued, the underlying motivation was competition, not paternalism.42 The economist Amartya Sen wrote that an individual's freedoms depend on many determinants; “such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussion and scrutiny).”43 Similarly, cultural hegemony is not sustained through the exclusive use of state instruments, but rather power is dispersed and hegemony is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society. The elite employed many different institutions to deny the agency of Blacks. Schooling, the family, churches and religious life, cultural organizations, gender, sexual and ethnic identities, support hegemony by reproducing different societies in a racially structured form.

However, the first step in the post-abolition world to restrict the Black's freedom was

40 Galtung, Johan. "Cultural violence." Journal of peace research 27.3 (1990): 291-305. p.294. 41 This description of culture changing slowly over time while events are perceived as specific incidents is drawn from the French Annales school of history. This approach is associated with Fernand Braudel. The longue durée designates an approach to the study of history which gives priority to long-term historical structures over events. 42 Van Den Berghe. Race and racism: A comparative perspective. New York, Wiley, 1967. p29. 43 Sen, Amartya. Freedom as Development. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 1999. p. 36.

25 denying political control to Blacks. Without the vote workers could not wrest concessions from the oligarchy.

The hierarchical forces of oppression which control a field hand's place in the labor market can also be mapped horizontally and spatially as concentric circles of oppression radiating outward through society.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Economic base 1. Social relations of production: forces constraining the movement of a laborer within labor markets shape identity: a. Psychologically b. Physically c. Sexually Cultural hegemony constrains the laborer through: 2. Social Norms and Taboos 3. Paramilitary violence 4. State laws 5. National influence

The plantation economy, distinct from feudal or capitalist, was an economic unit which created a specific social organization. The level of technology in plantations requires a large number of workers, or field hands. A nonmarket mechanism, the coercion of slavery and later the coercion of peonage or sharecropping, is required to

26 ensure a sufficient supply of workers and this defines the class relations. The culture which emerges reinforces those class relations. At the top of this economic and social organization is the power and authority of the planter elite, which espoused a cultural hegemony of white superiority. There is a dialectical relationship between cultural hegemony and the mode of production. Cultural hegemony in one sense is created by the needs of the mode of production and in turn legitimizes and holds together the mode of production. By examining two variables of the mode of production- class structure and technology, and the third variable, a cultural hegemony of racism, this paper will trace how the racial hierarchy of the plantation economy survived slave emancipation. Noting the importance Gramsci placed on the role of the state in creating social structures to elevate the population, or keep it in place, this paper argues that states used social services to maintain racial hierarchies, and inequalities, during the economic transition from agriculture to industry.

The Origins of the Plantation Complex

The Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil were both geographic regions encompassed by the plantation complex. At its height, this plantation complex

“ultimately stretched from Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil to the Mason-Dixon.”44

The plantation complex refers to an economic and political order centering on slave plantations in the new world tropics, which, “during the century centered on about

1800…played an important role in the European-dominated portion of the world

44 Curtin, Philip D.The rise and fall of the plantation complex: essays in Atlantic history. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p. x. 27 economy.”45 The first sugar-plantations involving slave labor were built by the

Portuguese on the Atlantic islands of Maderia and Sao Tome, off the coast of West Africa.

The Portuguese brought the spread of racial slavery and sugar plantations to the

Caribbean and Brazil.

Climate was a primary role in determining the geographic distribution of plantations and slavery. The tropical American lowlands were most suitable for mono- culture crops of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton. Economic development of any kind needed labor. The tropical lowlands along the coasts or in the interior had much lower population densities and were more open to the spread of diseases among the native population. During the New World colonization the native population in the Americas was decimated by disease. It was estimated that when the Spanish arrived on the island of

Hispanola “it must have had a native population of approximately a million. In 1508 it had only 60,000; in 1554, 30,000; and so on, until in 1570 … scarcely 500.”46 African slave labor was the solution.

The economic model of slavery impacted the social development of plantation societies. Slavery necessitated a social hierarchy and social controls to reinforce the racial division of labor.47 The landed elite, which were dependent on large supply of cheap labor, were the most consistent in enforcing the racial hierarchy. The equal political participation of a democracy is incompatible with a racial hierarchy enforced by social control. Barrington Moore hypothesized that large landowners engaged in “labor

45 Curtin, Philip D.The rise and fall of the plantation complex: essays in Atlantic history. p,. ix. 46Mellafe, Rolando.Negro Slavery in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. p. 20. 47 Ibid. p. 100. 28 repressive” agriculture would be the most implacable opponents of democracy.48

The economic and social structure of plantations influenced the collective psychological disposition of the ruling elite. The hierarchal society in Brazil and the

United States was demarcated by race. Slavery in ancient Roman had no color line. There was no single and clearly defined slave race or slave caste. In contrast, in the Americas a slave holding mentality developed in which whiteness meant freedom and dark skin meant servitude. English colonists probably inherited their racial prejudice from Spanish and Portuguese slave traders. The scholar James H. Sweet argues that in turn “Iberian

Christians took over and magnified Muslim stereotypes of black slaves.”49 Once ingrained in Western European thought, biological assumptions based on cultural collisions centuries past were exported to the new world.

Slavery in the Americas created a racial caste system in which members of the racial caste were considered “not merely as social inferiors but as permanent aliens or social outcasts.”50 An example of how the definition of slave changed to adopt a racial caste system is found in colonial Virginia:

At first the Virginia legislature struggled over how to define a slave. On Oct 3, 1670 it was declared that “all servants not being Christians imported into this country by shipping shalbe slave for life.” In 1682 the definition of slave was reclassified. In short, any imported Negro was presumed to be a slave, no matter what his religious or national background. So logical a connection would the status of slave and the color black or brown have in Virginia slave codes that, in later years, a Negro or Mulatto was automatically presumed to be a slave and it was incumbent upon him to prove otherwise.51

482 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. Capitalist Development and Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1992. 49 Davis, D. B. Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives. The American Historical Review. (2000). 105 (2), 452-466. p.463. 50 Hamilton, Chalres V., Lynn Huntley, Neville AlexandeR, Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimaraes, and Wilmot James Eds. Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. p.19. 51 Klein, Herbert S. Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virigina and Cuba. Ivan R. Dee Publisher. 1988. p. 47. 29

There were differences between the racial hierarchies of Brazil and the United

States. In Brazil race was viewed along a continuum while the United States developed a bi-color model. In Brazil the three most common racial categorizations are whites, pardos, or mixed, and pretos, or blacks. The permeable color line in Brazil was caused by a greater freed black population and an early history of master-slave miscegenation.52

Initial Portuguese colonial migration included relatively fewer Europeans, and

Portuguese women came later, leading to greater miscegenation between white planters and slave mistresses. In contrast to Brazil, in the U.S. South, the plantation society grew up alongside a permanent colony model in which there were many English families. The race line between Blacks and whites was vigilantly maintained in the British colonies and later codified in the United States under the “one drop rule.”

The American Wars for Independence from colonial rule, beginning with the

United States and then spreading to South America, did not disrupt the plantation complex. Barrington Moore wrote that the American Revolution “did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society.”53 Many of the revolutionary leaders were slave owners and consideration of where free blacks fit in America was never considered in the constitutional debate.54 When the revolutionary winds reached Latin

America, the landed Creole elite looked to the American Revolution for inspiration. In contrast to the excessive violence against the aristocracy in France and Haiti, the

American Revolution reassuringly presented the “tranquil, patrician image of

52 Boxer, Charles Ralph.The golden age of Brazil, 1695-1750: growing pains of a colonial society. Univ of California Press, 1975. p. 177. 53 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. "Capitalist development and democracy." Cambridge, UK (1992). p.112-113. 54 Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p.12. 30 revolutionaries such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson living in wealth and surrounded by slaves.”55 Brazil was also caught in the revolutionary fervor. Slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists wanted to use the liberal republican ideology as a weapon against slavery and racial privilege. For them, these liberal principles meant the overturning of slavery and of all legal distinctions based on race.56 When Brazilian independence was declared in 1822, however, it was as a fundamentally conservative movement that removed Portuguese rule but maintained intact virtually all the institutions created by colonialism. Slavery, the plantations, and even the monarchy all remained in place.

The Plantation Complex and Abolition

The biggest revolution to the plantation complex was not independence but abolition. In Brazil and the United States abolition was a very different experience. In

1872 Brazil numbered 6.1 million Blacks compared with 3.7 million whites.”57 On May

13, 1888 Princess Reget Isabel signed the Golden Law, completely abolishing slavery.

Brazil was the last Christian country to abolish slavery in 1888.58 In comparison, the emancipation experience of the South dwarfed all others in scale and magnitude. Four

55 Grossman, Edith. Forward to The General and His Labyrinth. Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tran: Edith Grossman. Everyman’s Library. 1990. p. xi. 56 Andrews, George Reid. "Black and White Workers: São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1928." The Hispanic American Historical Review 68.3 (1988): 491-524. p.30. 57 Hamilton, Charles V., ed. Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Lynne Rienner Pub, 2001. P.121. 58 As one old verse goes: Everything in this world changes, Only the life of the Negro remains the same: He works to die of hunger, The 13th of May fooled him Johnson, Paul Christopher. "Law, Religion, and “Public Health” in the Republic of Brazil." Law & Social Inquiry/ 26.1 (2001): 17. 31 million slaves were manumitted in the South, eight times that of Brazil in 1888.59 Also unique to the South’s experience was the cost of the terrible war fought to end slavery.

While wars contributed to the end of slavery in Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil, none were comparable to the magnitude of the Civil War and the 623,000 soldiers that died.60

The assimilation of free slaves into society posed a unique problem to both the

United States and Brazil. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the period which follows the abolition of slavery has therefore always been a time of uneasiness and social difficulty.

This is an inevitable evil; we must resolve to meet it, or make slavery eternal.”61 The

United States’ approach of reconstruction in the Deep South was without parallel in

Brazil, and at the time it marked the federal government’s most intensive effort to address black poverty. In the 1867 elections, close to 70 percent of the one million newly eligible blacks registered and black voter turnout was between 70 and 90 percent.62 The

Freedmen’s Bureau provided food rations and established more than forty hospitals and

4,300 schools. Black literacy rose from 10 to 50 percent between 1865 and 1890 and black per capita income increased 46 percent from 1860 to 1880.63 While the South lost at Gettysburg and Appomattox, it won Reconstruction. In an 1877 deal with Southern

Senators, President Hayes declared the end of reconstruction, and demobilized and removed Federal armies from the South. The end of Reconstruction marked the failure of the central state to consolidate its authority. Instead, in an attempt to maintain northern and southern white unity, blacks were abandoned to southern regional elites.

59 Woodward, C. Vann. "The Price of Freedom." What Was Freedom's Price (1978): 93-113.Ed. David Sansing, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008. P.96 60 Woodward, The Price of Freedom. p. 100. 61 Ibid. p. 101. 62 Marx, Anthony W. Making race and nation: A comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p. 129. 63 Marx, Anthony.. p.130.

32

Abolition formed a direct threat to the planter class in both Brazil and the United

States. In the Deep South many planters felt that the imposition of being forced to suffer beneath blacks in political office was a particularly egregious insult. In both locations planters set about to structure post-emancipation social, political, and economic arrangements in such a way as to ensure that their interests would not be directly challenged.

The Deep South Cultural Hegemony of Racism The Southern planter elite who returned to power after the civil war continued to employ the same ante-bellum methods of social dominance and control. They utilized cultural hegemony as a non-violent from of social control.64 Southern whites were split

64 In his 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese applied Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to the white maters of the slave South. Cultural hegemony is the world view of the elite that is imposed on a diverse society so that social hierarchies are viewed as natural, rather than social constructs which benefit the elite. Genovese placed paternalism at the center of the master-slave relationship. He argued that both masters and slaves embraced paternalism, though for different reasons and with varying notions of what paternalism meant. For the slave owners, paternalism allowed them to think of themselves as benevolent. Slaves, on the other hand, recognized that paternalist ideology could be twisted to suit their own ends, by providing them with improved living and working conditions. Certainly, friendships developed by master and slave, and blacks and whites were mutually dependent on each other in many different ways. However, paternalistic views of slaves as children in need of help were based on white supremacy. A Virginian planter said of a freed slave that “The Negro stands as much in need of a master to guide him as a child does” (Been in the Storm:359). White paternalism revealed an ignorance of black attitudes. In a form of revisionist history after the Civil War, many whites argued that a kind of benevolent patriarchy had characterized slavery. Paternalism existed to absolve white guilt. There are two specific criticisms of Genovese’s concept of paternalism. First, Genovese failed to account for the presence of indirect violence that put the slave in an inequitable relationship. Melvin Leiman, in a Political Economy of Racism, wrote that virtually all contemporary studies of American slavery, including Genovese: “Do not cut to the marrow of one vital aspect of the slave system- every instrument of persuasion from brute force to accomdationism (acknowledged by Genovese), and even some extension of social privileges (as a modest cooptation device) was employed to enforce and reinforce the power and interests of a ruling class over its subjects.” (Leiman, Political Economy of Race p. 22.). The essential brutality and inhumanity of the system cannot be overlooked. Secondly, Genovese’s concept of paternalism fails to account for the double nature of the relationship between master and slave. According to a review of Genevese’ work, the underlying flaw to Genovese’ analysis is “it is one-sided. The slave was split between two worlds, possessed by and possessing a ‘doubleness’ which could not be superseded” (King. 1977: 130).

33 along class lines. On one side was the relatively small plantation aristocracy. In 1860 only about 8,000 planters, less than 2 percent of the population owned 50 or more slaves. The large non-slaveholding class of whites resented but did not often challenge the planter elite’s hegemony, because at the same time they feared the potential or actual competition of slaves and free men of color. In the post reconstruction era, “whites clung unwaveringly to the old doctrine of white supremacy and innate Negro inferiority that had been sustained by the old regime.”65 A culture of innate black inferiority continued to be perpetuated in the South.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the Progressive spirit swept over

America and racist ideology was buttressed by the pseudo-science of eugenics, which developed as a transatlantic dialogue between Britain and American intellectuals. One of the most vocal exponents of this racial ideology was Madison Grant. The Passing of the

Great Race (1916) is Grant’s most famous attempt at describing a racial hierarchy which would thereby reaffirm the importance of the 'Nordic” race. He saw a social status as determined by race and worried that immigration and the mixing of the races would subsume or dilute the blood and therefore character of the 'Nordic people' of America.

The eugenics movement believed the health of the population could be maintained through the elimination of degenerate people. Domestically, they worked to pass measures including sterilization, immigration restriction, and marriage restriction.66 The

Passing of the Great Race was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the

65 Woodward, C. Vann.The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press, USA, 2001. p.23. 66 Burgers, Johannes Hendrikus. "Max Nordau, Madison Grant, and Racialized Theories of Ideology." Journal of the History of Ideas 72.1 (2011): 119-140. 34

Nazis when they took power, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that, "The book is my

Bible.”67

Beneath the placid appearance of permanent dominance, hegemony was a fluid struggle, a constant remaking and rebuilding of beliefs and boundaries. In the 1920s, new

Black ideologies challenged ideologies of white supremacy and Black inferiority. The

Garvey movement vocalized a message that Black people, Black culture, Black history and Africa were and rivaled Western civilization. “This praising of things Black flew in the face of hegemonic beliefs.”68 The Harlem Renaissance and the literary movement it produced in the 1920s carried a similar message. It created, through protest literature, a

“New Negro” proud of Black heritage and prepared to fight for Black liberation.69

The ideology of white supremacy, when internalized by whites and Blacks as the pervasive view in society, had important psychological implications. In Southern white society this ideology served an important purpose by reducing class conflicts between white elites and poor whites.

The white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while they had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment (Du Bois 1935:700).

67 Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press. (29 September 2010). 68 Morris, Aldon D. "A retrospective on the civil rights movement: Political and intellectual landmarks." Annual Review of Sociology. (1999): 517-539. p. 520. 69 Ibid.

35

The permanence of this view in society negatively affected blacks and morally corrupted whites. The psychological impact of racial stigma was cited in 1954 by the

Supreme Court as evidence to support ending racial segregation in the United States. The

Court asserted that, “[t]o separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”70 Another psychological affect was an aspiration exhibited by some Blacks to whiteness. John Dollard wrote that “whiteness represented full personal dignity and participation in American society.”71 One of Dollards' sources reported that his mother encouraged marrying a lighter skinned woman, because his mother felt that lighter- skinned blacks received more concessions from whites. Dollard's source could advance his own status by marrying a light skinned woman.72

Blacks developed methods psychological of resistance in the face of constant interaction with this ideology of racism. This resistance took form in regards to how

Blacks presented themselves. “The slave was split between two worlds, possessed by and possessing a ‘doubleness’ which could not be superseded.”73 Slaves and African-

Americans in general often projected one image for “white America,” while concealing their true feelings and sentiments in order to facilitate interactions in a racially divided society. This is expressed in the old folk song:

Got one mind for white folks to see, ‘Nother one for what I know is me;

70 Brown, 347 U.S. At 494 as quoted in Oh, Reginald. "Interracial Marriage in the Shadows of Jim Crow: Racial Segregation as a System of Racial and Gender Subordination."UC Davis Law. Review. 39 (2005): 1321. p. 2328. 71 Dollard, John. Class and Caste in a Southern town. New Haven (1937). p. 67. 72 Ibid. p.69. 73 King, Richard H. "Marxism and the Slave South." American Quarterly 29.1 (1977): 117-131. p.130. 36

He don’t know, He don’t know my mind.74

It is also the sentiment behind Paul Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.”

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.75

The impact of an ideology of racism extended from the realm of psychology to controlling sexual relations. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population.” At the heart of this economic and political problem of population, at the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains, was sex. A racial caste maintains the status quo inherited from slavery, defining a superior and inferior group and regulating group members' behavior. Its most distinctive mark is on marriage and sexual prohibition. In order to preserve the 'color line' in Southern society a union of members of the two castes may not have a legitimate child.76

Miscegenation occurred, but in order to protect the color line, the most important factor was that the white father did not acknowledge his mixed offspring. The child was not considered “legitimate,” “i.e. openly recognized by the society as having a white father.”77

74 Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom. Vol. 530. Oxford University Press, USA, 1978. p.xiii.

75 Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Joanne M. Braxton, ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. 76 Dollard, John. "Class and Caste in a Southern town." New Haven (1937). p. 62. 77 Ibid. 37

Miscegenation between the races was considered taboo and both social and legal pressures were exerted to prevent it. Dozens of states throughout three hundred years passed laws banning marriage or miscegenation between races. Virginia court documents detail punishment for the crime of miscegenation between the races as early as the 1630s and 1640s.78 Influenced not simply by a history of racism but also by the scientific principles of racial eugenics, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity

Act of 1924, which forbade miscegenation on the grounds that racial mixing was

“scientifically unsound and would 'pollute' America with mixed-blood offspring.”79 The men who sponsored the legislation were mentored by Madison Grant. The pseudo- science of eugenics in the 1920s provided a facade masking the true intentions of men who wanted to maintain “white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority,” a

“respectable veneer for ancient prejudice.”80

The position of Blacks in Southern society was enforced most immediately by rules of social etiquette governing the interaction of whites and blacks. After abolition the old pretenses, the submissive demeanor projected in the presence of whites, was maintained. Whites continued to address adult Black men as “boys” and demanded being called “Massa.”81 Racial rules were symbols of racial subordination. A black man always had to remove his hat when speaking to a white. Other rules of etiquette similarly displayed and reinforced racial hierarchy. In Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1930s, Black

78 Klein, Herbert S. Slavery in the Americas: a comparative study of Virginia and Cuba. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. P.47. 79 Lombardo, Paul A. "Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia." UC Davis L. Rev. 21 (1987): 422. 80 Ibid. p.425. 81 Litwack, Leon F. Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Vintage, 1980. p.252-253. 38 people could not enter or leave a white's house by the front door.82 Etiquette helped to maintain boundaries, when they were crossed they were met with paramilitary violence.

More than two thousand blacks were lynched during the last two decades of the century.83

Between the end of Reconstruction and the modern Civil Rights era, the state of

Mississippi alone lynched 539 Blacks.84 Between 1930 and 1950 alone, Mississippi had at least 33 lynchings.85 Paramilitary violence was often carried out with the tacit approval, if not outright participation, of law authorities and the elite. Commenting on a proposed piece of civil rights legislation in 1946, Senator Bankhead of Alabama warned that the Klu Klux Klan would be revived “if you force this on us."86

At the end of reconstruction white planters in the Deep South set about to first re- assert political control. The legal expression of racial political domination in the South was Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws were passed between1876 and 1965 and mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states. The first laws placed limits on black political power. Southern states employed an array of “nonracial subterfuges,” including property and literacy requirements, and the poll tax, designed to avoid federal intervention and to deny the vote to blacks. In Tennessee gubernatorial elections, the black turnout fell from 60 percent in 1888 to none in 1890.87 The Southern planters not only excluded black voters, they also selectively disenfranchised whites who had sided

82 Harris, J. William. "Etiquette, lynching, and racial boundaries in southern history: A Mississippi example." The American Historical Review 100.2 (1995): 387-410. p.391. 83 Marx, Anthony W. Making Race and Nation: A comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p.141. 84 Charles Payne (1994) as quoted in Morris, Aldon D. "A retrospective on the civil rights movement: Political and intellectual landmarks." Annual Review of Sociology (1999): 517-539. p. 519. 85 Morris, Aldon D. "A Retrospective on the Civil rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks." Annual Review of Sociology (1999): 517-539. p. 519. 86 Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol. 3. Knopf, 2002. p.98 87Marx, Anthony W. Making Race and Nation: A comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p.140. 39 with the populists. In Alabama, “23.6 percent of the white, male voting-age population was disenfranchised by the poll tax alone.”88

The Southern States were able to create race laws without regard to federal intervention because they controlled the U.S. Senate. In Southern states election systems ensured political power resided in the country side. Georgia operated a miniature electoral college in which even the smallest county received two votes.89 This ensured that rural counties had more say then cities. By controlling local elections, the Southern political elite were able to ensure the re-election of their candidates year after year. Their secure path to re-election allowed Southern Senators to benefit from the United States

Senate’s seniority system. The Senate seniority system determined the Chairmanships of the Senate’s 15 Standing Committees. The Senator who has been in office the longest would be awarded the position of chairman and therefore control the committee’s agenda and which pieces of legislation could be brought for debate. The success of this system is evident when you consider that in 1859 every single Senate committee was chaired by a

Southern Senator.90 Ninety years later, in 1949, eleven of the fifteen Senate committees were chaired by a Southern Senator.91 Southern control of the Senate was so complete that the Senate was referred to as a Southern Institution and they used their power to prevent the government from passing any important civil rights legislation from the end of reconstruction until 1957. For example, in 1938 Southern Senators filibustered any attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation.92

88 Ibid. p.138. 89 Cobb, James. The South and America since World War II. Oxford University Press. 2010. P. 65. 90 Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol. 3. Knopf, 2002. p.90 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. p.97 40

In the face of political oppression and domination exercised by the state and civil society, underground forms of political resistance and communication remained important in the Black community.93 During slavery, community building took place between as well as on plantations and farms, as slaves not only formed and renewed relations with one another but also exchanged information, gossip, and rumor. One observer wrote that slaves “have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves; it will run several hundred miles in a week or fortnight.”94 By the early twentieth century the underground appeared to assume an increasingly encompassing character as black communities turned ever inward, avoiding as much as possible the gaze and fury of potential fury of whites, though it was ready to generate new rounds of activism as changing circumstances might allow.95 Political traditions and genealogies became embedded in long-established communities. These memories were kept vital by family stories, shared memories, and ongoing stories. Ella Baker, who helped found the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was the granddaughter of slaves. Baker writes that her grandfather’s community had a sense of independence, which provided “you with a sense of your own worth.”96 SNCC organizers in the Deep South in the 1960s encountered many political traditions and genealogies which enabled people over many decades to endure repression.97

93 Though this paper draws on A Nation Beneath Our Feet, other studies which document the continuity of Black protests and Black insurgent ideologies include Vincent Harding's (1983) study There Is A River and George Frederickson's (1995) Black Liberation. 94 Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to The Great Migration. Belknap Press, 2003. p. 41 95 Ibid. p.474. 96 Ibid, 97Ibid. p. 476. 41

At times these forms of resistance generated rounds of direct activism. In 1890, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance movement had 20,000 members in Arkansas, 290,000 in

Texas, 50,000 in Louisiana, 50,000 in Alabama.98 In Leflore county, Mississippi in 1889 cotton pickers who were members of Colored Alliance expressed their determination to go on strike in a letter to whites and 75 of them marched in a military style formation into the town of Shell Mound to deliver it. In September, three companies of the Mississippi

National Guard were called in and, in what became known as the “Leflore massacre,” more than forty members of the Colored Alliance were shot.99 African-Americans continued to launch protests attacking racial inequality in the South. Between 1900 and

1906 Southern Blacks developed boycott movements against Jim Crow streetcars in most

Southern cities.100

Base Social Relations of Production

The social relations of the South remained the same following the Civil War because the pattern of land ownership remained the same. The issue of land redistribution and whether to confiscate plantations and provide it to former slaves was viewed as the only means to break the power of the Southern plutocracy and create a new class of property owners and a new foundation for Southern society. Land confiscation was debated and defeated in Congress in 1866.101 Jonathan Wiener studied planters from five

Black Belt counties in Alabama and found that few new families came forward after the

98 Ibid. p. 423. 99 Ibid.. p. 422. 100 Morris, Aldon. A Retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 25 (1999). p. 517-539. p.520. 101 Mandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American economic experience since the Civil War. Duke University Press, 1992 p. 10.

42 war. On the contrary, the richest families between 1850 and 1860 before the war were the same families the following decade in 1870.102

At the moment of abolition, the Deep South’s economy was almost exclusively agrarian. From the planters’ perspective, the basic problem of emancipation and readjustment was retaining control over labor. Many did not believe they could bring blacks to work without coercion. They had a long standing view of blacks as poor workers. “No black, free or slave, in these Southern states, nor in any part of the known world, ever would work or ever will work unless he’s made to.”103 One solution considered was the large-scale importation of labor from either Asia or Europe. In 1866 the Southern states “organized companies, held conventions, even sent an agent to China to promote coolie imports, but the federal government frowned on the idea, the planters lacked capital, and only a handful of collies actually turned up in Dixie.”104 In 1904

Mississippi Delta planters tried to encourage Italian immigration by sponsoring a trip for the Italian ambassador, Baron Edmundo Mayor des Planches.105 Despite notions that they enjoyed sitting atop a racial caste system, planters would have jettisoned blacks and the accompanying racial hierarchy if a replacement in the cotton fields had been found.106

To meet labor demands of planters, blacks were forced into debt peonage and sharecropping. Peonage was a transitional state between slave and free labor. Similar labor systems emerged in Mexico, Latin America, and the Philippines after encomiendas and plantations were abolished. Peonage, a practice that gave employers complete control

102 Wiener, Jonathan M. Social Origins of the New South. Alabama: 1860-1885. (Baton Rouge, LA., 1978). 103 Litwack, Leon F. Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Vintage, 1980. p.363. 104 Woodward, C. Vann. "The Price of Freedom." What Was Freedom's Price (1978): 93-113.Ed. David Sansing, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008. p. 107. 105 Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p.320. 106 Ibid. 43 over their laborers, practically reinstituted slavery. Booker T. Washington observed in

1888 that the “colored people on these plantations are held in a kind of slavery that is in one sense as bad as the slavery of antebellum days.”107 Most blacks signed annual contracts. They took advances on their expected share of the crop. When settlement time came the next fall, the laborers often discovered that their share of the crop did not cover what they owed the planter. When planters used indebtedness as an instrument of compulsion, the system became peonage. By the beginning of the twentieth century one scholar of peonage would write that “the South resembled a backward colony, poverty- encrusted and dependent on Northern capital.”108 It was estimated in 1907 that in

Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi “investigations will prove that 33 1/3 percent of the planters operating from five to one-hundred plows, are holding their Negro employees to a condition of peonage.”109 Peonage evolved in Southern society to reach the point where a debt-labor system characterized by violence and the corruption or acquiescence of local police officers was openly tolerated.

Peons existed at the center, constrained by circles of oppression. In the 1880s and

1890s nearly every Southern state legislature had passed a contract-labor measure in which a laborer who signed a contract and then abandoned his job could be arrested for a criminal offense.110 However, much peonage stemmed from custom, not law. Local police in the cotton belt would arrest black laborers and hold them in jail until the planter arrived. Planters were allowed to pick field hands from jail cells. Prisoners were leased to

107 Daniel, Pete. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1972. p.ix. 108 Ibid. p.19. 109 Ibid. 22. 110 Ibid.p.25.

44 work off their debt on plantations or other heavy work. The line between slavery and peonage was blurry at best. Corrupt law enforcement officers worked closely with planters to maintain a system enforced by violence.

Another contributing factor to the control of a Black labor force in the Deep South was the lack of viable employment opportunities for Blacks outside of the South. Fifty years after slavery was abolished, on the eve of World War I, more than 90 percent of

Blacks still lived in the South. Due to racial prejudice Northern factory owners preferred white laborers over Blacks. From 1861 to 1920, 29.5 million immigrants arrived from

Europe.111 When white foreign immigrants were available, Northern factory owners did not want Blacks. No employment opportunities were available outside of the Deep South until the First World War disrupted the stream of immigrants for labor. Facing increased demand due to the war effort Northern factory owners became desperate for labor, even black labor. Between 1916 and 1919 500,000 blacks moved to the North. The momentum would continue.112

The national government’s unsuccessful efforts to protect blacks caught in peonage reflect an inability and unwillingness of the central government to project its power over the entire country and protect the rights of all citizens. Justice Department tried cases at times, but southern juries refused to return guilty verdicts. An official in

Florida explained that “no white jury will convict a white man for anything he might do to a Negro.”113 One of the most horrific cases involving peonage was the case of John

Williams. John Williams, the owner of a 2,000 acre plantation in Jasper County, Georgia,

111 Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p.268. 112 Ibid. p.284. 113 Daniel, Pete. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1972. p..33. 45 was convicted of murdering eleven black men to conceal evidence of peonage from

Federal agents. John Williams was the first Southern white man since 1877 to be indicted for the first-degree murder of a black- and he would be the last until 1966.114 Peonage continued into the 1920s. Often cases forwarded to the Justice Department remained uninvestigated and forgotten.115 Into the 1920s many planters continued to regard Blacks as private property.

Southern white cultural hegemony, the continued acceptance of Blacks as private property despite the ending of slavery, enabled white planters to maintain the social relations of production. An example is found in the 1927 Mississippi River flood.116 The flood was a major disruption to the operations of the surrounding plantations. The reaction of the planters in the Mississippi Delta revealed the authoritarian nature of their control. When the flood waters began to recede planters became concerned that black sharecroppers might run away and not return to the plantations. Black laborers were locked involuntarily behind gates until the waters receded from the fields and the laborers could return to work. One eyewitness reported to the Department of Justice of seeing

“people hurdled in camps of 5,000 or more and soldiers from the National Guard are used to let none out of these camps and to keep people on the outside from coming in and talking with them.”117 In other cases planters held “their labor at the point of a gun for fear they would get away and not return.”118 The custom of restricting the movement of

114 Ibid. p.16. 115 Ibid. p. 139. 116 In words that were all too prescient of Hurricane Katrina, Daniel Pete wrote “Natural disasters have a way of exposing the racial caste system of the South.” Daniel, Pete R.The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1990. 117 Daniel, Pete R.The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1990. p.153. 118 Daniel, Pete R.The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. University of Illinois Press, 1990. p.153. 46

Blacks had become so common it was accepted, especially by the Mississippi Guard soldiers who were from the same area. The custom of peonage prevailed and men were arrested for attempting to leave the plantations.

Despite living in a repressive society, Blacks resisted by organizing and attempting to form their own communities outside of the economic sphere of white society. Du Bois argued that African Americans must become the masters of their own economic destiny, and advanced the concept and strategy of “racial economic cooperation.” Similarly, Frazier argues that cooperative education and leadership are necessary to promote such developments and to “liberate the Negro from the present share crop system of farming.”119 If they could own land, then Blacks could exert control over their economic lives. Landownership is important because it is a form of wealth, not just income. As such, it can provide a spur to economic development and broader investment, including the education of children. In the Black Belt of the rural South, where most African-American farms were, and are, located, land was key to cultural and political power as well. Landownership became a form of economic resistance.

The government’s failure to implement a major land settlement program after

1865 for freedmen was a lost opportunity for independent farming.120 According to

Census surveys, the amount of acreage owned by non-white farmers in the South peaked at 12.8 million acres in 1910.121 There was a general movement down the agricultural ladder for most Black farm operators, from a higher rung of independent farm operators to a lower rung of sharecropper, which began in the 1890s and continued into the 20th

119 Frazier., Franklin “Cooperation and the Negro.” The Crisis. 1923. 25: 5 (March): 228-229. P.229. 120Reynolds, Bruce J. "Black farmers in America, 1865-2000: the pursuit of independent farming and the role of cooperatives." (2003). p.2. 121 Ibid. p.4. 47 century. The decline from a higher rung of economic mobility to a lower one was accompanied by conditions that became more restrictive and exploitative.122 The worsening conditions for black sharecroppers and tenants coincided with the beginning of the Jim Crow Era in 1890.

The most direct strategies for the pursuit of independent farming in the early 20th century were projects for coordinated land purchase. In the late 19th century, a few prosperous black communities emerged in the South.123 Booker T. Washington studied and wrote about some of the most successful rural communities, pointing to them as examples of economic uplift. Mound Bayou, MS, founded in 1887, became famous for establishing black-owned businesses and independent farms, and governance entirely by its black residents. The interaction between these agricultural education groups and some of the ideas of the cooperative movements in the late 19th century influenced the development of planned farming communities. Black land improvement companies were started in the late 1890s to coordinate purchases of large tracts that were subdivided and sold to black farmers at low interest rates. In 1886 the Colored Farmers Alliance and

Cooperative Union was established. The Alliance provided experience with cooperatives and introducing the application of unions to many black farmers. Tuskegee University initiated the Southern Improvement Company in 1901, followed by the Tuskegee Farm and Improvement Company (Baldwin Farms) in 1914.124 At about the same time the

Farmers’ Improvement Society of Texas was formed among black farmers. This

122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. p.7. 124Reynolds, Bruce J. A History of African-American Farmer Cooperatives, 1938-2000. USDA/RBS/Cooperative Services, 2001. p. 7. 48 association organized cooperatives and developed working relationships with the

University of Tuskegee.125

Forces of Production

The forces of production represent roughly the state of technology as well as the labor force present in the economy. The state of technology is important in Marxist thought because it is argued that changes in the state of technology leads to corresponding changes in the social organization of production. In 1930 the techniques of cotton production closely resembled the methods employed in 1865. Cotton still needed to be “chopped” and picked by hand. The result was a highly labor-intensive business in a society characterized by a racial caste system.126 An indicator that cotton lagged behind other crops in mechanization is found in Jacob Schmookler’s data on the number of patents granted for agricultural commodities.

Table 1. Average Annual number of patents granted for Grain and Corn Harvesting, Threshing, and Cutting and Cotton Harvesting, Picking and Chopping Plows: 1837/1859-1847/1919127 Year Cotton Grain Corn 1837-1859 1.2 10.3 12.4 1860-1879 11.1 35.4 34.2 1889-1899 25.9 57.2 48.7 1900-1919 46.1 47.1 63 Total Average 20.5 35.9 37.8

James H. Street, the principal historian of cotton technology, argues that technical difficulties were not the principal reasons that technology lagged in cotton production.

125 Ibid.p. 7 126Dattel, Gene. p.295. 127 Schmookler, Jacob, Patents, Invention and Economic Change, Data and Selected Essays, edited by Zvi Grileches and Lenid Hurwicz (Cambridge, Harvad University Press, 1972). p. 100-103.

49

Nathan Rosenburg developed a theory of “inducement mechanisms” to explain technological change.128 According to this theory technological advances occur when an urgent problem such as a labor shortage threatens to disrupt production and a technological innovation is then sought for to provide a solution. Jay Mandle advances the idea that the inverse of this theory could be true for cotton production. Attention was less devoted to technological change in cotton production because it confronted production disruptions less frequently.129 Indeed, cotton production continued to grow steadily. Per capita income rose in the South, but the rise remained linked to the fortunes of the world market demand for cotton. Post-war cotton production grew from 4.8 million bales in 1860 to 17 million bales in 1931.130 American cotton production was feared and envied by the world powers. It was extolled as “the only natural monopoly of a world- wide necessity.”131 The average annual trade surplus for the entire United States between

1910-1914 was $514 million, while average annual raw cotton exports were $551 million.132

Jay Mandle argues that the economic model of plantations retarded economic growth and technological innovation in societies. In plantation societies the entire social structure was built to prevent disruption to agricultural production. Planters were concerned about the raising value of labor. Racial discrimination and the threat of violence controlled black laborers. The lack of viable alternative employment possibilities kept a large labor supply on hand. Another factor was investment in

128Mandle, Jay R. The Roots of Black Poverty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978. p.7. 129Ibid. p. 67. 130Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p. 296. 131Ibid. p. 298. 132 Ibid.

50 education. As economic historian Gavin Wright has pointed out, in the South, there was low investment in education, which would have increased the value of laborers. Once workers were educated, they could leave to seek better employment opportunities elsewhere in the country, taking the value invested in their education with them.

Employers “could not [completely] block the mobility of workers to leave but they did not have to spend their money on an educational process likely to raise the probability of departure.”133 However, these mechanisms, while allowing for the continuation of labor intensive agriculture, they also prevented plantations from experiencing the incentives to advance technologically. The low educational attainment and the absence of technical skills in machine building, metallurgy, and so forth meant that the South failed to attract investments in development. The lack of technological change mandated the continuation of a labor-intensive agricultural process and a racial-caste social hierarchy.

Brazil In Brazil the pro-abolition campaigns and resistance to slavery by slaves and educated, middle-class whites was arguably the first time the povo, the people, “rose up to assert a role for itself in the setting of national policy.”134 Abolition brought panic to the ruling elite in Brazil. Post-1889- they utilized all the means at their disposal, including regulating the labor market and coercion to ensure compliance. There was no state program akin to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Afro-Brazilians were left on their own strategies, and the there was no substantive change in the position of blacks in the labor market. This, a point of departure between the American and Brazilian experience, was

133 Brand, Horst. "Old South, New South (Book Review)." Monthly Labor Review 111.5 (1988): 58. Business Source Premier. 134 Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil: 1888-1988. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1991. p.42.

51 one contributing factor as to why Brazil never established de jure segregation such as the

Jim Crow laws in the United States. Afro-Brazilians never gained political power comparable to the African-American situation during Reconstruction, and therefore there was no need to pass laws excluding Afro-Brazilians from full participation in civic and social life. De facto segregation enforced through social norms would suffice.

Cultural Hegemony of Racism An ideology of white superiority in Brazil had existed since the first slaves were brought to Brazil. Following abolition, the dominant Brazilian ideology of white superiority was influenced by European and North American racial science. As a result of a history of miscegenation dating back to colonial times, it was impossible for

Brazilian social scientists in the early twentieth century to define racial categories except that the darker a person was; the lower they were socio-economically. In the late 19th century, Raymundo Nina Rodrigues' ethnographic study of Afro-Brazilians focused on the African element in the country. He introduced the grave question as to how the Black race will hinder the state formation of Brazil. It was a warning that African-culture threatened to dominate Brazil.135 Inherent within this view was an assumption that the

African was genetically and culturally inferior, at the bottom of a strict, scientific, racial hierarchy dominated by Europeans. He wrote “we consider the immediate or long-term supremacy of the Raca Negra harmful to our nationality, and that its influence is prejudicial in all cases, restraining the progress and culture of our people.”136 The path of national development and the realization of civilization were viewed as the responsibility of the white man. “The black and the Indian...form a passive and unprogressive mass

135 Butler. Kim. p35 136 Ibid. p.59 52 upon which works...the formative action of the man of the white race.'137 This view represented the one shared by many elites; Africans were antithetical to modernization, a social ill and a national problem to be remedied.

Racial science was embraced by scientists and intellectuals in civil society who vocalized it in variety of fields and began to apply the concept to describe the backwardness of the Northeast. The Faculdade de Direito, the law school at Reciefe, embraced social Darwinism and the theories of Herbet Spencer. Euclydes da Cunha’s bestselling book employed racial and geographic determinism to describe the physical and mental characteristics of the northeastern people.138 Tobias Romero, another one of the group of intellectuals who studied race in the northeast at the Escola do Recife in the

1880s and 1890s, wrote that “the Negro is not only an economic machine, he is, above all else, and despite his ignorance, an object of science.”139

Between 1870 and 1920, Brazilian intellectuals and elites without exception came to embrace the idea of whitening, which posited that the Brazilian population could become whiter. Whitening operated at both the cultural and physical level. It constituted the idealization of European cultural aesthetics and an idealization of European physical aesthetics. It would be accomplished by subsuming African culture into white culture and, through the influx of white Europeans and “constructive miscegenation,” the bleeding out of African genes. This combination would create a whiter “Brazilian” race.

In the late 1910s a scientific movement of eugenics supported the idea of whitening.

Seventy-four major publications were released on eugenics between 1897 and 1933.140

137 Ibid. p.40. 138 Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2011. p.51. 139 Ibid. p. 52. 140 Butler, Kim. 53

The Sao Paulo Eugenics Society was created in 1918. The social and cultural objectives of Brazilian elites were directed toward policies aimed at containing the African element in public life to create a new European-based Brazilian society. The eugenicists advocated a long-term approach of tempering racial deficiencies through such measures as education, sanitation, and social reforms. A more immediate solution was immigration.

Brazilians evaluate race primarily according to phenotype, offering a spectrum of fluid and ambiguous categories, whereas North Americans until recently followed the one-drop rule and the bi-polarization of race as either white or black. Every day discourse focused on color, hair, and facial features without identifying specific racial types. A person's class was decided not just by color but also by context. As a result of the eugenics movement and adoption of whiting as official state policy, by the time Gilberto

Freye began to write about Brazilian race relations in the 1930s most Brazilians had embraced the concept that a new national race was emerging as the result of the intermingling of Africans, Europeans, and indigenous blood. Gilberto Freye wove this concept into the national identity of Brazil. He described racial miscegenation between white male colonialists and indigenous females in the early days of Brazil's colonization.

“The milieu in which Brazilian life began was one of sexual intoxication.”141 He turned this unequal “love affair” into a celebration of interracial sexuality as well as into an argument for how Brazil was different and morally superior to the United States. For

Freye, the white colonialists' desire for dark-skinned women fueled racial miscegenation and contributed to a lack of racial prejudice. This fantasy of interracial sex (ignoring the

141 Freyre, Gilberto, and Samuel Whitehall Putnam. The Masters and the Slaves-[Casa-Grande & Senzala.] A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilisation. Translated from the Fourth and Definitive Brazilian Edition by Samuel Putnam. Alfred A. Knopf, 1946. p.85. 54 unequal power relationships between master and slave) as proof of Brazil as a “color- blind democracy” distorted the perception of race relations in Brazil.

What is missed in Gilberto Freye’s argument is the point that while certain idealized representations of mixed-race women were appreciated for their beauty, and presented as evidence of racial harmony, other characteristics of “Blackness” were deemed to be detrimental and alien to the national culture. Combined, the twin myths that

Brazil is different and that Brazil is a racial democracy produces a “Brazilian racial hegemony.”142 This constitutes a powerful ideology which shapes society while also impeding counter-arguments concerning racism. It impedes discourses on racism because it denies that racism or racial categories exist at all in Brazil.143 The hegemony of racial democracy appears to value all three cultures of the European, African, and indigenous equally. In reality it was created from the assumption that the dominant European culture must absorb subordinate indigenous and African cultural elements. 144

Whitening constituted the idealization of European cultural aesthetics and an idealization of European physical aesthetics. Expressions of Afo-Brazilian culture and religion were closely related to Yoruba and other African religions, and embodied an

“otherness” that white elites wanted to erase from Brazilian culture. Cultural displays of capoeira and religion became a space of contestation to a greater extent in Brazil then in the Deep South. Brazilian elites believed that because these traditions were closer to their

Yoruba influence, they represented a greater threat to the nation. Public displays of Afro-

Brazilian culture were framed as incompatible with the maintenance of public morals and

142 Hanchard, Michael George. Orpheus and Power: The" Movimento Negro" of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil 1945-1988. Princeton University Press, 1998. 143 Butler, Kim D. Freedoms given, freedoms won: Afro-Brazilians in post-abolition, Sao Paulo and Salvador. Rutgers University Press, 1998. p.50.

55 order.145 Africans express themselves and their culture on the public streets of Salvador during Carnival. In doing so they crossed a boundary in the public sphere, against the perceived Africanization of Bahian culture. Police targeted Afro-Brazilian religious expressions, dance and music, and capoeira. These were considered uncivilized and primitive, and hence inappropriate for public display. However, in the 1930s, Brazilian religious expressions were co-opted instead of overtly repressed. Authorities began allowing pubic expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture such as samba to appear publicly.

The Vargas regime used Afro-Brazilian religious traditions to promote an image of racial democracy.

The Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion and other cultural activities, such as

Carnival, functioned as space for resistance for the Afro-Brazilian population on many different levels. Expressions of self-determination outside the strictly sphere of political parties and electoral processes have political repercussions and are political acts. In the

Northeast, the most direct activism on the part of Afro-Bahian collective groups between

1888 and 1938 was directed toward the protection of cultural freedoms.146 These included what became known as the “African” Carnival clubs and the many congregations of

Candomblé. The simple act of manifesting African cultural forms was a political act of self-determination because that resisted the dominant hegemonic culture. The act stated their right to exist and expressed Black agency. It provides a space for the renewal of self-esteem for all those exposed to the daily mistreats and discrimination by the privileged classes. At the same time, African religion provided for institutional spaces to organize the community. The Candomblés offered practical assistance to the poor who

145 Bulter, Kim. p.201. 146 Butler, Kim. p.133 56 made up the membership base. One Brazilian commented that “the Candomblé organization offered the only social insurance of value to the blacks. If a man, or a woman, were poor, his temple group would try to help him out. They would try to get him a job or introduce him to somebody useful or, if he were in trouble with the police, would hide him with no questions.”147 Candomblés’ ability to deliver vital social services and provide resources garnered support for the organization in much the same function as a political party. In the post-abolition era, Afro-Brazilians resisted cultural hegemony in both the social and culture areas through collective activism.

Political control allowed the planter elite to maintain the social hierarchy after abolition. In 1889 Brazilian planters peacefully overthrew the monarchy and replaced it with a decentralized Republic controlled and dominated by agrarian elites “It proved to be the perfect vehicle for planter rule.”148 Political participation measured in suffrage was more restricted than the monarchy as the electoral system excluded 98 percent of the population.149 The Republic represented the planters’ effort to contain and reverse the political, social, and economic consequences of that revolution (abolition). In the decentralized republic, the mechanism which allowed the planter elite to control the rural northeast was the political control afforded by the coronel. The coronel was frequently a land owner who dominated social, political, and economic institutions in the rural northeast from 1850-1950. Coronelism literally means colonel, a reference to the military rank many local political bosses held in the municipal or county National Guard. This planter elite was expected to deliver votes and military recruits and maintain social order,

147Butler, Kim. p.206. 148Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil: 1888-1988. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1991. p.43. 149 Butler, Kim. P.30. 57 which he accomplished by commanding the private armies in their municipios.150 In the absence of a centralized state, regional political elites were the only institutions of power.

It was a government designed to accommodate the interests of a landed elite.

In politics, corenelism represented the antithesis of the acceptance of a higher authority. A national system of party politics failed to develop in Brazil, and instead state parties were represented at the federal level. By 1900 a doctrine of the “politics of governors” was in place. In each state different oligarchic families controlled their individual muncipio. The municipio was the seat of the local legislature. Coronels used violence to prevent voter registration and often resorted to padding voting rosters and buying votes to obtain the vote they wanted.151 Elections in the First Republic were a collaborative effort at fraud between the coreneis who controlled the municipios, and the state governors who controlled the legislature. While each coronel controlled an individual muicipio, a statewide network of political clientele never emerged. The diversified economy, the isolation of scattered economic activities, and difficult communication and transportation links were some of the factors that discouraged the rise of a familiocratic oligarchy to the state level in Bahia.152

Despite being deprived of political rights by the 1889 Constitution, Afro-

Brazilians continued to organize politically. Increasing industrialization in cities such as

Sao Paulo and Salvador increased networks and facilitated the forging of solidarity in the workplace.153 The Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazilian Black Front) was founded in 1931

150 Pang, Eul-Soo. Bahia in the First Brazilian Republic: Coronelismo and Oligarchies, 1889-1934. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1979. p.9. 151 Ibid. p.16. 152 Ibid. p.150. 153 Reiter, Bernd. "What’s New in Brazil’s “New Social Movements?." Latin American Perspectives 38.1 (2011): 153-168. 58 and had a membership of about 200,000 members in 1936 before the government of

Getúlio Vargas outlawed it.154 In the city of Salvador, the first black political organizations were the Associação Tipográfica da Bahia (Bahia Typesetters’ Association), founded in 1870, and the Centro Operário (Workers’ Center), founded in 1894. They were both suppressed by the Vargas regime beginning in 1930.155 Kim Butler argues that political organizing was not necessarily an option in Bahia for several reasons. Not only was political organizing outlawed at times, it was also typically dependent on organizing opportunities provided at the workplace. She argues that due to the barely industrialized context of poor Bahia, where many poor Brazilians were marginalized to the economic peripheral, Afro-Brazilians in Bahia were more inclined to organize in the cultural realm.156

Social Relations of Production With political power secure, planters turned to securing control over labor.

Brazilian planters were pessimistic about employing free blacks. In 1898 a Pernambuco state senator argued that libertos were inherently lazy, a trait characteristic of “countries where the weather is hot.”157 Given the combined effects of scientific racism and the ideologia da vadiagem, planters in the Northeast and throughout Brazil turned to

154 Ibid. 155Ibid. 156Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2011. p. 77.

157 Kim, Butler. Freedom Given, Freedoms Won. 59 immigration as a solution. As early as 1857, a merchant association formed to promote immigration to the state of Pernambuco.158

Immigration was a deliberate public policy aimed at “rubbing out the black stain” and “purifying the nation's racial stock.” Between 1890 and 1914, more than 1.5 million

Europeans arrived in Sao Paulo alone, 64 percent with travel fare paid by the state government, the majority of them Italian peasants.159 The massive state-subsidized

European immigration by law excluded “undesirable races.” European immigration, in addition to providing an additional source of labor, was intended to contribute to the

“improvement” (the whitening) of Brazilian racial stock.”160 The goal announced by the

Brazilian delegate to the 1911 Universal Races Congress in London was to eliminate

African descendants by the year 2012. Both in the United States and in Brazil authorities encouraged the importation of Europeans.

The conditions European immigrants found in Brazil were far from the paradise they were promised. Planters noted that in order to have cheap labor:

“‘It is impossible to have low salaries, without violence, if there are few workers and many people who wish to employ them.” And by 1888: ‘It is evident that we need laborers…in order to increase the competition among them and in that way salaries will be lowered. Supply and demand replaced the violence and coercion of slavery as a means of organizing production.”161 Coffee planters and industrialists drove their immigrant labor as ruthlessly as they had driven slaves.162 Planters restricted workers’ mobility through debt peonage and

158 Blake, Stanley. p. 37. 159 Hamilton, Charles V., ed. Beyond racism: race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Lynne Rienner Pub, 2001. P.122. 160 Ibid. p.123. 161 Andrews, George, p. 58 162Woodward, C. Vann. "The Price of Freedom." What Was Freedom's Price (1978): 93-113.Ed. David Sansing, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008. P.108. 60 intimidation.163 Often the planters put hired European workers under the control of overseers and hired gunmen who had continued many of the brutal practices of the slave regime.164 In 1902, the Italian government officially prohibited its citizens from accepting subsidies for travel to Brazil, and the Swiss Consul in Brazil was actively investigating several accounts of persecution.165

In the rural economy of Brazil, Blacks lost out to white workers. Political scientist

Paula Beiguelman describes the rural economy of the prosperous Sao Paulo state as a two-tier, racially segmented labor market, with an upper level of “foreign wage-earners, who toward the eventual accumulation of cash savings; and a second, Brazilians, for the painful and difficult tasks rejected by the first.”166 In the countryside, white workers, who were almost exclusively immigrants, quickly became concentrated in the most prosperous coffee growing regions in the West. Black workers either retreated to more depressed parts or held the least desirable jobs on the plantations. The relative poor economy of the

Northeast discouraged immigration, which remained majority Afro-Brazilian. Afro-

Brazilians were still kept in a subordinate position in the market for manual labor. Their exclusion from worker reinforced “racist assumptions concerning the unemployability of

Black people.”167

Following abolition, the Northeastern states passed laws to control labor. In the

1890s the Northeastern states began to put in place vagrancy laws. Antonio Pedro da

Silva Marques, Pernambucan’s minister of justice, believed there was a clear relationship

163 Wolford, Wendy. "Producing community: the MST and land reform settlements in Brazil." Journal of Agrarian Change 3.4 (2003): 500-520. See also Dean 1976; Stolcke 1988. 164 Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil: 1888-1988. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1991. p.84. 165 Lesser, Jeff. Negotiating national identity: Immigrants, minorities, and the struggle for ethnicity in Brazil. Duke University Press, 1999. 166 Andrews, George p.88. 167 Ibid. p.89 61 between race and crime. In his arguments for the use of agricultural penal colonies, he wrote ”without these measures, we will struggle against vagrancy and feed the Negro army of crime.”168 The freed slaves in the Northeast found themselves trapped at levels by forces that limited and controlled their movement. White European immigration stopped the freedom of movement in the labor market that would have allowed black laborers to seek employment elsewhere in the country. In northeastern states, with a large supply of labor but few jobs, free men were unable to argue for reduced wages. They were trapped in the Northeast.

Within the Northeast, freedmen were dependent on planters. The lack of additional employment opportunities within the northeast meant freedmen were forced to obtain their means of subsistence from the planters. Freedmen relied on plantation owners for tools, land, and credit. A form of sharecropping or debt peonage characterized the relationship between laborers and landowners. Additionally, “large-scale, single crop, agricultural production for foreign markets had established a single marketing relationship: from Brazil to foreign countries. Anything that was not connected to the large-scale production of a few commercially valuable commodities destined for export was doomed to be a miserable, small-time, secondary activity.”169 In Bahia the economy remained largely agricultural throughout the entire First Republic; by 1940, 85 percent of the state's working was employed in agriculture.170 There were few alternatives for

168 Blake, Stanley. p.77. 169 Meade Teresa. The Transition to Capitalism in Brazil: Notes on a Third Road. Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 3, Peasants, Capital Accumulation and Rural Underdevelopment (Summer, 1978), pp. 7-26 170Kim, Butler. Freedoms given, freedoms won: Afro-Brazilians in post-abolition, São Paulo and Salvador Butler, Kim D. Rutgers University Press, c1998. p.29. 62 employment. Thus anyone who remained outside the sphere of plantation agriculture faced dismal prospects.

Blacks did however continue to resist the political-economic system by creating autonomous communities outside of white control. Black resistance during slavery took the form of massive escapes and slave revolts. Due to the geographical advantages offered by the frontier of Northeastern Brazil, runaway slaves formed autonomous communities, called quilombos, outside the economical and repressive control of white landowners. In the state of Bahia, in the southern districts of Cairu and Camamu, runaway slaves either outnumbered or were equal to the number of slaves.171 The most famous quilombo in Brazil was Palmares that survived until 1697, when it was crushed by a Portuguese military expedition. These communities contained a significant number of escaped slaves or free Blacks that lived in self-sufficient communities for decades, and even centuries. In 2008 the Brazilian government officially recognized 1,739 quilombos with an estimated 2 million people.172 These autonomous communities that attempted to defend themselves against colonial military patrols were collective acts of resistance to the oppressive social and economic order around the slaves. Their number testifies to their continued importance as repertoire of resistance against discrimination and repression.

Forces of Production The dominant sugar sector in Northeastern Brazil began to decay in the 1830s. It experienced brief cycles of small booms and sporadic modernization, giving rise to

171 Jones-de Oliveira, K.,F. (2003). The politics of culture or the culture of politics: Afro-brazilian mobilization, 1920-1968. Journal of Third World Studies, 20(1), 103-120. 172 Reiter, Bernd. "What’s New in Brazil’s “New Social Movements?”." Latin American Perspectives 38.1 (2011): 153-168.

63 engenhos centrais (refineries) in the 1880s and 1890s. There were two factors that disrupted sugar production in northeastern Brazil during the 19th century. First, demand for Brazilian sugar decreased on the international market. By mid-century, the world sugar market had been completely restructured and Brazil no longer controlled the

European market.

Second, there were disruptions to the slave labor supply. The British Navy began to enforce the abolition of the slave trade after 1850. Importation of slaves into Brazil stopped. Faced with economic troubles in the North, planters began to sell their slaves to the increasingly prosperous coffee plantations in the Center-South. Additionally, slaves began to flee northeastern plantations and to seek new opportunities’ in the Center-South.

In Campos and its adjacent region, where rural violence and the flight of slaves were frequent occurrences, refineries began to suffer from the labor crisis in the canefield in the early 1880s. In 1881, refineries in Campos operated for 134 days and in 1882 for 140.

173 But in 1883, the year that the mass exodus of slaves from the canefields began, the refinery operated for only 54 days.174

Planters recognized the need for modernization and changes in technology occurred. Steam-powered sugar mills, called engenhos centrais, were introduced in the

1870s and 1880s. These in turn were replaced by even more powerful mills, called usinas. Usinas needed more sugar in order to maintain a constant level of efficiency. This meant that usina owners needed control of more land to fill their refinery’s capacity. The capacity to handle far greater loads overwhelmed the traditional plantations, easing them out of competition. Inefficient plantations were bought up and smallholders and peasants

173 Pang, Eul-Soo. “Modernization and Slavocracy in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Spring, 1979), pp. 667-688. p. 684 174 Ibid. 64 were displaced. Many members of the old landowning class were displaced by the new usina owners.

The Brazilian experience appears to confirm Nathan Rosenburg’s theory of inducement mechanisms. A stagnant economy caused by a depressed international market and a declining labor pool forced planters to modernize. Despite increased mechanization in the process of sugar refining, the mode of agricultural production on the whole changed very little. The existing level of technology, machines and tools, and level of skill among subsistence farmers and former slaves in general remained extremely low.

The mechanized processes that were introduced were largely for sugar refining, which required large amounts of capital with which to buy the expensive, foreign-made machines. The machines were still dependent on a large coercive labor supply. Planters played no active role in developing the existing level of technology.

This modernization however, had relatively little effect on the social structure.

While it might have changed power relations within the landed elite, the coronel still maintained power over the local Afro-Brazilian population. In the northeast the planters’ monopoly of land in the sugar zone continued to give them economic and political supremacy and prevented the emergence of an independent farming middle class.175

Planters passed much of the cost of the sugar export crisis to the free workers, who had virtually no bargaining power.176 The lives of ex-slaves and subsistence farmers did not improve.

Conclusion:

175 Eisenberg, Peter L. The sugar industry in Pernambuco: modernization without change, 1840-1910. Univ of California Press, 1974.p.225. 176 Ibid.p.226.

65

To conclude, of the three variables that determine change in the political economy of the plantation society, the social relations and social forces of production remained the same. Land ownership, which determined social relations, remained in the hands of the white elite. Technological development, which determined the forces of production, remained stagnant on plantations. The cultural hegemony of the elite continued to perpetrate an ideology of white supremacy. Therefore, plantations continued to rely on

Black field hands to provide a source of cheap labor. Unfortunately, during the transition from slave-labor to free-wage labor, very little changed in the political economy of the plantation societies in the Deep South and the Northeast of Brazil. The state found new measures to control the Black population.

Comparing State Services

Due to sugar and cotton planters' transition from slavery to wage-labor, there was erosion in whatever previous patronage-patron relationship may have existed. If before a few planters felt obligated to pay for minimal health and education services for their laborers, now none did. The state began to take greater responsibility for the obligation to pay for the education and medical services of the plantation elite’s laborers. A white professor in Atlanta near the beginning of the twentieth century once said, “The suppression of his ballot, and the other discriminations that are made against the black man, have at least no immediate bearing on his health, vitality, or longevity.”177 This was nonsense. White supremacy and white political control of social services allowed the planter elite to directly influence the development, the quality of life, of the Black

177 Semmes, Clovis E. Racism, health, and post-industrialism: a theory of African-American health. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. p.3 66 population. As Soloff and Stanley Engerman argue, in plantation economies institutions reproduced the effects of slavery and contributed to maintaining the underdevelopment of

African people. Dr. Clovis Seemes wrote that the “exploiting class hold by definition, inordinate control over the resources of life and human advancement. The inequality caused by this exploitation places limits on the subordinated group’s potential for self- help and self-elevation.”178 Political leaders and reformers initiated a number of social and educational reform programs designed to ensure social and economic progress.

Public Health and Education Departments were the primary vehicles for these reforms.

Gramsci argued that power is dispersed in the state and civil society institutions which influence society. Cultural hegemony, an expression of power, then is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society and the state. State institutions in the Deep

South and the Northeast of Brazil reflected an ideology of white supremacy. Social services such as education and health care reflected the interests of the ruling elite and were instruments of social control. One of the most important functions of every state,

Gramsci argued, ”is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class.'179 There were two underlying economic elite interests, which appear to contradict each other, which determined the quality of state services that were offered to African people in the Deep South and the Northeast of

Brazil. The first purpose of the services was to maintain a healthy enough work population so that Blacks could be effective workers. The second purpose was to deny

178 Semmes, Clovis E. p.2. 179 Hall, Stuart. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. p.429

67

Blacks services which would enable them to have the freedom of social mobility and seek other types of employment outside of the plantation economy. This tension between conflicting motivations explains why some social services were extended to Blacks following abolition. In certain situations, Blacks were able to build on these opportunities and improve the education and health of their communities. Despite these opportunities, there is no escaping the dramatic underdevelopment and deprivation which characterized much of the Black population.

Education in the Deep South:

In the Deep South, Southern progressives in early twentieth century advocated building roads, schools, and hospitals, enforcing child-labor and temperance laws, or providing public health welfare services. Southern state and municipal governments suddenly became a focal point for positive social action. “Out of two decades of progressive ferment the great fundamental residue of the progressive era in Southern government was a firm establishment and general acceptance of the public service concept of the state.”180 Health care and education were now considered to be extensions of the state.

The plantation economy discouraged investment in education. Education reform was implemented in countries in the 19th and 20th century as an indicator of increasing industrialization, which demanded more skilled labor. However, in countries dominated by agricultural elites, there was resistance to education reform. Agricultural elite wanted to maintain an uneducated work force to supply cheap agricultural labor. In Southern

180 Larson, Edward J.Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. p.17. 68

Mexico “where haciendas (employing essentially slave labor) dominated, there was virtually no increase in school enrollment following” the 1910 Mexican revolution.181

This is true in the United States also, where the South lagged behind other areas of the country. In 1910 in the United States high school graduation rates were never more than

15 percent in the Northeast and the West, but only 4 percent in the South. As late as 1940, expenditures per pupil in Virginia, for example, were 54 percent below the national average.182 Developmentally, constraints on literacy and education hindered self-help efforts and economic mobility among African-Americans. As a counter-point, Anderson

(1988) argues that Blacks were interested in education as a means for liberation.

After Reconstruction ended, Southern state legislatures were left to their own devices and they took steps to limit expenditures on educating freed blacks and poor whites. During Reconstruction, education services were improved for both whites and

Blacks. In 1889-1890, for example, Black school children received 100.2 percent of the funding they should have received if funds were distributed equally.183 But whites resented having to pay for the education of Blacks, who paid relatively few taxes, and that resentment fueled accusations of mismanagement and abuse of public funds--i.e. that their increased taxes were simply lining the pockets of white carpetbaggers and radical officials. In Alabama, virtually no native whites supported Black education. New Black schools became the main object of white terrorism in the years between 1865 and 1875.

Many Black schools were burned, many teachers were threatened and terrorized, and a few were killed.

181 Oded, Galor. Unified Growth Theory. Princeton University Press. 2011.p.39. 182 Brand, Horst. "Old South, New South (Book Review)." Monthly Labor Review 111.5 (1988): 58. Business Source Premier. 183 Bond, Horace Mann. "Negro education: A debate in the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901." The Journal of Negro Education 1.1 (1932): 49-59. p.49. 69

The 1901 Alabama State Constitution succeeded in its purpose of perpetuating the power of the oligarchy over the Alabama Legislature. Disfranchising Blacks and maintaining white supremacy were the central purposes of the 1901 Alabama State

Constitution, which was written by former Confederates and the landed elite.184 The

Constitution purposefully limited the property tax millage rate that can be enforced by any local area to support local public schools.185 Commenting on the 1901 State

Constitution’s impact on public education, Horace Mann Bond wrote “The dominant white majority has… sacrificed Negro schools to the end that white schools might be maintained at a high level.”186 In Alabama in 1890, Black and white schools received almost equal funding, $3.14 million for white schools and $3.1 million for Black schools.

Twenty years later, Alabama spent $10 million for white schools and $2.69 million for

Black schools.187 Alabama was demonstrative of a pattern that occurred throughout the

Southeast. In 1930 in South Carolina, Black children received 22 cents for every $1.00 spent on a white child.188 In 1929-1930, Mississippi spent $5.94 per Black pupil versus

$31.33 for a white student.189 Analysis of a school for Black workers on a Mississippi plantation in 1937 is illustrative. The number of students dropped from 127 in first grade, to 40 in third grade, to 8 in eighth grade.190 Black teachers earned a monthly salary of

184 Two delegates to the 1901 State Constitution who did speak in favor of equal treatment for Blacks were Thomas G. Jones and Mr. L. E. Brooks. Bond, Horace Mann. "Negro education: A debate in the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901." The Journal of Negro Education 1.1 (1932): 49-59. 185 Mahua, Majumdar. “Relationship between absentee landownership and quality of life in Alabama.” Masters Thesis, University of Auburn. 8/15/2011. http://etd.auburn.edu/etd/handle/10415/2790. p. 18. 186 Bond, Horace Mann. "Negro education: A debate in the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901." The Journal of Negro Education 1.1 (1932): 49-59. P.58. 187 Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p.324. 188 Bond, Horace Mann. "Negro education: A debate in the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901." The Journal of Negro Education 1.1 (1932): 49-59. P.49. 189 Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, 2009. p.324. 190 Ibid. 70

$39.18 while their white counterparts earned $103.90. The average annual expenditure per black pupil was $6.74, per white pupil was $84.59.191 "primitive one-room frame structures, wholly lacking in modern facilities"192 Gavin Wright, an economic historian at

Stanford University, has written that this assault on Black schools affected the lives of

Black Southerners directly for generations.193

Despite the context of political and economic oppression and the extreme inequalities schools suffered, Black communities valued schools and attempted to build on what opportunities existed to help their communities. The most frequently documented form of involvement is financial contributions. By 1932, African American parents had already personally contributed 17% of the funds to build the more than 5000

Black schools in 15 states.194 The schools did provide some uplift to the Black community. In Alabama, for example, Black illiteracy decreased from 69.1 per cent in

1900 to 26.2 per cent in 1930.195 Blacks continued to seek ways to circumvent

Southerners who sought to "provide Negro education in keeping with their conception of

Negro place."196 For example, Blacks sought an education focused on classical training as opposed to one solely focused on menial skills training.197 Black schools were important parts of the Black community, yet despite the extent to which they were valued, it is impossible to ignore the overwhelming inequality they experienced.

191 Dattel, Gene. p.324. 192 Walker, Vanessa Siddle. "Valued segregated schools for African American children in the South, 1935- 1969: A review of common themes and characteristics." Review of Educational Research 70.3 (2000): 253- 285.p.259. 193 Ibid. p.272. 194 Ibid..p.258. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. p.290. 197 Ibid. 71

Health Care in the Deep South:

Health is primarily a function of social and environmental factors. The poorer health of African Americans was produced by the resulting problem of underdevelopment. Health care was one of various modes of social control used to subjugate Black people. The key to improving public health in a population is not technical advances in medicine, but achieving access to better health services. “With few exceptions the technical advances of modern medicine have not led to major improvements in measures of health, illness, life expectancy, or death in a population.

The key components in the achievement of better health are improved sanitation and nutrition.”198 At a basic level, the quality of public health is related to the ability of people to organize and control their lives in relationship to acquiring and utilizing available and needed resources for survival and prosperity. Limited access to health care limits the freedom of an individual. There is, then, a relationship between social emancipation and health.

In the Southern United States, there was recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century that the South lagged behind the rest of the country in medical care. In

1902 Charles Stiles shocked the southern medical profession by proclaiming that hookworm was common throughout the South.199 Hookworm enters human hosts through the feet and those who suffered from it were the poor, who often could not afford shoes. Hookworm, malaria, and other diseases were symptoms of the poor sanitation and public health services available in the South. Widespread recognition of a hookworm

198 Semmes, Clovis E. Racism, health, and post-industrialism: a theory of African-American health. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. p.5. 199 Martin, Mike G., and Margaret E. Humphreys. "Social consequence of disease in the American South, 1900-World War II."Southern medical journal 99.8 (2006): 862-864. p. 862. 72 infestation led the Rockefeller Foundation in 1909 to establish a commission to fight hookworm in the South. A survey of 12 rural counties containing greater than 250,000 homes at the beginning of the commission’s work found only 50% of households had

“any sort” of privy and only 10% had “a proper” privy.200 Even after 5 years of commission effort, a survey of southern school children found that 39% were still infected by hookworm. Malaria was also endemic in the South.201 By 1935, there were still more than 135,000 cases of malaria resulting in more than 4,000 deaths annually throughout the South.202 One survey on a large Mississippi plantation in 1915 showed that more than a thousand worker days were lost to malaria with an economic cost equivalent to a $3.88 tax per acre.203

Black health in post-abolition society suffered worst of all from poor public services and sanitation. There was virtually no healthcare for Blacks in the South. The

Black community experienced high morbidity and mortality, few trained health professionals, lack of control over health resources, and inadequate personal resources to access a system controlled by others. Pellagra and other nutritional-deficiency diseases were pervasive.204 Poor housing and sanitation contributed to high rates of disease and suffering. Diets were nutritionally inadequate and little changed from the slave culture.

The winter diet was salt meat, corn or flour bread, and syrup or sorghum.205 There was wide-spread malnutrition. The cotton system de-incentivized against diversified food production and tenants were not enthusiastic about growing their own food after working

200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid 204 Semmes, Clovis E. Racism, health, and post-industrialism: a theory of African-American health. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. P.53 205 Ibid. 73 long hours in cotton fields. African Americans who owned their own land were better able to grow their own food.206 The plantation economic system shaped the health of

African-Americans well into the twentieth-century. Charles S. Johnson’s study of

Macomb County, Alabama- a county characteristic of the entire Black Belt- illustrated the relationship between white supremacy, cotton production, and the sickness and disease of

Southern Blacks.207 As late as 1967 a team of physicians reported to Congress that they had found many Black children in the Mississippi Delta living under “such primitive conditions that we found it hard to believe we were examining American children of the twentieth century.”208 The report continued:

In child after child they detected vitamin and mineral deficiencies, serious, untreated skin infections and ulcerations; eye and ear diseases, also unattended bone diseases secondary to poor food intake,” and in “every county” they visited the doctors found children “with obvious evidence of severe malnutrition with injury to the body’s tissues- its muscles, bones, and skin as well as an associated psychological state of fatigue, listlessness and exhaustion.”209

Booker T. Washington attempted to institutionalize the goal of improving the health of African Americans though his creation of National Negro Health Week. He advocated creating a program that would improve the health and sanitary conditions and health-related practices of African-Americans. Using his insight into the psychology of white supremacy, Washington secured the support of a white power structure by convincing its leaders that healthy Blacks suited their economic interests. Again, the reality was that the white elite power structure did not assist its victims unless there was an economic return on the dollar.

206 Ibid. p.54. 207 Ibid. p.53. 208Cobb, James. The South and America since World War II. p. 167. 209Ibid, p.168. 74

The American Medical Association (AMA), which accredits medical schools and hospitals, was another medical organization whose activities had racial implications. The refusal of the AMA to admit Black physicians from southern states and the District of

Columbia led to the formation of the National Medical Association in 1895.210 The AMA maintained discriminatory policies until the late 1960s. A few Black physicians were

AMA members in northern and western states, but leadership of the AMA was essentially all white.211 The AMA consolidated its power over the medical profession by reforming medical education. The Flexner Report, issued in 1910, discusses the need to advance scientific medicine. Chapter 14 of the report addressed “The Medical Education of the

Negro.” The report stated that Blacks were unsuited to be doctors; .it is all the more cruel to abuse his [Blacks'] ignorance through any sort of pretense. A well taught Negro sanitarian will be immensely useful; an essentially untrained Negro wearing an M.D. degree is dangerous.”212 Through the Flexner Report, the AMA decided how medical training should be structured. By 1923, all Black medical schools had closed except for

Howard University and Meharry College medical schools. The others could not survive the cost of raising standards for medical education prescribed by the AMA and the

Flexner Report.213 In the late 1990s, there were still fewer Black medical schools than there were 100 years ago.214

The limitations placed on Black medical schools were one contributing factor to the lack of Black physicians in the United States. African American physicians have

210 Menefee, Larry. “Are Black Americans Entitled to Equal Health Care? A New Research Paradigm.” Ethnicity and Disease. Vol. 6., Winter/Spring 1996. p. 59 211Ibid. 212Ibid. 213Semmes, Clovis E. Racism, health, and post-industrialism: a theory of African-American health. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. P.114 214Iibid. 75 routinely made up no more than 3 percent of the profession, even though up to 12 percent of the population is Black.215 The failure of medical education to train Black physicians is a public health concern because it limited the access of Black patients to physicians.

Black physicians were the few physicians who would serve Black communities. Black physicians were twice as likely to work in medically underserved areas as white physicians.216 This lack of Black physicians in Black communities contributes to racial disparities in the allocation and utilization of health -care resources.

Health Care in Brazil:

Interest in improving public health increased worldwide in the 1910s and 1920s, and also in Brazil. Brazil's public health reforms of the early twentieth century represented an unprecedented expansion of government services in the government's responsibility for its citizen's well-being. Positivism of the early twentieth century promised a confidence in science for the eradication of all physical and social ills. The government's interest in improving its citizens had several origins. In the Northeast, the economic and political elite were concerned with the physical well-being and economic productivity of the working classes. They were most concerned with agricultural workers.

Planters were unwilling to increase wages to ensure an improved standard of living for workers, but they lobbied the state government to do as much as possible to improve worker's health.217 In 1920, Pernambuco's governor Jose Rufino Bezerra Calvalcanti said that social welfare programs were necessary in order to “benefit populations, whose

215Ibid. p. 110. 216 Menefee, Larry. p. 59 217 Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2011. p.99. 76 economic value...have been diminished by disease, with evident ant notable prejudice for the economy and the future of the state.”218

Effective public health services arrived in the Northeast of Brazil after the creation of federal programs, except Pernambuco and Bahia, which created effective public health services without federal assistance. The federal government established the

Rural Preventive Health Service in 1918 and the National Department of Public Health in

1920. In 1903 Dr. Oswaldo Cruz conducted a yellow fever campaign. Brazilian officials believed that if tropical disease could be eradicated by the hygienic model, than other areas, such as moral and cultural areas, could benefit as well. European theories of social

Darwinism and race evolution were applied to both physical models of disease and the sociocultural sphere. The Faculdade de Medicinia in Pernambuco began to publish a medical journal which not only discussed medicine, but also the social and political dimensions of public health.219 Public health reforms in the 1920s and 1930s constituted an attempt to remake the Northeast according to theories of eugenics.

Biological, spiritual, and moral deficiencies were projected on the slave. After abolition, medical research was used to support this. The Oswaldo Cruz Institute Medical

Surveys of the Northeast were conducted from 1912 to 1914. They believed there were several reasons for the Northeast's backwardness. They cited government indifference to the plight of nordestinos, northeasterners, and to antiquated forms of labor, which demonstrated that “the North has shown itself to be incapable of progressing with free labor, the origin of the material development of the South.”220 Racial background was cited, suggesting that race was a factor in the region's backwardness. Physicians noted the

218Ibid. 219 Ibid. p.96 220Blake, Stanley E. p.99. 77 many Negros and caboclos, and the lack of whites. The expedition equated whiteness with health and economic progress and, conversely, Blackness with disease and laziness.221 They believed Black nordestinos were incapable of modernizing the

Northeast, and wrote that “the vast Brazilian territory cannot be populated without the cooperation of the foreign element,” meaning European immigrants.222

Public health measures were used as a form of social control in the cultural realm.

During slavery, white and Blacks coexisted in relative physical proximity because the hierarchy of difference and class was well established. With the destruction of slavery it was necessary to redefine the boundaries. In 1904, under decree 115, the government instituted the Service of Administrative Hygiene of the Union. This decree permitted cities to place restrictions on illegal medical practices, curandeirismo, and forbid sorcery.

All of these measures proceeded through public health avenues.223 Police attacked and destroyed Afro-Brazilian Candomble temples, terreiros, in the name of protecting public health. The law enforced distinction between what was considered Afro-Brazilian

“magic,” and religion in accordance with the pre-existing social hierarchy. The hygienist movement was a device for marking social differentiation and stratification.224 This law persisted in Brazil for many years. Under the list of crimes against public health, the penal code continued to list elements associated with Candomble. Law 2848, approved in

December 1940 cited the illegal practice of medicine, charlatanism, and “The inoculation or announcement of a cure by secret or infallible means.”225

221 Ibid. p.100 222Blake, Stanley E. p.101 223 Johnson, Paul Christopher. "Law, Religion, and “Public Health” in the Republic of Brazil." Law & Social Inquiry 26.1 (2001): 9-33.p.23 224 Ibid. p.26. 225 Ibid..p.29 78

Nineteenth century public health efforts were focused on controlling outbreaks of epidemics with little concern for the general, overall health of the population. Medical surveys in the northeast revealed that the population was not necessarily suffering from epidemic diseases, by from endemic, chronic, debilitating diseases such as malaria and

Chargas disease. Diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, rickets, pellagra, and other dietary deficiencies that caused night blindness were common among the rural population of

Northeast Brazil.226 In 1920, the state of Permanbuco reported that 93.4 percent of the population was infected with hookworm.227

The results of various medical surveys were offered as proof that Afro-Brazilians were racially inferior compared to the whiter population in southern Brazil.228 In order to help implement public health policies in Northeast Brazil the Rockefeller Foundation conducted campaigns against hookworm, yellow fever and malaria. Several of the foundation officials had gained experience treating hookworm in the Southern United

States in 1909 and 1915, and applied that experience in the Northeast of Brazil. The

Rockefeller's treatment for hookworm provided only temporary cure, rather than providing more comprehensive medical services. Officials believed that the high rates of infection in the Northeast were attributable, in part due to the region's racial background.

This reasoning avoided accounting for the inferior housing quality of patients, and the political-economic reasons that made the Black population more susceptible to disease to begin with. The focus of public health on hookworms provided a scientific excuse for the region's decline that avoided more complicated discussions about the failure of the political economy to distribute opportunities or resources equally.

226 Blake, Stanley E. p.140 227 Ibid. p. 103. 228 Ibid. 79

A public health approach that focused on individual illness helped to support the plantation-economy because it provided scientific excuses, but did not push for reform that would challenge the authority of the planter elite. Officials’ approach to infant mortality, for example, focused on direct assistance and advice to mothers. Alimentary education, milk stations for infants, and nutritional kitchens constituted attempts to treat the symptoms rather than the causes of hunger and poverty among the poor and working class.229 Public health officials argued that the main cause of dietary deficiencies was the general population’s ignorance of what constituted a healthy diet. This is exemplified in a conversation between the Director of the Department of Health for the state of

Pernambucoco and a worker:

-How is it that you eat? -Listen, Snhor Doutor, how is it that the poor eat? -If I ask it’s because I don’t know. -Fish and jerked beef with manioc flour. -But don’t you have more than enough hens in the backyard? -I do, but I’m not going to eat them. -And the eggs? -I sell them. 230

The doctor, incredulous that the workers did not eat the chickens or the eggs, believed that worker was ignorant regarding what constituted a proper diet. However, agricultural workers’ pay did not allow them enough to afford food.231 Instead, as another reformer,

Josue de Castro commented, the question researchers should have asked is “How is it that you can eat like this and not die of hunger?”232 It was the political economy which restricted their choices that was killing people, not individual ignorance or choices.

229 Blake, Stanley E. The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2011. p.148. 230Blake, Stanley E. p.142. 231Ibid. 232 Ibid. p.143. 80

Public health research was also used to support the existing labor structure that marginalized Afro-Brazilians as appropriate because they were physiologically different from other Brazilians.233 The science of bio-typology was derived from the general scientific positivism of the era. Bio-typology labs collected public health data from populations and then used the data to classify people into six basic types. This grouping allowed researchers to debate the perceived physical and psychological shortcomings of people and to then recommend appropriate educational, exercise, and health regimes and the appropriate division of labor in society for the appropriate person. In a 1940 paper, one researcher, Alvaro Ferraz, argued that Afro-Brazilians were better suited to agricultural work because, according to his research, they had on average arms that were longer in proportion to their bodies and were thus able to till the ground more easily.234

The physical underdevelopment or malnourishment of Afro-Brazilians was cited as the cause, rather than the symptom of Northeastern Brazil’s underdevelopment. An ideology of Black inferiority, espoused by public health institutions, provided a discourse that supported the marginalization of Black workers in the political economy.

Education in Brazil:

Brazil’s politically influential agrarian elite had no interest in the promotion of schooling. Most likely, large landowners were reluctant to subsidize the education of the masses by paying higher taxes. Not only would expanded education cost more through taxes, but education could lead rural workers to seek better-paid jobs in the developing

233 Ibid.p.139. 234Ibid. 81 urban sector, threatening the supply of a cheap labor force. 235 As mentioned earlier, suffrage laws were conditioned on literacy from 1881 until 1988. Given that 70 per cent of the total population over 9 years of age was illiterate in 1920, restricting education was closely tied to maintaining political control.236 The elites’ fear of the incorporation of new voters was one factor in the defeat of a proposal for introducing free and compulsory primary schooling, introduced during the constitutional revision of 1925-1926.

The influence of the planter elite in limiting education in Northeastern Brazil is evident when you compare the rate of land inequality to the expenditures on education in

Brazil. There were sharp differences in the access to public education made available in the Northeast versus other regions of the country. In 1940 in the southern state of Parana, literacy reached 45 percent, while in the federal district it peaked at 77 percent.237 In the north, literacy in Bahia was only 21 percent.238 In Pernambuco less than 30 per cent of the population was literate.239 Similarly, in Bahia, for example, school attendance rates did not reach half the national average. In 1935, all of the states that had attendance rates higher than 50 percent were in the south and southeast.240 As late as 1982, 32 percent of children in the Northeast of Brazil were never enrolled in school, compared to 10 percent in the Southeast.241

Regional differences in education rates reflect differences in the resources the elite made available to pay for education. In the prosperous states of the southeast state

235 Wegenast, Tim. "Cana, café, cacau: agrarian structure and educational inequalities in Brazil." Revista de Historia Economica 28.1 (2010). p. 105. 236 Wegenast, Tim. "Cana, café, cacau: agrarian structure and educational inequalities in Brazil." Revista de Historia Economica 28.1 (2010). p. 105. 237 Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of whiteness: Race and social policy in Brazil, 1917–1945. Duke University Press Books, 2003.p.69 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 82 governments provide most of the revenues for schools. In the predominantly rural

Northeast, however, the funding is left to municipios dominated by agricultural elites.

Large planters used their political influence to avoid taxes. One study showed that 91 percent of producers in the Northeast with wage earners did not fulfill their tax obligations.242 State governments in the Southeast collect as much as three times the revenue per capita as the state governments in the Northeast. In 1944, states in the South spent annually Cr $23 per inhabitant on education. Meanwhile, states in the northeast spent on average Cr $6.243

The Revolution of 1930 brought Getulio Vargas to power, and rising social movements and increasing industrialization generated a broader consensus over the necessity for educational spending. The new constitution of 1934 granted formal education for all and mandated the creation of free and compulsory education. The

Church and families were allowed to provide education as well. Brazilian intellectuals saw the expansion of educational services as an opportunity to "improve” the Brazilian race. Mário Augusto Teixeira, the educational director for Vargas, exemplified this trend.

He argued in favor of anthropomorphic techniques, which included measures such as intelligence testing, and detailed charting to evaluate and classify children according to their abilities.244 Tests were used in Brazil with the intention of improving education for all. However, implicit within the tests was the baseline goal of achieving a European ideal for all students. White and affluent students performed the best on the test and were rewarded with superior educational opportunities. Conversely, the school system

242 Pereira, Anthony W. "God, the devil, and development in northeast Brazil."Praxis: The Fletcher Journal of Development Studies 15 (1999): 1-18. 243 Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of whiteness: Race and social policy in Brazil, 1917–1945. Duke University Press Books, 2003. 244 Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of whiteness. 83 provided a remedial experience teaching hygiene and rudimentary skills for children who did not meet the white and affluent standards.245 The result was to institutionalize in

Brazil a racially based segregated educational system.

Discussion

This research in this paper supports the hypothesis that racial inequalities persist because institutions established by a planter elite continue to allocate resources along a basis of race. The political economy of the plantation complex was designed to constrain workers’ mobility in the market place in order to provide cheap labor. Due to the transformation from a slave society to a free-wage society, other measures were created for social control. Health and education limited workers’ mobility and supported an ideology of white superiority, which in turn reinforced the plantation economy. The greatest factor in maintaining the plantation economy was the control of land. Land ownership shaped the social relations of production. Without owning land, an independent economic life that could support a family was impossible.

Education was one of the most important factors constraining the mobility of

Blacks in labor markets. Despite differences in language and the construction of there were remarkable similarities in the mechanisms employed by planters in both Brazil and the Deep South to limit access to education. Davila’s Diploma of Whiteness highlights how a separate, segregated school system rose up in Brazil despite the lack of de jure segregation. The tax-system was the most effective way for underfunding public education for Blacks in both countries. Tax system inequalities persist because it is harder to call attention or demonstrate a racial motive in such contexts.

245 Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of whiteness. p.242-243

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Health care did not have as direct a connection to limiting economic mobility.

However, access to healthcare is representative of an accumulation of social indicators. It reinforced the powerlessness of Blacks within the political economy because they could not control resources to meet their most basic needs. Actions that were undertaken to improve public health were based on an economic utility analysis of Black workers.

Finally, medical studies of Black workers within academic discourses supported an ideology of white supremacy by providing “scientific” support for Black inferiority. The mechanisms which limited Black access to healthcare in Brazil and the U.S. were not as parallel compared to education. This may in part be due to a limitation of the research.

This paper relied on secondary historical studies but there have been fewer studies focusing on racial inequalities in the medical profession of Brazil.

Conclusions:

There were limitations to this study. First, the author does not speak Portuguese and was constrained to reviewing only English sources for this paper. While many valuable and major works have been published about Brazil in English, this language barrier particularly limited access to more specialized journal articles and essays in

Portuguese that have not been translated. Second, there is a lack of statistical data available for Brazil compared to the Deep South, especially from 1900-1930. Thirdly, there has been less research published on racial inequalities in the Northeast of Brazil compared to Brazil in general. This may in part be due to the fact that the Deep South

U.S., because it was an independent country in rebellion against the federal government for five years, developed a regional identity in popular consciousness that is picked up by

85 researchers to a greater extent than the Northeast. There have a far fewer number of works, though Stanley Blake’s is one example, focusing on a unique Northeastern

Brazilian regional identity.

This paper maps out a political-economy of plantation economies that included cultural as well as economic influences, and then demonstrates how the combination of economic and cultural influences shaped public institutions in Northeastern Brazil and the Deep South U.S. Previous scholars who examined the South’s underdevelopment, for example, often used classic economic models but divorced the political from the economic. Not only can economics not be divorced from the political, but when examining race, culture also has to be taken into account. This broad approach to analyzing society highlights the interconnectedness between different parts of a cultural hegemonic society, and how parts of society mutually reinforced each other and affirmed the status quo.246 This paper also examined how culture and economics changed over time, not just for a moment. Finally, this paper outlined the mechanisms used by planter elite to influence societal institutions in two case studies that have not been seriously compared before. This paper in its entirety represents an argument for looking at implications for international development outside of the traditional scope of the field.

Policy makers attempting to address rural poverty in the United States and in the Deep

South especially could greatly benefit from such insights. In turn, looking at how rural under-development persisted in economic powerhouses such as the United States and

Brazil can shed light on the nature of development in “third-world” countries.

246 Ira Katznelson (2006) for example, demonstrated how different institution influenced by Southern Senators in the United States contributed to maintaining racial inequalities through President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. 86

Further research examining comparisons between the Deep South United States and the Northeast of Brazil would be particularly interesting. For example, how did Black solidarity movements continue to push for reform and resist? The Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South was complemented later by Black solidarity movements in Brazil in the 1980s. The next step was to correct underlying social structures. Martin Luther King recognized the necessity of this and in 1967 switched from organizing for political representation and the end of Jim Crow, to organizing a poor people’s for economic and human rights. However, the social services initially created during this time period continued to produce systemic inequalities. The underlying structures of these systems persisted, and the governments of these regions continue to wrestle with the legacy today.

One of the most interesting questions would be to compare the push for land reform in Brazil and the Deep South. Changes in the economic base threatened the distribution of white land ownership. In 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama, for example,

Blacks formed the Black Panther Party to attempt to wrest political and economic control from white families who owned 90 percent of the land, though the county was 80 percent

Black. In the late 1950s in Northeast Brazil Peasant Leagues formed and called for agrarian reform “by law or by force.” These efforts have continued. Since 1985, the MST in Brazil has managed to settle 200,000 previously landless families. Land reform has yet to come in the Deep South. Regional and racial inequalities persist due to state institutions that fail to adequately deliver resources. In Brazil, the Northeast continues to suffer compared to the rest of the country. More than four decades after segregation officially ended in the Deep South there has been immense change, but deep inequalities persist.

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Some have argued that the mark of slavery can never be erased. There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow inherited in us. At the heart of the field of epigenetics, is the concept that genes cam transmit memory and that the lives of our grandparents can directly affect us decades later. Recent studies in Sweden explore the effects of famine and abundant harvests on the health of descendants four generations later. The French psychologist Anne Ancelin

Schützenberger spent decades studying what she calls the ancestor syndrome. She argues that we are links in a chain of generations, unconsciously affected by their suffering until we acknowledge the past. Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a psychiatrist, argues that we pass on genetic memory which forms a reservoir of dormant knowledge. In the novel Sitgmata, by Phyllis Perry, the protagonist Lizzie DuBose physically manifests the wounds not of the saints, but of her slave ancestors. Returning to her family home in Alabama, she struggles to understand why bleeding manacle-scars and flay marks appear on her back.

Whether science or science fiction, it seems evident that societies transmit suffering. The

Deep South U.S. and the Northeast of Brazil continue to inflict poverty and disease in ways reminiscent of slavery.

A better description of the mechanism by which the durability of inequalities persists is found in William Faulkner’s quote “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

Racial inequalities persist because they continue to be actively created by social structures. What is troubling is that these inequalities continued to be maintained by a dominant culture. Culture acts as blinders or a prism, impacting not only how we view situations but how we think about situations. Culture changes at a slower rate than society. Racism is today rarely directed by one person towards another. The acceptance of

88 unequal access to life opportunities for Blacks as normal and acceptable constitutes another form of racism that obstructs change. However, poverty is not an accident, it is man-made. Social structures can be corrected. Education and access to low-cost and effective health care should become the objective of Civil Rights and social activism in the African-American and Afro-Brazilian community.

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