Armadilhas da cor: raça, racismo e dignidade em Salvador no Pós-Abolição (1889-1910)

Abstract

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the Republic, Brazilian elites appropriated and reworked European scientific theories to legitimize racial hierarchies, thereby sustaining the notion of Black people’s moral and civilizational inferiority. Given the large proportion of Afro-descendants in the country, social exclusion came to operate strategically through language, avoiding the explicit naming of race and instead shifting the focus to a social vocabulary of color. This thesis examines, in the context of Salvador between 1889 and 1910, how this vocabulary operated as a trope that naturalized racism beyond elite circles—emerging in physical and verbal confrontations, in records of misfortune marked by attenuated forms of empathy, and in other episodes of everyday life—primarily involving workers identified as mulattoes, browns, creoles, mestizos, and Africans. The study argues that a central mechanism of Brazilian racism lies in its refusal to name itself, sustaining practices of marginalization through ostensibly nonracial categories that nonetheless remain socially operative.