The metaphors that Jessica Lynn Graham uses to characterise discourses about democracy and race in Brazil, the United States and beyond from 1930 to 1945 grow more dramatic and vivid across the course of this excellent monograph entitled Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil. From the relatively mild ‘labyrinth’ (p. 3), ‘tug of war’ (p. 4) and ‘war of words’ (p. 5) in the earliest pages, Graham proceeds to describe a ‘discursive mosh pit’ (p. 32) and ‘a veritable smorgasbord’ (p. 137) in subsequent chapters. This apt imagery reflects a seemingly contradictory rhetorical and geopolitical landscape where a panoply of political actors – from anti-racist activists and liberal democrats to communists and fascists – grappled over, and contributed to shifting, the meanings of democracy. Such contests, Graham persuasively shows, often hinged on discourses about racialised social difference. From this shifting ideological landscape, Graham traces the production of ‘racially inclusive nationalisms’ – what she most prominently terms rhetorical racial democracy – as official state doctrine and a set of cultural projects in both Brazil and the United States by the mid-1940s.
Graham deftly delineates the geopolitical contexts that contributed to official rhetoric of racial democracy in this period. In the midst of the Great Depression and then the Second World War, officials in Brazil and the United States sought to maintain the moral high ground and present a coherent, convincing argument for the democratic nature of their political and economic systems. Communists and fascists, meanwhile, aimed to draw adherents to their ideologies, including by undercutting the democratic claims of officials in Brazil and the United States. The Moscow-based Comintern and communist parties in the United States and Brazil saw African descendants in both countries as prime targets for recruitment. Advancing rhetoric that championed the right to Black self-determination and presenting the Soviet Union as a racial utopia, communist officials were, Graham demonstrates, some of the earliest political actors in this period to deploy the rhetoric of racial democracy. Anti-communist officials would later appropriate that rhetoric in an effort to dissuade possible Black recruits to the Communist Party and, ultimately, to cement the Brazil–United States wartime alliance. Black activists, meanwhile, consistently engaged in these rhetorical battles, including by detailing the ways that US and Brazilian democratic discourses of racial inclusion fell far short in practice. Those activists also pursued programmes of what Graham terms ‘action-oriented realism’ that aimed to address deeply rooted racial inequalities within and across national borders.
Graham advances a fresh interpretation of the origins and meanings of racial democracy. She aims to shift the frame away from Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre, commonly identified as the principal architect of this ideology (though, as Graham notes, Arthur Ramos in fact coined the term). Graham revises the Freyrean origin story by detailing the broader set of authors who contributed to the construction of rhetorical racial democracy. Graham also argues that racial democracy was not exclusively tethered to Brazil's supposedly exceptional social reality as the racially utopian counterpoint to the racially dystopian United States (as implied in the Freyrean narrative). Graham, in fact, describes political discourse in the United States in this period as racially democratic, though that discourse differed from the Freyrean vein that held racially inclusive pluralism as an actually-existing, already-achieved social reality. Graham terms that version of racial democracy ‘racial denialism’. Discourse of racial democracy in the United States most often instead fell in one of the other three categories that Graham identifies: racial realism, racial dissuasion and racial obstructionism. The expanded semantic and geographic analysis of racial democracy sets up Graham's key historical argument for the ‘co-constitutive emergence of racially inclusive nationalisms as Brazilian and US state doctrine between 1930 and 1945 in relation to blacks’ (p. 2). Rhetorical racial democracy was constructed, she proceeds to show, in a transnational process between the United States and Brazil in response to the crisis of capitalism and global war and in the service of national security.
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’ assertion that the problem of the twentieth century was the colour line, in 1995, at a gathering organised by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Manning Marable described the problem of the twenty-first century as ‘the challenge of multicultural democracy’. A key aspect of that challenge is the coexistence of prominent anti-racist and multiculturalist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the stark realities of continued racialised inequality and violence, on the other. Graham's study sheds significant light on the roots of the rhetorical side of this coin in the (somewhat surprising) trans/national security sphere and in the context of the US–Brazilian wartime alliance. At the same time, the book captures both sides of the dialectical puzzle, as official doctrines of racial inclusion in the mid-1940s were put into practice in limited form. As Graham writes: ‘What materialized was a national identity that espoused racial pluralism but maintained the racist reality. At its core and through this process, racially inclusive theory became bound to racially exclusive practice’ (p. 88).
Indeed, in both Brazil and the United States, the principal practical application of the rhetoric of racial inclusion was limited. Graham cites two examples – both pushed by Black anti-racist activists – of what seemed like promising policy changes: the 1941 establishment of the Fair Employment Practice Committee by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1951 Afonso Arinos Law in Brazil, which decreed racial discrimination illegal. Neither policy, however, resulted in significant social change. More often than policy, the application of rhetorical racial democracy was confined to the cultural field and entailed what Graham terms the demarginalisation of Blackness as a set of cultural forms and their symbolic association with Brazilian and US national identities. While Graham notes that this process benefitted some Black cultural workers, White cultural mediators remained the principal brokers and beneficiaries of this demarginalisation. The quotidian social realities of most Black residents remained far removed from anti-racist ideals of inclusion. Graham maintains, nonetheless, a sanguine stance on the significance of the rhetorical shifts she charts in this era: ‘racial democracy did create new nationalist attitudes in the United States and Brazil that future antiracists were able to utilize to their advantage’ (p. 10).
Readers in an array of academic and policy contexts will find Graham's text generative. Shifting the Meaning of Democracy would sit comfortably on the syllabi of undergraduate and graduate courses focused on Brazil or the United States in the twentieth century, along with those too-few, in my estimation, classes framed by the shared and comparative histories of these two colossuses of the Americas. The monograph would also find a home in classrooms centred on: the Black diaspora; comparative studies of racial identity and inequality, especially in the western hemisphere; and the history of the United States in a global context. Instructors of Latin American studies would, similarly, find much appeal in this text for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses that broach politics, race and/or culture. In such classes, readers may find enticing opportunities to investigate how the production of racially inclusive nationalisms in Brazil and the United States intersected with and/or diverged from national identity projects elsewhere in the hemisphere, including in the context of notable and contemporaneous articulations of racial pluralism and/or mestizaje, such as Mexican José Vasconcelos’ ‘cosmic race’ and Cuban Fernando Ortiz's writings on transculturation. Lastly, current and future policy-makers and activists – along with any observer of contemporary politics in the United States and Brazil – would also find much interest in this monograph.
Shifting the Meaning of Democracy won seven book prizes following its 2019 publication. Those extraordinary accolades reflect the originality and quality of Graham's contribution, along with, in my estimation, the salience of this book for our current, comparable period of discursive mosh-pitting around the meanings of democracy, race and racial democracy in Brazil, the United States and far beyond. The relevance of the text has only increased in the years since its publication, including in the aftermath of parallel and intersecting anti-democratic movements in both countries.
