The Pacific Route: Brazil, Japan, the Paris Peace Conference, and the Meanings of Racial Equality

Abstract

This article explores the Brazilian aftermath of Japan’s unsuccessful bid to include racial equality as a principle in the League of Nations charter in 1919. While U.S. and Japan specialists have written about the proposal, its little-known fallout in Brazil contains key insights about racial ideology and the contested meanings of racial equality in the aftermath of World War I. The Brazilian side of the story, which overlapped with a contentious presidential campaign, is significant for three reasons. First, the proposal’s impact on that campaign and among Black intellectuals illuminates a previously overlooked path—what I call the “Pacific route”—that identifies Japan as one unlikely site of genesis for Brazil’s vaunted mythology of “racial democracy.” Second, debates about the proposal anchor our understanding of that mythology in the early twentieth century, pushing back the timeline often associated with “racial democracy” and revealing an early moment when Black intellectuals staked claim to the idea. Third, while Whites in the United States and the British Empire rejected the proposal and opposed Asian immigration in openly racist terms, in Brazil opponents sought to square their position with an inchoate national ethos of racial harmony. The failed proposal offered an opportunity to do so and helped cast Japanese immigrants as uniquely possessing race, in contrast to Brazilians, who had melded into a raceless nation. The Pacific route therefore holds lessons about Brazilian history and the global trajectory of the idea of racial equality.

In 1919, when national delegations gathered at the Paris Peace Conference to write the charter of the League of Nations, contentious debates emerged around Japan’s proposal to include racial equality as a foundational principle of the League. While specialists in Japanese and U.S. history have written about the proposal, its little-known fallout in Brazil provides key insights into the formation of racial ideology and the contested meanings of racial equality after World War I. In Brazil, debates about the proposal were shaped by a dramatic case of mistaken identity in Paris, where Japan’s delegates apparently confused Portugal’s representative for Brazil’s. The fallout became entangled with presidential elections, which overlapped with the Peace Conference. Brazil’s lead delegate, Epitácio Pessoa, was also a candidate for president. Though he won the election in absentia, conflicting accounts about whether he supported or opposed the Japanese proposal momentarily threw his campaign into disarray, setting off months of acrimonious conversations in the press about race and racial equality.

Those conversations were shaped by domestic forces and the disparate global standing of Japan and Brazil. As an imperial power advancing a vision of racial equality that some detractors cast as insincere, Japan became a useful foil many times over in Brazil. With ugly stereotypes about Asian difference readily available, the Japanese delegates and Japanese immigrants became easy targets. Japan wielded global influence that Brazil did not possess, and yet its racial equality proposal was defeated. Japan therefore occupied a place in the global order that some Brazilians saw as vulnerable, but which most also admired or grudgingly envied. As conflicting accounts of Pessoa’s vote circulated in Brazil, his supporters and opponents made breakneck reversals, an indication that few cared about the content of the proposal as much as they did their own political interests. Though these forces blunted any potential for an effective alliance to counter U.S. and European power, the Japanese proposal had an impact, previously overlooked, in the formulation of Brazilian racial ideology.

The proposal’s Brazilian twists and turns reveal three sets of insights. First, studying how Brazilian responses traveled along a path that passed through Paris but emanated from Japan—what I call the “Pacific route”—shows that Japan was not only a driver of immigration to Brazil; it also functioned as one unlikely site of the genesis for conversations that shaped Brazil’s vaunted myth of “racial democracy.” ¹ This surprising finding illustrates the profound complexity of the discourses and practices attached to racial equality in Brazil, and helps frame a second set of insights. Debates about the proposal provided Black intellectuals a chance to publicly advance arguments about Brazilian racial fraternity, a concept previously thought to have moved from the pages of the Black press to larger, multi-racial audiences in the second half of the 1920s. References to racial fraternity in the Black press were often deployed to identify afrodescendentes (Afro-descendants) as true Brazilians, in contrast to the waves of European immigrants who were arriving in Brazil at the time. Discussions around the Japanese proposal move the timeline of these references back and reveal an interesting contrast with discourses proffered at the same moment by Black intellectuals in the United States, who generally encouraged and embraced the Japanese proposal. Conversations in Brazil also display how, though the ideas of Brazilian racial fraternity and racial democracy are often rightfully understood as facades that congealed around mid-century, and were maintained by White power structures, their roots go much further back and were shaped by multiple groups and social sectors.

A third set of insights builds on and also complicates previous treatments of the Japanese proposal, which have highlighted how a project ostensibly meant to defend racial equality engendered racist responses by U.S. and British officials, who saw it as a threat to their own, openly racist anti-Asian immigration policies. There was a parallel response in Brazil, but with a crucial difference. While the United States and Great Britain did little to disguise their racism, Brazilian opponents of Japanese immigration had to square their opposition with an inchoate national ethos of racial harmony. The failed proposal offered an opportunity to do so and, in the process, cast Japanese immigrants as racial Others and, in some iterations, as uniquely possessing race, in contrast to “real” Brazilians, who had melded into a raceless nation. This facilitated the expression of racist discourse without disturbing claims of racial harmony, a Brazilian paradox to match others that arose elsewhere in response to the Japanese proposal.

Setting the Stage

Diplomats debated and defeated the racial equality proposal on a stage that was dominated by the United States and Europe, but also shared by an ascendant Japan. Crammed into a smaller space on that stage were Brazil and other “developing” nations. For Japan, the conference signaled its arrival, alongside the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy, as a “great power.” The beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 galvanized its ascension, which reached inflection points in 1889 with the passage of the Meiji Constitution, in 1902 with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and in 1905 with Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Though these developments helped transform Japan into a military force and global power broker, the 1919 charter negotiations left clear that even such influence could not counter the racist power dynamics that marked the emerging, postwar order. Naoko Shimazu, the author of the only English-language book-length treatment of the Japanese proposal, demonstrates that the racial equality proposal was a manifestation of Japan’s long-term project to forge a powerful “modern” nation. She also shows how the proposal’s defeat contributed to Japan’s growing militarization and isolation while also helping establish key ideas enshrined in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ² Japan’s rise to global prominence took place amid a surge of racist immigration policies and “yellow peril” hysteria. In the United States, anti-Japanese agitation produced the so-called Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907, which tightly limited Japanese emigration to the United States to avoid the embarrassment of an explicit ban, and California’s 1913 Alien Land Law, which further marginalized Japanese immigrants. ³ The forces driving this legislation, like those behind Australia’s infamous 1901 Immigration Restriction Act and its larger “White Australia” project, played outsized roles in defeating Japan’s proposal.

Racist immigration policies clashed with a Japanese imperative to send “surplus labor” to foreign lands. Brazil played a key role in resolving this dilemma, receiving almost 190,000 Japanese immigrants between 1908 and 1941, more than any other foreign land besides Hawai`i. ⁴ As it received these immigrants, Brazil traveled a path that at times ran parallel to and at other times diverged from Japan’s own transformation into a “modern” power. While most of Latin America established independent republics in the early nineteenth century, Brazilian independence in 1822 left in place a monarchy with close ties to Portugal, and only in 1888 did Brazil become the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. If the 1889 Meiji Constitution marked “the birth of Modern Japan,” that same year has been hailed in similar terms in Brazil. ⁵ A year after abolition, Brazil replaced its monarchy with a republic, ushering in the First Republic (1889–1930). Brazil entered the Paris Peace Conference with high aspirations, based not only in its political structure but also in the noteworthy distinction of being the only Latin American nation to send troops to combat in World War I. However, though it was on hand in 1919 to help create the League of Nations, Brazil withdrew seven years later after failing to secure a seat on the Permanent Council, an indication of its outsider status. ⁶

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Brazilian elites fantasized about “whitening” their population, while also strategically embracing a multi-racial identity that would distinguish the country from others. Article 72 of Brazil’s first republican constitution, adopted in 1891, declared, “All are equal before the law.” ⁷ That heady idea was blunted significantly in practice by Article 70, which limited voting rights to literate citizens, a small fraction of the population. Nonetheless, Article 72 became a hallmark of racial discourse and would serve as a reference point in 1919 as commentators seized on it to assert that there was no racism in Brazil and to accuse opponents of betraying that ethos. These broad dynamics—and no small dose of confusion—shaped the dialogues surrounding the Japanese proposal, as racial equality took on multiple meanings and sprouted new, often contentious, and sometimes surprising forms outside of Paris.

Drafting, Revising, and Defeating the Proposal

Though “racial equality” was the English phrase that delegates used in Paris to refer to the Japanese proposal, Shimazu enumerates a larger set of Japanese concepts and terms. Japanese citizens more frequently spoke of “equal treatment” as opposed to “discriminatory treatment,” and when they used the phrase “racial equality” it most often meant “racially equal treatment to the Japanese people” as opposed to the broader idea of “racial equality for all.” ⁸ As Alexis Dudden shows, the act of translating between Japanese and non-Japanese terms had a profound impact on Japan’s ability to function as a colonial power. To do so, Japanese officials strove “to craft a vocabulary that was consistent both with traditional Japanese practices and Japan’s new aspirations, and that was, furthermore, intelligible to an international audience.” ⁹ While Brazilians generally viewed Japanese immigrants as an undifferentiated mass, Japanese citizens held differing ideas about Japanese racial identity, especially when it came to debates about racial hybridity and racial purity. ¹⁰ Ideas about race were also prone to change. As Ikuko Asaka has shown, nineteenth-century Japanese diplomatic engagements with the United States lay bare “the instability of race,” both in terms of how Japanese representatives viewed people they encountered abroad and in the visions that foreigners applied to the Japanese. ¹¹ Discourses surrounding the Japanese racial equality proposal similarly exhibit the variability of racial categories as well as the changing contours and limits of the idea of racial equality.

Debates in Paris pitted Japan against the United States, Great Britain, and representatives from the British “dominions,” especially Australia. Some saw Japan’s advocacy for racial equality as a self-serving ploy to prohibit exclusionary immigration policies against its citizens, or as a bargaining chip to secure control over territory Japan captured in China (and the Pacific) during World War I. Shimazu argues that while immigration and the politics of bargaining in Paris were important, the proposal, at its core, was meant to secure equal treatment from Europe and the United States; in this case, racial equality meant “the equality of status [for Japan] among great powers.” ¹² Xu Guoqi draws a similar conclusion but finds a greater degree of “sincerity” among its Japanese architects. ¹³ Many outside Japan, including African American intellectuals and activists, hailed the proposal as a powerful statement against White supremacy. ¹⁴ In 1924, Negro World identified the denial of Japan’s proposal in Paris as a salvo that locked the world into a larger race war. “Those who sow the wind,” the paper wrote, invoking the Bible, “reap the whirlwind.” ¹⁵ Black intellectuals and larger Black communities in Brazil were keenly attuned to, and often in conversation with, Black writers, intellectuals, and the Black press in the United States. Though they often employed different approaches, Brazilians were well aware of the revolutionary “whirlwind” and the brutal anti-Black violence that precipitated and followed it. ¹⁶ We know less about what Brazilian Black intellectuals thought about Japan or larger Black-Asian relationships. Though future research may provide additional insights, the Japanese proposal provides a compelling snapshot of one remarkable moment in time.

The League of Nations Commission, the body charged with formulating the body’s charter, was created in January 1919. Negotiations about the racial equality proposal stretched from the commission’s inception through late April. Japan attempted to include the proposal as part of Article 21 of the charter, which was originally drafted to protect religious freedom. On 13 February, the proposal was defeated, and Japanese officials began to formulate a new version. This second attempt was defeated on 11 April. The Japanese delegation tried once again to rework the proposal, which was definitively shot down at the end of April. ¹⁷ During the negotiations, public opinion in Japan galvanized in support of the proposal “more than on any other peace conference question,” but in Paris the Japanese delegates had to placate numerous opponents. ¹⁸ As a result, the meaning of “racial equality” traveled on two opposite tracks, one in Paris, where the proposal was continually watered down, and another in Japan, where the broader populace mobilized around the proposal and imbued it with new meanings. These contradictory movements illustrate how the idea of racial equality took on new life, even as the amendment itself died.

As opposition from the United States and Europe hardened, Japanese representatives in Paris and observers in Japan called out the hypocrisy of the United States and Great Britain. The Japanese daily Asahi pointed out how the proposal resonated with ideas and actions championed by its detractors and likened the proposal to Great Britain’s condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade a century earlier. ¹⁹ However well-reasoned, such arguments had little impact on the proposal’s detractors. No matter how far the Japanese delegation went to soft-pedal the proposal, and even though other nations supported it, British and U.S. diplomats would not budge. Even in April, when Japan presented the revised proposal in the form of a preamble to the League charter that called for the “equality of nations” instead of the “equality of races,” British and U.S. opposition remained. ²⁰ When put to a vote, a clear majority of nations voted in favor of the clause, but Wilson pulled rank, declaring that such an important matter had to gain unanimous support. “My own interest,” he said, “is to quiet discussion that raises national differences and racial prejudices.” ²¹ Turning the situation on its head, Wilson thwarted the proposal, which he cast, however improbably, as a source of prejudice and division.

Gerald Horne writes that U.S. opposition to the proposal “exposed the debilitating rigidity of white supremacy, which had difficulty in distinguishing among the powerful and powerless who were not defined as ‘white.’” ²² Some Brazilian responses to the measure’s defeat may be read as attempts to separate their new republic from other “powerless” nations and to reshape and solidify a collective racial identity that was not quite White, but which many hoped could ascend in the global order. Other Brazilian responses reflect ambivalence toward Japan, which Brazilian elites held up as a model for economic development and whose people they depicted alternately as exotic Others or White (or almost-White) Asians. ²³

The proposal’s fate in Paris was complicated by language barriers in Paris and muddled communications between delegates and their home governments. In this confluence, misunderstandings abounded. Dialogue between the Japanese delegation and officials in Tokyo was plagued on multiple levels, and Japan’s foreign-policy apparatus was characterized by numerous opinions. ²⁴ News of the proposal’s first defeat, in mid-February, took nearly a week to arrive in Japan. ²⁵ While the delay was typical of the conference, at least the Japanese delegation spoke the same language as officials at home. In Paris, representatives often struggled to communicate with each other, and there were other obstacles as well. Japan preferred to negotiate directly with the British, which made it difficult to see that their most forceful detractor was the Australian representative, Billy Hughes, who reportedly feigned sickness to avoid the Japanese delegation. ²⁶ Miscommunication also blended with racial essentialism. Some observers cast the Japanese delegates as “Sphinx-like” or “silent partners.” ²⁷ French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, a purported ally of the proposal, made venomous comments about Japanese representatives and complained that he could not hear what one Japanese official said during negotiations. This was, in part, because Japan was physically marginalized in the conference room, seated far from the other “great powers,” near representatives from Guatemala and Ecuador. ²⁸ David Hunter Miller, a U.S. lawyer who helped draft the charter, claimed that Brazil’s Epitácio Pessoa “spoke only in French. I think he understood English imperfectly, if at all.” ²⁹

Such misunderstandings and communication barriers shaped the consequential case of mistaken identity between Japan and Brazil. When the proposal was put to a vote in April, the Japanese delegation apparently mistook the Portuguese representative Jayme Batalha Reis—who along with the representatives from Great Britain, the United States, Poland, and Romania tacitly opposed the proposal—for Pessoa and thought that it was Brazil (and not Portugal) that opposed the project. While the Japanese delegates could be forgiven for confusing one light-skinned mustachioed man for another, the confusion “nearly caused a diplomatic incident between Brazil and Japan” and had a dramatic effect in Brazil, where apocryphal news of Pessoa’s opposition to the proposal soon circulated, rocking his nascent administration, and opening a new space for heated conversations about race and nation. ³⁰

Disagreeing to Agree

Discussion of Pessoa’s vote drew heavily on foreign reporting and traveled across Brazil, spilling over from the pages of newspapers into political agitation. The Brazilian press was in the midst of an evolution that, since the turn of the century, had made it more closely engaged with “the complexity of [the nation’s] changing social structure.” ³¹ Newspapers enthusiastically took—and also switched—sides in political battles, and their pages served as platforms for men of letters to throw flames at rivals and make names for themselves. They also provided a venue for Pessoa’s opponents to seize on confusion about his vote in Paris and accuse him of being racist and thereby dishonoring the nation’s ideology of racial mixture. That ideology, which later came to be known as “racial democracy,” idealized whiteness even while advancing the idea that Brazil was a racial paradise where Black, White, and Indigenous people came together in peaceful harmony. During debates about the Japanese amendment, writers in the Brazilian press often referenced a single “Brazilian race,” almost always attached to those three categories—“Black,” “white,” and “Indian”—who were the constitutive parts of a new, uniquely egalitarian and even raceless people. Some writers also conjured and staked claims to “Latin” and “Lusitanian” races that bound the nation to Portugal, France, and other European countries.

Such projections built on ideology developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Brazilian and other Latin American elites embraced neo-Lamarckian ideas about genetics and heredity, which gave them hope that race could be malleable. That malleability left open the possibility that nations with large Black and Indigenous populations could be “improved” through racial mixture; gradually, White genes would dominate and erase non-White genes. ³² In Brazil, this ideology was known as embranquecimento or branqueamento (“whitening”), or preto no branco (“Black into white”). In 1911, Brazil sent the director of the National Museum, João Batista de Lacerda, to the First Universal Races Congress in London. His address extoled the virtues of racial mixture, which, he projected, would within a century lead to the “extinction of the black race in our midst.” ³³ The idea of whitening gradually gave way to (or merged into) the belief that, even while progressing steadily towards a White apogee, Brazilian society was an egalitarian racial democracy.

As a non-White global power sending emigrants to Brazil in large numbers, Japan’s position vis-à-vis and within Brazilian racial schema was complex and unstable, not quite White and oscillating between being inferior, equal, and superior to Black and Indigenous people. Dating to the nineteenth century, White European immigrants to Brazil “were hailed as saviors” because they were understood to make the nation whiter and therefore better. ³⁴ Japanese immigrants were viewed alternately as part of that whitening project and as outside of it. During the nineteenth century, experiments to contract Chinese laborers provoked hostile, racist responses. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, elites in São Paulo often drew sharp distinctions between Chinese and Japanese immigrants, elevating the latter to almost-White status even while also deploying racist caricature. ³⁵

In 1919, as debates about the racial equality proposal played out, the measure’s opponents and proponents often settled into the same reactionary position, describing Japanese immigrants as incapable of assimilating. Similar rhetoric has shaped national historiography, which is often still dominated by what Jeffrey Lesser aptly called “the triangle theory of Brazilian society: a ‘civilization’ created from the ‘collision of three races’: Africans (Blacks), whites (Europeans), and Indians (indigenous), where the mixture of peoples found within the area enclosed by the borders of the triangle created infinite genetic possibilities.” ³⁶ In recent years, scholars such as Andre Kobayashi Deckrow and Sidney Xu Lu have blazed new trails by utilizing Japanese-language sources and placing greater focus on the Japanese side of immigration, which they show to have been intertwined with imperial and settler-colonial projects, internal migration, and political and intellectual movements in Japan. ³⁷

Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, 4.55 million immigrants came to Brazil. Among them, Asians (and Arabs and Jews), “most challenged elite notions of national identity” because they were “deemed nonwhite and nonblack.” ³⁸ That is not to say that Brazil welcomed Black immigrants. Just the opposite was true: Brazil’s first republican decree on immigration banned Africans, along with Asians, from entering the country. ³⁹ While Italians and other Europeans initially filled post-abolition rural labor demands, after World War I many migrated from plantations to cities. ⁴⁰ This, along with the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, created new openings for Japanese immigration in Brazil. By 1919, Brazil was home to thousands of Japanese immigrants, with São Paulo alone boasting three Japanese-language newspapers. ⁴¹ As Japanese immigration increased, stereotypes and racist invectives regularly appeared in the Brazilian press. The most virulent wave of anti-Japanese attacks surged in the 1930s and beyond. ⁴² 1919 was a key precursor to that later surge.

Early that year, news of Japan’s proposal made its way to Brazil, where competing narratives quickly took shape. The previous years had brought waves of worker mobilizations matched by state repression, and Brazil also found itself in the middle of an emergency presidential election. Rodrigues Alves had died shortly after winning the presidency in late 1918, a casualty of the influenza epidemic. The new election pitted Rui Barbosa, a White jurist, statesman, and one of the authors of the 1891 constitution, against Pessoa (also White), the nation’s top delegate in Paris. In his youth, Barbosa had been an abolitionist. In 1907, he represented Brazil at the Second International Peace Conference (held in The Hague), where he “became the champion of the smaller nations by arguing for complete equality in national representation on the court.” ⁴³ Barbosa was pegged to lead the Brazilian delegation to Paris but declined the invitation, which fell to Pessoa. ⁴⁴ In Paris, Pessoa sought a productive relationship with Wilson and European leaders (some would say that he enthusiastically tried to placate them). Despite not being in Brazil to campaign, Pessoa handily won the presidential election, which was held on 13 April. During the campaign and after the election, the racial equality proposal repeatedly bubbled to the surface.

Commentary on the proposal appeared in large-circulation newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, and in a diverse set of newspapers published outside Rio, including the Black press. ⁴⁵ As we will see, even though Brazilian newspapers were read by only a small portion of the population (which was largely illiterate), the ideas about racial equality and national identity were percolating among multiple social sectors. In February, Brazilians learned that Japan had advanced an amendment “proposing that racial differences not be established in immigration laws.” ⁴⁶ The implicit suggestion that “racial differences” might not yet be engrained in immigration laws illustrates a core facet of the discussions that followed: though Brazil had already passed a decree banning African and Asian immigrants, many would nonetheless cast racial difference and distinction as external and foreign. News from Paris arrived through channels that resembled an international game of telephone, with reports from Paris disseminated, translated, and reprinted via reporters and special correspondents stationed in Europe, the United States, and Asia, and then transmitted through various publications in Brazil. Even when the information was accurate, negotiations and reversals in Paris could make for confusing news cycles. On 25 March, a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro ran one communique stating that a French daily had announced that Japan had withdrawn “the amendment about the equality of races” and another stating that the Japanese delegates had rejected that same report. ⁴⁷

Brazilian journalists lauded the idea of the Japanese amendment, though that support could waver, and their view of Japan and Japanese immigrants was often negative. In late March, a newspaper in Paraná, in southern Brazil, informed that the Japanese delegation had promised Wilson it would not hold up the League charter, despite his rejection of the racial equality amendment. Less than two weeks later, readers learned that due to the proposal’s exclusion, Japan now openly opposed the League of Nations. A summary of news telegrammed from Paris to Washington seemed to express sympathy for the new Japanese position, especially insofar as it highlighted U.S. racism. ⁴⁸ But on 2 April, the same newspaper ran a biting headline: “The Race Question and Japan’s Intransigence.” ⁴⁹ The headline is an indication of how the changing and often confusing news about the Japanese proposal found a combustible counterpart in the flexible and variable terms that the Brazilian press was already well-practiced in applying to Japanese immigrants. Though a powerful global player, Japan could fall out of the Brazilian conversations altogether, only to reappear later as home to a racial Other that threatened to destroy Brazilian racial democracy by flooding it with unassimilable immigrants.

On 15 April, the pro-Pessoa A Razão (Rio de Janeiro) reported, “The Equality of the Races Was Approved in Principle,” with a majority of delegates voting in favor of the proposal and the United States voting against it. ⁵⁰ Soon, however, news broke that Pessoa had voted against the proposal, unleashing a slew of forceful denunciations and equally forceful defenses. At this point, some of the miscommunications and confusions began to turn into intentional misinformation. In the process, Pessoa’s most ardent supporters found themselves first vigorously defending his “no” vote and then suddenly reversing course and just as vigorously defending his “yes” vote. To Pessoa’s detractors, reports about his “no” vote provided an opportunity to seize the moral high ground and pummel him as racist and out of touch with Brazil, a line of attack they did not relinquish even after Pessoa repeatedly tried to clarify his position.

The back-and-forth is distilled in a running exchange between two influential Rio de Janeiro newspapers: the pro-Barbosa O Imparcial and the pro-Pessoa O Paiz. Even while taking diametrically opposed stances on Pessoa’s actions, the papers advanced similar opinions about race, an indication of how the idea of racial democracy often developed through conflict and confrontation, an ironic path for an ideology that placed so much emphasis on harmony and agreement. O Imparcial reported that the North American press had identified Pessoa as one of the delegates who voted against the proposal, news that the paper seized as evidence that he was unfit to lead the nation. It was “truly incomprehensible” that Pessoa leveled a vote “against the equality of the races” given that he represented “a country that already established that equality in the letter of [our] Constitution” and in “our traditions and our customs.” Brazil, the paper intoned, was “a nation where the Black and the Indian have ascended to the highest positions in society.” Pessoa’s vote left him in opposition to the “very essence of our democratic structure.” The paper also observed that successful “men of color” represented “one of the great elements of Brazilian progress” and that Pessoa had made clear that he would be “a president only for white people.” ⁵¹ This was a remarkable charge, noteworthy both for singling out “men of color” as important constituents and for suggesting that Pessoa would only represent Whites.

O Paiz rejected these claims, though it did so based on the flawed intel that Pessoa had voted against the proposal. To support that purported vote, O Paiz concurred that racial division did not exist in Brazil and explained that Pessoa’s “no” vote aligned with the justifiable U.S. and British policies of Asian exclusion. In this line of argument, the exclusion of Asians had nothing to do with race and was merely a practical matter of defending national borders, though this bled easily into a complementary narrative that distinguished Japanese immigrants as a foreign, unassimilable race. To prove that the accusations against Pessoa were off base, O Paiz employed almost the exact same argument that O Imparcial used to make its accusation. “In Brazil,” O Paiz wrote, “the race question, in the social and political sense, doesn’t exist.… In reality, we don’t have races here; there is only one race, formed from the gradual fusion” of “the Portuguese, the Indian, and the African.” This “melding” (caldeamento) process, the paper allowed, was not yet complete. Echoing Lacerda’s 1911 paper, O Paiz asserted that Brazil’s remaining “pure elements” (that is, unassimilated Indigenous and Black people) would eventually be “eliminated by the process of social and economic selection.” Recently arrived immigrants, Indigenous people, and “the remnants of the slave rabble who await being absorbed or eliminated” were all “abnormal elements that would fatally disappear in the synthesizing cauldron of mestiçagem [racial mixture].” By voting against racial equality in Paris, Pessoa had acted to protect racial mixture and promote momentum toward achieving racelessness at home. O Paiz dismissed the Japanese proposal as an “insidious trap” meant to achieve “universal hegemony of the Mongolians.” Just the previous year, the paper noted, none other than O Imparcial had opposed Japanese immigration, a stance entirely in line with Pessoa’s supposed vote, which would save Brazil from an Asian invasion and push the world toward its rightful state, united around the “immense material and moral patrimony of European civilization, white civilization.” ⁵²

O Imparcial shot back at O Paiz, now drawing on Japanese newspapers. One article, from the Japan Times, which O Imparcial quoted at length and was reproduced in other Brazilian papers, assailed opposition to the proposal as a sign that White nations would never allow racial harmony to flourish. The Japan Times article also compared Japan’s plight to that of a hypothetical Black preacher, who “on account of his oratory eloquence, [is] invited to preach in a church [but] because he is a different race than the white congregation isn’t considered as an equal.” ⁵³ O Imparcial also reprinted a statement from a pro-Barbosa group and declared that Pessoa’s “no” vote stood in opposition to the 1891 constitution, which made “equal all citizens without distinction by color.” ⁵⁴ Similar statements appeared in Barbosa’s home state, Bahia, in northeast Brazil, where Pessoa was lambasted as an “adherent of racial inequality.” ⁵⁵ One paper reprinted the Japan Times article and added that Pessoa had injected questions about race that would impede the “progress that blacks and whites” had made in Brazil. By contrast, Barbosa’s record revealed his belief that Brazil was a “truly democratic people.” ⁵⁶ A newspaper in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, stated, “Our Constitution makes equal all citizens with no distinction by color or race.” All were “colorless [incolores] in our laws. All are of the same color or the same race.” ⁵⁷

It was clear that “all” did not refer to the Japanese, who the paper called “people of the yellow race, but our allies.” Pessoa had voted against the proposal because he did “not want to mix with people of color,” which was “just like” how they did things in the United States, “his boss at the League of Nations.” The article identified, in addition to the Brazilian constitution, the Free Womb Law, which in 1871 gave conditional freedom to newborn children of enslaved women, as evidence that Pessoa had not only betrayed the republic’s constitution but also a longer tradition of Brazilian law that guaranteed equality. ⁵⁸ In this debate, in which writers cast Pessoa alternately as a racist U.S. stooge or brave U.S. ally and torch bearer of Brazilian racial democracy, Japanese immigrants not only fell outside Brazil’s White-Black-Indigenous “triangle,” but were depicted as the only group who possessed (and were plagued by) race. Discriminating against this foreign race was not an act of racism and instead a necessary step to protect the racial equality said to be at the root of Brazilian society. Whether supporting Pessoa or Barbosa, commentators who disagreed on everything else repeatedly came back to this same point.

A Forced Embrace

Though Pessoa won the election in mid-April, Barbosa partisans continued to push his candidacy forward. On 23 April, they held a meeting in Rio de Janeiro that placed the Japanese proposal at the center of their opposition to Pessoa, who was still in Paris. The pro-Barbosa O Imparcial described people “of every social class” packing a large venue, where those in attendance heard speeches by a litany of distinguished men who supported Barbosa. While they voiced multiple complaints about Pessoa, the “decisive fact was [Pessoa’s] indefensible attitude voting for the inequality of human races.” Agostinho dos Reis, who was born enslaved and became a prominent abolitionist, described how “whites, Blacks, and mestiços” had forged fraternal bonds while fighting to abolish slavery. Pessoa’s vote betrayed this history and was an assault on “the Brazilian family.” Miguel Calmon, an influential White politician, and Barbosa ally, recalled Lacerda’s presentation in London, which he described as a statement that, with “effort, perseverance, and education,” all races could join the “vanguard of civilization and culture.” Skipping over the part about the projected disappearance of non-White Brazilians, Calmon accused Pessoa of being “inspired by North American prejudices.” Before concluding, he asked, “as proof and demonstration of the fraternity that exist[s] in the Brazilian people, that all present embrace one of the representatives of the Black race” present at the meeting. Calmon, the other speakers, “and everyone present” at the meeting proceeded to take turns hugging Antonio Alves, one of the Black men on stage. ⁵⁹

It is difficult to conjure a better metaphor for the myth of Brazilian racial democracy than these forced embraces, though we will see that however Alves felt about being thrust into the hugfest, other Black Brazilians would adopt and make diverse uses of the idea of racial fraternity and the Japanese proposal. Pro-Pessoa journalists depicted the meeting in Rio de Janeiro quite differently than O Imparcial. A Razão denounced the meeting and accused its organizers of “shameful exploitation” of “our Blacks and mulatos,” who had been lured to what it described as a sparsely attended event. Acknowledging that not all the details of the proposal were yet known, the paper was nonetheless convinced that its passage would portend an “invasion” akin to the one that brought “endless legions of Chinese” to other nations. Accusing O Imparcial of turning itself into a pawn for the “yellow press,” A Razão insisted that this was not a question of defending “the white race” and instead of protecting “Western civilization itself, preserving it from the decivilizing contact of unassimilable elements.” The paper also explained that Blacks and mulatos “should fear competition from the Asians or Chinese,” who would work for little money, introduce racial animosity, and threaten the comfortable lives that Black and mixed-race Brazilians enjoyed. Such “exploitation,” the paper believed, would not work: “Our Blacks and mulatos are much more intelligent, good-natured, independent, and dignified than their exploiters believe [them to be].” ⁶⁰ In this instance, Chinese immigrants are lumped together with Japanese and other Asians, an indication of how xenophobic hysteria could blur lines such as the ones used in other cases to elevate Japanese above Chinese immigrants. ⁶¹

The following day, Barbosa arrived in Rio, returning from a trip to Bahia. A large crowd, including Calmon, greeted him. At a rally that followed, he and his supporters railed against Pessoa for his purported vote against the proposal. According to O Imparcial, an interloper attempted to disrupt the proceedings by yelling, “A Black doesn’t have the right to speak about a White!” The crowd immediately advanced on the instigator, whom they “tried to lynch.” ⁶² Employing lynchar (to lynch), a Portuguese neologism adapted from English, the article drew a sharp distinction between Brazil and the United States—in Brazil, it was racists who got lynched. ⁶³

This contrast had particularly sharp teeth in 1919. During and after the debates about Japan’s proposal, news from abroad regularly informed Brazilians about how different things were away from home. While national representatives gathered in 1919, W. E. B. DuBois and other Black leaders held the First Pan-African Congress, also in Paris. A representative Brazilian account of the conference, translated from an article written by a White U.S. journalist, described the conference’s intention “to protest the exclusion of the Black race from global democracy.” ⁶⁴ Soon, news would circulate in Brazil about the violence gripping the United States during the violent summer of 1919, when lynchings and anti-Black riots exploded. ⁶⁵ Not surprisingly, reporting in Brazil emphasized the difference between Brazilian racial harmony and North American “racial hatred,” to quote a recurring title of Brazilian coverage of the violence. ⁶⁶

The Curveball

While supporters of Barbosa and Pessoa found it easy to contrast the Jim Crow United States with Brazil, everyone had to reverse course when word spread that Pessoa might not have voted against the proposal, after all. Having learned of the furor at home, Pessoa sent a telegram, which was published in the press: “Please inform [that] it is not precise [exacto] that I voted against racial equality. That question was proposed two times to the commission, on both occasions Brazil being favorable.” In a separate telegram, Pessoa stated more explicitly that when the measure was first introduced in February, Brazil joined Japan and China as the only nations to support it. ⁶⁷ He also asserted that Brazil had backed the measure subsequently and added, “No newspaper [in Paris] attributed that vote [against the proposal] to me. I have no doubt that the news has been fabricated [in Brazil] for political gain.” ⁶⁸

These corrections posed an uncomfortable question for both sides—how to now backtrack and embrace the exact opposite side of the debate? A Razão wrote, “Did [he] vote well? Or poorly?” It was impossible to say until more details about the proposal were known. Until then, attacks against Pessoa were just more evidence of the “bad faith” of Barbosa’s supporters. ⁶⁹ O Paiz hedged its support for the “no” vote: “According to the information [now] on hand,” Pessoa “did not enter into the merit of the question of superiority or inferiority of this or that race,” and instead had simply determined that the time was not right to “address such a delicate subject.” This language mirrors the ingenuous claim that Wilson made while defeating the proposal (that it would somehow exacerbate rather than ameliorate “national differences and racial prejudices”). It is possible that during the long negotiations in Paris, Pessoa, intent on gaining favor with Wilson, at some point indicated that he did not support the Japanese proposal. Whether or not that is the case, in the months to come Pessoa would insist with growing conviction that he never opposed the measure.

Now throwing its support behind Pessoa’s “yes” vote, O Paiz noted that it did not want to open old wounds but felt obligated to point out that Barbosa was the real racist. ⁷⁰ As proof, the paper referenced an article written by the Black educator Hemetério José dos Santos and published in March in O Exemplo, a prominent Black newspaper in Rio Grande do Sul. In that article, Santos lobbied against Barbosa’s candidacy, laying out multiple reasons why he was an unworthy candidate; O Paiz highlighted one. Among his reasons for opposing Barbosa, Santos called attention to a famous speech that Barbosa gave in 1916 while serving as ambassador to Argentina. In that address, Barbosa cast the heritage of the entire hemisphere in White hues. “America,” Barbosa wrote, “has in its veins the blood, intelligence, and richness of its predecessors, which are not the Apaches, the Guaranys, or the Africans, and instead the English and the Iberians.” ⁷¹ Summarizing Santos’s critique, O Paiz highlighted how Barbosa had diminished the contributions and status of Black Brazilians. This was correct, though it was only part of what Santos originally wrote. Santos also believed that Barbosa had elided Brazil’s Indigenous and Portuguese heritage, and Santos drew attention to Barbosa’s most controversial act: ordering the destruction of a large collection of government records related to slavery. Though Barbosa did so to deprive enslavers of written documentation required to receive indemnification for their lost “property,” Santos and others cast the act as an attempt to “whitewash” the nation’s past. Santos wrote that Barbosa “ordered the vile archives burned and made invisible all the vileness of the slave ships and the thieves, whose children would continue the crimes of their fathers.” ⁷² This was a forceful critique not only of Barbosa but also post-abolition Brazil, where the “children” of enslavers were said to act much like their predecessors.

That point was all the more powerful given the fact that, two years earlier, Santos’s son had been barred from school by a racist headmaster, who determined that, as a “colored” student, the child could not continue to study alongside White pupils, a seemingly blatant violation of Brazilian laws and mores. ⁷³ O Paiz did not mention any of this, instead focusing on the narrower point: It was Barbosa, not Pessoa, who was racist. Interestingly, like his critique of Barbosa, Santos’s public response to his child’s expulsion drew on narratives of Brazilian racial exceptionalism, referencing “the egalitarian lands of Brazil” and casting the discriminatory act as an unprecedented violation of Brazilian customs. ⁷⁴ If many (including Santos) used the idea of fraternal exceptionalism to bludgeon either Pessoa or Barbosa, Santos also employed it to call attention to the racism that he and his family experienced.

On 25 April, O Paiz published one of Pessoa’s telegrams, placing it near the bottom of the page, beneath two lengthy opinion pieces about racial equality. Its positioning illustrates how the details of Pessoa’s vote were becoming almost an afterthought. In the first column, evidently written before Pessoa’s telegram arrived, Celso de Melo Pereira Vieira explained how to reconcile a rejection of the Japanese proposal with liberal democratic ideals. A vocal White opponent of Japanese immigration and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Vieira accused the Japanese of using the racial equality proposal to drown the world in a “yellow flood.” While Vieira valorized “the first article of the liberal credo, [in existence] since 1789,” which recognized the equality “of men before the law,” he acknowledged that humanity had not yet determined “how to democratize the world, so divided by old antagonisms.” Vieira favored the approach of some democratic societies of Europe and America that did not “exclusively obey liberalism, as a Newtonian law of gravity” and instead allowed for “contingencies” and “deviations,” which could necessitate unequal practices and institutions. ⁷⁵ By emphasizing national sovereignty and embracing equality as an important but not absolute principle, Vieira (and others) could pledge fealty to the precepts of democracy and equality even while forcefully singling out and excluding the Japanese. Whatever the original intentions behind it, Japan’s racial equality proposal had been hijacked and put to work in the service of opposing political factions who claimed to be the guardians of Brazil’s raceless society and who at the same time had no problem delineating Japan as a racial Other.

Next to Vieira’s piece, O Paiz offered a brutal critique of Barbosa’s campaign, which it accused of “trying to incite disunion among our people” and “inventing a question of races, which never existed among us, and which would be even more absurd now, as the fusion of our ethnic elements continues to make gradually emerge the definitive Brazilian race.” ⁷⁶ Even while strenuously disagreeing about who was protecting whom, and who was defending “the definitive Brazilian race,” Barbosa’s supporters made strikingly similar arguments about who belonged in the republic—and who did not. One newspaper opposed Japanese (and also German and Syrian) immigration not because the Japanese were “of the yellow race, and instead because their presence in Brazil disturbs our economic and social order.” ⁷⁷ This line of thinking resonated clearly with the Nationalist League, an organization founded in 1916 in São Paulo that counted among its goals the reduction of immigrant laborers. ⁷⁸ In the vehement critiques and equally vigorous defenses of Pessoa, the two warring sides continued to root themselves in common ground—the stated belief, however strained its relationship was to reality, that racial difference and inequality did not exist in Brazil. Galvanizing around arguments about national sovereignty—and by referencing abstract and racially neutral sounding concepts such as “economic and social order”—both sides also demonstrated how to single out Japanese immigrants as belonging to the “yellow race” while simultaneously asserting that plans to exclude them had nothing to do with race. ⁷⁹

The pro-Pessoa press ran additional clarifications to align him with the Japanese proposal while at the same time distancing him from the Japanese representatives in Paris, whom Brazilian writers, often with an assist from U.S. and British journalists, cast as mysterious and withdrawn. ⁸⁰ These supposed traits were to blame for the confusion surrounding Pessoa’s vote and one more reason to oppose Japanese immigration. As these arguments developed, Pessoa sent more telegrams, hoping to finally distance himself from the mess. In one missive, he called “the question of the races a fib invented for political gain.” He had just dined with Colonel Edward House, an advisor to Woodrow Wilson, and Japanese delegate Makino Nobuaki, who “thanked me in the most effusive terms for my constant support of his proposal.” In another telegram, Pessoa denounced the rumors again: “It is false how I have been cast in the vote about the question of the races. Never, absolutely never, did I vote against this measure.” ⁸¹

Newspapers across Brazil published Pessoa’s telegrams, and also followed and participated in the ongoing debates. ⁸² In Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil, the Jornal do Recife believed that Pessoa would never betray “the ineludible second paragraph of article 72 of our Magna Carta.” Abolition had marked “the end of this arbitrary superiority of [one] man over [another] man,” and the 1891 constitution “annihilated altogether the supposed inequality of races in Brazil.” ⁸³ In a clear indication of how the matter of Pessoa’s stance on the proposal still remained unsettled, the essay shared the front page with another article that summarized U.S. newspaper reports stating unequivocally that Pessoa had voted against the proposal. ⁸⁴

The Debate Journeys Farther

News of Pessoa’s vote also traveled through Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. Thanks to European immigration, it had become known as a “white” state, but it was also home to large African-descendant communities. Black newspapers such as O Exemplo, which in March had printed Hemetério José dos Santos’s full critique of Barbosa (excerpted in O Paiz), combatted racism and tried out multiple strategies for representing and defending Black communities in a state that valorized and projected whiteness. Embracing racial mixture—and claiming space for Black Brazilians within it—was one such strategy, and Pessoa’s vote represented an opportunity to do just that. That Black intellectuals such as Santos discussed the proposal shows that it traveled beyond the confines of the mainstream press and suggests that it also reached the ears of non-literate Brazilians who attended political rallies where it was discussed or otherwise heard the news read or debated aloud. In early May, O Exemplo described a “clamor of protest” that pulsed across Porto Alegre (the state capital) after a telegram arrived informing that Pessoa had “follow[ed] the thinking of Wilson” and voted to maintain the “separateness of the races.” The newspaper’s writers expressed their surprise that Pessoa would have voted against the proposal “even under the threat of a possible invasion in our territory by the well-bred yellow race.” The combination of “invasion” and “well-bred” (morigerada) further illustrates the flexible and often-paradoxical nature of the discussions surrounding the proposal and regarding race and immigration; the Japanese could be both admirable models and invasive enemies.

O Exemplo also voiced its version of another emerging discourse, which lionized Brazilian racial mixture while at the same time continuing to fortify the borders of the racial triangle said to be at the heart of national genesis. The paper described Brazil as home to Portuguese, African, Indigenous, “and even Germanic and Italian” people and alluded to the nation’s “constitutional spirit of the equality of races.” The objective of the Paris Peace Conference, O Exemplo wrote, was “to unite every nation in the same fraternal embrace.” ⁸⁵ The phrase not only conjures the hugfest staged at the pro-Barbosa rally but also highlights a discourse that was gaining increased purchase among other Black intellectuals, who saw fraternal bonds as an effective metaphor as they advocated for equal treatment. ⁸⁶ Paulina Alberto shows how projects to erect monuments to the Mãe Preta (Black Mother) during the second half of the 1920s provided the first opportunity for Black intellectuals to “air their interpretations of racial fraternity” to a larger, interracial audience. Though they had elaborated such discourses previously in the Black press, it was not until the second half of the 1920s that they found opportunity to do so on the “much broader public stage” provided by larger-circulation newspapers. ⁸⁷ In 1919, Japan’s racial equality proposal provided an early opportunity to do the same. By calling attention to the apparent contrast between Pessoa’s vote and Brazil’s “constitutional spirit of equality,” the writers at O Exemplo valorized Brazilian legal structures that theoretically guaranteed equality, while echoing Agostinho dos Reis, the Black abolitionist who in support of Rui Barbosa had referenced the interracial bonds of the “Brazilian family,” a reference that prefigured those used several years later by proponents of the Mãe Preta monuments.

Accounts of Pessoa’s vote continued to evolve as more information arrived in the south. In its edition the week of 13 May, the anniversary of abolition, O Exemplo celebrated the end of slavery as the moment when Brazil “traversed the thresholds of universal civilization” and, in a separate article, dug deeper into the ongoing controversy. ⁸⁸ Surveying coverage of Pessoa’s vote in Rio de Janeiro, O Exemplo saw reasons for pessimism and optimism about the future of Brazilian race relations. Some newspapers had published openly racist articles, such as one by a male politician from Rio de Janeiro who sided with Pessoa, or at least the version of Pessoa who voted “no.” According to this author, the proposal to “establish the equality of races” represented “the most forceful … revolution,” capable of destroying social, political, and economic order. ⁸⁹ Thankfully, Pessoa had helped defeat the “infamous Japanese” project, whose potential danger the writer illustrated with an extended first-person parable about purchasing an expensive pair of roosters, whose “breed” (raça, the same word for “race”) was “incomparable.” After receiving his payment for the beautiful animals, the seller surreptitiously replaced them with a pair of sickly birds. “Didn’t you know,” he asked the author, “that the equality of the races has just been established?” With that catastrophe in mind, the writer intoned, “I am, in body and soul, on the side of … Epitacio Pessoa.”

If that article gave cause for concern, the editors at O Exemplo found reason for hope in O Imparcial’s coverage of the rally where Barbosa’s supporters reportedly pursued the racist instigator; O Exemplo reprinted O Imparcial’s coverage of the incident, under the subheading “Almost Lynched.” ⁹⁰ Though some Black residents of Porto Alegre soured on Pessoa, taking to the streets to express their displeasure, others found even in the “no” vote a reaffirmation of core Brazilian beliefs. Fending off a “Japanese invasion” would help preserve the nation and its unique mixture of inhabitants. ⁹¹ According to O Exemplo, in Brazil “what exists is the prejudice of color and not of race, to the contrary of what is seen in the United States of America.” ⁹² This idea, which both acknowledged and downplayed racism in Brazil, resonated with arguments that would emphasize variables other than race as sources of division and inequality in Brazil. By distinguishing color from race, the authors also highlighted the instability not just of racial categories but of race itself, which could be absent within the triangle but present outside of it. That flexibility facilitated anti-Japanese discourse, which often suggested that Japanese immigrants were not from an inferior race as much as they were uniquely and indelibly marked by race, in contrast to “real” Brazilians, who lived in a country where race did not exist.

On 28 June, the Paris Peace Conference concluded with the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which did not include the Japanese proposal or any reference to race. Nonetheless, at a parade in Porto Alegre to celebrate the treaty, a law professor spoke, hailing Pessoa for helping secure “the supreme guarantee of universal fraternity.” ⁹³ In the following weeks, O Exemplo published a two-piece series on “Evolution” that further illustrates how the concepts of equality and fraternity were evolving in tandem in Brazil. The author of this essay was Felipe Senillosa, the scion of an Argentine political dynasty. O Exemplo did not preface or otherwise frame the excerpts from Senillosa’s work, instead simply printing them for readers to digest on their own. Though Senillosa wrote the essay in the late nineteenth century, the portions printed in O Exemplo in 1919 clearly resonated with what readers found in previous issues and even on the very same page of this edition, which also featured continuing coverage of the now-completed Peace Conference. In the first excerpt that appeared in O Exemplo, Senillosa wrote, “The embryo of equality is thrown upon the land [and] must blossom, plant roots, and transform itself into a majestic tree…. It is certain that equality continues to penetrate the universal consciousness, and that the notion of rights for all, continues to spread.” ⁹⁴ In these words, originally proffered by a White Argentine, Black O Exemplo readers found a promising lens through which to view the current state and future of race relations in Brazil.

Though the Treaty of Versailles put an official end to the Japanese proposal, Pessoa’s vote remained a point of contention in Brazil through the end of 1919. In December, O Exemplo published one more interlocutor’s take on the question. This essay, which first appeared in the pro-Pessoa O Paiz, was written by João do Rio (João Paulo Alberto Coelho Barreto), an influential journalist-chronicler, who accompanied Pessoa to Paris, wrote dispatches from the Peace Conference, and lavishly praised Pessoa. It is uncertain what O Exemplo’s writers thought of João do Rio, whose writings were read widely and generally admired. His mother was Black, but he had light skin and identified as White or mulato. The paper seemed to endorse his defense of Pessoa, who, João do Rio wrote, had already been forced “for the third or fourth time” to publicly clarify his position in Paris. The ongoing controversy, he decried, was “one of the most scandalous examples” of how Brazilians “preferred the hostile lie to the simple truth.” ⁹⁵

João do Rio’s account encapsulates the remarkable way that the concept of racial equality could go together with blatant racism. Elsewhere, he called the Japanese proposal a “formidable jiu-jitsu attack” perpetrated to undermine U.S. immigration restrictions, a reference to the martial art that arrived in Brazil via the same immigration stream that the journalist cast as un-Brazilian. ⁹⁶ In the essay that O Exemplo reprinted, he called the Japanese “yellow, silent,” and “incredibly ugly.” ⁹⁷ João do Rio asserted that the Japanese delegation deeply appreciated Pessoa’s support for the proposal but also recalled that Pessoa had explained to the Japanese representatives “with the greatest kindness” that any appearance of opposition to the proposal had had nothing to do with political concerns and instead was a “question of principles that we [Brazilians] resolved practically in the fusion of the Indian, the Black, and the white.” Considering that history, it would have been illogical, “absurd,” and all but impossible for Pessoa or any other Brazilian to have opposed the proposal. “No one in Brazil,” the writer intoned, “could ever recall [any form of] distinction between Blacks and whites.” Resorting to a familiar contrast, he continued, “The race question … concludes each day [in the United States] with the lynching of Blacks.” In voting for the equality proposal, Pessoa had therefore all but declared: “[I am] a close friend of the United States, but an even closer friend to my opinion, and in my opinion, whites, Blacks, yellows or blues, men are equal.”

A gifted satirist, João do Rio closed with a riposte that drove home the way that racial difference, racial equality, and racial mixture could blend into one. “Preto no branco,” he wrote, “serves [in Brazil] to demonstrate that not even white is white, nor Black is Black, and not even a citizen voting openly for one thing can impede others from demonstrating that he voted precisely to the contrary of how he [actually] voted.” Employing a key phrase associated with whitening ideology (preto no branco, “Black into white”), João do Rio asserted that Brazil was a haven for racial mixture and a sentinel for the principle of racial equality, while at the same time clearly signaling that all this talk about equality was, in fact, as preposterous as the idea that Pessoa had voted against the Japanese proposal. And even if Brazil was a uniquely color-blind society, it had no room for Japan, whose immigration plans threatened the equilibrium that had been established in Brazil.

Several months earlier and two thousand miles to the north, in Bahia, Theodoro Sampaio had also weighed in on the controversy, providing an interesting counterpoint to João do Rio’s essay and further evidence that Black intellectuals seized on the proposal to publicly lay claim to the idea of racial fraternity earlier than previously thought. Born free to an enslaved mother, whose freedom (along with that of his siblings) he purchased, Sampaio was an accomplished engineer before becoming a politician. ⁹⁸ He helped found the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico da Bahia (IHGB), located in Salvador, sometimes hailed as Brazil’s “Black Rome.” ⁹⁹ There, in early May 1919, he delivered a speech about the Japanese proposal. Like others, Sampaio referenced a long history of racial harmony in Brazil. For “four centuries,” Brazil had witnessed the mixture of races, incorporating “the moral patrimony of Africans and Amerindians.” Sampaio twice mentioned “juridical equality,” a concept and tradition that, by excluding the Japanese amendment, the League of Nation’s charter would violate. The amendment’s exclusion meant that the League would leave “human dignity at the mercy of an accident of color [accidente de côr],” a depressing outcome and an “afront against human dignity … Christianity, and civilization.” Sampaio spoke at length about Booker T. Washington, recounting how the “illustrious Black man” had been denied service in the Jim Crow United States, something that “would never happen in Brazil”; after all, segregation and discrimination were antithetical to Brazilian traditions and prohibited by Brazilian law. “I do not bring here the agitation of the streets,” he told his well-heeled audience at the IHGB, “Nor do I wish to make demands and protests…, but this Institute, in its privileged function [defending] moral culture must not remain indifferent to retrocession,” which the League’s charter represented. ¹⁰⁰ Sampaio never mentioned Pessoa, instead laying the entire blame at the feet of the League of Nations.

Delivered two months after Santos’s similar evocation of Brazil’s centuries-long history of racial harmony, Sampaio’s speech illustrates the magnitude of the moment. In 1919, a half-decade before the Mãe Preta monument projects would give Black leaders a national forum to talk about interracial fraternity, Santos, Sampaio, and Agostinho dos Reis addressed large audiences, employing the same concept to underscore the difference between Brazil and the United States. The fact that Santos’s son had experienced the very same kind of racist exclusion that Sampaio suggested did not exist in Brazil emphasizes the multi-layered and multiple experiences and ideas felt and held by Black Brazilians and illustrates the many ways that Brazilians interpreted the amendment and the idea of racial equality.

Though commentary surrounding the proposal stretched through the end of 1919, its impact reached even farther. In 1921, Evaristo de Moraes, a close ally of Barbosa’s, helped defeat a bill proposed by two Congressional representatives, who sought to bar the entry into Brazil of “human beings of the black race.” ¹⁰¹ Though the explicitly racist bill was never passed, it inspired later proposals, and was handled with a duplicity indicative of larger trends in Brazilian foreign affairs, with officials professing race-blind policy in public while privately denying visas to non-White immigrants. ¹⁰² To defeat the bill, opponents called upon the same language that permeated the debates in 1919. The language they used “left an example for the antiracist uses of fraternity” that would become a hallmark of the Black press and a centerpiece in the Mãe Preta monument campaigns in the second half of the 1920s. ¹⁰³

Moraes became a renowned jurist during the early twentieth century and was one of Rio de Janeiro’s most influential Black intellectuals. He understood abolition and the declaration of the republic to be incomplete projects and believed in the power and importance of “equalizing laws,” or legislation meant to even the economic playing field. ¹⁰⁴ Moraes’s critique of the exclusionary immigration bill, and the terms in which the bill were debated, indicate how the discussions in 1919 influenced subsequent disputes and deliberations. To its supporters, the bill was an exercise in national sovereignty no different than what the United States had done in barring Asian immigrants. Rather than challenge that assertion, Moraes took aim at negative depictions of Blacks in the United States, which the bill’s sponsors used to bolster its appeal. Moraes also grounded himself in Brazil’s constitution. Wary of how his critique might be received, he prefaced his argument by emphasizing how the history and current state of race relations in Brazil was “much more humane, much more pleasant” than in the United States. ¹⁰⁵ He also emphasized that he wrote “as a Brazilian and as a jurist, disregarding any kind of consideration of race [and] separating—completely—from the apparent link that I have with what [the proposed bill] assails.” ¹⁰⁶ That “link,” of course, was his Blackness, which in this case he took great pains to downplay.

Though the restrictive immigration bill was defeated, its ideas and its proponents were not. In 1921, one of its sponsors was named ambassador to the League of Nations. Four years later, in a public exchange about Japanese immigration, a writer asserted, “Japan, since Versailles in 1919 insistently demands [the passage] of a racial equality clause. The British Empire and the United States have mobilized against the international application of that principle precisely because of the problem of yellow colonization in the white domains of the Pacific.” ¹⁰⁷ Racial equality was once again cast as a disguise for Japanese ulterior motives. By challenging Japanese “colonization” while tacitly approving of “white domains,” the writer also highlighted the continued privilege assigned to whiteness. The ideas of Celso Vieira, who in 1919 approvingly noted how democracies could allow “deviations” from egalitarian principles to prevent problems such as Japanese immigration, informed future thinkers and works such as the notoriously racist 1942 book A ofensiva japonesa no Brasil (The Japanese offensive in Brazil). ¹⁰⁸

These examples illustrate an unsettling legacy of the Japanese proposal for racial equality: jingoistic ideas and policies. But if such responses were directly in opposition to the stated intentions of the Japanese proposal, other results reveal a different kind of impact. A case in point is the way that Black Brazilians connected the Japanese proposal to Brazil’s 1891 constitution and its purportedly race-blind legal structure and society. Whatever the original intentions of its Japanese authors, the racial equality proposal created an early opportunity that Black Brazilians seized to claim on a national stage the ethos of racial fraternity, and to employ it as a tool to advocate for rights and inclusion.

Conclusion

Scholars have long understood the what of Brazilian racial ideology: whitening became a national ideology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eventually giving way to (but also shaping) the next big idea—that Brazil was home to a uniquely harmonious racial democracy. There remains—always—additional work to be done on the ever-important how; Brazilian engagement with Japan’s proposal provides unique insights about that enduring question. If the dominant forces in Paris ran counter to the proposal, in Brazil it seems, at least at first glance, that the opposite was true. Outrage grew over Pessoa’s purported opposition, which he went to great lengths to refute. While a similar response from Wilson is unimaginable, almost everyone involved ended up saying the same thing about Japanese immigrants—they were unwanted external Others. This coalescence, and the way that some evoked British and U.S. immigration policy as justification for their own ideas and proposals, is especially significant given the emphasis placed at the time on Brazilian racial exceptionalism.

As multiple strands of Brazilian racial ideology were taking shape, the forces at play in 1919 made it especially propitious to advance narratives of racial harmony in contradistinction not only to the United States but also to Japan, which by advancing a proposal for racial equality was portrayed as a potential source of racial division. Racial violence in the United States, Japan’s standing as a powerful but also vulnerable non-White power, and the emphasis that Barbosa’s and Pessoa’s followers placed on the image of Brazil as a uniquely harmonious racial paradise created a unique opportunity for Black intellectuals to stake claims to that image. Given the growing power of ideas that emphasized racial unity and racelessness, they found more reasons to deploy national fraternity than to openly align themselves with the Japanese authors of the proposal or offer expressions of unity akin to those that Black intellectuals in the United States expressed towards Japan for advancing the amendment. Sizing up the options before them, and cognizant of both the revolutionary “whirlwind” promised by Negro World and the vicious anti-Black violence in the United States, Black intellectuals in Brazil reasonably saw fraternity as the most promising strategy at the time.

At least before they believed that Pessoa opposed the measure, the Japanese diplomats who formulated the racial equality amendment likely did not give a great deal of thought to the Brazilian representatives in Paris. The proposal and the controversy surrounding Pessoa’s vote nonetheless landed forcefully in Brazil. In addition to opening an early avenue for Black intellectuals to deploy the language and idea of racial fraternity, the proposal also inadvertently helped propel forward the project to distinguish “colorless” Brazil from “yellow” Japanese immigrants, a project with long-ranging impact, evident in the fact that even today, “yellow” remains the official census category for Brazilians of Asian descent. Nonetheless, and though racist contemporaries would characterize the Japanese delegates as inscrutable, silent, and “Sphinx-like,” those delegates and their project to recognize racial equality had profound effect. Traveling along an often-overlooked Pacific route, and with a key stopover in Paris, the Japanese racial equality proposal influenced Brazilian political discourse and the ongoing struggles over the meanings of racial equality, revealing Japan as one surprising site of genesis and point of reference for ideas forged and debated in Brazil.