Who was Guerreiro Ramos, pioneer of racism studies in Brazil

The new book brings together unpublished texts by a black sociologist. A thinker whose trajectory was marked by the 1964 coup d’état, he defended the need to decolonize knowledge and, therefore, also ethnic-racial relations in Brazil.), in the context of ethnic discussions in the country. Black, he came to be called a “black racist” and was commonly seen as someone who made fun of the subject; in a report produced by the military regime, to which he had access in 1965, he was described as a “mulatto posing as a sociologist”.

Launched by the Zahar publishing house, the book Negro Sou helps to understand the importance of his vision for understanding the racial issue in Brazil. It is a selection of texts on the subject, written between 1949 and 1973, many of which are unpublished in book form, which deal with the subject. In a pioneering way, but which, in today’s eyes, may sound racist. Mainly due to a current idea that Brazil lived a racial democracy.

“[Esses textos] must be understood within the political game of Guerreiro”, explains to DW Brasil the historian and sociologist Muryatan Santana Barbosa, professor at the Federal University of ABC and organizer of the recently published book. “What was meant was to build a pact of democracy racialism that confronted really existing racism”.

As Barbosa explains in the introduction to the book, it is first necessary to interpret this vision of “racial democracy” without anachronisms. In that context, where there was explicit racial segregation in the United States, apartheid in South Africa, and other similar examples around the world, the racism that existed in Brazil was understood as something less rigid. “That is, despite the discrimination and prejudice, the opinion is that in Brazil there would be no racial hatred. Guerriero must be understood in this context”, writes the historian.

structural racism

The other aspect is that one of the pillars of Guerreiro Ramos’ sociological theory, in his proposal to create a national project, was the need to decolonize knowledge and, therefore, also ethnic-racial relations in Brazil. In this sense, as Santana points out in the text of the book, Ramos was a pioneer “in the perception that the ‘racial problem’ would be part of the reproduction of a colonial logic in the country […] both in relation to black and in relation to white”.

Updating to contemporary views and terminology, it was the forerunner of what is now understood as “structural racism”. “In this sense, blacks, whites and ‘whites’ in Brazil were all victims of the colonial condition that was established here,” comments to DW Brasil the sociologist and engineer Ariston Azevêdo, author of the Life and Work extension project of the sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

He explains that, in Ramos’ theory, blacks ended up being marginalized in Brazilian society due, on the one hand, to the “colonial mentality” and, on the other, “to the servile way […] how Brazil integrates into the modern Eurocentric world.” “So, to understand Brazilian society, we should start from these characteristics, as they were structuring for us,” he says.

Ramos defended that the condition of blacks would improve only if Brazil corrected the colonial situation by changing the social structure itself. “Guerreiro Ramos’ main contribution to this problem lies in the direct connection between our colonial situation and the problem of race relations that we have established here for centuries. In this sense, he was, in fact, a pioneer,” Azevêdo argues.

“We could, yes, understand it as a precursor to this problematic of structural racism,” says Santana. “It depends what we mean by structural racism, what structure of racism we’re talking about.”

“Guerreiro Ramos was rather a pioneer in the interpretation of racism as a consequence of the relationship that has been established and between conquering and conquered peoples”, underlines the researcher.

accused by the dictatorship

Born in Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos graduated in Science at the former Faculdade Nacional de Psicologia, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1942. The following year he graduated in Law, also in Rio. As a professor he worked at the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros and in courses promoted by the Administrative Department of the Public Service.

“He belonged to the first generation of sociologists in Brazil,” comments sociologist Alan Caldas, whose doctoral thesis, defended at the institute, was on Ramos’ work on YouTube at the Federal University of São Carlos. “As a black man living in the post-abolition period, his life was something of a jazz improvisation: he was a poet, essayist, literary critic, civil servant, adviser to President Getúlio Vargas, an organic intellectual for one of the main movements in Brazil, the Experimental Theater of the Negro. […] He was an essayist and political columnist and also a federal deputy.”

For specialists in his work, Ramos’ career as an influential thinker in Brazil was interrupted by the 1964 military coup. From the first wave of politicians impeached by the dictatorial regime, he eventually settled in the United States, where he taught at the University of Southern California.

And then, his sociological project took second place to that developed mainly by the intellectuals of the University of São Paulo. “When he returned to Brazil in the early 1980s, everything had changed. The protagonism of sociology and political science practiced in Rio de Janeiro was completely erased from sociology and political science at USP,” Azevêdo points out. “By the way, it should be remembered that, since the early 1950s, Guerreiro Ramos has always sided against the academic sociology of the USP, especially that led by Florestan Fernandes”.

For Ramos, it was an issue that pitted the producers of a legitimate Brazilian sociology against, in his view, the consumers of a canned foreign sociology.

For Azevêdo, this was one of the points that made Guerreiro Ramos a forgotten sociologist, a victim of “willful forgetfulness”, in his words. In addition to his “link to a tradition of men of action, thinkers not tied to university institutions”.

“In my opinion, the oblivion of Guerreiro Ramos is due more to the national and social science project that he embraced than to the color of his skin,” adds Azevêdo. “Obviously, his blackness has annoyed whites and ‘whites’ in quotation marks, we are a racist country after all. On several occasions he has faced public protests from his enemies. But, in the end, it was his views and political stances that cause more trouble, both right and left.”

Santana points out that another reason for this neglect was the fact that Ramos “was a defender of a Brazilian nationalism, a Brazilian national project, and that has been out of fashion for a while.” “The fact that he’s black may have some significance, but I think it’s a minor issue,” he says. “He was a very controversial author and that also brought animosity to his time, and may have inspired racism against him, however veiled.”

Source: Terra

Rose

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