Toward a Critique of the Socio-Logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of...

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Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice: TheAnalytics of Raciality and the Production of UniversalityDenise Ferreira Da Silva

Online Publication Date: 01 September 2001To cite this Article: Silva, Denise Ferreira Da (2001) 'Towards a Critique of theSocio-logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality',Social Identities, 7:3, 421 - 454To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13504630120087253URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630120087253

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Social Identities, Volume 7, Number 3, 2001

Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice:The Analytics of Raciality and theProduction of Universality

DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVAUniversity of California, San Diego

ABSTRACT: Fear of police terror has long been a daily facet of the lives of economicallydispossessed people of colour in the urban spaces of North America, Europe, LatinAmerica, and elsewhere. This essay addresses the conditions of possibility of the formof race injustice manifested in racial pro�ling and police brutality. It challenges thecentrality of the logic of exclusion — the view that race is only politically and sociallysigni�cant when race identi�cation is explicitly or implicitly used to justify discrimi-nation — in the understanding of race injustice. It explores the political-symbolicprocesses that have produced the mechanisms of racial power of which police brutalityis a most dramatic example. To elaborate this critique of the logic of exclusion, I discussthe newspaper account of an episode of police terror in a favela of Rio de Janeiro,Brazil. What the examination of the newspaper coverage of the Chacina de VigarioGeral reveals, is that this form of race injustice indicated the operation of meaningsproduced in an analytic of raciality, encompassing the various instances of manufac-turing the modern concept of the racial — the science of life, the science of man, andthe sociology of race relations.

Introduction

We cannot remain silent in face so much violence. We need to �nd outwhere justice is located in Brazil to demand punishment.

(Edilaine Regina Goncalves dos Santos, O Globo, 9 March 1993)

We will not rest until those who are guilty face justice.(Rev. Al Sharpton, New York Times, 15 February 1999)

There are more shootings involving black victims and black shooters asa percentage than there are of police of�cers doing it. So I know thoseare dif�cult facts for people to deal with but what we should be aboutin the media is leading people to the truth not reinforcing biases andprejudices.

(Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York Times, 15 February 1999)

My concern with race justice derives from my familiarity with matters that takeplace on the other side of universality. Over ten years ago, my cousin Marlao

ISSN 1350-4630 print/ISSN 1363-0296 online/01/030421-34 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1350463012008725 3

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422 Denise Ferreira da Silva

was shot to death by undercover police of�cers in front of his house in theearly hours of a night of terror which left nine dead in my neighbourhood.Though emotionally worn by yet another demonstration of the worthlessnessof the lives of those who live on the margins of justice, fear prevented me frombreaking the ‘code of silence’ which, I believe, has contributed to police terrorthat goes unchecked in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. I felt a strange relief when themother of a 19 year old who was killed on his doorstep while leaving to buymilk in the morning — having no one else to fear since she had already lost hertwo other sons at the hands of the police — broke the code of silence in aneffort to bring her child’s murderers to justice.

Reading the New York Times coverage of the murder of Amadou Diallo —the West African street vendor killed by undercover police of�cers in the foyerof his Bronx apartment building — Al Sharpton’s statement revealed in theepilogue to this Introductio was another painful reminder. Yet, I wonderedhow Amadou’s village might have responded to his promise: what could itmean to the people of rural Fulani, who may or may not have memories ofancestors lost to the commerce of �esh that built the American continent? Thepolice use of excessive force (I should say, bullets) in aggrieved communitiesof colour and against black and brown people is probably as ubiquitous as wasthe excess (of power) signi�ed by the use of the whip against already shackledbodies of slaves. Regardless of whether or not these villagers recall a line ofdescent lost to the slave trade, Amadou Diallo’s dead body might have taughtthem that, as Malcolm X once said, for people of African descent, Americaremains a nightmare.

It seems to me that, instead of apologies and promises, the return to Africaof another young man’s body, killed at the hand of law enforcementagents, should invite re�ection upon the commonality that only blacknessproduces. Reports of police terror are perhaps the only sign those fromthe ‘outside’ have of what takes place in this moral and legal no man’s land,where universality �nds its spatial limits. These deaths — Marlao’s, Amadou’s,and the young black males and females killed by police bullets acrossthe continent — challenge us to inquire into the fundamental effects of thepower signi�ed in their shared blackness. My argument here is that to graspthis effect of power of race manifested in police brutality demands an approachthat goes beyond the view of race as a mechanism of exclusion. To elaboratethis argument, I undertake an archaeological exercise which situates thisdominant view — one which I will call the (socio)logic of exclusion — withinthe larger �eld of production of meanings of the racial as a modern category ofbeing.

Following Foucault’s chronology, which locates the threshold of modernityat the end of the eighteenth century, I identify the early nineteenth centurywith the emergence of a scientia racialis, the particular domain of knowledgewhose strategies of intervention — concepts, methods, techniques — producedcategories of race difference (whiteness, blackness, etc). My aim here is to providean outline of the particular strategy of power — the analytics of raciality — thathas produced race difference as a category connecting place (continent) of‘origin’, bodies, and forms of consciousness. The primary effect of this mechan-

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The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality 423

ism of power/knowledge has been to produce race difference as a strategy ofengulfment — a modern scienti�c construct whose role is to reveal how the‘empirical’ is but a moment of the ‘transcendental’ — used in the mapping ofmodern global and social spaces. This �rst moment of the analytics of racialityintroduced the racial as a supplement to the hegemonic narrative of modernitywhose role has been to indicate which regions of the modern space, and whichkinds of human beings, lie within the domain of Universal Justice. Preciselythese conditions of production of the racial, I will argue, were erased in theearly twentieth-century epistemological re-arrangement which, among otherthings, transformed race into an object of sociological investigation. Racedifference was resigni�ed, introducing the idea that the racial only constitutes astrategy of power when race difference is invoked to justify exclusionarypractices.

From its inception in the early nineteenth century, the racial has followedthe destiny of other modern strategies of power/knowledge: it constitutes acrucial element in the symbolic con�gurations of socio-historical formationsproviding more than a grid of intelligibility for modern conditions. Informingmy argument is the understanding that the present con�gurations of modernglobal and social spaces are but the material effects of these political-symbolicprocesses, i.e., they are materialisations of the strategies of intervention deployedin various epistemological re-arrangements within which the racial was appro-priated and produced as a concept that revealed the ‘truth’ of human condi-tions.

In this text, I offer but an initial formulation of this argument. It starts witha discussion of the prevailing legal conceptions of race injustice, followed by anoutline of the analytics of raciality that identify the main moments of articulationof the racial as a modern concept. In the second part, I discuss the politicaleffects, the materialisation, of the production of blackness as a signi�er ofdeparture from modernity by tracing the re-signi�cations of the racial inattempts to produce the Brazilian national subject and social space as embodi-ments of modern cultural principles. My argument here is that the hegemonicstrategy of race subjection in Brazil has been informed by another construct ofthe scientia racialis, the notion of miscegenation (race mixture), whose primaryeffect has been to construct black and mestico (mixed-race) Brazilians aspathological social subjects, and their bodies and the urban spaces they inhabitas signi�ers of illegality. With this, I hope to contribute to an approach foramending the effects of the power of the racial which goes beyond theexhaustive cataloguing and endless enumeration of occurrences of race injus-tice characteristic of works informed by the socio-logic of exclusion. Whatfollows is an outline of an approach to race injustice that recognises howblackness and whiteness indicate distinct kinds of modern subjects, how thewhite body and the social (geographic, economic and symbolic) spaces associ-ated with whiteness have been produced to signify the principles of universalequality and freedom informing our conceptions of the Just, the Legal, and theGood. I believe only by examining how the racial has produced the domain,universality, will it be possible to work towards the enlargement of the horizonsof Justice.

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Beyond the Socio-Logic of Exclusion

Is police brutality and the economic dispossession of most people of colour inthe US, Latin America and elsewhere merely a manifestations of actual,historical, and/or institutionalised ideas and practices of exclusion? I believethat the understanding of these modes of social subjection demands a concep-tion of race injustice that moves beyond historical and social (institutional andsymbolic) processes of exclusion. Much of the problem with the deployment ofthe notion of racism in constructions of race injustice — and the socio-logic ofexclusion it presupposes — derives from the assumption that racist ideas areforeign to the modern conception of Justice. Many have pointed to theshortcomings of the liberal perspective which condemns racist ideas and practiceson the grounds that they counter the universalism inherent in the discourse ofmodernity.1 The most important contribution of such critiques of the liberallegal paradigm of justice has been to point out how racist ideas are notextraneous to modern imagination but instead circumscribe the zone of oper-ation of universality. Because principles, procedures, and judicial decision-making are informed by the principles associated with the culture of thedominant ‘racial group’, and because those implementing them usually sharethe interests and principles of those who will bene�t from race-based exclusion,the argument that racism is foreign to the domain of Law cannot be sustained.

However, following the critical legal scholarship strategy which uses thesocial to challenge law’s claims of uncommitted universality, the critics of theliberal legal construction of race injustice seem to suggest that the recognitionof racial (social) domination in itself would render judicial processes just. Whilethis claim is fundamentally correct, I believe it inherits a problem imposed bythe logic of racism. In describing the project of Critical Race Theory (CRT),Crenshaw et al. (1995) challenge the prevailing ‘civil rights discourse’ whichconstructs race injustice as discrimination, in which racism appears as adeviation from neutral and universal principles, and adopts ‘color blindness’ asthe fundamental means to achieve racial justice. Against this view, CRTscholars advance a ‘race-conscious’ legal perspective to address how ‘racialpower’ informs legal discourse and strategies. What this ‘race conscious’ legalscholarship accomplishes is a recuperation of the social basis of race injusticeoccluded in both the Plessy and the Brown decisions. Not only does a‘race conscious’ scholarship recuperate and support ‘a radical tradition ofrace-consciousness’ which was shunned with the conception of race justice as‘color blindness’ (p. xiv). It also curbs attacks on af�rmative action that con-struct it as opposed to the Brown principle (p. xv). Further, CRT legal scholar-ship targets the ‘perpetrator perspective’ informing liberal constructions of raceinjustice, which leaves un-addressed the ways in which representations of racehave organised the US social formation (Freeman, 1995).

While recognising the limits of this individualised (as opposed to historical,structural, and institutional) view of race injustice, CRT scholarship seems toretain a primary focus upon exclusion. For instance, in his critique of remediesdeployed to ensure the adoption of the Brown decision in de�ant schoolsdistricts, Bell (1995) notes that

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Plans relying on racial balance to foreclose evasion have not eliminatedthe need for further orders protecting black children against discrimina-tory policies, including re-segregation within desegregated schools, theloss of black faculty and administrators. (p. 25)

While challenging the legal privilege of discrimination as the paramountmanifestation of race injustice, Bell retains the view that ‘racial power’ mani-fests primarily as discriminatory (segregationist) acts and policies. Becausetheir critique of the liberal construction of race justice as a ‘color blindness’relies on a portrayal of race’s operation as political/social category primarily interms of exclusion, CRT considerations of the relations between race and justiceare ultimately limited to whether and how racism — as ideas and practices thatexclude on the basis of attributed race difference — plays a role in socialencounters, processes, and structures effecting the political and social rights ofindividuals of colour.

From a similar perspective, Fitzpatrick (1990) offers a compelling argumentconcerning how the separation between law and ‘material’ (economic) condi-tions in liberal discourses institutes a contradictory relation between law andracism that indicates how the latter is integral to the operation of law. Byexamining instances of adjudication of discrimination cases in British industrialtribunals, Fitzpatrick shows how anti-discrimination legislation (The RaceRelations Act of 1976) is rendered ineffective by the presupposition that lawcannot delve deeply into the more elusive exclusionary social practices, forinstance, cases of indirect discrimination — such as employers’ stipulation ofexcessive educational requirements for a job, which excludes ‘educationallydisadvantaged racial groups’ (p. 251). Racism, Fitzpatrick argues, is a dimen-sion of ‘material’ life that is compatible with law, it ‘marks the constitutiveboundaries of law, persistent limits on its competence and scope’ (p. 250). Inexamining processes of adjudication of racial discrimination cases in industrialtribunals, Fitzpatrick shows how the presupposition that the claimants are‘racial’ outsiders to the ‘community of law’ — which encompasses only Englishpeople — renders the evidence of racial discrimination they present irrelevant.‘Law’, he concludes, ‘is tied to a particular community that excludes thosewhom law would include through race relations legislation’ (p. 259). As Fitz-patrick locates racism as a set of exclusionary ‘practices’ and ‘beliefs’ operatingin the larger national/social setting within which legal decisions are made, heremains tied to the logic of exclusion informing CRT’s challenges to ‘law’sinnocence’. However, by arguing that law’s universalistic claims are bound toa certain shared sense of the particularity of the English people, Fitzpatricksuggests that the relationship between law and race can be captured byexpanding the domain of investigation beyond the limits of the legal archive(court rulings and law libraries). In other words, as he construes processes ofadjudication as moments in the production of the English in their differencefrom those who suffer racial discrimination, Fitzpatrick suggests that exclusionitself may provide a rather limited point of departure for addressing therelationships between race and justice.

My argument here is that the limitations of the CRT project reside in its

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sharing the liberal legal construction of racism, the view that if one’s racedifference is not explicitly found to determine unfavourable social thoughts oractions, exclusionary ideas and behaviour, it cannot be proven to be theultimate cause of the ensuing harm to that person’s rights. Precisely thisconstruction, identi�ed here as socio-logical2 — guiding both liberal and CRTconstructions of race — renders certain claims of race injustice, such as thedenunciation of police terror, either inarticulate or unheard because they fail tomeet the criterion of race invocation. It seems to me that in order to address themost elusive and insidious modes of race injustice, we need to expand thedomain of investigation of the material effects of the racial beyond the sociolog-ical archive (the accumulation of quantitative and qualitative evidences ofexclusion). Indeed, as exempli�ed in Mayor Giuliani’s statement during thedebate following the murder of Amadou Diallo, authorities, conservativescholars, and the public in general once again refer to the socio-logical archive,suggesting that the high incidence of crime in the aggrieved neighbourhoodsjusti�es the police’s harsh actions. My critique of the socio-logic underlying theexisting liberal and CRT conceptions of race injustice starts from the recogni-tion that race difference is not a substantive dimension invoked to justify social(political/economic) ideas and practices that produce exclusion. Instead, Ilocate the conditions of possibility of these forms of race injustice in thesocio-logical construction of blackness to signify a domain outside the terrain ofthe legal, while retaining the construction of whiteness as the signi�er of theform of consciousness to which the principles underlying the normativeschema of Universal Justice are indigenous. The most crucial effect of thissocio-logical construction has been to produce blackness, and the place ofresidence of black people, as natural (pre-conceptual and pre-historical) signs ofsocial pathology. Later in this paper, I discuss how the sociological constructionof blackness to signify a consciousness that emerges and thrives in the domainof the illegal enables certain actions otherwise considered unjust (usuallyinhumane) to escape the scrutiny of prevailing normative schema.

Much of this construction ensues from the logic of exclusion articulated inthe post-Second World War sociological re-con�guration of the analytics ofraciality, underlying the notion of racism. It is an effect of both the fact that the‘badge of pathology’ was also extended to the victims of practices of exclusionand, more importantly, from the very organisation of the sociological �eldrequiring a distinction between the production of class difference (strictly histori-cal) and that of race difference (always fundamentally natural, ‘original’). But thelogic of exclusion itself was �rst introduced in the initial version of thesociology of race relations, in the early twentieth century, in investigations ofthe destiny of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans in the United States,which assumed their ‘original’ outsidedness to the space of ‘Anglo-Saxon’modernity, immediately signi�ed in their bodies. A central consequence ofthese early sociological studies was to write their subaltern conditions as aneffect of their race difference. In this movement, blackness was constructed tosignify this ambiguous territory which, while located within the boundaries ofuniversality, would consistently signify that which belongs to its outside.

However, precisely because this prevailing (socio)logic of exclusion corre-

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sponds to the particular way in which race operates as a mechanism of powerin the United States, to capture this other dimension of race injustice it isnecessary to examine a national mode of race subjection which is not premisedupon an ‘original’ outsidedness of people of colour. Unlike the United States,where race difference organises accounts of the national subject, Brazil’s mode ofrace subjection is organised around the idea that miscegenation constituted thecondition of possibility for the emergence of the national subject, the mestico(mixed-race individual), whose particular combination of whiteness, blacknessand, to a lesser extent, Indianness enabled the construction of a modern tropicalsocial space (Silva, 1998). For this reason, I believe that the placing of blacknessoutside the domain of justice can be captured when one traces the meaningattributed to blackness in accounts of the Brazilian social subject.

Neither chance nor necessity led to my choice of Brazil as the point ofdeparture for a critique of the socio-logic informing conceptions of raceinjustice. In the sociology of race relations, Brazil has consistently occupied theposition of that exceptional multiracial space, where miscegenation had pre-vented the operation of race difference as a mechanism of exclusion. Yet, thesesame studies recognise in Brazil a social space in which blackness is a commoncharacteristic shared by those in disadvantaged political-economic circum-stances. More frequently than not, such an apparently contradictory conditionhas been uncomfortably attributed to the operation of class difference in theBrazilian social space. Precisely because Brazilian social conditions fail to yieldto the (socio)logic of exclusion, they provide a strategic point of departure fora critique of existing conceptions of race injustice.

The Production of the Territory of Universality

To account for how the racial has operated as a strategy of power in modernity,one should go beyond the enumeration and classi�cation of various forms ofrace subjugation and cataloguing various instances of race injustice. That is, itis necessary to address the very conditions of production of the symbolicmechanisms deployed in the constitution of people of colour as modernsubaltern social subjects. With the notion of analytics of raciality, I identify thegeneral dimensions of this process. Elaborated from a loose appropriation ofFoucault’s archaeological and genealogical strategies, the strategy of readingdeployed here is informed by his argument that modern mechanisms ofknowledge are the privileged instruments of a form of power whose mostcrucial accomplishment is to inscribe itself in the bodies and souls of itssubjects. My examination of the various moments in the analytics of raciality —the science of life, science of man,3 and the sociology of race relations — seeks toshow how a fundamental connection between body, place of origin, and formof consciousness came to be signi�ed in the notion of race difference. With this,I hope it will become clear that the primary effect of the power of race has been toproduce universality itself.

In The Order of Things, Foucault (1994) argues that the last decade of theeighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new mode of thought. This

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transformation was marked by the emergence of the transcendental being —which Hegel identi�ed as the fundamental agent of human history, the‘spirit’, the self-conscious transcendental consciousness (Hegel, 1900) — asthe fundamental locus in which resided the ‘truth’ of meaning and being. Thecentre of this arrangement was to be occupied by a new epistemological �gure,man, the sovereign (self-present and self-transparent) subject and ultimateobject of knowledge. According to Foucault, the deployment of historicity inthe �eld of empirical knowledge — premised upon the idea that man, theknowing subject, enjoys a privileged connection with the transcendentalbeing — resulted in that knowledge being conceived as having two tasks: (a)[for the empirical sciences] to reveal how the things of the world manifestparticular moments of the transcendental being, i.e., to unearth the natural,universal laws governing sensible phenomena; and (b) [for formal sciences] thetranscendental would have the task of providing the foundation for all knowl-edge.

In this brief archaeology of the conception of racism and its logic ofexclusion, I discuss two moments of the analytics of the racial. The �rst momentcorresponds with the advent of the modern episteme, so to the formulation ofLife as that fundamental attribute man shares with other creatures, of which he(re)presents the most advanced form. Modern anthropology and sociology —disciplines devoted to the knowledge of man — become possible precisely atthat moment when strategies of intervention elaborated in the domain of thenatural sciences were appropriated to provide a de�nitive mapping of humanconditions. The second moment can be located at the turn of the twentiethcentury. At this moment, historical strategies of intervention displaced sci-enti�c ones (natural sciences) in the disciplines involved in the production ofa knowledge of man: sociology, the social scienti�c discipline whose task is toexplain the relationship between economic and symbolic dimensions of mod-ern existence; and anthropology, the one dedicated to the investigation of thematerial and symbolic conditions prevailing in non-European spaces.

While the use of race difference in the classi�cation of human groupspreceded this epistemological transformation, a strategy of power/knowledge,an analytics of raciality4 — with its particular domain and instruments (concepts,methods, and techniques) — only emerged when the cataloguing of humangroups could �nally �nd its limits in the possibility of identifying what kind ofhuman organisation indicated the most advanced human mind, the one enjoy-ing a self-transparent connection with a transcendental consciousness. While ineighteenth-century Natural History race provided the point of departure forthe identi�cation and differentiation of human groups in various regions of theglobe, in the modern episteme, the cultural (moral and intellectual) attributeswould play a more central role in the characterisation of human collectivities.What would distinguish the concept of the racial introduced in this period,then, is not so much its reference to the contents of the human mind, but thefact that that content would also refer to the quality of human mental processesassessed in terms of the degree to which they departed from those processesassociated with a transcendental consciousness, said to be actualised in theminds of those human collectivities that ‘originated’ in the European continent.

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In modernity, the racial acquires political signi�cance not so much because itrefers to different kinds of human bodies, but because it indicates qualitativelydistinct kinds of human consciousness.

In his discussion of the ‘analytics of sexuality’, Foucault (1978) offers a pointof departure for understanding how products of modern knowledge operate asmechanisms of power. Not, however, as one would expect, in his discussion ofbio-politics in which he notes the intersections between sex and race instrategies aiming at the control of populations, but in which he construes theracial as a remainder of the previous mode of thought, deployed as exclusionand domination. Foucault’s study of sexuality offers the clue for the examin-ation of the racial as a modern strategy of power precisely because it showshow knowledge produces the human body as a surface of inscription ofmodern meanings. According to Foucault, the ‘analytics of sexuality’ producedsexual beings by deploying a strategy of intervention, confession, similar to thatadopted in historical investigations: by making individuals speak their desire,by extracting from the soul ‘truths’ to be used in the construction of differentuses of human bodies in the search of pleasure as signi�ers of sexed conscious-ness.

What distinguishes the modern notion of race from the notion of sex, then,is the fact that the former was articulated in �elds of knowledge, science of lifeand the science of man, in which the strategies of intervention of the naturalsciences were deployed in the cataloguing of human bodies. The strategies ofintervention deployed in the initial moment of the analytics of raciality requiredthe manipulation, measurement, and classi�cation of bodies to produce theracial soul. In that, they produced the racial subject (the raced consciousness) asa fundamentally mediated, determined, spatial, condition. An examination ofthe construction of the various categories of race difference in these contexts willreveal that race addresses justice even before blackness is deployed to preventor limit a person’s enjoyment of his or her rights: the racial operates assupplement5 to historical accounts of modernity which privilege human con-sciousness’s un-mediated connection with transcendentality . It is for that reasonthat its primary effect of signi�cation has been to circumscribe the particularspace of occurrence of that which is said to govern the modern conception ofjustice itself, the principles of universality.

In the early nineteenth century there would emerge two scienti�c projectsthat attempted to produce the ‘truth’ of man’s cultural (moral and intellectual)conditions as an effect of his empirical condition. The science of life and thescience of man produced race difference as a signi�er of physical/cultural (moraland intellectual) difference, with the deployment of strategies of intervention— i.e., theories, concepts, and techniques — which presupposed that the thingsof the world and the relations between them �nd their foundation in atranscendental domain. Under epistemological conditions, man, civilised man,became the point of departure for the investigation of living bodies. While thescience of life inherited its objects (living bodies) and its concept (character) fromNatural History, the objective now was not to expand the lexicon of charactersto be used in the classi�cation of genus, species, and varieties. The primary taskwas to reveal the particular arrangement enabling the emergence of that

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invisible, un-tangible, fundamental condition shared by all living beings, Life.‘Life’, Foucault (1994) argues

is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less certainfashion from the mechanical; it is that in which all the possible distinc-tions between living beings have their basis. (p. 269)

In this new epistemological con�guration, he notes,

Historicity … [was] introduced into nature — or rather into the realm ofliving beings; but it exists as much more than a probable form ofsuccession; it constitutes a sort of fundamental mode of being. (p. 276)

Within this project of knowledge, the ‘living world’ was organised accord-ing to the degree of internal complexity of bodies. Movement, complexi�cation,and differentiation — traits attributed to modern (‘material’ and ‘spiritual’)conditions — would enable the classi�cation of living beings, with ‘voluntarymotion’ and ‘sensation’, identi�ed as the distinguishing qualities of the mostadvance life form, inhere in the human body. The human body became theprivileged signi�er of Life: its own organisation would constitute the ‘empiri-cal’ form in which Life presented itself as the most advanced expression of atranscendental design, where Life manifest itself in its essentiality. Not surpris-ingly, highly developed ‘mental functions’ — the ability to reason, and toconceive of the universal — were identi�ed as the most important anddistinctive characteristics of the human genus. According to Cuvier (1863), themore sophisticated functions (‘memory’, ‘association of ideas’, ‘abstraction’,‘reasoning’ and ‘imagination’) derived from modi�cations in those parts of thenervous system which are ‘more circumscribed as the animal is more perfect’.In man, the most perfect animal, ‘it consists exclusively of a limited portion ofthe brain’ (p. 17). What distinguished human intellect, he noted, was exactly

the power of separating … accessory ideas of objects, and of combiningthose that are alike in several different objects under one general idea,the prototype of which nowhere really exists, nor presents itself in anisolated form; this is abstraction. (p. 17)

While the human body could be found across the surface of the globe, manexisted exclusively within the limits of the modern European space. In hisdescription of the ‘varieties of human species’ or ‘races’, Cuvier (1863) de�nedwhich of the various and diverse forms of human body expressed Life in itsessentiality. The being placed at the top of the animal kingdom is not the humanbeing in general, but man as he existed in Europe, civilised man:

Although the human species would appear to be single … there are,nevertheless, certain hereditary peculiarities of conformation observable,which constitutes what we termed races. Three of these in particularappear eminently distinct: the Caucasian, or white, the Mongolian oryellow, and the Ethiopian, or negro. The Caucasian, to which we belong,is distinguished by the beauty of the oval which forms the head; and itis this one which has given rise to the most civilized nations — to those

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which have generally held the rest in subjection: it varies in complexionand in the color of the hair. (…) The Negro race is con�ned to thesouthward of the Atlas chain of mountains: its color is black, its haircrisped, the cranium compressed, and nose �attened. The projectingmuzzle and thick lips evidently approximate it to the Apes: the hordesof which it is composed have always continued barbarous. (pp. 37–38)

In this �rst deployment of race in the modern epistemological �eld, Cuvierintroduces race difference as a scienti�c category, a signi�er, which connectscertain bodily traits, place (continent) of ‘origin’, and ‘mental functions’. In thisprocess, whiteness was produced to indicate the form of consciousness able toconceive of universal principles that emerged in the European space — theonly raced consciousness able to ful�ll the material and moral projects ofmodernity.6

The science of life provided the concepts, theories, techniques to a scienti�cproject which aimed at the investigation of man as an ‘empirical being’, thescience of man. Those involved in this venture claimed that to ‘know’ humanconditions demanded an investigation of the actual cultural and technologicalconditions found across the globe. Within this �eld of investigation, ‘racialtype’ emerged as the privileged concept which revealed how circumstantialand elusive aspects of the body and place of ‘origin’ revealed the operation ofabstract (transcendental) principles in the production of different kinds ofhuman consciousness. According to Brinton (1901), for instance, the object of thescience of man was not merely ‘visible traits’ but also the ‘internal structure ofthe organs’ which determined the physical and mental differences amonghuman groups. ‘Ethnography, the Science of Man’, he argued, had as itsobjective

to study [these] differences and ascertain which of [them] are the leastvariable and hence of most value in classifying the human species intoits general varieties and types. (p. 18)

Consistently, he added that the main physical traits to be employed in theclassi�cation of ‘human races’ were the structure of the bones (the skull, orbitof the eyes, aperture of nostrils, and the projection of maxillaries), the colour ofthe skin, the colour of the eyes, hair, muscular structures, stature and pro-portion. However, while skin colour, hair and eyes were important for theclassi�cation of the different ‘races of mankind’, the head was the part of thebody that was subject to more detailed examination. The study of the brain,the organ responsible for ‘mental functions’, the ‘organ of the mind’, requiredthe deployment of new techniques of measurement of the size, weight, and thenumber of circumvolutions of the brain, the ‘cephalic index’ and ‘facial index’.With these tools, the scientists of man formulated a typology of head forms,which enabled the speci�cation of fundamental ‘racial types’.7

While race difference became a strategy of engulfment which could indicatehow present human physical and cultural conditions re�ected the operation offundamental processes, hybridity (the result of race mixture) was deployed asa signi�er of containment, which indicated the harmful effects caused by a

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violation of these fundamental laws. According to Agassiz, from ‘uninterrup-ted miscegenation’ produces

a class of men in which the pure type has disappeared and with him allthe good physical and moral qualities of the primitive races, leaving inits place a bastard people (…) among who it is impossible to �nd oneindividual who has retained the intelligence, the nobility, and naturalaffectivity which make the pure bred dog the civilized man’s preferredcompanion. (cited in Augel, 1980, p. 214)

Both categories would later be deployed in projects that aimed to intervene ina dimension of human existence considered outside the domain of science: theunfolding of the historical process. In any case, by the end of the nineteenthcentury, then, race difference would not just claim to explain the ‘origins’ ofeverything that embodied European cultural speci�city, ‘modern civilization’.It would also provide the point of departure for formulating conceptions of thefoundation of political and social life, and strategies of social intervention —e.g. Eugenics — designed to further develop European superior cultural andtechnological achievements and for producing ontological accounts whichplaced the racial as the point of departure and �nal end of the trajectory ofpeoples and individuals.8

In the early twentieth century, the racial was moved to another domain ofmodern inquiry, as historical strategies of intervention become the privilegedinstruments to be employed in the knowledge of human conditions. Theprimary effect of this epistemological (political-symbolic) re-arrangement wasthe re-signi�cation of race difference as a natural signi�er of human (physical andcultural) difference. To this corresponded two historical (political-economic)shifts. On the one hand, the notion of the historical nation was consolidated asthe properly modern political category, the basis for capturing that whichuni�es and distinguishes a people’s consciousness (Hobsbawn, 1993). On theother hand, there was a consolidation of industrial capitalism, the imperialdomination of African and Asian people, accompanied by the beginning of thedecline of Europe’s world predominance and the ascension of the US as amajor global political-economic power (Hobsbawn, 1989). While many histori-ans have pointed to the centrality of the notion of the historical nation wouldacquire in this period, I have yet to �nd an investigation of the relationsbetween these historical processes and contemporaneous epistemological trans-formations. Although I cannot fully develop this argument here, I believe thatthe centrality the nation would occupy in this new phase of capitalism wouldaffect social scienti�c disciplines — primarily anthropology and sociology —resulting in historical strategies of intervention increasingly becoming thepreferred means for revealing the ‘truth’ of human conditions. As Stocking(1968) argues, early twentieth-century anthropology would introduce the no-tion of historical culture that would slowly replace race as the legitimatecategory by which to examine the technological and cultural conditions innon-European spaces.9

It seems to me, however, that while this shift resulted in a re-signi�cationof race difference, it did not erase the meanings it gained in its �rst articulation

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in the science of life. As anthropology de�ned culture as a product of historicalprocesses, race difference was re-signi�ed as a substantive sign of the longtemporal processes which �xed certain bodily marks in isolated pre-historicalconditions. Initially a product of scienti�c strategies of intervention deployed inthe study of man as a natural being, the category of race difference was nowre-signi�ed as a (pre-conceptual and pre-historical) signi�er of cultural differ-ence, one associated with great spatial (geographic) and quasi-eternal temporal(geological) processes.

While its strategies of intervention still belie the in�uence of social Darwin-ism, the sociology emerging in the US — which claimed for itself the task ofexamining the operations of the racial in modern social spaces — also deployedthe historical concept of culture as the primary factor in human social condi-tions. The sociology of race relations de�ned its task so as to reveal how thesenatural ‘racial differences’, which operated as signi�ers of cultural (moral/social) difference, entailed a speci�c form of social relations, namely, ‘racerelations’. In the sociological appropriation of race one �nds the most subtleeffect of re-signi�cation of race difference as a pre-conceptual and pre-historicalsubstantive sign of cultural (moral/social) distance, which disregarded theconnection between bodies, places of origin and forms of consciousness estab-lished by scienti�c strategies of intervention employed in earlier moments ofthe analytics of raciality.

Here one �nds the �rst articulation of the logic of exclusion, as natural racedifference is established as the ultimate source of the unbecoming ideas andpractices of exclusion in an otherwise modern (universal) consciousness. Themain �gure in the sociology of race relations in the US, Robert Ezra Park,argued that ‘race prejudice’ among ‘native (Anglo Saxon) America’ was an‘instinctual’ reaction to the social (moral) distance signi�ed in ‘Japanese’, ‘Chi-nese’, and ‘Negro’ bodies. He noted that the main social consequences of ‘racecon�ict’ was that the former would represent itself as ‘racial group’, evidentalso in the social isolation of the latter and that further increased the distancebetween the dominant and the subordinate ‘racial groups’. With this formu-lation, Park suggested that ‘race prejudice’, as a reaction to social/moraldistance, produces exclusion (isolation) within an otherwise modern (egali-tarian) social space. That is, race difference here becomes the ultimate factorproducing the economic, political, and spatial segregation of African-Ameri-cans and Asians in the early twentieth-century United States.10 That is, as akind of social relation, ‘race relations’ were problematic precisely because theyexpress principles that contradict the universal principles ruling modern con-sciousness. Moreover, he also argued that these unbecoming ideas and prac-tices would determine the consciousness of the subordinated ‘racial group’,which found expression in their cultural products. Comparing slave songs tothe poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Park ([1923] 1950) argued that while theformer re�ected the authentic (essential) ‘Negro consciousness’, the lattermerely expressed the predicament of free African Americans under segre-gation, re�ecting the ‘race prejudice’ con�ning them to the subaltern regions ofthe modern US space. Not surprisingly, he proposed that only intermarriagewould break up these differences of race and custom, the ‘racial difference

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[that] maintain[s] social distances [because they are] symptoms of differences incustom, tradition, and religion’ ([1943] 1950, p. 114). Hence, while recognisingthat miscegenation produced an intermediary group, he also believed that it wasa necessary condition for the elimination of this problematic type of socialrelation, namely, race relations. With this formulation, the sociology of racerelations introduced the argument that the consciousness of ‘racial difference’(‘race consciousness’) produces the unbecoming ideas (‘race prejudice’) andpractices (‘race con�ict’) of exclusion, and that in societies lacking barriers tomiscegenation, exclusion would not take place. More importantly, as it at-tributes the social operation of the racial to the presence of bodies whichsigni�ed an ‘origin’ outside the indigenous territory of modern cultural princi-ples, the sociology of race relations renders impossible any consideration of theracial as a fundamentally modern (symbolic) product and attributes its socialsigni�cance to the presence of those the science of life and the science of manconstituted as outsiders to the time and space of modernity.

Rejecting explanations that race difference is only socially signi�cant becauseit awakens instinctual reactions, post World War II sociological theorising ofrace would assume that racism is an ideological or cultural process at work inrelationships between different ‘racial groups’. In the two versions of thesociology of race relations formulated at this moment, racism makes itsappearance as the (cultural or ideological) principle of exclusion awakened byrace difference. Even as this later moment of the analytics of raciality continued tohighlight the importance of ‘historical’ (cultural, political, and economic) pro-cesses and strategies of intervention, they would also retain the earlier con-struct of race’s power as unbecoming and foreign to modern conditions. In anearly formulation of the liberal version, Myrdal (1944) de�ned the ‘raceproblem’ as a ‘moral’ problem, as ‘rationalization and beliefs’ that aim atresolving the contradiction instituted by the existence of exclusionary practicesin a social space said to be organised by universal principles.11 As in Park’sformulation, race difference remains the signi�er of outsidedness, entailing theemergence of ‘mental contents’ foreign to modern minds, even if the functionof ‘racial beliefs’ is to justify exclusionary actions perpetrated by otherwiseenlightened minds.12 Scienti�c research of ‘Negro’ social conditions and edu-cation, he believed, was necessary for the elimination of these unbecoming‘beliefs’ and the in-egalitarian practices they deployed as justi�cation as well asof the dire social conditions they produced.13 Indeed, a crucial effect of thehistorical re-signi�cation of race relations was to suggest that people of colourand racist whites both exhibit signs of non-modern consciousness, both effectsof the former’s race difference.

In his formulation of race relations within the Marxist framework, Cox(1948) argues that this kind of social relation developed on the basis ofan awareness of race difference, understood primarily as given physical differ-ences, whose ideological role is to ensure capitalist exploitation. While Coxde-naturalises ‘race relations’ by constructing them as ‘political-class relations’,he produces race difference as a signi�er of a particular kind of consciousnessthat emerged under subaltern social conditions produced by racist capitalism.According to Cox (1948), segregation produced the ‘social instability’ and

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‘stagnation’ characterising black conditions. ‘What segregation really amountsto’, he concluded, ‘is a sort of perennial imprisonment of the colored people bywhites’, which provides ‘the milieu for the planned cultural retardation of thecolored peoples’ where ‘they may mill and fester in social degeneracy withrelatively minimal opportunity for even the most ambitious of them to extricatethemselves’ (pp. 381–82). Hence, not only did segregation produce ‘degraded’subaltern regions in otherwise modern social spaces, it also produced ‘de-graded’ consciousness, which re�ected the spaces they inhabited. ‘The domi-nant socio-psychological pressure of color prejudice’, Cox suggested, ‘seems toproduce a collapsing effect upon the individual’s self-respect — to render himashamed of his existence’ (p. 383). Again, in this new moment of the analyticsof raciality, miscegenation —now re-signi�ed as the result of the historicaltrajectories of former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, enabled by culturaltraits proper to the colonisers14 — would be conceived as precluding theemergence of ideas and practices of exclusion. Frazier ([1957) 1965), for in-stance, noted that ‘Negro’ political participation in Brazil — which he con-trasted with the disenfranchisement of African Americans — resulted from thefact that ‘amalgamation’ and the incorporation of mulattos into the upperlevels of the social structure had prevented the emergence of a ‘problem ofpolitical power based strictly upon racial descent’ (p. 216).

Through each transformation of the analytics of raciality, and in each of itsknowledge domains, the racial is articulated as the category distinguishingmodern technological and cultural conditions from those which are spatiallyadjacent to but temporally distant from modernity. To be sure, the racial hasnever occupied a comfortable place in modern thought. As Foucault (1994)reminds us, a crucial trait of the modern episteme is the primacy of transcen-dentality, which requires that all difference be re-signi�ed as a moment in thetrajectory of the transcendental being. As suggested earlier, the racial does notescape this epistemological rule. However, it is also true that the ‘verticality’historicity introduces in the domains of the knowledge of things enabled theprocess by which the category constructing man’s cultural (moral and intellec-tual) being as the result of natural processes would necessarily produce hisbeing as a particular form of being human, which could not be immediatelyrecuperated into the transcendental. As a notion produced in the domain ofscience, which produced the being of things as spatially determined in thattheir fundamental immanence renders them unable to recognise their relationto the transcendental, the racial produces human beings as fundamentallymediated (as opposed to self-present, self-transparent, self-determined) beings.However, because it constructs the particularity of European (white) bodies asthe most perfect living beings, and the peculiar traits of European bodies andthe technological conditions of European space as signi�ers of their culturalperfection, the racial would produce them as the privileged signi�ers ofuniversality.

From its initial articulation in the modern epistemological �eld, race differ-ence has enjoyed a dubious position. The construction of modern conditions asruled by universal principles (rationality, equality, freedom) indicated thatbody and (geographic) space should not replace mind and time (history) in

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accounts of the emergence of modernity. Accordingly, from its �rst articulationin the science of life, the racial has consistently — in keeping with its role as asigni�er of difference — signi�ed other-wise, insistently pointing to the medi-ate, spatial conditions of possibility of modern particularity. While, in thescience of man, race difference produced all human beings as racial beings, in thesociology of race relations the racial would become an attribute of bodies andminds which failed to achieve the degree of development proper to modernconditions. It is their presence which gives birth to these unbecoming ideas andpractices of exclusion, which should have no place in the minds of ‘originally’modern beings — the same social processes of exclusion causing the emergenceof pathological social spaces and social subjects (consciousness) these unbecom-ing ideas and practices produce in otherwise egalitarian territory of universal-ity.

The police terror affecting my old neighbourhood, the Bronx, and the like,indicates a form of race injustice which assumes that blackness always-alreadysigni�es outsidedness to the territory of the universal principles ruling concep-tions of the legal and the just. Hence, it can do without race invocation andrecourse to the statistics that seem only to prove what everyone already knows.Unquestionably, this form of race injustice re�ects the operation of race as aglobal/historical political category which produces subaltern regions withinmodern social spaces. Perhaps because in the US — the social space providingthe model for the socio-logic of exclusion — this dimension of race injustice hasco-existed with ostensibly exclusionary discourse and practice, it can be re-duced to a more elusive manifestation of exclusion. For instance, denouncingracial pro�ling which highlights the cases of police abuse against properindividuals of colour leaves the way open to arguments (the one victorious inthe Diallo murder trial) that similar abuses against improper individuals ofcolour are justi�ed. Perhaps to capture what is speci�c to this form of raceinjustice we need to examine how race subjection operates in a social space,which the sociology of race relations has constructed as outside the zone ofoperation of the logic of exclusion.

The Historical and Social Ends of Mesticagem

Miscegenation (mesticagem) is without question the central component of thehegemonic narrative of Brazilian national subjectivity, the notion of racialdemocracy.15 Like race difference, miscegenation is also a product of the analyticsof raciality, i.e., it is a productive strategy of power whose primary effect hasbeen to enable the production of black Brazilians as subaltern social subjects.Further, like race difference in the United States, miscegenation has also beenplaced at the centre of knowledge projects, which adapted the strategies ofintervention deployed in various moments of the analytics of raciality to revealthe ‘truth’ of Brazilian cultural and social conditions. My argument here is thatthis centrality given to miscegenation in social scienti�c and hegemonic con-structions of the Brazilian subject, unlike the US, resulted in race subjection inBrazil operating independent of (if not against) the logic of exclusion. Anexamination of the various social scienti�c contexts of articulation of misce-

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genation used to write the particularities of the modern Brazilian social spacecan help us to understand how, in the late twentieth century, the bodies andsocial spaces inhabited by black Brazilians were constructed as signi�ers ofillegality.

The sociological literature on race in Brazil attributes to a strategic appropri-ation of categories and arguments deployed in the science of life and the scienceof man the fact that, after slavery, race difference would not become the point ofdeparture for distributing civil (political) rights.16 What they fail to recognise isthat this very construction holds the key for understanding of the particularway in which the racial would operate as a mechanism of power in modernBrazilian space. The various versions of the hegemonic narrative of the Brazil-ian nation, the history of the origins of a racial democracy, reproduce theappropriation of blackness and africanity to produce the uniqueness of theBrazilian subject, the ideal (historical) subject, the modern (historical) form ofconsciousness able to thrive in tropical conditions. Simultaneously, it alsoenabled the construction of the mestico, the actual (social) subject, who embodiesboth the outsidedness signi�ed in blackness and africanity and the pathologiesthe science of man associated with miscegenation .

What I am suggesting is that to understand race subjection in Brazil oneshould notice how the duality of the national subject has enabled bothmeanings of miscegenation — as teleological and eschatological signi�er — tobecome available to produce statements about modern Brazil. On the one hand,the ideal subject of the nation’s history appropriated blackness and africanity towrite the teleology of the mestico, the slightly-tanned European subject. Whilealready articulated in the works of Silvio Romero and other late nineteenth-century nationalists, only in the 1930s would miscegenation be consolidated asthat condition providing the particularity of the Brazilian national subject.17

Cultural anthropologists — such as Arthur Ramos, Bastide, Edison Carneiro,and Herskovitz18 — interpreted the beliefs and rituals of popular religiosity asfragments of an African Geist, ‘residues’ of africanity in American space, whichin�uenced but did not determine the character of Brazilian culture. Accord-ingly, in what is the best formulation of the national text, another anthropol-ogist, for Freyre, africanity and blackness as fragments which temper anddistinguish the Brazilian version of modern culture and civilisation.19 Misce-genation is written to produce Brazil’s difference as the result of the uniquePortuguese ability to mingle with other races, to assimilate them without losingan essentially European character.

Nevertheless, in the same movement in which blackness and africanity wereappropriated in the writing of the ideal (historical) Brazilian subject, the eschato-logical meaning of miscegenation was deployed to produce the actual (social)subject. Both anthropological and sociological texts played a crucial role asinstances of production of the historical and social meanings of miscegenationmade available to produce accounts of the modern Brazilian material and moralcondition.20 The degenerate mestico as actual (social) subject, is deployed toproduce the social subject who fails to catch up with Brazilian modernity. Theinitial formulation of the degenerate mestico was the work of the man who heardearly nationalism’s call to study the last Africans in Brazil. Presenting himself

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as a man of science, Nina Rodrigues’ ethnographic and (physical) anthropolog-ical investigations were pursued out of concern with the costs of the failure toinstitute effective mechanisms of segregation. Uncontrolled physical misce-genation, Nina Rodrigues argued, would prove to be harmful for the Brazilianmentality. In his critique of the �rst Republican Penal Code’s universal appli-cation of the principle of free will, Nina Rodrigues ([1894] 1957) argued thatmiscegenation required a distinct criterion of penal responsibility. The prob-lem, he argued was that Brazil had neither the moral superiority nor thehomogeneity presumed in the principle of free will. Deploying the science ofman, he noted that the blacks’ ‘mental inferiority’ and the ‘various degreesof moral and intellectual’ degeneracy of mesticos suggested that the applicationof the penal code should be based on distinct degrees of penal responsibility.The Brazilian population, he argued, ‘lack[s] physical and moral energy,[suffering from] apathy, and the want of foresight’ which characterise theBrazilian type (pp. 134–35).21 His solution was to limit this unwanted effect byconstructing mesticos (the majority of the Brazilian population) as legally(juridically) incapable modern subjects. This defence of various degrees of legalresponsibility aimed to constitute in Brazil an exclusive domain of deploymentof modern cultural principles inhabited by those Brazilians whose bodiessigni�ed proximity to a stable and modern consciousness. A solution wasattempted to correct the coloniser’s failure to maintain the boundaries ofwhiteness, and to write Brazil fully back within the domain of modernity.

Initially, the construction of mesticagem as a teleological signi�er placedBrazil outside the domain of investigation of the sociology of race relations.Pierson (1942), for instance, argued that the ideal of racial democracy hadresulted in the elimination of race prejudice in Brazil to which he attributedblack Brazilians’ lack of race consciousness and the fact that class constitutedthe primary mechanism of social differentiation. Only in the 1950s, did theworks of the Escola Paulista (Paulista School) of Sociology — a �rst attempt toprovide a sociological mapping of Brazilian social conditions — capture thematerial trajectory of the national subject, the drama of the mestico in theemerging modern Brazilian space.22 Once again, the eschatological meaning ofmiscegenation provided the point of departure for understanding black andbrown Brazilians’ subaltern social positioning. In a classic of the Escola Paulista,Fernandes ([1964] 1978) argued that the position of subalternity of Brazilians ofcolour in modern Brazil derived from their inability to shed improper, ‘tra-ditional’ culture (‘norms and beliefs’), and assimilate the cultural principlesthat would enable the modern social space to thrive. After abolition, the formerslaves and their descendants exhibited ‘mental and behavior patterns’ thatrendered them unable to compete in the ‘free social order’ with Europeanimmigrants and other (white) nationals. As a result, �fty years after emanci-pation, they had not yet ‘integrated’ into the ‘competitive social order’.23

Nevertheless, while attributing their subaltern conditions to their mentalpeculiarities, ‘norms’ and ‘values’ proper to a ‘slave’ consciousness, Fernandesargued that race difference played no signi�cant role in the organisation ofmodern Brazil.24 In modern Brazil, the descendants of slaves, he argued, wereimprisoned in their ‘structural dislocation’, a permanent state of social disor-

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ganisation and the ‘social pathologies’ usually connected with them. Accordingto Fernandes,

A real vicious circle was established between the socio-cultural heritagetransplanted from the slave quarters … and the permanent exclusionof the Negro and the mulatto from the ways to ‘earn a living’ in asociety born out of the urban and industrial revolution (…) Thus,life under permanent conditions of social disorganization turned intoa cultural tradition and invisible chains. This could only bebroken without question, at one point: when the ‘Negro’ dared to breakthe edges of his rural conception of the world and assault the ethicalcode of the inclusive society. Then, for better or worse, the ‘marginal’and the ‘criminal’ appeared as successful people with their own destiny— if not as authentic heroes, at least as someone, as persons who hadescaped on their own merits, the mediocrity of the common fate.(pp. 146–47)

Not only did this cultural incapacity explain black Brazilians’ lack of ‘raceconsciousness’, it prevented the formation of social bonds which would enabletheir action as a group, it also hindered the emergence of institutions whichwould serve to deploy the dominant (modern) ‘values’ among them. Moreover,Fernandes argued that not only did ‘race prejudice’ explain their social situ-ation, but racial democracy (the Brazilian racial ideology) only contributed tothe descendants of slaves’ predicament because it worked against their politicalmobilisation. In his conclusions, Fernandes, like his contemporaries, concludesthat race played no signi�cant role in Brazil and its in�uence would be totallyeliminated with the complete modernisation of social space.25

Two effects of the initial sociological construction of race in Brazil con-tributed to the writing of the mestico, the actual Brazilian subject, as anembodiment of the zone of illegality. On the one hand, it was an effect of theattribution of the descendants of former slaves’ material deprivation to their‘cultural’ incapacity and of the explanation of ‘crime’ as resulting from thisincapacity. On the other hand, it also resulted in a ‘silencing’ of race underclass, signi�ed in the category the poor. The most perverse consequences ofBrazil’s strategy of race subjection has been the production of this double(ambiguous) subject, where markers of blackness in the body of the mestico, theBrazilian body, the body of the poor, become indices of whether s/he inhabitsthat domain of the good, the legal, and the just.

Writing the Domain of Illegality in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

We need strong measures to change the belief in this country thathuman life is a �fth class Juridical good, if we want a Just State and acivilized society.

(The President of the Brazilian Bar AssociationOrdem dos Advogados do Brasil)

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This is another terrible attack on Rio de Janeiro’s dignity. [We] shouldunite to �nd a fast solution to this serious problem, beginning with thedrug traf�c, which is one of the roots of this problem.

(Dom Eugenio Sales, Rio de Janeiro’s Cardinal Archbishop)

In the early 1990s, when my cousin was killed in that night of terror, it felt likethere was an invisible wall across Rio’s space. On the one hand, there wereneighbourhoods like my family’s where one lives with a constant fear of terror— of the police and the drug dealers alike — the zone of illegality. On the otherhand, there was the other side of the city where most of the minorityEnlightened-middle-class-sun-tanned Cariocas live, seemingly unaware ofwhat goes on elsewhere — the domain of justice.26 During the years I commutedbetween these ‘places’, I often felt that I lived in both and belonged to neither.I say this to alert the reader that what follows is not an account of an insider.I moved out of my neighbourhood in 1988 for both practical and emotionalreasons but could never quite ‘assimilate’ to the other side, nor would I everbe like those I left back home. What follows is what I can understand fromwhere I �nd myself now. Far away from both.

Two Nights and Seven Days: A Chacina de Vigario Geral

We are suffering a lack of authority. Today you are at more risk whenthere is a police of�cer than when you go to a community consideredmarginal.

(Rio de Janeiro State representative commenting on theChacina of Vigario Geral)

The assassins knocked on the door and shouted, asking for (worker) IDs.Then we heard loud cries, with the women begging not to be killed. Itdidn’t take long: �ve minutes later, only bodies were left.

(The neighbour of the Evangelical family murdered in theChacina of Vigario Geral)

A few years after my cousin’s murder I went back home, now part of a longercommute — my �rst trip since I had moved to the United States — to discoverthat Rio remained the same. Near the end of my visit, at the neighbourhoodbus stop on a wintry grey Carioca morning, I learned of yet another instanceof police terror. This time it happened downtown. Seven children andteenagers were executed by the police, while sleeping on the steps of theChurch of Candelaria. The victims of the Chacina da Candelaria (Slaughter ofCandelaria) were street-children, those who most dramatically signify theexcess, the over�ow of ‘danger’, dispossession, and ‘moral degeneration’ fromneighbourhoods of the poor spaces claimed by Rio’s economic elites. Surpris-ingly, I noticed fewer attempts to write these kids out of their childhood andimprison them on the other side of morality. Also notable were expressions ofconcern and action on the part of state authorities, NGOs, and those who livein the Enlightened Rio.

Listening to and reading Cariocas’s commentaries on this episode of policeterror gave a glimpse of how the con�guration of Rio de Janeiro’s space is but

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an indication of the construction of blackness as a signi�er of these unbecoming‘cultural’ qualities that threaten Brazilians’ claim that they belong within theterritory of modernity. When commenting on the situation, the Enlightened(middle-class-educated-sun-tanned-perhaps-still-leftist ) Cariocas referred tosome diffuse phenomenon called a violencia (the violence). People in theneighbourhoods of the poor — which residents usually call favelas (shantytowns) — identify it with a mix of fear, loathing, revolt, and resignation as obicho (the animal). As I re�ect upon these terms, I am sure I understand both.Each identi�es a distinct symbolic region of the city. Each refers to a distinct‘moral’ zone of the city space, a distinct side of the invisible traces thatdistinguish the terrain of the legal — the sacred domain of Justice — and thezonas de violencia (zone of violence), that strange place where (blacks and mesticosand blackened whites) the poor — the Enlightened would wonder — seem to�nd it �t to live. But beyond their correspondence with the geo-economiccon�guration of the city space, they also indicate distinct ways of beingCarioca. Bodies and places in Rio de Janeiro can be read as materialisations ofthe strategies of intervention deployed in different moments of the analytics ofraciality, whose appropriation in attempts to provide a map of the modernBrazilian space resulted in the production of blackness to signify the domain ofsocial degeneracy, pathology, and illegality.

A little over a month later, when I had returned to the US, Rio woke up toanother Chacina. In a low-income neighbourhood not much different from myfamily’s, the night of 30 August 1993 was a night of police terror which left 21residents dead, several wounded, and many whose lives may still be colonisedby fear. I would like to share my reading of the coverage of the investigationof the Chacina de Vigario Geral by a major newspaper, with a mostly Enlight-ened readership. My objective here is to elaborate on what, I believe, renderspolice terror the most perverse and elusive instance of race injustice. Becausethe police are supposedly an instrument to maintain and ensure public order,to protect rather than harm the population, excessively violent police actionsare not matters of utmost public scrutiny. For a long time in Rio, thisrequirement has been overshadowed by a discourse constructing poor neigh-bourhoods as zonas de violencia and therefore has rendered the majority ofEnlightened Cariocas deaf, insensitive, or unable to articulate an effectivepolitical/civic counter-discourse.

The kind of race injustice expressed in police terror in these neighbour-hoods — regardless of whether it targets drug dealers or other residents — ishidden by a perverse logic. It assumes that since they have been writtenoutside the domain of legality, residents are also placed there and thereforerightful victims of police terror. Similarly, police terror is also rendered elusivebecause the placing of the neighbourhoods and their residents on the other sideof legality obscures the line separating terror from the necessary (drastic)routine police operations to protect these communities. Finally, its racedcharacter is made perverse and elusive because the poor is a category thatcombines the effects of class and race subjection, thereby hiding both. Thecategory the poor — when used in self-identi�cation — refers to those black,mestico, and blackened white Brazilians whose consciousness sociology writes as

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unable to adopt the ‘values’ required to survive and thrive in capitalistsocieties. Nevertheless, while this incapacity has been associated with misce-genation (and blackness), its raced character is diffused because, among Enlight-ened Brazilians, the logic of exclusion, the requirement of race invocation, alsoprevails.27 Hence, because the poor is always-already the actual (social) subject,the materially deprived (partially black) or black mestico, the raced dimensionof police terror is also silenced.

Indeed, what the subaltern Brazilian’s use of the category poor for self-identi�cation indicates is that the ‘silencing’ of race under class produces aregion of the Brazilian social space which is an effect of both race and classsubjection. Moreover it also points to that mode of operation of a form ofinjustice which can only be captured by the concept of the racial. That is, inthese circumstances when most basic human rights are violated only becauseblackness remains a signi�er of in-Humanity: when the acts of terror againstpeople of African descent are overshadowed by the violencia said to be properof the poor and the places they live. This second Chacina is a most painfulexample of this form of race injustice. In early 1990s Rio, not even theincumbent Socialist/Populist state administration — elected by the poor andwhich committed itself to the protection of their human rights — could destroythis logic. Actually, it helped to render it even more perverse.28

First Night (29 August 1993): Four police of�cers were shot near theentrance of the favela, ambushed by local drug dealers with heavyweaponry — AR 15, 9 mm pistols, and the like. Apparently, it was thework of the local drug chief whose brother and pregnant sister-in-lawwere kidnapped and killed by the police. The state administration andthe Military Police (PM) Command appeared concerned with controllingtheir subordinates. The commander of the PM was quoted as saying that‘this was an irregular operation …. these deaths could have been pre-vented if they had respected the norm of safety of the PM’ and that hewould ‘not tolerate revenge and PM invasion of the favela’. The policeof�cers used the situation to complain about their working conditions,low wages, and the new policy of human rights implemented by theSocialist/Populist state government and by the Enlightened (black) Com-mander of the PM. The report also included statistics regarding policedeaths: e.g., twelve police of�cers had been killed in the previous eightmonths.

Second Night (30 August 1993): Twenty police of�cers, wearing skimasks and bearing heavy weaponry invaded the favela and killed 21men, women, and teenagers, none involved in drug dealing, includingeight members of an evangelical family inside their own home. Thecoverage shows photos of bodies in alleys, bedrooms, and sidewalks; ofresidents throwing stones at the police investigators and authorities; andof the PM commanders and state authorities looking at the bodies. Theconsensus was that it was a case of police revenge. One survivor saidthat the killers �rst asked for proof that they were working people and,after throwing a bomb, started shooting indiscriminately. Three suspects

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had been identi�ed, among them ‘the terror’ of the community: ‘resi-dents denounced that he used to take money from residents and beatchildren and the elderly’. The coverage also included quotes frompoliticians, residents, police, authorities, church authorities, and severalpolitical organisations. It covered international reactions to the event,comments on recent killings in the community by drug dealers, statisticson the possible punishment of the suspects. Most references were to thecrisis of the institution (Police) and the Socialist/Populist state. Virtuallyeveryone called for Federal intervention in Rio’s police force.

In the Seven Days of coverage of the episodes of these Two Nights, thenewspaper struggled to provide closure to the Chacina. Most certainly, one thatwas adequate to everyone but the few cops who were put in jail and thecommunity residents’ who lost their relatives, friends, and neighbours. Howwas that version produced? On Day 2, the paper quoted state authorities, thepolice command, politicians, the governor, the community, and the organisa-tions of the Enlightened Carioca civil society who seemed certain that the Chacinawas an act of revenge. Two very troubling aspects required immediate expla-nation, though: (A) if it was an act of revenge against the drug dealers, why didthe killers shoot people who they knew were not involved with the drugtraf�c? (B) Why did they invade the home of the obviously honest and innocentevangelical family?29 Why were these circumstances so unsettling? Most masskillings that have made it into the news generally involved teenagers andyoung adults who were (or could have been) involved in drug dealing. Hencefor most of the Enlightened Cariocas, these episodes could be explained asunfortunate but understandable since — whether due to routine work of policeof�cers or groups of extermination — there was always the possibility thatvictims were or could become drug dealers, and then automatically placedoutside the domain of the legal.30

Many believed, however, that in the early 1990s, Rio’s violencia seemed tobe running out of control (out of its indigenous grounds) thanks to anincompetent state administration. From Day 3 to Day 6, the coverage empha-sised the thesis that the Chacina represented a ‘crisis of authority’ of the police,and therefore, of the State. A state representation of the opposition, recalledthat

The governor … had various opportunities to show more concrete actionto solve the shameful situation in Rio de Janeiro. He did nothing andnow it is clear that there is a crisis of command in the state.

This was a view shared by the President of the Rio de Janeiro State Federationof Neighbourhood Associations, who insisted that

what happened in Vigario Geral was not an isolated case. The adminis-tration should undergo great reform or else panic will overcome the city.We need an intervention in the Military [state] Police.

The crisis also seemed to have opened up a �ssure revealing that the stateshould not be treated as a uni�ed entity. For the president of the Rio de Janeiro

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State Supreme Court, it indicated that certain degenerate social subjects hadpenetrated the State itself:

We are in a social war between the layer of bandits which integrate thepolice and the other that practice all sorts of crimes … We will doeverything in the Court’s power to punish both the ones who killed thepolice of�cers and those responsible for these deaths.

Much of this probably re�ected the newspaper’s and Rio’s middle-class biasagainst an administration which they described as populist and, on manyoccasions, accused of being ‘soft on criminals’. But those most affected by‘crime’ only partially shared in this interpretation. The president of the Rio deJaneiro State Federation of Favela Residents denounced the

tense moment in which the favela population lives in RJ. The city, state,and federal administrations are responsible for this situation. We willdenounce what happened to the international human rights groups. Wedo not trust the Brazilian authorities, they don’t do anything.

Indeed, an examination of the quotes supporting the crisis of authority thesis— regarding the growing drug traf�c and ‘degenerated’ cops — suggests thepreferred interpretation. On the one hand, the crisis of authority thesis con-structed the Chacina as a ‘political question’ without addressing the mostcentral political question at stake, the relations between the state, here embod-ied by the police force, and the favelas’ residents. On the other hand, the ‘crisis’was restricted to the functioning of the Military Police as an institution,focusing on the identi�cation and arrest of suspects, measures to eliminateextermination squads, and power disputes within the Military Police. Ingeneral, besides a few radical calls to eliminate the force altogether, theprevailing idea was that the killers, the ‘bad cops’ — who succumbed to drugmoney — needed to be identi�ed and expelled. Here, the state divides itself,including the voice of those responsible for law enforcement. The newspaperquotes the Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Police, saying that

I have never seen anything so enormous and scary. The culture ofextermination is alive in the police basements and at night it goes outlike a wild animal to kill.

Parallel to the crisis of authority thesis, the seven-day coverage also pro-duced an image of the community that would help produce the necessaryclosure by addressing the two unexplained dimensions. This suggested thatviolencia was dangerously out of control, which would calm the fear that itcould affect even morally upright and hard working people everywhere. Asentiment conveyed by the press secretary of the Organization of BrazilianCatholic Bishops:

The cold blooded killing shows that the avalanche of violencia in thiscountry has reached its maximum and now seems uncontrollable.

Expectedly, closure required the closing of the boundaries of the zona daviolencia (zone of violence), accomplished by placing the evangelical family and

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the other victims within the same domain inhabited by the drug dealers andthe ‘bad cops’. As part of this strategy, the paper recounted the constantshootings in the neighbourhood (and those taking place in other favelas), thefear of witnesses who refused to collaborate with the investigations, theexisting war with the neighbouring community (a rivalry between drug dealerswhich the paper insisted in representing as among the community residents),the state of the community school building — situated in between the twoenemy favelas —riddled with bullet holes. With this strategy, the paper wrotethe community as just another favela, the sort of place where violencia isindigenous and not a novelty brought about by police vengeance. Slowly, thepaper was explaining for Enlightened Cariocas why working residents couldvery well be the victims of police terror: they lived in the domain of the illegal.Moreover, in the absence of any other points of reference, historical or sociolog-ical, which explained the historical and structural processes out of which Rio’sfavelas had been created, or how and why the drug traf�c was able to controlthe communities via terror, the only explanation left was that somethingintrinsic and unique to the favela residents had put them in this predicament.

But to construct this place, the favela, as the embodiment of violencia was notsuf�cient. The closing of the zona da violencia also needed to address why, thistime, only working people, and, more importantly, an evangelical family werethe victims. The answer here was as simple as one might fear. On Day 3, thepaper advanced the hypothesis that the family was killed by mistake becausethey knew the former local drug chief (who was in jail) and that they lived ina suspicious house that once belonged to him. On Day 4, the paper added thatthis house was used to hide the dealers’ heavy weaponry and that the familyhad connections with the former drug chief.31

On Day 5, the paper began building the version which would provideEnlightened Cariocas the desired closure. On the one hand, short reports rein-forced the crisis of authority and the dangerous liaisons theses. The authorityproblem became an institutional, internal one. The Chacina was not the re-sponsibility of the police as an institution but of certain ‘bad cops’ (some favelaresidents themselves) working with the drug traf�ckers — furnishing weapons,ensuring the transportation of drugs — and organised into exterminationsquads. As the state, via its law enforcement institutions, was identifying,separating, classifying, and punishing them, it disentangled itself from theproblem and only the small group of ‘bad cops’ was placed in the zona daviolencia. On the other hand, the paper also included a short report thatsuggested that the evangelical family also inhabited the same domain.

The Chief of the Military Police has no doubts: the target of thekillers … was the evangelical family who lived in a house that has beenowned by [the chief drug dealers]. The other [13] killed people mighthave been queima de arquivo [practice of eliminating potential wit-nesses] …. There are two possibilities that connect the death of the policeof�cers with the later killings: revenge or continuity of crime. In the �rsthypothesis, it is admitted that some of the police of�cers wereachacadores [cops working with/for the drug traf�c]. They were trapped

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and killed. The extermination squad believed that the trap was createdby the evangelical family. In the second hypothesis, the of�cers wereprotecting the local dealers who, with the connivance of the killedfamily, had failed to pay drug suppliers.

Quite simple. Actually, the evangelical family could have been responsible forthe death of the working, law-abiding residents.

This closure was analogous to the perversity and elusiveness of the form ofinjustice expressed in police terror. It constructed the poor and the favela asembodying that kind of social consciousness which only exists in materialdeprivation and crime. The explanation for the troubling deaths of documentedworking people and the morally elevated family revolved around their belong-ing to the zona de violencia, the domain of illegality. The �nal version wrotethem in the space shared by the police terrorists and the drug dealers.

At least one of the of�cers killed on the �rst night belonged to the domainof illegality; he along with the other of�cers had been trapped by the chief drugdealer seeking revenge for his relatives. On the second night, the ‘bad cops’invaded the community, killing the evangelical family because they lived in asuspicious house which they had bought from the former drug chief who wasalso their god-child. Moreover, the community was depicted not as a typicalfavela but as the headquarters of Rio’s organised crime. On Day 7, there werelengthy reports claiming that the community hid weapons used by a largecriminal organisation, and that, once the Enlightened and their human rightsorganisations left, life as usual had returned to the favela: drug dealers walkedabout unabashedly with their AR-15 and 9mm pistols in daylight, and a newdrug chief was in command. In the following week of coverage, the paperreported that the same group of police of�cers was also responsible for theChacina da Candelaria. Finally, Enlightened Cariocas could reacquire their peace ofmind as the episode was explained away as indigenous to the other side of theinvisible curtain, the zona de violencia and to the poor who live there. While theywould continue to be concerned with crime, violencia remained somethingforeign to the region they inhabited, despite the daily risk of encountering it inbanks, beaches, stores, and highways. For those living in the favelas and othercommunities of the poor, o bicho remains a palpable entity evident in theconstant fear of stray bullets, in the eventual dead bodies found in bloodycorners and alleys, and in the wet faces of those who �nd themselves victimsof the form of race injustice of which drug traf�cking and police terror are onlythe most dramatic manifestations.

Whither Justice?

I can’t stay quiet. I am not afraid of dying. We cannot let these cowardsdo what they want.

(The sister of a victim of the Chacina de Vigario Geral)

Many have suggested that the predicament of those struggling for race justicein Brazil is tied to our inability to establish the boundaries between socialjustice and race justice. Perhaps it is not just a Brazilian thing. Perhaps it is

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impossible to separate race subjection from class subjection. Nevertheless, I dobelieve that our predicament does capture a form of injustice speci�c to racesubjection, a dimension we share with many African Americans who perhapswill never leave the inner-cities to come into contact with the institutions andpeople who may use race invocation to produce race injustice but who can atany moment face police terror and other forms of race injustice which consist-ently and stubbornly escape the logic of exclusion. In the post-Civil RightsUnited States, when the practices and ideas that produced and justi�ed thesubjugation of African Americans have been exiled from the domain of justice,it seems necessary to investigate the extent to which blackness itself has retainedthat which was once de�ned as proper to the minds of certain unenlightenedand prejudiced white minds. Just as Emancipation recuperated southern moral-ity, the Civil Rights movement has recuperated US morality, but yet once againblacks carry the burden of retaining that which de�ned the boundaries ofjustice, moral qualities that exclude them from the terrain of the legal.

Why does race subjection in Brazil provide the starting point for a consider-ation of the kind of race injustice actualised in police terror? Obviously, as aform of race subjection that has operated (and continues to operate) withoutof�cial or customary segregation and does not require race invocation toproduce subalternity, it indicates why the recognition of race domination (in itssymbolic and institutional forms) in considerations of Justice would not expandthe domain of Justice. The most dramatic modes of race subjugation incontemporary urban spaces in Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdomand elsewhere indicate how race continues to demarcate an entire (socialsymbolic) region outside the terrain of the just, legal, and the good: the zona deviolencia. Moreover, this form of race injustice persistently highlights (as itbecomes primary material of mainstream sociological investigations of race) theline of justice, the domain of universality which (in the presence or absence ofof�cial segregation) has been identi�ed with whiteness. Insidiously suggestingthat the closer one can get to this region — which is also the locus of wealth— the less risk one runs of being caught outside the domain of the legal, as avictim or as a possible perpetrator.

Most critical considerations of the relationship between the ideas of theRacial and Justice privilege racism, the logic of exclusion, and the ratherparticular kind of race subjection were embodied in the Supreme Courtdecision in Plessy vs Ferguson. Expectedly, the liberal attack on of�cial segre-gation, which culminated with civil rights and af�rmative action legislation,would reinstate race in the domain of the legal both by punishing exclusionarypractices and providing legal remedies to address the ‘social distance’ theyhave produced. Nevertheless, it left un-addressed how the structures, institu-tions, and principles organising the US social space have been constituted outof the assumption that whiteness and only whiteness signi�es universality.Neither did it address the conditions of blacks whose social situation made itdif�cult (if not impossible) for them to bene�t from anti-discrimination or evenaf�rmative action legislation. The CRT critique of the liberal legal scholarshiphas produced powerful challenges to the thesis of universality, with the argu-ment that law and judicial procedures are inherently exclusionary, even the

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absence of legal segregation, because principles, procedures, and judicialdecision-making are informed by the majority’s ‘cultural values’ and thereforeis biased in favour of its interests. But this is not enough, as suggested by theUS Attorney General John Ashcroft’s comments of 19 June 2001, in response toattempts to suspend the date of execution of Raul Garza:

The facts of Garza’s case are important. Seven of Garza’s eight victimswere Hispanic; the prosecutor in the case is Hispanic; the presidingjudge is Hispanic; at least six of the jurors are Hispanic and all of thejurors individually certi�ed that race, color, religious beliefs, nationalorigin, and sex were not involved in reaching their respective decisions.In addition, of the six defendants — all of whom are Hispanic — whocould have faced the federal death penalty from this jurisdiction inTexas, the government only sought the death penalty against Garza (…)In the meantime, there is no evidence of racial bias in the sentence MrGarza received and, like former Attorney General Reno, I do not believethere is any reason to further delay his execution. His execution and theDepartment of Justice’s ongoing efforts to review how death penaltycases are brought in the federal system serve the same goal: thepreservation and protection of the public’s con�dence in our system ofjustice.

The most insidious and pervasive manifestation of race injustice is not themasking of racism under said universal principles. The most vicious form ofrace injustice is that which usually does not make it to the courts. Even whenit does, it always-already ensures that the black or Latino perpetrator willreceive a guilty verdict because the blackness and brownness of the accused orvictim and the place where she or he lives is read as the indigenous locus ofviolence. No wonder urban revolts — such as the one that took place inCincinnati last May, after the killing of another unarmed young black man bya white police of�cer — have been the most common response to this form ofrace injustice. It is badly in need of articulation. It needs to be theorised. Untilwe formulate a radical critique of the political-symbolic effects of the deploy-ment of the racial in modern thought, black leaders’ demands for (and promisesof) Justice will remain weak.

I would like to thank Phil Mabry for his careful reading and challenging comments onthe �rst version of this paper, George Lipisitz for his generous, sharp, and encouragingcomments on a later version, and John Goldberg-Hiller for his kind editorial sugges-tions. I would also like to thank Sherene Razack, Peter Fitzpatrick, Philomena Essed,Yen Espiritu, Tayyab Mamud, Margaret Montoya, John Monteiro, Marcia Lima.Finally, for their incisive comments and encouraging reactions to the ideas advancedhere, I thank the participants of the workshop Critical Race Theory: Between the Streetsand Systems of Justice, the 2000 Law and Society Summer Institute ‘Race and theLaw’, and the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Associacao Nacional de Pos-Graduacao e Pesquisa em Ciencias Sociais (ANPOCS).

Denise Ferreira da Silva may be contacted at the Department of Ethnic Studies,University of California, San Diego, e-mail [email protected].

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Notes

1. Goldberg (1993) identi�es crucial aspects of the relations between liberalthought and race. On the more speci�c question of justice, combined thetexts of the CRT movement (Crenshaw, et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995) consti-tute a powerful critique of liberal universality. Texts by Freeman and Belltexts were published in Crenshaw et al. (1996).

2. This perspective still informs contemporary critical ‘sociological’ ap-proaches. For instance, Omi and Winant (1994) correctly observe thatconceptions of racism emerged in the post-Civil Rights era — racism asall-pervasive and racism as ethnicity — which provoked a crisis of mean-ing which has undermined attempts to challenge this strategy of power.Nevertheless, their proposed minimalist de�nition of racism — i.e., ‘racist[is a] racial project that creates or reproduces structures of dominationbased on essentialist categories of race’ (p. 71) — suffers from the oppositeproblem. While their conception of racial formation suggests that the racialproduces modern structural and symbolic moment, they still circumscribethe operation of racial power to symbolic and structural mechanisms ofexclusion and domination.

3. References to other texts of the science of life and the science of man can befound in Count (1950), some of which are discussed in Silva (forthcoming).

4. In the eighteenth-century Natural History developed as knowledge aimedprimarily at organising the physical world into smaller groupings. Theproject of Natural History was to provide an exhaustive classi�cation of thephysical (vegetable and animal) world into ‘genus’, ‘species’, and ‘varieties’which enabled the identi�cation and grouping of various natural beings —the creation of a table of identities and differences, the ultimate objective ofknowledge (Foucault, 1994).

5. This is formulated by Derrida (1973) in which he states that ‘whether itadds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positiv-ity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replacedby it, must be other than it. Unlike the complement, dictionaries tell us, thesupplement is an ‘exterior addition’. It should be noted, however, that I amarguing that race is only exterior to the accounts of modernity thatprivilege history (transcendentality/temporality). The racial is integral tomodern thought precisely because it was articulated in science, the domainof modern knowledge which privileges mediation and spatiality. See Silva(forthcoming) for an elaboration of this argument.

6. In Darwin’s subsequent elaboration of the science of life, race differencewould again be articulated but with the particular conformation of thehuman brain, and the characteristically human mental functions, explainedas a result of the complexi�cation of material conditions. Darwin observedthat ‘[p]rogress … has been much more general than retrogression; thatman has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowlycondition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge,moral and religion’ (p. 161). Under the theory of natural selection, the mostperfect, the most advanced ‘races of mankind’ were not only the ones

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which presented more perfect and better adapted organic structures butthose whose perfection and development are exempli�ed in the products oftheir minds, their material conditions, their ‘Civilisation’.

7. According to Boas ([1899] 1940), ‘measurements must be selected in accord-ance with the problem that we are trying to investigate. The ratio of lengthand breadth of head may be a very desirable measurement in one case,while in another case it may be of no value whatever. Measurementsshould always have a biological signi�cance. As soon as they lose theirsigni�cance, they lose also their descriptive value. The great value ofmeasurement lies in the fact that it gives us the means of a comprehensivedescription of the varieties contained in a geographic or social group’(p. 169).

8. Here Hitler’s appropriation of De Gobineau and other work in the scienceof man resulted in a most dramatic actualisation of the power of the racial.

9. For a discussion of the re-conceptualisation of the anthropological projectinstituted by the notion of historical culture, see Silva (forthcoming).

10. For instance, in discussing the emergence of ‘racial ideologies’ inthe United States, Park ([1924] 1950) argued that the initially democraticsocial conditions on ‘the frontier’ were disturbed with the coming of‘the Oriental’: ‘the situation changed. He looked strange, he spoke aquaint language, and he developed habits of industry and thrift that wereintolerable to those who had to compete with him’ (pp. 258–59). He notedthat ‘the physical marks of race, in so far as they increase visibility,inevitably segregate the races, set them apart, and so prolong and intensifythe racial con�ict’ (p. 252). Park also discussed the origins of ‘race con-sciousness’ and ‘race ideologies’ in ([1939] 1950), ([1928] 1950), ([1937]1950).

11. The main mechanism of racial subordination, the foremost being ‘racialbelief’, he argues, is the ‘doctrine of anti-amalgamation’ that informs the‘white man’s theory of color caste’, which connects ‘racial purity’, ‘rejectionof social equality’, and ‘segregation’ (p. 58). It is in the impossibility ofamalgamation, of losing the visible signs of their ‘difference’, that theorigin of ‘Negro’s’ subordination resides.

12. According to Myrdal, ‘The low plane of living, the cultural isolation, andall the resulting bodily, intellectual, and moral disabilities and distortionsof the average Negro make it natural for the ordinary white men not onlyto see that the Negro is inferior but also to believe honestly that Negro’sinferiority is inborn’ (p. 101).

13. Social research, he argued, would play a fundamental role in improvingthe ‘Negro’s’ conditions in the United States: ‘It is no accident that popularbeliefs are biased in a direction unfavorable to the Negro people — becausethey are steered by white people’s needs for justi�cation of the caste order.And it is consequently, no accident that scienti�c research, as it is progress-ing, is unmasking and rejecting these beliefs (racial beliefs) and givingrational reasons or beliefs more favorable to the Negroes’ (p. 109).

14. About the colonisers, Cox notes: ‘Among Latins, there was a strongtradition in favor of a continuation of the old religious criterion of equality,

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while among the Anglo-Saxons an objective, capitalistic orientation facili-tated the manoeuvring of the colored people into a position which seemedmost suitable to their continued segregation. In this discussion it has beentaken as understood that neither Spain nor Portugal ever attained theindustrial development of northern Europe’ (p. 375).

15. This argument is advanced in Skidmore (1993), Schwarcz (1993), Silva(1998) and Silva (forthcoming), among others.

16. Since the early 1970s studies of ‘race relations’ have shown that subtle butef�cient race discrimination has determined that blacks and mesticos oc-cupy the most unfavourable positions in the Brazilian social space, andhave attributed to the dominant ideology of racial democracy the fact thatthese evidences of race domination are not accompanied by signs of raceconsciousness. For works in Portuguese see Hasenbalg (1979), Hasenbalgand Silva (1993), and Silva and Hasenbalg (1992); see also Degler ([1971]1986), Hanchard (1993), Winant (1994) and Marx (1998).

17. For a discussion of the effects of the deployment of miscegenation in thewriting of the national subject see Silva (1998).

18. See, for instance, Bastide ([1960] 1978), Carneiro (1964), Herskovitz (1967),and Ramos (1934) and (1935).

19. Elsewhere (Silva, 1998) I discuss the irony of this movement. They pro-duced the predicament of Brazilian culture precisely because the ambiguityof the signi�er miscegenation rendered their strategic re-signi�cation quiteunstable. Miscegenation would remain available to be deployed in attemptsto re-signify Brazil’s ‘culture’ and ‘history’ so as to write the Brazilian spaceon the outskirts of modernity.

20. What I am suggesting here is that both meanings of miscegenation survivewithin the split in the nation’s double-time — the ‘people as the object ofnationalist pedagogy’ and ‘the peoples as the subject of the process ofsigni�cation’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145).

21. The problem, he argued, was twofold. On the one hand, because ofdifferent mentalities it was impossible to equate the penal responsibility ofthe ‘inferior races’ with ‘the civilised white races’; on the other hand, themestico had a fundamentally unstable ‘mentality and morality’ due to thecon�ict of two distinct ‘mentalities’ within one body. Hence, blacks andIndians, he argued, should have an attenuated penal responsibility becauseof the ‘disequilibirum … provoked by an imposed adaptation in suchbackward spirits by a superior civilization’ (p. 122). In relation to themesticos, however, Nina Rodrigues offered a �ner distinction claiming thatthe degrees of penal responsibility should be determined according to theirdegree of mental instability. A similar distinction can be found in Vianna(1938).

22. The classic works of the Escola Paulista include, among others, Bastide andFernandes (1952), Costa Pinto (1952).

23. According to Fernandes, white European immigrants and the nationalswho were able to adapt to the demands of the new social order, tookadvantage of the opportunities to accumulate, blacks and mesticos onlyparticipated in the ‘competitive social order’ when favoured by the protec-

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tion of the upper strata. For most of them, however, their own subjectiveconditions determined that ‘the class society remained unequal and closed’(p. 46).

24. ‘The freedman’, he argued, ‘lacked the self-discipline and spirit of responsi-bility of the free worker, the only conditions which could ordain, sponta-neously, the regularity and ef�ciency of the workers in the new economicregime’ (p. 73).

25. Recent studies of ‘race relations’ in Brazil have accepted the argument thatthe ideology of racial democracy co-exists with (while repressing) racistideas and practices (while) they have rejected the conclusion that blacksand mesticos subalternity derives exclusively from class dynamics.

26. Such division does not coincide with the administrative division or evenactual division. The same street in a middle-class neighbourhood manytimes ends in favela.

27. This is exactly what enables mainstream Brazilian social scientists to arguethat race is not a principle organising the Brazilian social space. Forinstance in a study of violencia in Rio de Janeiro, Soares et al. (1995) arguethat while Brazilians of African descent constitute the majority of victims(and perpetrators) of violent crimes, race plays no role in this trend becausethey all come from low-income neighbourhoods.

28. The following is a summary of the O Globo coverage of the tragedy from30 August 1993 — 5 September 1993. Which means the who’s, why’s, andhow’s are the newspaper’s advanced explanations according to the infor-mation the journalists were able to gather, and editorial selections.

29. Among the Brazilian poor, the Pentecostals have the image of belonging orplacing themselves on a higher moral ground than their neighbours

30. Moreover, this Chacina was framed by the Chacina of Candelaria. Once it wasproved that police of�cers had killed the street-children, there was intensepressure on the part of the Enlightened Cariocas, and their organisations,upon the Socialist/Populist administration. Moreover, conservatives andthe oppositions (left and right) used the opportunity to attack the incum-bent administration.

31. The brother of the killed father said: ‘My brother knew the [former chief]since he was a child. They were all raised together and the [chief]considered my nieces and nephews his siblings. But it was only an oldfriendship’. But it is hard to �nd anyone living in favelas who do have orhad family members or friends — people we considered family — involvedwith the drug traf�c.

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