The U.S. Sent Brazil A Different Plague

After the Revolutionary War thousands of traitors and their families and slaves-- so-called loyalists-- fled to Canada, the Caribbean and Britain. Eventually some snuck back into the country. Decades later, some helped foment the American Civil War. After the reactionaries lost that one, a great many fled the U.S.-- mostly without their slaves, who were now freemen-- for Brazil. Yesterday, the Washington Post's correspondent in Rio de Janeiro, Terrence McCoy, took a look at the descendants-- who reminded me of Joe Kennedy III's fraternity.

Brazil is led by a proto-fascist, Jair Bolsonaro who is very much like Trump. He has been as terrible on confronting the pandemic as Trump has and, in fact, Brazil has the second largest case-load in the world after the U.S.-- 2,484,649 confirmed cases (11,683 vases per million Brazilians). Yesterday Brazil added another 41,169 cases. Like the U.S., the pandemic is raging out of control due exclusively to bad political leadership. Unlike the U.S., though, a group of unions representing Brazil's health workers are urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Bolsonaro for crimes against humanity over his handling of the pandemic. There have been 88,634 COVID-deaths, again, secondly to the U.S.'s (152,320).

McCoy's report on Brazil, though, isn't about COVID. It's about another plague that multi-racial Brazil has had to deal with: the Confederates and their racist descendants. He explained that "It’s one of history’s lesser-known episodes. After the Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners came to Brazil to self-exile in a country that still practiced slavery. For decades, their descendants have thrown a massive party that now attracts thousands of people to the twin cities of Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste to celebrate all things Dixie. The Confederate flag? Everywhere. On flagpoles and knickknacks. Emblazoned on the dance floor. Clutched by men clad in Confederate battle gray. Decorating the grounds of the cemetery that holds the remains of veterans of the rebel army-- the immigrants known here as the confederados. In a country that has long been more preoccupied with class divisions than racism, the Confederate symbols, stripped of their American context, never registered much notice. But now, as the racial reckoning in the United States following the killing of George Floyd inspires a similar reexamination of values in Brazil, that has begun to change."

Brazilians in recent weeks have demanded the removal of the notorious statue in São Paulo of a 17th-century settler who enslaved indigenous people. Protests for black equality have rumbled through several cities. And in Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, the cities founded by the Confederates, Brazilians who have never been to the United States are increasingly asking questions piercingly familiar to Americans: Where should the Confederacy be remembered-- on a flagpole, or in a museum?

...The debate has simmered for years. On one side is the Fraternity of American Descendants, the group that throws the annual party, tends to the Confederate cemetery grounds and promotes a Lost Cause orthodoxy reminiscent of the most ardent Confederacy apologists. On the other is the Black Union for Equality (UNEGRO), which has been leading a community charge to strip the festival of the flag considered by many to be a symbol of hate and repression.

In what might be the farthest outpost of the American culture wars, a new battle over the Confederate flag is only just beginning.

A mass exodus in search of land and slaves

The newspapers called it “Brazilian fever.” With the war lost, thousands of Southerners, fearful of living under Northern rule among freed slaves, were seeking other opportunities. Some pushed for Mexico. Others for Venezuela. But Brazil, which wouldn’t abolish slavery for another 23 years, proved to be the most attractive of countries.

Emperor Dom Pedro II, a fierce advocate of the South during the war, tried to induce their immigration, offering free transport, cheap land and an easy path to citizenship. Before long, Southerners sailed out from New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, for Rio de Janeiro. Eventually, between 8,000 and 20,000 immigrated.

“Move here and buy land,” Col. Charles Gunter urged in a letter to the Charleston Mercury newspaper in 1868. “We have here a beautiful place for our village, in the center of rich land, and on a grand river.”

But historians say one of the central draws was a country where Southerners could freeze time and continue a lifestyle that had been put to a violent end in the United States. In journals, one bragged about how inexpensive Brazilian slaves were; another lamented that they couldn’t bring recently freed American slaves to Brazil.

“They came to continue having slaves,” said Luciana Brito, a historian at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. “They associated the existence of slavery in Brazil with the maintenance of a system of racial subservience.”

Brito and other historians have scoured letters, journal entries and deeds of sale. One researcher found that more than three-fourths of Southerners who wrote to the Brazilian government to inquire about immigration were slaveholders. At least 54 families bought at least 536 slaves upon entering Brazil. Using racial epithets, they expressed fears of an “African government” in Brazil, and black “rulers” in the United States.

“The confederados presented themselves as refugees of a devastated America,” said Jordan Brasher, a geographer at Columbus State University who wrote his dissertation on the confederado communities. “As the downtrodden, poor, defeated Confederate soldiers looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

“They also brought the ideology of white supremacy and racial terrorism from the United States South to Brazil.”

In one dark episode, two Confederate immigrants led a mob in the lynching of a police chief who had refused to track down escaped slaves-- in front of his family. The confederados were also suspected of assassinating a Brazilian senator who supported emancipation.

In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, nearly a quarter-century after the United States. But interracial relations in the two countries were different. There were neither draconian racial distinctions in Brazil nor government prohibitions on intermarrying between races. The races mixed, yielding a country of extraordinary diversity. Over time, some confederados adopted new opinions on race.

“One of the changes most evidenced in the Confederados of my youth... was their belief in tolerance among the races,” Eugene C. Harter, who was raised among the confederados, wrote in a book about the community. “This they had acquired from the Brazilians.”

The confederados and their descendants assimilated and intermarried. English was largely forgotten. The towns become indistinguishable from their neighbors.

One of the few elements to remain was the yearly Confederate party, with its pageantry, its music and its flag.

‘I didn’t want to be black’

Cláudia Monteiro, president of the local Black Union for Equality, rarely paid much attention to the party. She’d spent 40 of her 48 years in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and, to her, it was nothing more than a town quirk. Living in Brazil, other racial issues had always seemed more pressing, including those in her own life.

Like many Brazilians, she grew up identifying as morena, one of the many distinctions in the country’s racial taxonomy, rather than the darker negra. Negra, she was led to believe by mass media, and even in her family, was “always ugly. Their hair was ugly. Their form was ugly. I didn’t want to be black.”

Not until she saw the work of the photographer Sebastião Salgado did she reassess that belief. In his images, she said, she recognized so much beauty and dignity in the faces of Africa and Brazil that she committed herself to black history and activism.

In the summer of 2015, she and another activist got to talking about Dylann Roof. The killer of nine black churchgoers in Charleston had glorified the Confederate flag, and it was taken down from the South Carolina statehouse. But in Brazil, officials weren’t asking for its removal from the Confederate extravaganza. They were actively supporting it, and had put the party on the official São Paulo events calendar.

With the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, their frustration only grew. “We started to mobilize,” said Carlinhos Barros, the other activist.

But the man whom they asked to remove the flag had a very different interpretation of it-- an interpretation they learned in detail at a public debate. The sides agreed to the event in the hope of settling their differences. But before a crowd of dozens, they could scarcely agree on a shared syntax, much less a common set of facts.

One side said the Civil War was about slavery. The other side said the “War of Secession” was about independence.

One said the flag was racist. The other side said it wasn’t.

One side demanded it come down. The other demanded it stay.

“We have to respect the history of the other, the pain of the other,” pleaded Monteiro.

“The flag will not come down,” said João Leopoldo Padoveze, president of the Fraternity of American Descendants.

He said there was no reason to be ashamed of the flag. It wasn’t racist, and neither were the confederados who waved it. His great-grandmother, and her mother before, had been black. People of color had frequently come to the party. So Padoveze put the Confederate flag on his car, in his office, on the hat he wore while giving speeches.

He wanted people to know the good his ancestors had accomplished in Brazil. They introduced farming equipment and techniques that helped to revolutionize Brazilian agriculture. They founded the first Protestant churches. They established schools all over São Paulo state. Brazil was better because the confederados settled here, he believed, and the flag was their symbol.

“They are saying that I’m racist, when I’m not,” he said. “Just because I have a different view of this very complex thing.”

So Padoveze refused to take it down, despite Monteiro’s pleas. She responded by camping herself outside the party in protest. Last year, scores of people arrived, carrying large banners. “Lower the Confederate flag,” they demanded.

The problem wasn’t the party, Monteiro told the revelers. It was the flag. It had to go.

Padoveze still refused.

“I’ve considered what they’ve said, but I know the flag isn’t what they say it is,” he said. “This is my view, and it’s very personal.”

Monteiro has also refused to yield. Her group is planning to ask local lawmakers for help. They’ve distributed letters of condemnation that have garnered the support of more than 100 religious and civil rights organizations. Younger generations, whose pleas for racial equality have intensified since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody, have taken up her calls.

This year’s party, scheduled for April, was canceled amid Brazil’s coronavirus outbreak, now the world’s second worst. But both Monteiro and Padoveze know the flag will fly again in their community.

“It’s the story of my family,” Padoveze said.

“It’s racism,” Monteiro said.

“Who’s right, and who’s wrong?” Padoveze asked.

“We have different views of different worlds,” Monteiro said.

Most Southerners Didn't Own Slaves, So Why...?

When Frank Hyman-- whose essay on racism in the News&Observer I want to discuss below, was in first grade, he got in trouble for calling a classmate the N-word. The classmate was Hispanic. It reminded me of a run-in with racism I once had in San Francisco when I was much younger. I met a farm boy who had run away from home in the Sacramento Delta area and hitch-hiked down to San Francisco. On our way back to my apartment in my old Ford Fairlane we drove through the Fillmore district and we stopped at a light at a corner where there were 4 or 5 black guys hanging put. My young farmer friend started cursing "the fucking Jews." He wasn't joking. I later learned he was raised by a Nazi grandfather who taught him that blacks are... "fucking Jews." A strange world we live in. (Aside: he was a lovely boy and he eventually had his Nazi tattoos removed to facilitate a closer relationship between us.)

Anyway, Mr. Hyman grew out of the racism he learned at home in a southern military family and came to understand the ugliness of the Confederate flag and what was behind that ugliness. He wrote that he "learned that for black folks the flutter of that flag felt like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And for the most prideful flag waivers, clearly that response was the point. I mean, come on. It’s a battle flag. What the flag symbolizes for blacks is enough reason to take it down. But there’s another reason that white southerners shouldn’t fly it. Or sport it on our state-issued license plates as some do here in North Carolina."

The Confederacy-- and the slavery that spawned it-- was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form. 
You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks-- a third of the South’s laborers-- to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

...[M]ost Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now: the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.

How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would-- in today’s lingo-- trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid-- which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites-- resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day.

One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it. Only by shedding those too, will Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, health and education.

There's been lots of progress in Virginia, some in Florida, some in Texas. And the Deep South? That's another signal Georgia voters in the Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb county 'burbs north of Atlanta may soon be sending the rest of the country when they turn out on April 18 and June 20 for Jon Ossoff. Replacing Mick Mulvaney in South Carolina (May 2 for the primaries and also June 20 for the runoff) with a non-Confederate will be a lot harder. The Republicans are likely to run a backward-facing state Rep., Tommy Pope, and the DCCC is pimping for some Goldman Sachs guy, Archie Parnell.