Differentiating Between Race and Ethnicity for Immigrant Communities in Brazil

• In Event: Migration and Restriction in the Global South

Abstract

The central paradox presented in this paper is that while the majority of Jews in Brazil have a higher racial status than Japanese Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians have a higher ethnic status than Jewish Brazilians according to existing public opinion polls (e.g., Lesser and Mori 2000). I argue that this paradox stems from Brazil’s early twentieth century immigration policy and explains the higher propensity for ethnic voting among my Jewish Brazilian interviewees when compared to my Japanese Brazilian interviewees and the greater support for racial quota programs among my Japanese Brazilian interviewees when compared to my Jewish Brazilian interviewees in Brazil today.

In this paper, I focus on the limitations of conflating race with ethnicity, especially with Brazilians of Japanese and/or Jewish heritage, two groups that arrived in Brazil after the end of the African slave trade in 1850. Although there have been numerous studies by Brazilian and U.S. scholars challenging the popular conception of Brazil as a racial democracy (e.g., Skidmore 1993; Hanchard 1994; Guimarães 1999; Guimarães 2002; Guimarães 2004; Telles 2004), there have been far fewer studies that address the political implications of ethnicity in contemporary Brazil. Similarly, many studies have compared the governmental and social construction of race in Brazil to the governmental and social construction of race in the United States (e.g., Andrews 1992; Marx 1998; Guimarães 1999; Telles 2004), but while the United States includes both racial and ethnic categories on its Census, Brazil has never allowed for ethnic categories on its Census (Lesser 2007). This lack of data has hindered research and has led to a tendency to conflate race with ethnicity in social scientific studies of Brazilian society and politics.

I start the paper by discussing currently existing public opinion poll data from Brazil about attitudes towards different racial and ethnic groups. This data reveals that Japanese Brazilians are perceived more positively as an ethnic group than Asians are perceived as a racial group in Brazil. I argue that this paradox has its roots in contradictory immigration policy in the early twentieth century that banned Chinese immigration due to beliefs about Chinese inferiority and inassimilable but subsidized Japanese immigration due to beliefs that the Japanese were the “whites of Asia.” Similarly, Jews are perceived more negatively as an ethnic group than White Brazilians are as a racial group in Brazil. This public opinion data is consistent with my semi-structured interview findings from 60 third generation Brazilians of Japanese and Jewish heritage. For example, when I analyze perceptions of racial discrimination against the racial group with which these interviewees identify on the Brazilian Census, more Japanese-heritage interviewees, most of whom identified as “yellow”, believed that there was racial discrimination against the group with which they identified on the Census than the all-white Jewish interviewees.

Next, this paper investigates the role that ethnicity based on national origin plays in political behavior, particularly with regard to ethnic voting. I find that more Jewish-heritage interviews expressed believing that there is discrimination against the ethnic group with which they identify and were more inclined to vote for a candidate of their same origin. Lastly, I discuss differences between and within my Japanese- and Jewish-heritage interviewees in their attitudes towards racial quotas. I find that there was more support for racial quotas for Black and Indigenous Brazilians among Japanese-heritage than among Jewish-heritage interviewees. The non-white racial identification of these Japanese-heritage interviewees helped them to perceive discrimination against other groups in Brazil and see a need for racial quotas as a result.

Author

• Angela Ju, St. Edward's University