Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States … and Racial Politics in Brazil?1

Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co existence of racial inequality with Brazil s self image as a lracial democracy . Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white black distinc tion as explanationsfor the low level of black political mobilisation. In doing this, these studies unreflectedly take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordina tion of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation. What seems to escape these analysts is that the Brazilian construction of race was set against the view that lracial differences identify distinct groups, a view which still prevails in the United States and in sociological constructions of race. Actually, an analysis of writings on Brazilian subjectivity suggests that the texts which write blackness do so by deploying various modern categories of lbeing race, nation, gender, and class both in the narratives which have produced blacks as subordinate subjects in modernity and in the texts which aim to foster black emancipation.