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When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy

By Rúrion Melo

This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here.

1. Introduction: The Ideological Function of Racial Democracy Revisited

There seems to be no doubt anymore that Brazilian racial democracy, that is, the idea that Brazil was formed based on “a kind of racial paradise, a harmoniously mestizo country”[1] (Santos 2022: 211), is a “myth”. Anti-racism theorists and activists have been combating this myth for many decades and sought to reinforce that Brazilian society is racist, that the structures of racism are constitutively rooted in our way of life (Moura 2019). Still, when we look at the most diverse spheres of our daily lives, there seems to be an uncomfortable but permanent truth content surrounding this “myth”[2]: we continue to be a society that produces and reproduces multiple means to perpetuate everyday racism. How and why, despite all the questioning and anti-racist struggle, do we still embrace, so to speak, the forms of segregated integration of the population, allowing “racism to continue there, silent, but keeping the wheels working”? (Santos 2022: 211). The answer that Nilma Lino Gomes offers to this question is unequivocal: Because we are still “a society that hides and keeps racism behind the discourse of racial democracy, miscegenation, diversity” (Gomes 2018: 111).

Saying that racial democracy is a myth does not just mean concluding that, in reality, we live in a racist democracy or that true democracy is only possible without racism. It means that racism is perpetuated through the existing democracy, and only for this reason it ensures its effectiveness in social terms: “Racial democracy or the myth of racial democracy is not merely a false belief, but involves a way of functioning and regulating social practices, power relations, forms of sociability and social thought that make up a certain historically constituted ethnic-racial domination regime” (Sales 2023: 105). It is not, therefore, a question of denying that racial democracy operates effectively in the perpetuation of racism, nor of concluding that its effectiveness presupposes that we live in a democracy without racism. Certainly, “the denunciation of racial democracy as a myth occurs […] in the context of the criticism of political democracy as a farce” (Guimarães 2001: 147). But its criticism is directed less at some ideal of interracial democratic coexistence than at some hegemonic mode of domination and oppression that acts through everyday racial sociability itself. Who is interested in hiding the racism that actually exists behind discourses and practices that deny its existence? On the one hand, according to Antonio Sérgio Guimarães, “‘Racial democracy’ was extensively used to make Brazilian racial inequalities invisible”, but it doesn’t mean “to deny its effectiveness in inhibiting grosser manifestations of racism” (Guimarães 2019: 41–42). On the other hand, racial democracy wouldn’t have just the intention of perpetuating social inequalities (i.e., racial, class, and gender) between white and Black people. This would have the function of preventing critical anti-racist behaviour, demobilizing indignation and resistance (Santos 2022; Theodoro 2022).

Carnival is understood to be one of the different practical ways in which racial domination takes root in Brazilian public culture. Photo via Unsplash.

But if something like racial democracy fulfils the role of hiding or dissimulating racism, what are the social practices that materialize, sustain, and simultaneously prevent the recognition of everyday racism? According to Lélia Gonzalez’s formulation: “What happened for the myth of racial democracy to have so much acceptance and dissemination? What were the processes that determined its construction? What does it hide, besides what it shows?” (Gonzalez 2020g: 76). Recent literature has sought to investigate this issue on different fronts based on processes of subjectivation of domination and the internalization of racism. Concepts such as colour blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2020), whiteness (Bento 2022; Theodoro 2022), raciality devices (Carneiro 2023), or even interdicted (Faustino, 2021) or ambivalent recognition (Melo 2024) refer to attempts to explain the persistence of racism and social inequality in our democratic ways of life.

The purpose of this text is to re-read one of these attempts to understand the paradigmatic issue of Brazilian racial democracy by assuming indirectly the “conceptual framework” of conviviality (Costa and Nobre 2019: 12). More precisely, admitting an “inseparable nexus between conviviality and inequality” (Costa 2019: 28). Instead of an analysis specifically focused on social structures (although never failing to consider them), “conviviality specifically refers to the interactions observed in the realm of common life. They obviously include not only interactions based on cooperation but also those marked by competition, conflicts and violence” (Costa 2019: 27). However, according to our hypothesis, social interactions that constitute conviviality can be the path to understand the aspects of hidden inequalities that operate in the perpetuation of racism. How does conviviality hide inequalities? And how could the nexus of conviviality and inequality contribute to the understanding of racial democracy? If, conceptually, conviviality always contains inequality – once conviviality cannot be confused with good coexistence – would it be the function of the myth of racial democracy to hide and perpetuate social inequality through a kind of a veiled racism?

 […]

6. Carnival and the Doméstica-Mulata Dialectic

As we are seeing, [Lélia] Gonzalez[3] investigates the different practical ways in which racial domination takes root in our public culture. Racism is perpetuated through the myth of racial democracy because, through certain social practices, it produces and reproduces a kind of consensual domination. Some aspects of Brazilian popular culture have more power to make the myth even more effective. Gonzalez calls them “rites” that sustain and actualize this hegemonic function. Myths can only be perpetuated through rites. Paradigmatic in our popular culture are rites such as soccer and samba, phenomena that are widely accepted and emblematically linked to the presence of Black people, because “the images of Brazilian Carnival and soccer are widely used […] as ‘concrete proof’ of Brazilian ‘racial harmony’” (Gonzalez 2020c: 168). Among these rites – which usually include other popular festivals – Gonzalez pays special attention to “Carnival”: “The myth that we are trying to re-enact here is that of racial democracy. And it is precisely at the moment of the carnival rite that the myth is updated with all its symbolic force”. And if “it is at Carnival that the myth of racial democracy is exalted”, this is because it is impossible to talk about the carnival rite or, much less, the myth of racial democracy without putting a decisive character on stage – the Black woman (Gonzalez 2020g: 80; 92).[4]

It is well known that Gonzalez gives centrality in her reflections to the experiences and struggles of Black women. To understand them is to understand the contradictions and possibilities of our society, the obstacles and the emancipatory potential of our democracy. For this reason, the best way to investigate the ideological construction of racial democracy, the reality/falsehood dialectic that constitutes Brazilian racism, is by trying to understand the lives of Black women. Because “as with all myths, that of racial democracy hides more than it reveals, especially with regard to symbolic violence against Afro-Brazilian women” (Gonzalez 2020c: 165). So, what is hidden or revealed through these women that allows us to properly understand what is at stake in racial democracy? According to Gonzalez, racial democracy “exerts its symbolic violence in a special way on Black women, because the other side of carnivalesque deification occurs in the daily life of these women, when they become domésticas” (Gonzalez 2020g: 80).[5]

The doméstica-mulata dialectic defines, in Gonzalez’s terms, the racialized recognition of Black Brazilian women. An identity heteronomously constituted by the way Black women are situated in the discourse of racial democracy. This dialectic refers to the “place in which we situate ourselves” based on the “double phenomenon of racism and sexism”. Black women thus express “the symptomatic that characterizes Brazilian cultural neurosis” (Gonzalez 2020g: 76, emphasis in the original). She materializes negative and positive images in a dynamic and violent way – the sum of the ideological construction that sustains the extremes of the racial democracy discourse. It is the product of the interdicted and the unsaid of current language in Brazilian culture. A contradiction that should remain hidden under the hegemony of the ideological construction, but which is constantly revealed in the common language of our public culture. After all, how is it possible for mulata and doméstica to be attributed to the same subject? Why does it engender in white men and women (and Black men) simultaneous and contradictory feelings of desire and guilt, deification and aggression? Mulata or doméstica: “the name depends on the situation in which we are seen” (Gonzalez 2020g: 80). Therefore, Black women are seen in Brazilian society in an extremely contradictory way: “as a body that works and is overexploited economically, she is the cleaner, maid and cook, the ‘pack mule’ of her white employers; as a body that provides pleasure and is overexploited sexually, she is the mulata of Carnival whose sensuality falls into the ‘erotic-exotic’ category” (Gonzalez 2020c: 170). But this neurotic transfiguration always fulfils ideological functions, because it is precisely through it that racial (and sexual) contradictions remain hidden and justified by those affected themselves.

It is necessary to see the degree of symbolic violence that is operating behind the laudatory language directed at the “queen of Carnival”, the exaltation of the mulata. “We know that the word ‘mulata’ comes from mule – a hybrid animal”, Gonzalez reminds us, a “permanent prisoner of nature”. Her humanity is not recognized as a subject, she has no agency. The most she can aim for is to become an object of desire – “but never a muse”, just “a fruit to be tasted”. In the Carnival parades, the mulata “becomes a Cinderella: adored, desired and devoured by those who went there precisely to lust after her” (Gonzalez 2020c: 165). But everything is always accompanied by sexual violence (in the tension between repulsion and desire).[6] Furthermore, by becoming a professional due to the effects of capitalism, “she is never recognized as a human being and no movement has been made to restore her dignity as a woman. She has clearly been transformed into a commodity” (Gonzalez 2020c: 165–166).[7]

7. Sexual Exploitation of Black Women

Mechanisms of whitening also work to make all this symbolic violence suffered by Black women a reality. Gonzalez analyses interviews with domestic workers who also worked as samba dancers, in other words as mulatas. All the stories and her analysis bring out the inhuman side of the “fairy tale”. First of all, mulatas couldn’t be “completely white or completely Black”. They had to fit into the “national category of skin for export: mulata” (Gonzalez 2020c: 166, emphasis in the original). For the “most important prerequisite” consists of the following: “A mulata must have delicate white features if success is to be guaranteed”. This includes mestizo features and phenotypes that are not completely Black, but European, such as having a “fine nose and well-drawn lips”. Mulata candidates are “rigorously examined ‘as if they were horses’” (Gonzalez 2020c: 168, emphasis in the original). Finally, mulatas need to know how to behave socially, which implies that the “export standard” requires them to take “social etiquette classes” so that they don’t just know how to dance samba on stage. In order to “stand out on stage and be incredible in her profession”, the mulata needs to “learn to be a woman”.

These stories, according to Gonzalez, express very well “what it means to be a mulata in the ‘racial paradise’ called Brazil” (Gonzalez 2020c: 168, emphasis in the original). But the internalization of the ideology of whitening leads to “identification with the ideology of the dominator”. Gloria Cristal, one of the mulatas interviewed, says: “Being a mulata is the best profession in the world, because we have the opportunity to become ladies. Everyone treats us with affection and care. Sometimes I think I’m a porcelain doll and I really like that” (Gonzalez 2020c: 167). The dominant ideological system subjects Black women (“young Black women from humble origins”) to a type of manipulation and sexual, social, and economic exploitation, exposing them to a veritable “brainwashing”: “Without realizing it, they are manipulated, not only as sexual objects, but as concrete proof of Brazil’s ‘racial democracy’: after all, they are so beautiful and admired!” (Gonzalez 2020b: 59, emphasis in the original). These young Black women see this type of work – mulata as a “profession” – as a means of ascension and a possible way out of their “place of Black people”, usually their original situation of poverty.

This sexual exploitation of Black women is totally linked to the obstacles they face in finding a humanly dignified place in the workforce and in everyday social relations. Gonzalez observes that the difficulties of mobility and social ascension for Black women are linked to everyday racism and the mechanisms of whitening that reinforce discrimination. In many professional activities (administrative work, school teaching, nursing services, receptionists, etc.), “Black women find it obviously difficult to be hired because many of these activities […] require direct contact with the public” (Gonzalez 2020c: 159). Thus, they are discriminated against because of the colour of their Black skin. In most cases, job advertisements for such activities already mention “the requirement of ‘good looks’. In practice, ‘good looks’ means that the candidate belongs to the dominant racial group” (Gonzalez 2020c: 159). In other words, this means that it is not desirable for “Black candidates to come forward, they will not be admitted” (Gonzalez 2020b: 58). This derogatory view of Black women (which, according to Gonzalez, always creates a counterpoint with the “fairy tale” image of the mulata – the dialectic between doméstica and mulata) materializes in the way they are treated in everyday interactions and are socially integrated: even if in a veiled way, they are always subordinated and inferior according to the rules of cordiality of Brazilian racial democracy. Therefore, “it can be concluded that discrimination based on sex and race makes Black women the most exploited and oppressed segment of Brazilian society, limiting their possibilities for advancement” (Gonzalez 2020c: 160). They are left to internalize racial domination and struggle to survive in deteriorating living conditions as domésticas for middle and upper class families in Brazilian society facing a double shift of work and care in their own home (looking after family members, especially children), without medical care, without quality education for their children, resigning themselves to the “refuges” of society.[8] Even so, as we shall see, Black women have always resisted class, race and gender oppression in different ways.[9]

Black feminism – not white feminism – was the only one that worried about and fought against the forms of overexploitation of Black women. This is because Brazilian feminist movements, generally led by white middle-class women, disregarded the issue of race. “Although they deal with the relations of sexual, social, and economic domination to which women are subjected”, says Gonzalez, “they do not pay attention to the fact of racial oppression” and therefore “neutralize the problem of racial discrimination” (Gonzalez 2020b: 61). At the end of the day, this forgetting or invisibilization of the racial issue would have the conscious intention of hiding the fact of the “exploitation of Black women by white women”. This would demonstrate the (often unconscious) effects of the internalization of racism on progressive sectors, which do not realize that “in their own discourse, the mechanisms of the ideology of whitening and the myth of racial democracy are present” (Gonzalez 2020b: 61).

However, Gonzalez is not only harshly critical of white feminism. Even Marxist movements focused exclusively on class struggles “ended up becoming accomplices of a domination they intended to combat” (Gonzalez 2020f: 145): “It is worth noting that even the leftwing groups absorbed the thesis of ‘racial democracy’ to the extent that their analyses of our social reality never glimpsed anything beyond class contradictions” (Gonzalez 2020f: 144). In addition, Gonzalez does not shy away from criticizing the sexual discrimination present in the Black movement: “Our partners in the movement reproduce the sexist practices of the dominant patriarchy and try to exclude us from the movement’s decision-making sphere. And it is precisely for this reason that we seek out the women’s movement, feminist theory and practice, believing that we can find there a solidarity that is so dear to the racial question: sisterhood. However, what we really find are practices of racist exclusion and domination” (Gonzalez 2020f: 148). This means that Black women suffer racism from the feminist movement, sexism from the Black movement, and racism/sexism simultaneously from leftists guided by class struggles.

8. Black Women’s Agency

Continue reading here.


Notes

[1] All translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.

[2] Florestan Fernandes was the first intellectual to talk about the “myth” of racial democracy. He problematized the processes of integration of the Black population in a class-stratified society. His research points to the social marginalization of the Black population and how the myth of racial democracy hinders the recognition of the intertwining of socio-economic inequalities and racial discrimination (Fernandes 2008 [1964]).

[3] For more details on Lélia Gonzalez’s Critical Approach see the original Working Paper. For an intellectual biography of Lélia Gonzalez, see Ratts et al. 2010.

[4] Similar passages in other texts reinforce this thesis: “The myth we are describing is that of racial democracy, since it is precisely at the moment of the Carnival rite that the myth takes on its full symbolic impact. It is at this moment that the Afro-Brazilian woman is transformed into a sovereign, into that ‘mulata, my samba queen’” (Gonzalez, 2020e: 164–165).

[5] We chose to keep the original Portuguese terms doméstica (female domestic worker) and mulata (a mixed-race woman, typically of African and European descent – an outdated and potentially offensive term today, historically associated with samba dancers in Brazil).

[6] There is brutality and disrespect in praising Black women as sexualized objects. Gonzales always offers many examples of very common uses of popular language when referring to mulatas “flatteringly”: “What legs, man! Look at that passista [dancer] wiggling. What an ass! And look at her navel. She must be very good in bed! She’s driving me crazy!” (Gonzalez 2020c: 164).

[7] Mulatas are “subtly co-opted by the system without realizing the high price to pay: that of their own dignity” (Gonzalez 2020b: 59). In the end, as Gonzalez thematizes, they end up turning to prostitution.

[8] Including the constant danger of sexual violence. Gonzalez always points out that violence and desire are realized differently in situations where Black women are seen as mulatas or domésticas. But both always refer to the violent and symbolically structuring act of “rape”. In addition to all kinds of difficulties and suffering, domésticas continue to reproduce the role of mucamas (in Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa, a young Black female slave who helped with household chores and accompanied the lady of the house on outings, and could also serve as a wet nurse) as sexual objects for their masters, bosses, fathers and their children.

[9] This “Black woman’s place” in society finds many parallels with the concept of the “outsider within” as later developed by Patricia Hill Collins (2019).


References

Bento, Cida (2022): O pacto da branquitude, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2020): Racismo sem racistas: O racismo da cegueira de cor e a persistência da desigualdade na américa, São Paulo: Perspectiva.

Carneiro, Sueli (2011): “A miscigenação no Brasil”, in: Carneiro, Sueli (ed.), Racismo, sexismo e desigualdade no Brasil, São Paulo: Selo Negro, 66–69.

———- (ed.) (2011): Racismo, sexismo e desigualdade no Brasil, São Paulo: Selo Negro.

———- (2023): Dispositivo de racialidade: A construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser, São Paulo: Zahar.

Costa, Sérgio (2006): Dois atlânticos: Teoria social, anti-racismo, cosmopolitismo, Belo Horizonte: UFMG.

———- (2019): “The Negleted Nexus Between Conviviality and Inequality”, in: Novos Estudos Cebrap, 38, 1, 15–32.

———- (2023): “Convivialidade”, in: Rios, Flávia; Santos, Márcio André dos and Ratts, Alex (eds.), Dicionário das relações étnico-raciais contemporâneas, São Paulo: Perspectiva, 89–93.

Costa, Sérgio and Nobre, Marcos (2019): “Introduction: Conviviality in Unequal Societies”, in: Novos Estudos Cebrap, 38, 1, 9–13.

Faustino, Deivison (2021): “A ‘interdição do reconhecimento’ em Franz Fanon”, Revista de Filosofia Aurora, 33, 59, 455–481.

Gomes, Nilma Lino (2018): “Por uma indignação antirracista e diaspórica: Negritude e afrobrasilidade em tempos de incerteza”, in: Revista da ABPN, 10, 26, 111– 124.

Gonzalez, Lélia (2020a): “A democracia racial: Uma militância”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 310- 312.

———- (2020b): “A mulher negra na sociedade brasileira: Uma abordagem político- econômica”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 49-64.

———- (2020c): “A mulher negra no Brasil”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 158-170.

———- (2020d): “Democracia racial? Nada disso!”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 201-203.

———- (2020e): “O racismo no Brasil é profundamente disfarçado”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 302- 305.

———- (2020f): “Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 139-150.

———- (2020g): “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira”, in: Rios, Flávia and Lima, Márcia (eds.), Lélia Gonzalez: Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 75-93.

Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio (2001): “Democracia racial: O ideal, o pacto e o mito”, in: Novos Estudos Cebrap, 61, 147–162.

———- (2019): “A democracia racial revisitada”, in: Afro-Ásia, 60, 9–44.

Sales, Ronaldo (2006): “Democracia racial: O não-dito racista”, in: Tempo Social, 18, 2, 229–258.

———- (2023): “Democracia racial”, in: Rios, Flávia; Santos, Márcio André dos and Ratts, Alex (eds.), Dicionário das relações étnico-raciais contemporâneas, São Paulo: Perspectiva, 106–111.

Santos, Ynaê Lopes dos (2022): Racismo brasileiro: Uma história da formação do país, São Paulo: Todavia.

Theodoro, Mário (2022): A sociedade desigual: Racismo e branquitude na formação do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.


About the Autor

Rúrion Melo holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is a professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at the same university. He is also a researcher at Cebrap and a Principal Investigator at Mecila. At USP, he coordinates the Group for the Study of Politics and Critical Theory. His research focuses on political and social theory, with particular interest in critical theory, democratic thought, the public sphere, struggles for recognition, feminism, racism, and anti-racism. He is one of the coordinators and translators of the Habermas Collection published by UNESP Press.


Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series Conviviality and Inequality

Ajay Gandhi, The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, 22.04.2025. 


Citation: Rúrion Melo, When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.05.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59225

 

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 27, 2025). When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/140o5


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