Portuguese (post-)colonial situations, national identity and the ...

Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
Portuguese (post-)colonial situations, national identity and the
understanding of racism: the politics of academic narratives
Introduction
Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marta Araújo
Centre for Social Studies
July 2010
The colonial is thus the blind spot upon which the modern
conceptions of knowledge and law are built. The theories of the
social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are
as important for what they say as for what they silence. What
they say is that modern individuals, that is, metropolitan men,
enter the civil society. What they do not say is that a massive
world region of the state of nature is thereby being created, a
state of nature to which millions of human beings are
condemned and left without any possibility of escaping via de
creation of a civil society (Santos, 2007: 50).
Within the twentieth-century colonial horizon of international
relations, Nazism was a profound disruption of the global order;
it brought the conventions of European imperialism and
European racism into a colonial configuration that undermined
the liberal template. Nazism conflated the distinction between
European Nation and European Empire, confusing the so-called
realm of order and civility and the so-called realm of chaos and
savagery. […] In particular, the persecution and extermination
of the Jews erased the global colour line, distorting the extant
colonial and racial distinction between European and „non-
European‟, white and „non-white‟. Within and against that
context, a Eurocentric concept of racism emerged, concerned
with confronting these excesses of „race‟ –thinking‟, not their
European and American formations (Hesse, 2004: 20-21).
The TOLERACE project proposes a historicised understanding of the semantics
of (anti-)racism and tolerance. This approach considers four core questions:
(i) The historicisation of racism must avoid its conception as being tied to a
“single case” or in the juxtaposition of “particular cases” to be classified on
the basis of formal categories (Balibar, 1991). Thus while processes such
as colonialism, slavery, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust pertain a specific
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symbolic nature reactivated in anti-racist struggles, they should be seen not
as phases of the past, but as crucial components of the history of European
national states which influence in a decisive manner contemporary racism.
(ii) A historically informed approach needs to make problematic the hegemonic
definition of racism as beliefs or attitudes arising from specific (extremist)
ideologies. On the contrary, we defend the need to conceive of racism and
„race‟ as emerging from political situations, that is, racism should be
understood rather as a political technology of (post-)colonial governance
(Hesse, 2004; Bauman, 1987); more precisely, as Eric Voegelin‟s pioneer
study anticipated, the „race idea‟ has been effective “in the governmental
organization of the community” within the historical formation of the
European national states (1997: 117).
(iii) Intimately related to the previous point, we also take as problematic the
individual-centred approaches to racism as prejudice that have been
prevalent in the academia and in policy-making since the 1950s. We argue
that the prejudice paradigm depoliticises racism that is, it “removes” racism
from “comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of
the powers that produce and contour it” (Brown, 2006: 15, original
emphasis). This has a tremendous effect on the current temporalities and
geographies of (anti-)racism and tolerance that confine policy measures to
the combating of discrimination against immigrants – mainly from outside
the EU, regarded as the incarnation of the growing diversity of the
population within the EU‟s territories.
(iv) Finally, we argue for the need to overcome an “immigrant imaginary”
(Sayyid, 2004; Hesse & Sayyid, 2006), which amplifies ontological
difference and frames racial discrimination as a combination of social
contrasts - and therefore as a matter of integration, often read as
assimilation-, thus naturalising hostility or fear of the other, and cultural
discontinuities - depoliticising historical processes and cultural formations.
This paper is anchored in these four questions in order to explore core academic
narratives within the Portuguese context regarding both the history of colonialism and
the current study of racism and intolerance in Portuguese society. We will see the ways
in which different disciplinary approaches (historiography, socio-history, sociology,
anthropology and social psychology) have been related to the formulation/critique of a
“Portuguese specificity” – described as a capacity to contact other peoples and to be
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convivial, an idea which is now commonsensical, enunciated as Lusotropicalism
(Freyre, 1952; Castelo, 1998). Moreover, we will relate this (a-)historicity of
“Portuguese colonialism” to the construction of racism as a non relevant socio-political
debate.
As the two epigraphs from Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Barnor Hesse show,
the historical drawing of an incommensurable line between the metropolis and the
colonies has prevented an analysis of the interrelation between colonial and national
governance. Although the construction of Portuguese national identity – including the
idea of a Portuguese colonialism/empire – has been intimately linked to colonialism
and the idea of the Portuguese “discoveries” (Os Descobrimentos) (Ribeiro, 2004: 17),
the relevance of the „race idea‟ has been effectively erased from the understanding of
Portuguese nationhood, and therefore it appears only as (partially) relevant to analyse
“racial relations” in the colonial territories, but not in the (European) metropolis.
Engaging with this helps to critically analyse current imaginaries of diversity in
Portuguese society and the myth of a soft colonialism epitomised by miscegenation:
this process is foregrounded when it is located in the colonial territories (what the
Portuguese brought there) but it is foreclosed when those cultural „encounters‟ and
„racial mixtures‟ occur in the Portuguese national space; paraphrasing Miguel Vale de
Almeida (2006a: 366), those cultural and racial formations are supposed to remain
within the (ex-)colonial space, and not to return to the metropolis (i.e. African black
immigrants). More precisely, they fail to question the old configuration of a Portuguese
nation as culturally (Christian) and racially (white) homogeneous.
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PART I: NARRATIVES ON THE HISTORY OF THE PORTUGUESE
EMPIRE AND NATION
1. The history of “race relations” in the Portuguese empire:
formulation/critique of the myth of a non-racist and tolerant
nation
The Portuguese are, among all colonizers, those who best govern the African peoples,
because we do not have that exaggerated prejudice of the separation between races and
we are guided, by our way of being, to treat the indigenous with tolerance and kindness,
respecting their customs and institutions as far as possible. (Regulamento do Trabalho
Indígena 1 ,1914: 949-950, apud Meneses, 2010: 76) 2
We are fed up to the teeth.
Fed up with supporting you, with suffering the terrible consequences of your follies, your
demands, with the squandering misuse of your authority.
We can no longer stand the pernicious effects of your political and administrative decisions.
[...]
We repeat that we don‟t want hunger, nor thirst, nor disease, nor discriminatory laws
founded on the difference of color. (“The African Cry”, Mozambican newspaper, 1932 apud
Duffy, 1961: 305)
Since the end of the 18 th Century, European states started to take initiatives aiming at
the outlaw of slave trade; these initiatives grew in number during the 19 th Century‟s
power struggles between central and peripheral mercantilist and increasingly
industrialized (imperial) economies. Additionally, humanitarian anti-slavery lobbies and
the diversified Christian missionary “enterprise” had a central role in the international
arena, renovating the practice and discourse on the civilisation of the “heathen”. These
complex political, economic and cultural struggles between the metropolitan centres
were drawing a specific racial cartography and (re-)inventing the dark continent – Africa
(Meneses, 2010), epitomised by the “scramble for Africa” of the Berlin Conference
(1884-85). Portuguese trading network (Portugal-Angola-Brazil) and the areas in the
African territories disputed with Britain were also at the centre of these heated
negotiations.
Our analysis of two key works published in the early 1960s (Boxer, 1963; Duffy,
1959, 1961) that brought about a critique of the myth of a Portuguese non-racist and
tolerant colonialism, takes into account this historicity of Portuguese colonialism since
the 19 th Century. These academic narratives are shaped by two specific political
contexts: the already mentioned international accusation of slave trade against
1 Decree No 951, Diário do Governo No 187 (14 October 1914, pp. 948-977).
2 Os portugueses são, de todos os colonizadores, os que melhor e mais facilmente trazem ao seu
domínio os povos africanos, pois que não temos o preconceito exagerado da separação de raças e
somos levados, pelo nosso modo de ser, a tratar o indígena com tolerância e bondade,
respeitando-lhes os usos e instituições, tanto quanto possível.
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Portugal during the 19 th Century and the first decades of the 20 th Century (Jerónimo,
2009), and the dictatorial regime of the New State (Estado Novo) that ruled the country
and its African colonies – „overseas provinces‟ after 1961 – between 1933 and 1974 3 .
Our analysis focuses not so much on the historical evidence provided by these studies,
but rather on their approach to the „race‟ question within a specific context of
international power relations, namely the independence struggles taking place in Africa.
Charles Boxer‟s work, and more precisely his book Race Relations in the
Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825, is considered nowadays as a fundamental
contribution to the history of power relations within the Portuguese Empire (Curto,
2007: 314) and to the critique of the New State‟s Lusotropicalism (Castelo, 1998: 42-
43). Boxer‟s aim was to demonstrate that Salazar‟s 4 discourses on the absence of
racial discrimination in the colonies – an idea eventually interiorised by most
Portuguese – lacked any historical accuracy:
As most of you probably know, it is an article of faith with many Portuguese that their country
has never tolerated a colour-bar in its overseas possessions and that their compatriots have
always had a naturally affinity for contacts with coloured peoples. [...] These beliefs are very
sincerely and very deeply held, but it does not follow that they are always grounded on
historical fact. It is the object of these lectures to show that the truth was more complex, and
that race relations in the old Portuguese colonial empire did not invariably present such a
picture of harmonious integration [...]. (Boxer, 1963: 1)
In order to understand how this approach frames the historicity of racism and the „race
idea‟, two aspects need to be highlighted within Boxer‟s analysis. On the one hand,
Boxer‟s “race relations” is framed within the prejudice paradigm – explored in the
sections below – that focuses on the “colour-prejudice” of the (white) Portuguese and
the subsequent attitudes towards the peoples they encountered. This perspective
presumes an already constructed arithmetic of racial categories (white, Negro, mulatto)
coupled with national (the Portuguese, the Brazilian) and broader cultural/religious
identities (European, African, Asian). On the other, a refined historicisation of „race‟ and
racisms 5 is absent, resulting in the use of diachronic references to support his
argument without a consideration of the contexts of their production. Two examples
from his analysis of the Portuguese role in the West African slave-trade – in the
territories constituting what is nowadays Angola – and the discussions of the
impossibility of a “peaceful” conversion of the heathen that took place in the 16 th and
17 th Centuries, are illustrative of this perspective:
3
The periodisation of the regime is a subject of discussion; the army-led coup d‟Etat against the
First Republic took place in 1926 and the Constitution of the New State was adopted in 1933.
4
António Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968, and
President of the Portuguese Republic.
5
The term racism is never used in Boxer‟s book.
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The attitude of the Portuguese towards the peoples south of the river Bengo forms a curious
contrast with the efforts so persistently made to convert and Europeanize the Congolese by
peaceful means. The inhabitants of the country south this river were admittedly rather less
advanced than those of the old kingdom of Congo when the Portuguese first made enduring
contacts with the former; but this does not entirely explain the summary way in which for the
most part they were treated. [...] As early as 1563, a pioneer Jesuit missionary in Angola
advocated what one of his colleagues in Brazil termed „preaching with the sword and the rod
of iron‟ 6 . Padre Francisco de Gouveia S. J., who was detained for many years at the kraal of
the Ngola, or native chief from whom Angola derives its name [...] explained that these
Bantu were barbarous savages who could not be converted by methods of peaceful
persuasion that were employed with such cultured Asian nations as the Japanese and
Chinese (Ibid: 22-23, our emphasis).
The opinion of the average white Portuguese in Angola of the Negroes whom they enslaved
was reflected in a memorial of c. 1694 drawn up by all those engaged in this commerce at
Luanda, and which described the slaves as being „brutes without intelligent understanding‟
and „almost, if one may say so, irrational beings‟. This was an attitude which persisted for
centuries, and which was based on the firm conviction that the Negro was fitted only to be a
slave or an indentured labourer. An Englishman 7 with long experience of Portuguese Africa
noted with warm approval that the Portuguese had never viewed the Negro „in anything but
a proper and practical light; for them he is first and last the mão de obra (labouring hand),
and any proposition to lessen his value in that capacity would never, and will never be
entertained by them‟ (Ibid: 29, our emphasis).
Boxer‟s denunciation of racial prejudice naturalises the asymmetrical power relations
that pervaded the formation of the Portuguese colonial administration and the central
role of racialisation processes. More precisely, the author reifies the idea of a
Portuguese and European identity/culture and of “the Portuguese” as belonging to the
white race. In this sense, the lasting “prejudices” of “the Portuguese” appear more as
an innate (national) characteristic than as being under continuous reformulation within
the different colonial governmentalities. Moreover, his critique of the central role of
Portugal in the slave trade and of the justifications given by the colonial rulers and
missionaries draws on a historicist linearity between discourses and situations in the
16 th Century and those produced in the 20 th Century within the anti-slavery international
controversy 8 .
This assumption of an already established Portuguese and European identity is
also present in James Duffy‟s analysis of Portuguese colonialism in Africa; he
emphasises the discrepancy between theory and reality in Portuguese colonialism: “the
gap between the administrative dream, contained in elegant legislation, and the reality”
(Duffy, 1959: 5). Moreover, his interpretation – taking specifically into account
Portuguese colonisation in the Congo since the end of the 15 th Century 9 – assumes a
6 Boxer refers here to the letter of Father José de Anchieta (16 April 1563): “…para este género de
gente não há melhor pregação do que espada e vara de ferro”. Boxer also indicates here the work
of Father António Brásio to illustrate the advocacy of “forcible Conversions”: Monumenta
missionária africana: África Ocidental (Lisboa : Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952).
7 The author refers to Reginald Charles Fulke Maugham‟s Portuguese East Africa. The history,
scenery and great game of Manica and Sofala (1906); Maugham (1866-1956) was a career British
foreign service officer, who was in his time regarded as an authority on Mozambique and Central
Africa.
8 See footnotes 6 and 7.
9 Duffy describes this process as “the first substantial contact of a European nation with black
Africa” (1959: 6, our emphasis).
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linear interpretation of the level of sophistication and advance of the (European and
African) civilisations (Ibid: 10), and an ambivalent position regarding colonisation as a
process of “assimilation” into the “European ways” (Ibid.: 12). In general terms, Duffy‟s
analysis opposes the “virtuous principles” of Portuguese “celebrated adaptability to any
culture or climate” (Ibid: 18), to the evils of the slave trade:
[...] the history of Portugal in Africa has been the story of the enslavement and repression of
the majority. In the name of Christianity the African was sold into slavery; in the name of
civilization he is presently obliged to learn “the dignity of labor”. Under the guise of
paternalism, Portuguese authorities in this century have attempted to replace African cultural
traditions with their own; they have until recently succeeded in isolating the African
population from all political and intellectual contact with the rest of the world. Portuguese
practice has not been a persuasion for assimilation, and Portuguese policy has been directly
only toward maintaining a medieval status quo in Africa (Duffy, 1961: 206).
While Duffy stresses the incapacities of Portuguese colonial administration – thus
Portugal as a poor, uneducated and ill-developed country, he offers an interesting
study of racism, inequality and segregation in the New State‟s native policies, with a
specific emphasis on education. Duffy proposes that while historically the Portuguese
presence in Africa has lacked “color consciousness”, this had ceased to be the case:
[...] they may justifiably claim, in spite of their slaving practices, that in the past as well as in
the present their social attitude toward the African has been marked by an easy-going
tolerance and some sense of human equality. But in the last half-century another attitude,
partly originating in the inegalitarian concepts of the generation of 1895, has become
increasingly apparent in Portuguese Africa; it has become especially more pervasive in the
last twenty years. [...] What is happening in Portuguese Africa is that the careful distinction
between racial equality and cultural inequality cannot be maintained once the relatively large
number of white immigrants has begun to make its presence felt. It is a logical human step,
even in Portuguese colonies, to proceed from laws which distinguish between natives and
nonnatives, especially when the second category is made mostly of Europeans, to racial
distinctions between black and white. It is likewise logical in a colonial society in which the
white population subjects the African to a growing economic repression for the European to
justify his position by the color of his skin. Signs on the doors of Angolan restaurants reading
“Right of Admission Reserved” are not accidental phenomena any more than are the
creation of almost exclusively white towns and colonization projects in the interior. They
signify more than a legal distinction between a civilized man and an uncivilized one; they
reflect a racist tendency intruding into the society of Angola and Moçambique (Duffy, 1959:
298-299, our emphasis).
At the beginning of the 20 th Century, a legal differentiation was established in the
African colonies between European and Indigenous population 10 naturalising racism via
“cultural” differentiation in the name of civilisation, so characteristic of the 19th and 20th
Centuries European national and colonial ideologies. Duffy‟s specific analysis of the
colonial educational system in Angola and Mozambique (1963: 296-297), shows the
pervasiveness of asymmetrical racial differentiation. The system is divided in two types
10 Estatuto do Indigenato (1926), derogated in 1961 at the time of the outburst of the independence
struggles in Angola and Mozambique and when the New State‟s regime was facing strong critiques
form the international community. The Estatuto do Indigenato was the culmination of a series of
legislative initiatives in order to re-codify the subjugation of the native black population to enforced
labour within the context of anti-slavery controversy (i.e. Regulamento do Trabalho Indígena, 1899;
Regulamento para os Contratos de Serviçais e Colonos nas Províncias de África Portuguesa,
1878; Regulamento do Trabalho Indígena, 1914). See Meneses (2010) and Henriques (2004b,
2004c).
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of schooling: the state elementary system that duplicates the metropolitan school
structure and exists only for “white students, Mestiços and assimilated Africans”; and
the “ensino de adaptação (called until 1956 ensino rudimentar) which is exclusively for
Africans” (that is, for Black people). The analysis of figures regarding African students
(Black) in Mozambique that pass form the “rudimentary level to the elementary level” is
clear: “For African students the decline is extraordinarily high and reveals the
discrimination inherent in the colonial education system” (Ibid: 299). This historicity of
„race‟, racism and culture within the colonial education system is crucial to understand
current mainstream, colour-blind narratives in Portuguese education sphere. As Marta
Araújo has analysed, racism continues to be naturalised in the policies and practices in
education, resulting in the “pathologisation” of black students:
A common view amongst teachers (and also more widely held) is that Eastern European
and Chinese students are very motivated, disciplined and hard-working children, who quickly
learn the language and whose parents are very committed to education. This helps their
construction as „model students‟. Black students, on the other hand, seem to be more often
perceived as lazy, talkative or undisciplined, and as culturally and linguistically deprived, a
view that needs to be understood within a history of secular colonial domination and its
racial legacy. (Araújo, 2009: 11)
§§§
A recently published collection of articles on the Portuguese Expansion from 1400 to
1800 that can be regarded as a reference on the subject – some successors to Boxer‟s
work are included in this collection – is presented as “a self-reflective critical position”
that:
allows us to detect different patterns of reciprocal cultural impact as experienced either by
the peoples affected by the Portuguese expansion or by the Portuguese themselves,
including economic, social, linguistic, architectural, musical, and artistic exchanges.
(Bethencourt and Curto, 2007: 11)
Regarding the different formations of the Portuguese empire, it is noted that the
Portuguese presence in Asia followed a policy of miscegenation, reproduced also in
Brazil and to a much lesser extent in Africa; this is considered a “distinctive
characteristic of the Portuguese empire” that brought about “complicated „racial‟
criteria” (Ibid.: 8). Yet, none of the collected texts are fully dedicated to the
configurations of “race” and racisms within the Portuguese expansion, although some
related questions and case studies are analysed, such as: the process of conversion of
Amerindian and Black populations and the reluctance to admit nonwhites within the
religious orders (Guimarães Sá, 2007: 277); and the negotiations of a slave-interpreter
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to obtain his freedom as a challenge to the top-down view of social control and a
process of civilisation (Curto, 2007: 316-320; 349).
It is our view that these historical approaches reproduce, although in a much
sophisticated manner 11 , the narrative of the Portuguese “expansion” as a history of
reciprocal cultural impacts, interactions, contacts and exchanges. Although power
relations are not neglected, we believe that there is a taken for granted use of notions
such as “the Portuguese world”, “the Portuguese empire”, “Portuguese culture” or “the
European presence”, giving way to the reification of processes such as
“Christianization and Westernization” (Disney, 2007: 296). We consider it crucial to
use these categories as part of the configuration of “imperial maps” that “despite the
apparent fixity of their geographic referents….have historically possessed remarkable
fluidity” (Coronil, 1996: 53); that is, we need to problematise the “very idea of Europe
as an ideological construct” (West, 1993: 121) and its consequences for the modern
configurations of “race” and racisms.
Following David Goldberg, we also need to distinguish “between race and racisms,
conceptually as much as politically” and thus to acknowledge that race “assumes its
power in and from the thick contexts of the different if related geopolitical regions in
which it is embedded, the specific conditions of which concretize the notion of race
representing them” (2006: 332). Goldberg proposes the concept of “racial
regionalizations”: […] regional models or mappings, rather than ideal types, broad
generalizations as contours of racist configuration, each one with its own material and
intellectual history, its prior conditions and typical modes of articulation (Ibid.: 333). A
historicity of “racial regionalizations” in the Portuguese context needs to take into
account the diversified administration of populations and the consequences of its
concentration on the government and exploitation of the African colonies during the
19 th and 20 th Centuries. Colonialism became then a State-centred policy and ideology,
supported by the scientific “colonial” knowledge produced by large sectors of the
academia.
Moreover, the trivialisation of slavery and slave-trade (Henriques, 2004a) also
meant the trivialisation of a specific governmentality: the administration of human
11 For an historical analysis sponsored by a state-endorsed institution, that considers Portuguese
“expansion” as an exceptional process because it constituted an intercultural dialogue between the
Portuguese and the peoples they “encountered”, see Oliveria e Costa e Lacerda (2007) and Lopes-
Cardoso (2001).
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groups and inequalities that created the equation, black/Negro = slave 12 (Pinheiro,
2002; Sweet, 2003) – and the African Negro-slave then turned into the preto (Tinhorão,
1988: 71-77). This governmentality was put forward by the idea and practice of
“conversion” that implied the formulation of a taxonomy of populations that, in fact,
could be “converted” into the Christian values. In the second half of the 18th Century,
within the Enlightenment‟s growing centrality of scientific and empiricist rationality, the
idea of „race‟ entered common usage. At the time, it was used to refer to discrete
categories, empirically observable, according to phenotypical traits (Mosse, 1978;
Solomos and Back, 1996; Hannaford, 1996), and to justify racism on the basis of
“scientific” evidence of the fundamental inferiority of specific races and populations. It
was also during this period that the renovation of discourses on civilisation epitomised
by that ideological construct of the “Enlightened Europe” (with its internal geographies
and inequalities), naturalised racism in the name of [Western] culture.
This process was evident within the Portuguese colonial configuration and it had
important consequences on the imagining of the Portuguese nation: the naturalisation
of racism was inextricably bound with the process of naturalising a racial and cultural
homogeneous Portuguese nation. In this sense, some key historical approaches to this
period have downplayed the relevance of this racist configuration by not considering it
as “properly racist” but a consequence of “ethnocentrism” and “exacerbated
nationalism”. It is in this terms that the historian Valentim Alexandre understands the
link between “populist nationalism” and the production of a “Imperial mystic” from 1875
to 1945; for instance, his analysis of the political elite‟s idea of “national integration” that
regarded the African colonies as an extension of the “Portuguese civilisation” and the
(black) indigenous population‟s submission to forced labour as a means for their
civilisation, considers that:
What we have here it is not a properly racist conceptualisation but rather, a strongly
ethnocentric one, deeply marked by the exacerbated nationalism that, since the last quarter
of the 1800s, was embraced by almost the totality of the Portuguese political elites (the
exceptions could be found among some groups within the working class movement). They
all had in common the idea of an “end” or a “mission” to be accomplished in the name of
overseas Portugal, as the incarnation of the values of “civilization” before the “primitive
peoples” [...].When the 2 nd article of the 1930 Colonial Act [Acto Colonial] states that “it was
in the organic essence of the Portuguese nation to perform a historical function of
possessing and colonising the overseas lands and of civilising the indigenous populations
comprised within them”, was merely giving official signature to a typical view and feeling of
Portuguese nationalism, in its different versions (from Seara Nova to the integralistas)
(Alexandre, 1999: 140) 13 .
12 During the 15 th Century slavery was related to Moore/Muslim populations and the (black)
populations of the Western African Coast – what it is nowadays Guinea Bissau and Senegal – were
designated as gentios, and also Ethiopians (Etíope) (Soares, 2000; Tinhorão, 1988: 72).
13 Estamos perante uma concepção não propriamente racista, mas fortemente etnocêntrica, muito
marcada pelo nacionalismo exacerbado que, desde o último quartel de Oitocentos, tomara a quase
totalidade das elites políticas portuguesas (as excepções estariam tão-somente nalgumas franjas
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This interpretation shows a theoretically weak conceptualisation of racism and more
precisely of its relation to the notion of civilisation, central to understand the
construction of the legally sanctioned differentiation between Europeans and
Indigenous in 20 th Century Portuguese colonialism. Regarding this, as had been
argued by Aime Césaire (1955) within the context of struggle for independencies,
“civilisational values” had been destined to Europeans, while their absence was
tolerated outside Europe (apud Hesse, 2004). Moreover, such reading disregards the
tremendous relevance of “race” and racist configurations not only in Portuguese
nationalism but also in the imagining of Portuguese nationhood – and in most of the
modern European national formations. In this sense, in certain historical approaches
within the Portuguese context, we need to look at the nuances of Hesse‟s analysis of a
Eurocentric notion of racism that reveals (extremist) nationalism (2004: 14) that is, the
emphasis on “ethnocentrism” removes the “excess of race-thinking” from Portuguese
nationalism and nation-building. Therefore, as we explore in the second part of this
paper, while the pervasiveness of colonial ideologies may be invoked to give account
of current racial prejudices and racist attitudes against (black) “immigrants”, this
paradigm does not question the ways in which colonial ideologies and routine
administrations have informed the imagining of the metropolitan Portuguese nation as
white and homogeneous.
2. The study of Portuguese nationhood/nationalism: “race”, racism
and the (purged) “other” within
Portugal never had an identity problem as other countries. There were never different
alternatives to that generated by the political power. (…) Even today, we do not have large
communities of other religions or other ethnic groups to truthfully test that commonplace
conviction saying that the Portuguese are not racist. (Interview to Rui Ramos, Público
[Ípsilon], 20-01-2010) 14
The Portuguese case reveals certain particularities in relation to other European National
States that it is worthy to note: the scant relevance of ethnic, religious and linguistic
do movimento operário). Era-lhes comum a ideia de uma “finalidade” ou de uma “missão” a cumprir
por Portugal no ultramar, como portador dos valores da “civilização” face aos “povos primitivos”
[…]. Ao determinar, no seu artigo 2º, que era da “essência orgânica da Nação Portuguesa
desempenhar a função histórica de possuir e colonizar domínios ultramarinos e de civilizar as
populações indígenas que nelas se compreendam”, o Acto Colonial de 1930 não fazia mas do que
dar cunho oficial a um modo de ver e de sentir comum ao nacionalismo português, nas suas várias
correntes (da Seara Nova aos integralistas).
14 Historian and coordinator of the book History of Portugal (Lisboa: A Esfera dos Livros, 2009).
“Portugal nunca teve um problema de identidade como outros. Nunca houve alternativas diferentes
da que foi sendo gerada pelo poder político. […] Mesmo hoje não temos grandes comunidades de
outras religiões ou de outras etnias para que possamos, verdadeiramente, testar aquele lugarcomum
de que os portugueses não são racistas”.
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minorities, generally easily integrated within the national totality; a scarcity of regional and
local rebellions. In this context of relatively homogeneity […] it is not surprising that History
has mainly emphasized a sense of national unity. (Matos, 2002: 123) 15
The historical and anthropological 16 narratives emerging by the end of the 19 th Century
– fundamental in the institutionalisation of contemporary Portuguese academia – were
committed to purge the Portuguese national character of „blackness‟, reinventing the
imaginary, prevalent nowadays, of a country with a history of racial and cultural
tolerance but internally homogeneous . The commonsensical idea of a Portuguese soft
colonialism (Henriques, 2004c) – more often named as the Portuguese discoveries or
expansion 17 – characterised by miscegenation, racial tolerance and an absence of
prejudice, has been complementary to the idea of Portugal as a country with anciently
constructed borders, born out of a historically homogenous nation. This is an idea
reproduced by contemporary historians, as the two quotations above show.
Nevertheless, some social scientists (Vakil, 1996; Ribeiro, 2002; 2004; Matos, 2006a,
2006b; Vale de Almeida, 2008) have analysed the development of this double
imaginary and the alliance between the academia and political administration that had
its “golden period” between 1870 and 1950:
Within the colonial project, the national identity, the scientific field and the political intentions,
were intimately related. Thus, we find several discourses – simultaneously political and
scientific – that define the Portuguese “nation” as a “colonial nation”. It is for this reason that
most of the authors that deal with this “race” and “national identity” questions are interested
in the colonies. In relation to the production of a “colonial knowledge”, there is a compromise
between science and the political. (Matos, 2006: 55) 18
I believe that probably the construction of an Other in the colonial world was part of the
process of constructing the Same in the homeland. This can be seen in the trajectory of
influential anthropologists of the time, who did research on both national and colonial
anthropology. More important than these divides is the common weakness of
anthropological production until the last quarter of the twentieth century: it was not up to date
by international standards; it was not politically free; and it was ideologically permeated by
the national messianic narrative of Portugal as the country of Discoveries. (Vale de Almeida,
2008)
15 O caso português revela particularidades em relação a outros Estados-nação europeus que
importa considerar: escasso peso das minorias étnicas, religiosas e linguísticas no todo nacional,
de um modo geral nele integradas sem problemas; escassez de revoltas e rebeliões regionais e
locais. Em tal contexto de relativa homogeneidade […] não surpreende que a história tenha
sobretudo vincado um sentido da unidade nacional.
16 For an analysis of the Portuguese anthropological and ethnographical contribution to the
configuration of the national identity, see Leal (2000; 2001); Leal‟s work focuses only on the role of
Anthropology for nation-building but neglects its fundamental role for the construction of “colonial
knowledge”. See also Sobral (2004).
17 Since the end of the 19th Century – marked by the impact of the British Ultimatum of 1890 –
political discourses and particularly republican campaigns over colonial questions, invested in the
imaginary of „Portugal‟s golden age [...] equated with the Expansion and the spirit of the
„Discoveries‟; an epoch of national affirmation but also of scientific pioneering and „modernity‟‟
(Vakil, 1996: 44-45).
18 No âmbito do projecto colonial, a identidade nacional, o campo científico e o desígnio político
estavam intimamente ligados. Encontramos, por isso, vários discursos simultaneamente políticos e
científicos que definem a “nação” portuguesa como uma “nação colonial”. Por essa razão, grande
parte das preocupações dos autores que se debruçam sobre a questão da “raça” e da “identidade
nacional” diz respeito às colónias. No que diz respeito à produção dum “saber colonial”, há então
um comprometimento da ciência com o campo político.
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It is important to be aware that this messianic conception was produced within a hostile
international arena for Portuguese aspirations and for the value of its “civilising”
mission; it was in this context that Portuguese political elites, intellectuals and
academics defined the imperial nation “as the centre of a colonial empire and as a
periphery of Europe” (Ribeiro, 2002: 133). We want to highlight here that the „race‟ idea
and racist configurations were central in the process of imagining Portuguese white
nationhood as opposed to miscegenation in the colonies.
The Negroes should stay in Africa, in order to preserve the purity of race within the
Metropolis of the colonial nations, and preventing miscegenation [mestiçagem]”. (J. A. Pires
de Lima, “Influência de Mouros, Judeus e Negros na História de Portugal”, 1940 apud
Cabecinhas, 2007: 43) 19
Accordingly, it had to reject the views hold by other European on Portuguese non-
whiteness:
Sometimes Portugal is included within the black race‟s region. Even in a session of the 15 th
International Congress of Anthropology and Pre-Historical Archaeology – that took place in
1930 in Coimbra and Porto – Mr. Eusébio Tamagnini had to rectify this in the map presented
by the Polish Professor, Mr. Czekanowski. (Heleno, 1933: 17) 20
The “presence” of black people in Portugal – more precisely, of slaves and their
descendents – and their “influence” on the racial configuration of the Portuguese nation
was a central issue of discussion among historians, anthropologists and ethnologists in
the first decades of the 20th Century. Mendes Corrêa (1938), one of the most relevant
Portuguese anthropologists of that period, was concerned with proving that the
“vestiges” of Negro‟s influence within the Portuguese population (in terms of blood
mixture) was bare minimum. Moreover, as Manuel Heleno showed (1933: 15-16),
during the 1920s and 1930s, a series of articles published in European journals, stated
that Portuguese colonising incapability was due to the degeneration of the Portuguese
race after mixing with black slaves. This situation urged the majority of Portuguese
historians and anthropologists of those decades to purge of blackness the Portuguese
“national character” and “race”. As David Goldberg reminds us, this “purging” has been
a constant in the self-articulation of modern Europe as the centre of History and of
politics:
Europe‟s racial self-articulation has long expressed itself in terms of the denial, exclusion,
and ultimately the purging of those not white – not European, to be emptily, circularly precise
– from first its ideational conception and then also from what it has taken as its territory.
These interactive reinforcing modes date back to – /and can be seen as the source of – the
very idea of Europe articulated at the onset of European modernity in the mid-fifteenth
century, predicated as it was on the purging of any Jewish or Muslim mark on its selfarticulation
(Goldberg, 2006: 357).
19
Os Negros devem ficar na África, mantendo-se, na Metrópole das nações coloniais, a pureza da
raça, e impedindo a mestiçagem.
20
Algumas vezes Portugal aparece incluído na zona da raça negra. Ainda numa das sessões do
XV Congresso Internacional de Antropologia e Arqueologia Pré-histórica, que em 1930 reuniu em
Coimbra e no Porto, o Sr. Dr. Eusébio Tamagnini teve de fazer correcções nesse sentido à carta
apresentada pelo professor polaco Czekanowsk.
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We belief it is central for the TOLERACE project to take into account the ways in which
this historicity of the idea of “race” and of racist configurations are downplayed
nowadays in order to give account of a new image of Portugal as a multicultural
country born out of growing immigration flows. In this sense, this narrative reinforces
the supposed cultural and racial homogeneity of Portuguese society, a narrative that
excludes from history the relevance of racial and ethnic minorities such as the Roma 21
and the black communities. For the case of the (Portuguese) black people, it is
important to note that their “presence” was not always neglected, a situation that
reveals the a-historicity of current sociological narratives on the new configurations of
Portuguese diversity and the permanent exteriority of non-white populations (non-
European) within these narratives:
Although it is not as large as it used to be, the coloured population is still very numerous in
Portugal. [...] Individuals of black race [raça preta] are recently quite abundant in Lisbon,
some of them are newcomers and others, the vast majority, were born and raised in
Portugal. How many? We do not have the conditions to know it. Unfortunately, the 1940
Census did not included races, a regrettable and inexplicable lapse, as this was already
done in the 16 th Century [....]. (Brásio, 1944: 120) 22
PART II: SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE STUDY OF RACISM IN
PORTUGAL
In Portugal, contemporary research on racism is relatively scarce and it was only from
the late 1990s that could be considered a field of academic enquiry. Since early on, it
was marked by studies within social psychology, sociology and migration studies,
mostly deploying quantitative methodologies and, particularly, surveys on social
attitudes. Within these studies, it is noticeable the framing of racism within the prejudice
paradigm, as well as the embedding of an “immigrant imaginary” in academic thought.
It is to the analysis of these aspects that we now turn to.
21 Regarding early works on the Portuguese Roma communities, although mainly from an
ethnographic, culturalist, perspective, see: Coelho, Adolfo (1994 [1892]) Os ciganos de Portugal –
Com um estudo sobre o calão. Lisboa: Dom Quixote; Leite de Vasconcelos, José (1982 [1956])
“Ciganos” in Etnografia portuguesa. Tentame de sistematização, vol. IV [elaborado segundo os
materiais do autor, ampliados com nova informação por M. Viegas Guerreiro]. Lisboa: Imprensa
Nacional, 351-419.
22 Embora muito menos avultada que em tempos idos, a população de cor é ainda hoje bastante
numerosa em Portugal. Tanto sob o aspecto humano como cristão, pena é não haver, em
modalidade de assistência, nada que se assemelhe em protecção moral e social às justamente
famosas confrarias e irmandades de Nossa Senhora do Rosário. (…) São bastante numerosos,
recentemente, os indivíduos de raça preta em Lisboa, uns de arribação e outros, os mais deles,
nados e criados em Portugal. Quantos? Não nos é possível sabê-lo. Infelizmente o censo de 1940,
não curou de raças, omissão tão lamentável como incompreensível, pois já se fazia em pleno
século XVI […].
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1. The centrality of the prejudice paradigm
The social psychology of prejudice starts with this
assumption of sameness and provides scientific
legitimation of it. And it is clearly central to the
administrative ideology of fairness (...) The
emergence of the concept of prejudice as an
object of scientific enquiry and as a political issue
exemplifies the way in which knowledges on the
one hand and the powers associated with them
on the other, are mutually productive (Henriques,
1984: 64-5)
As a concept, racism is intimately linked to the context of political and academic
concern with fascism and anti-Semitism, subsequently tied to the Holocaust as “the
paradigmatic experience underwriting the abstraction” (Hesse, 2004: 15). It was in this
particular context that took place the ascendancy of the idea of racial prejudice – the
product of specific ideologies that shaped a cluster of beliefs (id: 11) –, which became
prevalent in academic approaches and informed political debates (e.g., UNESCO‟s
declaration on race and racial prejudice in 1950 [Barker, 2002b: 476; Hesse, 2004]). In
the 1950s, the advancement and proliferation of quantitative approaches to the study of
racism, particularly within social psychology in the United States – in its search for
scientific status (Henriques, 1984) -, has paved way to the primacy of the prejudice
paradigm (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). This concern with the identification of the traits of the
“authoritarian personality” (Henriques, 1984) was highly contested since the end of the
1960s, as made evident in the work by Carmichael and Hamilton on institutional
racism, in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published in 1967. And
yet, the individual-centred approaches to racism as prejudice have been prevalent in
the academia and in policy-making since then 23 .
As the prevalence of the prejudice paradigm in research on racism is paramount in
the Portuguese academia, we will address in this section what we see as the major
problems with this conceptualisation of racism, working on and enlarging the scope of
the critical analysis proposed by Julian Henriques (1984). Analysing the politics of
racism involved in the production of knowledge within social psychology, Henriques
focused in particular in two key works - The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor
Adorno and colleagues (1950) and The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport (1954) –,
as well as on their legacy on influential institutional reports on racism in the British
context.
23 According to our analysis, this is also the case with official European institutional conceptions: for
instance, the first reports by the EU‟s monitoring body, racism is described as “beliefs or attitudes”
(DGV, 1993: 12), and racist individuals as “Those responsible for racism or xenophobic attitudes
rely more on ideology, irrationality and fantasy than on reasoned argument.” (EUMC, 1998b: 19).
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1.1 Methodological individualism
Julian Henriques (1984: 60), pointed out to the prevalence of a dichotomy between
individual and society on the framing of racism as racial prejudice. He thus proposed
the idea of the „rotten apple‟ theory of racism, according to which racial prejudice is
seen as occurring in the occasional behaviour of a few, isolated prejudiced individuals,
who can refrain from contaminating other individuals once removed from the basket. In
such conceptions, the individual is seen as an entity that may be (best) understood as
separable from society.
Accordingly, the preferred focus of empirical research is the individual. This
constitutes what is generally referred to as methodological individualism, a key
characteristic of the prejudice paradigm that “seeks to disaggregate all larger
institutional and historical entities into the practices and relations of the individuals or
groups who compose or inhabit them” (Cohen, 1992: 77). This society-individual
dichotomy is reinforced by the methods developed within social psychology, which
make extensive use of surveys and favour a “„clinical approach‟ on racial attitudes – the
search for the prejudiced and tolerant individuals in societies.” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003: 64).
This is a key characteristic of most studies on racism in Portugal (e.g. Vala, Brito &
Lopes, 1999a, 1999b; Vala, Pereira & Ramos, 2007; Cabecinhas, 2007).
Another related aspect that is often implicit to methodological individualism is the
presumption of the unitary racist subject: the idea that individuals are coherent and
non-ambivalent and that their prejudices are expressed in their behaviours (Rattansi,
1992). Rather, complexity and ambivalence are inherent to racism, articulating
differently in diverse contexts and times. Not only is problematic the linear relationship
encapsulated in the common expression prejudice-attitudes-discrimination, as
individuals are not so rigid or unitary: the so-called racist subject may also forge
alliances with individuals that are the object of racial hatred on the basis of age,
gender, sexuality, and so on (id.). It thus results that the identification of the racist or
prejudiced subject is a fallacy. According to Philomena Essed (1991), “The term
individual racism is a contradiction in itself because racism is by definition the
expression or activation of group power” (p. 37). In this sense, the author proposes that
a more productive approach is the identification of the processes through which racism
reproduces and renews discriminatory ideologies and structures in routine ways.
1.2. Racial prejudice as bias and margin
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Within the prejudice paradigm, stereotypes are framed as bias from accurate
representation, “transgressions of the rational limits of category use, that is, as
irrational categories” (Goldberg, 1990: 321). This results from the differentiation -
produced by the prejudice paradigm - between “rational and objective information
processing that produce a perfect representation” (in this case of the stranger,
foreigner, immigrant) and those “erroneous generalisations” based on prejudice
(Henriques, 1984: 71-76). Thus, it is possible to discern, on the one hand, a belief in
rationality as an ideal for democratic societies and, on the other, a conception of the
individual as the locus for the disintegration of rationality (Henriques, 1984: 66). This
makes easy the related conceptualisation of racism as a problem of specific, irrational
individuals.
These are very common assumptions across the academic literature produced in
Portugal: without a conception of a system of racial domination, the prejudice paradigm
has helped to frame racism as a “cognitive bias” (e.g. Cabecinhas, 2007: 269). The
following example illustrates this:
...in circumstances of automatic processing of information, even subjects with low levels of
prejudice can give prejudiced answers 24 (Vala, Brito & Lopes, 1999b: 34).
That is, within the prejudice paradigm there is often the assumption that negative,
preconceived ideas are irrational responses from the otherwise coherent subject (see
Goldberg, 1990, for a thorough critique of conceptions of racism as irrationality). We
see this assumption as problematic in two further ways. Firstly, by conceiving of
prejudice as originating in ignorance, it implies that education (and information) can do
much to eradicate racism (Henriques, 1984; Goldberg, 1990; Sarup, 1991). 25 In fact,
most contemporary approaches reveal the belief in education and information as tools
for eliminating the evil of racism, proposing liberal policy initiatives to deal with it, such
as activities for awareness raising (Sarup, 1991), multi/intercultural or citizenship
education (Gillborn, 1995) which tend to evade the power dynamics of racism and
focus on the need to know the “other”. The following quote is illustrative of such
requirement for information, in a way that allows for the reproduction of current
configurations of racism:
This perception (of immigrants being seen as consumers of collective resources) is eased
by the fact that, in the media, the information that immigrants do not compete with the
24 ...em condições de processamento automático de informação, mesmo sujeitos com níveis baixos
de preconceito podem dar respostas preconceituosas.
25 While, for Adorno and colleagues, the causes of prejudice as irrationality are seen as lying within
the social realm (and thus sees treatment as a insurmountable task that can only address the
symptoms), Allport suggested that prejudice can be corrected by the provision of accurate
(in)formation (Henriques, 1984).
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citizens of the host country in the same areas of work, as well as information about their
contribution to economic growth, is absent 26 . (Vala, Pereira & Ramos, 2006: 223)
Furthermore, we would argue that with misrepresentation and prejudice seen as
“inaccurate”, such approaches tend to overlook that “„ignorance‟ is an effect of
particular knowledge, not an absence of knowledge” (Lesko & Bloom, 1998: 380), and
thus marginalise considerations on ideology and structure.
A second aspect that is related to the framing of racism as bias stemming from
irrationality or mis-education is the common-sense view (also prevalent in the
academy) that associates prejudice to the problem of uneducated individuals 27 . As a
result, the ignorant, racist subject becomes conceived as being “socially sick” and thus
not morally accountable (Goldberg, 1990: 318). This is reflected in the deployment of
disease metaphors to speak of racism (see also Hesse, 2004). The cancer metaphor is
particularly recurring, suggesting that racism is abnormal, external, i.e. an intruder to
the otherwise healthy body – the democratic society (see, for example, Neal, 2003;
Malan, 2008).
Accordingly, when research frames such individuals collectively, in tends to do so
by focusing on what is considered deviant groups, those constituting extremist
organisations. This helps to frame racism as being on the margins of social and
political cultures, as Paul Gilroy argued:
The price of over-identifying the struggle against racism with the activities of these extremist
groups and grouplets is that however much of a problem they may be in a particular area
(and I am not denying the need to combat their organising) they are exceptional. They exist
on the fringes of political cultures (…). A more productive starting point is provided by
focusing on racism in the mainstream and seeing „race‟ and racism not as fringe questions
but as a volatile presence at the very centre of British politics (Gilroy, 1992: 51).
Much work in Portugal frames the political in such narrow way, absolving (more
moderate) political parties for their participation in the (re)production of racism:
Portugal is one of the countries of the European Union in which political parties or forces
that host and promote racist or xenophobic ideologies have nearly no social or electoral
expression. 28 (Machado, 2001: 53)
The myth of “non-racism” (…) had unpredicted effects, in that by trying to justify an
undoubtedly situation racist – the colonial domination – ended up contributing to condition
the social and cultural contemporary reality. Yet what is really interesting is that, through a
sort of “perverted effect”, the New State inoculated in the Portuguese, through school and
the State apparatus, a kind of vaccination that has prevented, so far, the most virulent forms
26
Esta percepção (de os imigrantes serem vistos como consumidores dos recursos colectivos) é
facilitada pelo facto de nos media estar ausente a informação de que os imigrantes não competem
com os cidadãos dos países de acolhimento nas mesmas áreas de trabalho, bem como a
informação sobre o seu contributo para o crescimento económico.
27
An aspect that the works on racism within elites, such as those by Teun van Dijk (1993) and
Philomena Essed (1999) clearly contradict.
28
Portugal é um dos países da União Europeia onde não têm praticamente expressão social ou
eleitoral partidos ou forças políticas que acolham e promovam ideologias racistas ou xenófobas.
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of racism against populations of African origin, as well as the politicization of antiimmigration
discourses. 29 (Marques, 2007: 33)
This is an approach that effectively narrows down the political to extreme right-wing
political parties. This presumption of racism as abnormal allows for a conceptualisation
of racism as marginal to democratic societies; society is exonerated, presumed the site
of tolerance, democracy and human rights (Henriques, 1984; Goldberg, 2006, 2009),
as it is further developed in section 1.4. As a result from such narrow conception of
racsim, the myth of Portuguese non-racism and tolerance discussed in the previous
sections goes unchallenged.
1.3. Social attitudes and the naturalisation of hostility
Another key problematic aspect with the concept of prejudice – generally
perceived as taking place between an „in-group‟ (or „endogroup‟) towards an „out-group‟
(or „exogroup‟) (e.g. Vala, Brito & Lopes, 1999; Cabecinhas, 2007), or majority/minority
(racial) relations - is that it tends to assume the relative rigidity of such groups. The
following quotes illustrate how this approach contributes, on the one hand, towards the
essencialisation of the groups that are seen as the victims of racism, and, on the other,
to reducing racism to ethnocentrism and heterophobia, which is then naturalised:
At the level of individual differences of psychological type, in our model we included the
following variables: ethnocentrism, or orientation to the rejection of exogroups, a variable
that follows from the studies of Adorno et al. (1950), according to which discrimination of an
exogroup is, merely, a symptom of a more general orientation to the discrimination of any
exogroup 30 (Vala, Brito & Lopes, 1999: 182-3).
It is known that Guineans of Muslim ethnics live, spatially, more concentrated that average,
have strong intra-ethnic and weak inter-ethnic sociabilities and are the most contrasting with
the involving society in linguistic and religious terms (Machado, 1999). If we add the fact that
they are the most visible in their difference, due to the use of garments that distinguishes
them from all others, it is not wrong to think that they may, due to this accumulation of
29
O mito do «não racismo» (…) teve efeitos não previstos, pois procurando justificar uma situação
inequivocamente racista – a dominação colonial – acabou por contribuir para condicionar a
realidade com os cidadãos dos países de acolhimento nas mesmas áreas de trabalho, bem como
a informação sobre o seu contributo para o crescimento económico.
29
An aspect that the works on racism within elites, such as those by Teun van Dijk (1993) and
Philomena Essed (1999) clearly contradict.
29
Portugal é um dos países da União Europeia onde não têm praticamente expressão social ou
eleitoral partidos ou forças políticas que acolham e promovam ideologias racistas ou xenófobas.
29
O mito do «não racismo» (…) teve efeitos não previstos, pois procurando justificar uma situação
inequivocamente racista – a dominação colonial social e cultural contemporânea. Mas que é
verdadeiramente interessante é que, através de uma espécie de «efeito perverso», o Estado Novo
inoculou nos portugueses, através da escola e dos aparelhos estatais, uma espécie de vacina que
tem impedido, até agora, as manifestações mais virulentas do racismo contra as populações de
origem africana bem como a politização dos discursos anti-imigração.
30
A nível das diferenças individuais de tipo psicológico, são incluídas, no nosso modelo as
seguintes variáveis: o etnocentrismo, ou orientação para a rejeição de exogrupos, variável que
decorre dos estudos de Adorno et al. (1950), de acordo com os quais a discriminação de um
exogrupo é, apenas, um sintoma de uma orientação mais geral para a discriminação de qualquer
exogrupo.
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differences, be more often the target of demonstrations that they take as racist, and that it is
precisely that which their perceptions reflect 31 (Machado, 2001: 69).
As such, race becomes “the force of prejudice exercised against newcomers (…)
an irrational excess” (Goldberg, 2009: 162). The emphasis is shifted onto their culture,
their difference (within the common-sense idea that “they have culture, we have
civilisation”) – along with the essencialisation and pathologisation of those cultures and
lifestyles, seen as clearly identifiable and discrete categories 32 . This paves way to an
understanding of racism as the fear of the unknown or hostility towards those perceived
as threatening „our way of life‟, that is, a natural response to the „other‟, playing on what
Teun van Dijk designated as the “ubiquity argument (…), which says that prejudice and
discrimination are universal, human properties” (1993: 169; see also Goldberg, 1990:
320-322).
The main consequence of this approach is the providing of explanations
concerning “racist attitudes” that naturalise the “divide” between homogeneous
ethnically non-marked nationals and immigrants/minorities, also framed as “social and
cultural contrast” (Machado, 2001: 71; see also Marques, 2007: 50). Such
naturalisation of hostility (Barker, 1981, 2002a) or cultural distance (Balibar, 2008: 37)
effectively transforms the problem of discrimination into a problem of integration, and
its victims into “potential objects of tolerance” (Brown, 2001: 3). Combined with a view
of prejudice as inaccurate knowledge about the „other‟, it ends up shifting “the object of
study from the prejudiced person onto the stimulus object” (Sarup, 1991: 56), thus
“blaming the victims” of racism – constituted as the unknown -, rather than focusing on
the prejudiced - the unknowing subject (id.). As a result, the problem shifts from
discrimination to difference itself. As David Gillborn argued regarding the official
endorsement of Education for Citizenship in the early 1990s-Britain:
justice and fair-play are the norm, while „racial prejudice‟ and „discrimination‟ reflect „the
tensions and conflicts that occur between groups which perceive each other to be socially,
racially, ethnically or culturally different‟ (NCC, 1990b: 6). Therefore, „prejudice‟ and
„discrimination‟ are defined in terms of a reaction to difference while racism, as a persistent
31 Sabe-se que os guineenses de etnias muçulmanas vivem espacialmente mais concentrados do
que a média, têm sociabilidades intra-étnicas fortes e interétnicas fracas e são os mais
contrastantes com a sociedade envolvente em termos linguísticos e religiosos (Machado, 1999).
Se somarmos a isso o facto de serem também os mais visíveis na sua diferença, devido ao uso de
indumentária própria que os distingue de todos os outros, não será errado pensar que possam, por
esse acumulado de diferenças, ser mais vezes alvo de manifestações que tomem como racistas, e
que seja justamente isso que as suas percepções reflectem.
32 This was perhaps intensified in political and academic debates in the 1950s, following the issuing
of several declarations by UNESCO from the 1950s, proposing to “drop the term „race‟ altogether
and speak of ethnic groups” (UNESCO, 1950: 6). Yet culture did not replace „race‟; rather it has
operated in a pseudo-biological fashion and been further essencialized (Barker, 1981/2002b).
Racism no longer required the existence of „races‟ to operate (Balibar, 1991); racial thought was so
deeply inscribed in western societies that its foundational category could now be discarded. The
shift of emphasis onto culture lead authors such as Barker (1981/2002a) to argue that, in post-war
Britain, a new racism was emerging in political discourses and sociobiological theories, effectively
framing other cultures and lifestyles as pathological.
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feature that reflects and recreated the unequal distribution of power in society, is
conspicuously absent (Gillborn, 1995: 135-6, original emphasis)
This is based on the idea that it is racial and cultural diversity per se, rather than its
management, that creates tensions and conflicts:
The ethnic or “racial” conflictuality that is observable in the suburbs of the main cities has its
sources in the problematic of social mobility, in the fear of exclusion and in the uneasiness
regarding the social equivalency to the social status of the “immigrant”. Racism expresses itself,
thus, through the transferral of the existing difficulties of the autochthons to the close presence of
populations with origins by immigration. 33 (Marques, 2007: 41)
In tandem with this approach, most empirical studies on racism in Portugal have
been carried out in Lisbon metropolitan area – where „immigrants‟ and „ethnic
minorities‟ tend to be located, along an explicit call for racism to be studied in the real
space of its “empirical concentration” (Machado, 1999; Ferreira, 2003). This reading of
racism as resulting from the direct contact with an-“other” stems from a view that is the
“exoticism” of the immigrant and the “modernity” of host society that generates racism
(Sayyid, 2004; Hesse & Sayyid, 2006). This materialises in empirical studies that
reproduce the idea of hostility or fear as natural(ised) responses to contact, taking
place in “disadvantaged neighbourhoods” with the presence of “immigrants” or
“minorities” (e.g. Vala, Brito & Lopes, 1999a: 28).
1.4. Prejudice as remnant of old ideologies
Since the ending of the US civil rights movement, the
Cold War and the apartheid regime in South Africa,
political discussion of the meaning of racism seems to
be over in the West. Its sociality is overwhelmingly
conceived as a problem that has been largely overcome.
What remains is seen as residuum, consigned to
pathology, a profound moral deviation from the western
liberal and democratic ethos and ethnos. (Hesse, 2004:
10)
Work on racial prejudice also reflects a “historicist” notion of race (Lentin, 2008a):
as race was scientifically discredited and considered a “morally irrelevant category”
(Goldberg, 1990: 339), racial classifications and racism were considered false views
that were historically overcome, or remain merely residual (Hesse, 2004). This
perspective is quite evident in the work of Adorno and colleagues:
How could it be…that in a culture of law, order and reason there should have survived the
irrational remnants of ancient racial and religious hatreds? How to explain the willingness of
great masses of people to tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens? What
tissues in the life of our modern society remain cancerous, and despite our assumed
enlightenment show the incongruous atavism of ancient peoples? And what within the
individual organisms responds to certain stimuli in our culture with attitudes and acts of
33 A conflitualidade étnica ou «racial» observável nos subúrbios das principais cidades tem as suas
fontes na problemática da mobilidade social, no temor da exclusão e na inquietude face à
equiparação ao estatuto social de «imigrante». O racismo manifesta-se, então, através da
transferência das dificuldades concretas dos autóctones para a presença próxima de populações
com origem na imigração.
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destructive aggression? (Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 1950, p. V apud
Henriques, 1984: 67).
The triumph of the historicist notion of race and racism - as old and radical
ideologies, progressively erased - is intimately linked to the forging and universalisation
of the concept of racism as inevitably tied to the Holocaust, excluding colonialism from
its conception. As Barnor Hesse argued (2004: 14):
Once the concept of racism became universalised (internationalised), beyond the particular
paradigmatic experience (nationalism, Nazism, the Holocaust) in which it was initialised, it
could be and was subject to conceptual claims for inclusion by „other‟ particularised
experiences (e.g., US racial segregation, European colonialism). A conceptual logic
emerged where what became foregrounded (exclusion, discrimination, ghettoisation,
exterminations) supplied the conceptual resources to translate „other‟ experiences into the
vaunted paradigmatic template. However, what was simultaneously foreclosed by this
conceptual process were aspects of the „other‟s‟ racialised experiences that appeared
inassimilable or incomprehensible and threatening to the privileging of the paradigmatic
experience (e.g., colonial inclusions, orientalism, exoticism).
Studies in race critical theories have stressed the need to think of racism as an
embedded aspect of Western modernity and its state structures (Goldberg, 2006;
Hesse, 2004; Lentin, 2008b). Challenging the traditional way in which the problem of
racism has been addressed in Europe (as an ideology that has been overcome), these
studies provide a historically informed understanding of the persistence and durability
of racism in Western states by revealing the colonial inheritance of racialised
governance and by interrogating postcolonial conditions (Hesse, 2004: Hesse and
Sayyid, 2006, 2008; Sayyid 2004; Law and Sayyid, 2007).
On the contrary, the prejudice paradigm is a depoliticising perspective that does
not consider the analysis of power relations that reproduce excluding ideas of
citizenship and its articulation with nationality, and the corresponding current
constructions of difference as (political) otherness. Accordingly, much academic work
in this paradigm continues to split racism from routine ways of racialised governance,
which in turn determines what is identified as racist, making racism dependent on
motivation and intent (examples of this can be found in Machado, 2001: 60-1). This
effectively constructs racism as an externality, “an aberrant ideological affront to the
enduring ideals of Enlightenment and the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition”
(Hesse, 2004: 22), rather than regarding it as a political practice inherent to the
constitution of the Nation-State, democracy and citizenship in European history. The
following examples are illustrative of the prevalence of this idea of racism as external to
Europe:
In modern societies, racism constitutes indeed a betrayal to the proclaimed values, a
significant distancing to the norm of equality.
In a young democracy that is based upon the principle of universal citizenship, built upon the
ashes of a regime of fascist inspiration, racist manifestations effectively constitute a serious
22

Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
distancing to the values of civic, political and juridical equality. 34 (Marques, 2007: 15, our
emphasis)
The combat against racism is carried out in several ways, from the exemplary punishment of
violent crimes of racist nature to the assertion of the civilizational values of equality and
respect for the dignity of human beings. 35 (Lígia Amâncio, Preface to Cabecinhas, 2007: 9-
10, our emphasis)
Also pervasive is the historicist conceptualisation of racism that works with “ideal
types” 36 (flagrant and subtle racism, modern, aversive racism, but always eschewing
institutional and everyday racism 37 ), based on its conception as a “distorted belief”,
fuelled by structural elements such as economic crises or the absence of
institutional/legal initiatives for the promotion of integration. Consequently, its
expression is mostly confined to well-bounded expressions of racially/ethnically
motivated crimes perpetrated by extremist individuals/groups whose ideology may,
however, receive some support from the “majority of the population”. The challenge for
European democracies is, accordingly, the integration of a growing population with
“identifiable racial and ethnic difference” that is making Europe “multicultural and
multiracial in an unprecedented way” (DGV, 1993:6).
2. Racism amd imigration
Another cluster of presumptions across academic work is that which focuses on
immigration, and that sees racism as a problem of immigrants, newcomers – thus
evading the racial – while not quite addressing it.
2.1. The “immigrant imaginary”
Politically and academically, there is an overemphasis on immigration in Portugal,
which has helped to create an imaginary in which the country is positioned as „centre‟
(Vale de Almeida, 2006a: 363-4). Neglecting the role that structural, economic
emigration plays in the country and emphasising that the country is increasingly the
destiny of immigrants – though this might be still perceived as a threat - helps to
34 Nas sociedades modernas, o racismo constitui, de facto, uma traição aos valores proclamados,
um afastamento significativo à norma da igualdade.
Numa jovem democracia que se baseia no princípio da cidadania universal, construída sobre as
cinzas de um regime de inspiração fascista, as manifestações racistas constituem efectivamente
afastamentos graves aos valores da igualdade cívica, política e jurídica.
35 O combate ao racismo faz-se de diversas formas, desde a punição exemplar dos crimes
violentos de natureza racista, à afirmação dos valores civilizacionais de igualdade e respeito pela
dignidade dos seres humanos.
36 See Goldberg (2006, 2009).
37 See, for instance, Vala, Brito & Lopes (1999b), Machado (2001), Marques (2007) and
Cabecinhas (2007).
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Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
imagine it as desirable, valuing the national identity by locating it alongside other rich
and modern European countries:
The existence of ethnic groups in Portugal presents, nowadays, a noticeable statistic
dimension and an increased socio-cultural diversity, conferring on the country a truly
multicultural profile, a characteristic that it shares with many European and world countries.
(Rocha-Trindade, 1995: 204).
This facilitates the construction of a binary vision of development - the global South
as poor, wrecked by disease and poverty, aspiring to emigrate to the rich, developed
and modern North -, as well as fuels analyses based on an economic and nationalised
logic of „push and pull factors‟ (Hesse & Sayyid, 2006).
In the year of 2000 and subsequently, a deep change, both quantitative and qualitative, in
the landscape of immigration in Portugal has been verified. (…) These new immigration
trends, with no linguistic or cultural affinities to the Portuguese, may perhaps be attributed to
a greater knowledge and attraction of those populations for the economically and socially
privileged space of the European Union, following the preparation of the process of
adhesion of numerous countries of that area to the European community space 38 (Rocha-
Trindade, 2003:76).
What is at stake is the operation of a „immigrant imaginary‟ (Sayyid, 2004; Hesse &
Sayyid, 2006), which constructs and amplifies an ontological distinction between host
society and immigrants and reads immigrant experiences from either an exoticised or a
banalised register – both celebrating and exaggerating difference and overemphasising
sameness and denying racism –, with whiteness as the norm. Sayyid (2004) argues
that this imaginary assumes that difference will be consumed (both metaphorically and
literally) over time, an assumption that is quite common in the academia:
Social contrasts, on the one hand, and cultural continuities, on the other, are, in sum, two
basic elements for the equation of racism in Portugal in the medium run. The permanence of
the former at current levels means a high probability of foci of future tension, in which new
“second generations” to be formed in the meanwhile will not cease to play the leading role.
The increase in the latter, facilitated by the enlargement of the time of residency, will help to
minimise the racialised interpretation that can be made socially about those tensions 39
(Machado, 2001: 75).
Yet, the author also argues, its unit of analysis – generations - prevents the
process of immigration from ending and (indefinitely) postpones assimilation (Sayyid,
2004: 150-153).
38 No ano 2000 e seguintes verifica-se uma profunda alteração, tanto quantitativa como qualitativa,
no panorama da imigração em Portugal. (…) Estas novas correntes imigratórias, sem qualquer
afinidade linguística ou cultural com os Portugueses, podem talvez atribuir-se a um maior
conhecimento e atracção daquelas populações pelo espaço económica e socialmente privilegiado
da União Europeia, decorrente da preparação do processo de adesão de numerosos países
daquela zona ao espaço comunitário.
39 Contrastes sociais, por um lado, e continuidades culturais, por outro, são, em suma, dois
elementos básicos para a equação do racismo em Portugal a médio prazo. A permanência dos
primeiros aos níveis actuais significa probabilidade elevada de focos de tensão futura, em que não
deixarão de ser protagonistas novas "segundas gerações" a formarem-se entretanto. O aumento
das segundas, proporcionado pelo prolongamento do tempo de residência, ajudará a minimizar a
interpretação racializada que socialmente se possa fazer dessas tensões.
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Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
While in politics and in academic research on racial prejudice and social attitudes,
racism and migrations tend to be seen as two intertwined phenomena that frame the
immigrant as the recipient of racism (whilst shifting the emphasis onto their cultures
and lifestyles, as argued above), the analysis of work within Migration Studies in
Portugal shows that a concern with the theoretical engagement with the complex
configurations of racism remains conspicuously absent. For instance, Baganha &
Marques (2001) argued that:
It may be said that, in Portugal, not only does it not exist an assumed racism, as the cases
of militant racism are extremely rare. 48
[Text to footnote 48 ] Both public opinion and official authorities have always firmly
condemned the incidents of racist nature that occurred in the last decade 40 (Baganha &
Marques, 2001: 70).
The focus is rather on integration, which dissolves racism within its promise of
assimilation:
The individuals that are naturals from Eastern Europe frequently have (or claim to have)
qualifications of higher level (…) although, for many of the immigrants of these origins, the
jobs to which they can accede are roughly below the qualifications that they really hold, it is
expected that when holding an adequate masterisation of our language and giving proof of
performance skills in works of a more highly qualified or specialised nature, they will
progressively have access to those. 41 (Rocha-Trindade, 2003: 177).
As a result, integration is an idea that finds wide circulation academically and little need
for enquiry or critique:
A report for the European Observatory of Racism and Xenophobic Phenomena, presented
in March 2005 said that the majority of the Portuguese feel there is an excessive number of
foreigners in the country (…) This position is sometimes interpreted in the press as
„resistance to immigrants‟ or even xenophobia. But this is not necessarily the case. It is
important to note that the Portuguese are in favour of equal civic rights and a multicultural
society. Further, this general feeling about the „excessive‟ number of foreigners should also
be understood in the context of the present economic environment, marked by labour
market contraction and an increase in unemployment. Finally, there has been a lack of
information about the economic and social benefits of immigration (Fonseca, Malheiros &
Silva, 2005: 4-5, our emphasis).
2.2. Reading (post)colonial migration as cultural continuities
Another aspect in academic narratives on racism in Portugal is the depoliticised
approach to the relation between immigration and colonialism. Most contemporary
immigration to Portugal has resulted from the historical process of colonialism. In 1999,
immigration from the former African colonies represented almost half of the total foreign
40 Poderá dizer-se que em Portugal não só não existe um racismo assumido como são
extremamente raros os casos de racismo militante. 48 (Texto da nota de rodapé 48 : Tanto a opinião
pública como as autoridades oficiais condenaram sempre com firmeza os incidentes de natureza
racista ocorridos na última década.)
41 Os indivíduos naturais da Europa de Leste têm frequentemente (ou proclamam ter) qualificações
de nível superior (...) embora para muitos dos imigrantes destas proveniências, os empregos a que
inicialmente podem aceder estarão sensivelmente abaixo das qualificações que realmente
possuem, é de prever que quando possuidores de um adequado domínio da nossa língua e
tenham feito prova de capacidades de desempenho em trabalhos de natureza mais qualificada ou
especializada, a eles venham progressivamente a ter acesso.
25

Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
population (Baganha & Marques, 2001). With the increase in immigration having
generally been steady, that resulting from the former colonies‟ post-independence
processes became statistically less significant, mainly due to a raise in immigrants from
the former Soviet bloc, largely Ukrainians. Yet the current migratory outward movement
of many Eastern Europeans and the slowing down of immigration into Portugal is once
again rendering post-colonial migration very significant, pointing to the relevance of
(continuing) historical processes and cultural formations (Hesse & Sayyid, 2006: 21).
However, the legacy of race colonial constructions is practically absent from migration
studies within the Portuguese academia. Rather, the focus is the taken for granted
cultural continuities, an assumption also often shared within socio-psychological
approaches. This approach does not so much decouples migration from the history of
colonial relations (Hesse & Sayyid, 2006), as it depoliticises the colonial to reduce it to
the idea of a common cultural heritage:
In the Portuguese case (...) The anti-Gypsy racism is stronger than the anti-African, which is,
in its turn, stronger than the anti-Indian racism, relatively uncommon. Now, the Gypsy
minority is precisely that which more social and cultural contrasts accumulates, the various
African populations have stark social contrasts, but significant continuities in terms of
sociability, language or religion, while the Indian minorities combine cultural contrasts with
social continuities. 42 (Machado, 2001: 71-2)
Contrary to what happens in the countries with older immigration, immigrants are not, thus
far, targets of a racism of differentialist character; this may be due to various types of
factors: firstly, it is necessary to underline the existence of significant cultural continuities
between the immigrants of African origin and the Portuguese with which they are in closer
contact. That is, contrary to the example of countries in Northern Europe, no truly significant
cultural contrasts – at the level of language, religion, and even family structures – are
registered between the majority of the populations originating in immigration and the
autochthonous population. 43 (Marques, 2007: 50-1)
Nowadays, this imaginary is being embodied in the idea of idea of a Lusophone
world community, with shared “cultural continuities”, presuming a common language
(and religion) but omitting its imposition. As Vale de Almeida argues:
Lusophony, as a global geostrategic concept, would serve to define „culture‟. Culture would
be something given to others by Portugal. Nationality, however, would be only for us who
belong in the genealogy. In this sense miscegenation and mestiçagem are discursively
constructed as the passing of Portuguese blood for the others, and rarely the other way
around. And when the others are among „us‟ the definition of their cultural authenticity
places them outside nationality/citizenship, although they are allowed to enjoy
42 No caso português (…) O racismo anticiganos é mais forte do que o antiafricanos, que é, por sua
vez, mais forte do que o racismo anti-indianos, relativamente pouco comum. Ora, a minoria cigana
é justamente aquela que mais contrastes sociais e culturais acumula, as várias populações
africanas têm contrastes sociais acentuados, mas continuidades significativas em termos de
sociabilidade, língua ou religião, ao passo que as minorias indianas combinam contrastes culturais
com continuidades sociais.
43 Inversamente ao que se passa nos países de imigração mais antiga, os imigrantes não são, por
enquanto, alvos de um racismo de carácter diferencialista; o que se pode ficar a dever a várias
ordens de factores: em primeiro lugar é preciso sublinhar a existência de continuidades culturais
significativas entre os imigrantes de origem africana e os portugueses com os quais eles estão em
contacto mais directo. Isto é, contrariamente ao exemplo dos países da Europa do Norte, não se
registam contrastes culturais verdadeiramente significativos – ao nível da língua, da religião e
mesmo das estruturas familiares – entre a maior parte das populações com origem na imigração e
a população autóctone.
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Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project
multiculturalism. (Vale de Almeida, 2006b: 22)
The disjuncture of the cultural and the biological effectively removes racism off the
agenda while downplaying routine forms of racialised governmentality. It is made
possible through the emphasis on broad colonial ideologies, such as Lusotropicalism,
and specifically the way in which they were appropriated in Portugal (that is, preserving
the idea of racial homogeneity in the metropole).
Consequently, the downplaying of the legacy of colonial racialized governance in
academic narratives helps to reproduce a Eurocentric conception of racism, as Barnor
Hesse has argued:
The universalisation of a Eurocentric concept of racism is itself racist, because it does not
question the conventionalization of the North American/West European colonial hegemony
of international relations. It is racist to the extent that its deployment as a concept obscures
the colonial excess of the European and American racism which continues to dehumanise
„non-Europeans‟ and „non-whites‟. (Hesse, 2004: 20)
27

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