The Dark Side Of The Brazilian Medical ‘Whiteness’ – OpEd
By Pambazuka News
December 4, 2013
By Marcio André dos Santos, Sheila Dias and Pablo Mattos
The history of social and political thinking in Latin American countries, especially Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia, reveals that since the end of the 19th century until the first decades of the 20th century important segments of medical elites participated actively in the elaboration and promotion of racist campaigns. These campaigns were defamatory and of xenophobic character, directed against Asian and Arab migrantes, against blacks and natives. Hygenization and eugenics were systematically practiced against those groups to limit and control their presence on national ground. The racial preaching becomes evident in “The BrazilianDoctor”, a publication by the Medical Academy of Rio de Janeiro from 1904:
“No doubt an imbecile white man is inferior to an intelligent black man. We do not argue though with exceptions. When referring to a race we do not individualize types of that race. Thereby we can see that the black caste equals backwardness; the white caste stands for progress and evolution… Dementia affects the blacks to a bigger extent. One might say they become demented more frequently because of their condition than the whites. …” (Quote from “The spectacle of the races” by Lilia Schwarcz. p. 223)
Those practices are intrinsically related to “racist racial politics” which referred to the immigration of white European workers – preferably “Nordics” like Germans, Swiss and English, who were considered as superior in comparison with the “Latinos”, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and those from Southern Italy.
Equally they received strong support by the state and by private capital by big land owners with the aim to “whiten” the Brazilian population, composed of “blacks, natives and mestizos”.
More:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/04122013-dark-side-brazilian-medical-whiteness-oped/
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