Brazil Under the Racist Gaze of the Allies

By declaring war on Germany and Italy in August 1942, Brazil became part of a bloc of countries that conceptualized itself not only in opposition to Axis military expansionism but also against the doctrines of racial supremacy that sought to justify it. Or at least that was what the defenders of the United Nations in public opinion claimed, which explains both the enthusiasm with which many anti-racists embraced the Allied cause and the reaction of domestic racists to a position they saw as undermining traditional discriminatory and segregationist practices. However, deep contradictions regarding the issue of race appear in the documentation generated by diplomatic officials and advisors and by the Allied intelligence agencies in Brazil. The prejudices of the Americans and British toward the country’s black and mestizo majority worked in concert with both the deeply entrenched racism of Brazil’s social, intellectual, and political elites and that of the representatives or descendants of the Axis nations. The strength of the racist convictions that united this transnational bloc that extended across the war’s ideological divide vividly illustrates the difficulty of effecting a transformation in how racial issues were addressed, even at a historical moment otherwise exceptionally favorable for this type of change.