Previsões são sempre traiçoeiras: João Baptista de Lacerda e seu Brasil branco

Abstract

The article presents and analyzes the talk given by scientist João Baptista de Lacerda at the First Universal Races Congress, held in London in 1911 and financed by England and other participating nations (France, Belgium, Italy, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, South Africa, Hungary, Russia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Brazil). Governmental and church authorities, professors, members of The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration and Second Conference, plus a representative of each invited country were in attendance. Brazil, the only Latin American nation invited, was seen as an example of the mixing of the races, and Lacerda argued that immigration policies would lead to the whitening of mestizos and the extinction of the "black race" in Brazil. The country thus occupied a unique position in the Americas, standing apart from the segregationist model of the United States and from South America's tyrannies.