Back to the Cocoon? The Discordance of the Renewal of the Old Illusion of “Racial Democracy” in the Face of Crisis

Abstract

In this article we reflect on how “multiculturalist” interpretations of Brazilian racism fail to overcome and, on the contrary, even confirm some central assumptions of the well-known “myth of racial democracy.” If the bourgeois ascent of the abolitionist transition was based on this strategy of class domination, the renovation of its arguments in the face of the current crisis emerges as an irrational product of this context. In the midst of the evident exhaustion of neoliberal reforms embedded in the alliances and pacts forged earlier, and the growing response of the working class to the attacks it suffers, the class struggle is moving to the sphere of culture in such a way that the ideological discordance is rooted in the nature of the crisis itself and its decadent political philosophy.