2025/05/13 by Marc Hertzman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Australian History and Society #Japanese History and Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0010417525000106
openalex publication_date 2025/05/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This article explores the Brazilian aftermath of Japan’s unsuccessful bid to include racial equality as a principle in the League of Nations charter in 1919. While U.S. and Japan specialists have written about the proposal, its little-known fallout in Brazil contains key insights about racial ideology and the contested meanings of racial equality in the aftermath of World War I. The Brazilian side of the story, which overlapped with a contentious presidential campaign, is significant for three reasons. First, the proposal’s impact on that campaign and among Black intellectuals illuminates a previously overlooked path—what I call the “Pacific route”—that identifies Japan as one unlikely site of genesis for Brazil’s vaunted mythology of “racial democracy.” Second, debates about the proposal anchor our understanding of that mythology in the early twentieth century, pushing back the timeline often associated with “racial democracy” and revealing an early moment when Black intellectuals staked claim to the idea. Third, while Whites in the United States and the British Empire rejected the proposal and opposed Asian immigration in openly racist terms, in Brazil opponents sought to square their position with an inchoate national ethos of racial harmony. The failed proposal offered an opportunity to do so and helped cast Japanese immigrants as uniquely possessing race, in contrast to Brazilians, who had melded into a raceless nation. The Pacific route therefore holds lessons about Brazilian history and the global trajectory of the idea of racial equality.