Focus on Ham's Redemption and discuss the Eugenics symbol.
The work is considered one of the most racist and reactionary paintings of the nineteenth century, bringing with it the symbolism of elitist thinking. The painting appears in a post-abolitionist process of the new republic, which sought progress using Europe as a model. In the eyes of the elite, the white, represented progress, while the black represented the past. In this context comes the eugenics and whitening as mentioned earlier, which proposed miscegenation as a solution, leaving the population with an increasingly European profile. The painting is simply a visual representation of the subject present in the discourse of the intellectuals of the time.In 1911, the then director of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, João Batista de Lacerda used the painting as an illustration of his article entitled Sur les métis au Brésil (Portuguese, "About the mixed-race in Brazil") at the First Universal Race Congress in Paris. The Congress brought together intellectuals from all over the world to discuss the relationship of races to the process of civilization. Lacerda's work, considered one of the main exponents of the "whitening thesis", came out in defense of the miscegenation, presenting the positivity of this process in Brazil and showing the supposed superiority of the white races in relation to the blacks and the indigenous. In presenting the painting of Brocos, he described it as follows: "The black going white in the third generation, by the effect of the crossing of races." In his speech, he affirmed that in a century the Brazilian population would be mostly white; that is, by 2011 or 2012, the black population would be extinct, and the mixed-race would represent a maximum of 3% of the population.Between the 1920s and 1930s, it was no longer possible to distinguish between Brazilians who identified themselves as exiled Europeans and the local population, since the mixture between indigenous peoples, blacks and whites constituted a miscegenation that went beyond the standards imposed by high, white society. Thus, the elite had almost a need to create a new Brazilian identity, with the desire to be different from any model, and the eugenics ideal lost much of its strength.
indigenous João Batista de Lacerda mixed-race miscegenation eugenics National Museum of Rio de Janeiro abolitionist Rio de Janeiro races whitening intellectual Paris First Universal Race Congress Eugenics Portuguese