The social sciences, the racial question and the Cold War: Brazil as a laboratory

Abstract

This article analyzes the anti-racist political and academic guidelines that informed the efforts to solve the negro question after World War II. The study recovers Cold War policies when Brazil was conceived as a Social Sciences laboratory in order to search solutions to the challenge of facing the great moral dilemma that totalitarianism brought in relation to the racial question. This international agenda was conceived as the great modern dilemma and point out ways to promote social changes that were challenging principles and social justice and Human Rights. Unesco’s presence was essential in the sense of creating public policies that brought concrete effects with regard to overcoming racism and segregationism imposed on the black population. For the creation of these policies, later known as “affirmative”, the essential questions were the effects of social changes due to capitalist innovations in societies with a slave-owning past and the identification of color as an obstacle to social mobility.