ONE DOES NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THE French formula, made famous by Charles Maurras - Politique d'abord! as a set from or supreme method in applied political sociology, to recognize the importance of political behaviour in the world we now live. It is a world in which politics is playing an extremely important and, in some matters, a really decisive role.

Much is still said about the importance of economics in both the contemporary Western and non-Western worlds; and no one denies the importance of this factor. Nor has religion ceased to be a force among contemporary men as science and technology have attained such an immense power among them. All these forces act, at present, as influential factors in the various national and regional cultures, which are at different stages of development. Each force is in a particular or specific relation to each of these stages of cultural development or of social or regional situation.

But one aspect of these developments, common to all of them, is the political direction, or the style or the from of political direction, that is being given not only to each national or regional development, but to their increasing interderpendence. In regard to this point, it is difficult for a sociologist or for a social anthropologist not to agree that, in a national culture or in international relations, this style may be, in some ways, more important than the content because, as a modern political scientist says, it "rationalizes a mood"; and this mood may be - and actually is, in a number of contemporary cases - one of "revenge".

Of course this rationalization may be, in some of these cases, more apparent than real - the irrationality of the content being too powerful to be dominated by any type of formal rationalization; but if it functions as a rationalization - for even a rationalization may become paradoxically, a myth - to the majority of the people that it affects - it may be accepted as sociologically effective. For the sociologist, as we know, myths may be, in some cases, realities: sociological realities conditioned by specific time; and valid in specific spaces.

Race has been, in the past, and continues to be - indeed it is intensely so at present - an important factor in politics. This is not only on account of its importance as a social content, but on account, also, and in some cases, principally, of what in this semantically vague word stands for emotional, psychological, economic, religious, suggestions, or implications. These may be used or abused, in what a shrewd analyst of human nature in politics, Professor James C. Davies, has described as "the more intimate stylistic relationships between the rulers and the public".1 But not only is this true of broad "stylistic relationships" of a political character with general social or cultural contents: it seems to be true, also, of those relationships, of the same character, between the rulers of one national or regional group and other groups, national and regional, in this field, it may provide, and indeed has provided, and is providing, a rationale not only for promotion, domination, competition, for national or nationalistic purposes, but, as has been suggested, for revenge: a very dramatic aspect of the role that race is playing in contemporary politics.

Race and revenge have become closely associated in contemporary politics. The most notable example of this was the racism of the Nazi rulers of Germany. This was a racism that become genocide in regard to Jews but that included also Slavs and directed itself, in a addition, through the almost purely demagogical rhetoric of Hitler, against what he once described as the "corrupt mestizos" of Latin America. It was a racism that went as far as to attempt to promote the glorification of a mythical master white, Aryan, Nordic, "race" and to condemn, as incapable of self-government, non-Aryan ethnic groups, including, in these incapable groups, those that Hitler is said to have described as ruled by corrupt half-breeds. More recent examples of the association of race and revenge are those that come to us from ethnic groups in Asia and Africa, and also in the United States. For these a new political status - that of national states - in some cases, and the struggle for full citizenship, or for separatism, in other cases - is giving an opportunity for the expression of revenge against past racial tutelage and former subordination to white groups. This expression is, if not always a political behaviour, a behaviour partly political but partly non-political: social-psychological rather than political, and, as such, an expression, in some cases, of so crude an anxiety, a fear, a frustration, an insecurity, that very little style of political behaviour is characteristic of it; and also very little rationalization on a political lever.

This type of behaviour was not entirely absent from the 1910 Mexican Revolution: from its first explosion as a movement not only political but sociocultural and economic, - though its political aspect should not be neglected - but a movement in which race was not an insignificant factor; nor revenge, conditioned or stimulated by the presence of this factor, an insignificant aspect. This revolution - the Mexican - is still going on; it is now becoming Peruvian and Bolivian. Aprism was, for some time, a rationalization of it at a sociological-political level.

But it may be pointed out that race, in these Indo-Latin-American revolutions, as associated with culture, may be interpreted as having meant, and meaning still, an absence of most or some of the native, or Indian Mexicans and now, perhaps, in a more tragic way, of Indian Peruvians and Bolivians, from technological change. This absence has placed, and still places, large parts of the indigenous population of Mexico and Peru and Bolivia in a situation of very secondary participants, not only in the political control of Mexican or Peruvian or Bolivian affairs by Mexicans or Peruvians or Bolivians but in the development of those societies as modern national States and modern civilizations in non-European regions. Hence, as national states, they are, to a large extent, fictitious, as copies of European or Anglo-American models.

One of the reasons for the demoralization of this fictitious or apparent "Europeanness" is a biological development, in recent years, affecting that part of the world, as well as other non-white populations, with sociological consequences that are beginning to find also a quasi-political expression: I refer to the sensational population expansion that Latin American countries are experiencing. It is an expansion that makes the number of Latin Americans of non-European origin, and, in some cases, of non-European culture, as their predominant culture, such a great quantitative and even quantitative force in countries that do not, anymore, attract European white immigrants in large numbers, that one may speak, now, of a considerable de-Europeanization, in certain social and cultural aspects, of Latin American, as well as of a de-whitenization, in racial terms, of its population. Indeed, one may speak of a "rising tide of colour" - to use a well-know expression - in the Latin American population. The same seems to be happening in other non-European and now almost entirely non-white parts of the world, where there was, during the 19th century, through immigration and domination, a considerable increase of Europeans and whites and of their values.

Latin Americans - artists, writers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, educators, religious leaders, architects, agriculturists - are, now, becoming increasingly extra-European, in their creative efforts, in their analyses and interpretations of their natural and human situations, in their expression of what is non-European in their experience and in their aspirations, though without repudiating, in many cases, European or Anglo-American values and techniques. Some of these values and techniques have been already assimilated by their ancestors or are - they think - of evident advantage for their present or future development. In this attitude, race - the consciousness, on the part of numerous Latin Americans, of being descendants of non-European races - is not being felt any more by them as a humiliation but is being accepted even as an advantage on the psychological or ideological or, perhaps, is some cases, rhetorical, basis that Latin Americans may be creating for what a Mexican sociologist, Jose Vasconcelos, considered a "cosmic race"; or for what another Latin American, equally enthusiastic of race mixture, has described as the "real synthetic race of the future.2 This rationalization or idealization of race mixture implies in it a conception of the development of Latin America as a multi-racial, continental community in which the tendency may be said to be for the various races to live, not separate ethnic and cultural lives, but to join most of their values, traditions, characteristics, as well as to mix their bloods and unite their bodies, for the formation of new types of men and new forms of culture in the broadest sociological or anthropological meaning of culture.

If this tendency is becoming as significant as a tendency - only as a tendency - as some analysts of the racial and the cultural situation of Latin America think that it is becoming, then it is not difficult to understand why, in Brazil, the now very supple or elastic use of the word moreno has become one of the most expressive semantic - sociological happenings that have ever characterized the development of Portuguese America as a society whose multi-racial composition in increasingly becoming what an inventor of new words would perhaps be so bold as to describe as meta-racial. That is, a society where instead of sociological preoccupation with minute characterizations of multi-racial intermediates or nuance types, between white and black, white and red, white and yellow, the tendency is, or begins to be, for those not absolutely white, or absolutely black, or absolutely red-skin or absolutely yellow members of the Brazilian society or community, to be described, and to consider themselves almost without discrimination, as "moreno". This word was originally used, in the Portuguese language, to describe men or women of a Moorish complexion and, later, specially applied to white brunettes in contrast to louros, or blondes. This same word, howerer, is now having a sociologically supple and biologically elastic use - so elastic that even black Negroes are now being described, in Brazil, as morenos, not so much because Negros or Mulatto are words that, for typical or castizo, Brazilians, sound, as a purely racial characterization, as they do to European, specially to Anglo-Saxon, ears but because Negro, to Brazilian ears, and even Mulatto, still sound, in numerous instances, as equivalents of slave: as verbal survivals of that past, not so remote, when an owner of slaves in that country was said to own, not so many slaves, but so many Negroes (Negros) or so many Blacks (Pretos) or so many Cabras - even in cases when the slaves were of a lighter colour than their owners. The fact, however, is that the word "Negro" is beginning to mean to a number of Latin Americans something that has little to do with slavery: a race and a culture older than Spanish or Portuguese America. This may be, partly, the result of what is happening in Negro Africa: not in the ex-Belgian Congo, of course, but in such areas as Nigeria and Senegal, where Negroes have already revealed a capacity for self-government and for national originality. It seems to some of us that it is a healthy tendency, for new elites in Africa, Asia and Latin America, to follow, and to encourage among the populations under their influence or leadership, what the French call "un retour aux sources".3

This "retour aux sources" may imply an exaggerated racial pride among peoples who were, for centuries, oppressed - or considered themselves oppressed by Whites and by their equally exaggerated, and in some cases, brutally imperial, ethnocentrism. But new political leaders, deciding to lead new nations or quasi-nations to new paths of national development and national expression may act in such a way as to harmonize extremes, using racial, or cultural-racial, pride only, in so far as it may stimulate cultural creativity or political originality. This is based not only on a "retour aux sources" but on an intelligent use of foreign political models, techniques, methods White and Yellow, Communistic and Capitalistic - adapted to the needs and aspirations of these new nations or quasi-nations. In this task political leaders will need aid of social scientists, of educators, or artists, of humanists, of religious leaders. It has to be, predominantly, a task of political art, in which racial-cultural pride may be used, but should not be abused. None, with a minimum of sociological objectivity, should deny to peoples who, for centuries, were hurt in their racial pride by a systematic effort, on the part of some of their oppressors, either of destruction or of demoralization of some of the most intimate cultural values associated with the so called inferior races, a reaction now against possible survivals of such types of oppression through, at times, an extreme form of expressing their racial consciousness associated to their cultural values or styles. Gradually, however, they should be led by non-demagogical leaders to see things as they really are. Their political leaders even non should be orienting their political action in such a way as to minimize the importance that has been recently given, and is still being given, to the purely racial factor, and to magnifying the importance that should be increasingly given to the cultural factor.

In race, then - race, not as an absolute reality, but as a reality for those who now consider it, almost as the Nazis did, as a physical and mental force with a political and cultural specific mission - taking the place of class, as a factor in contemporary politics? Possibly, in a number of cases, yes: by some leaders of Orientals, certainly, in an evident distortion of Communism and of its traditional use of the Proletariat, whatever the race of the Proletarian, as the great oppressed giant to be redeemed. This is also being done by some political leaders of some non-Oriental and even White peoples.

On the other hand, automation is reducing so sharply, even in some non-European areas, the normal working time, among men, that a "Working Class", as such, a Proletariat, as glorified until recently by revolutionary socialist orators, seems to be less and less a sociological reality with a dynamically political significance. While race, be it a biological myth or not, as far its mental or cultural expression is concerned, is becoming prominent, in national and international politics, as a psychosocial force: and as such, assimilating some of the power until recently connected almost entirely with a revolutionary Working Class. It may be even suggested, as we shall see later, that new political leaders, in Asia, Africa, America, have, at present, a tendency, not to put race at the service of a rigid class ideology, with full emphasis on a class war, but to put a class ideology at the service of a revolutionary racial mystique on the part of men or of groups whose main interest is to fight for the opportunity of nations with black or yellow or predominantly coloured populations to develop their own economic and political systems, inspired, to a large extent, in racial-cultural traditions and myths, though super-racial in most of their techniques.

The most dramatic modern aspect in politics, national or international, is no more that of a Bourgeoisie considering itself under the menace of a Proletariat in violent revolt against a predominant or privileged class, but that of the white man's world now in a defensive, rather than in an aggressive, position in face of non-white peoples. For it is a world, that of the white man, that considers itself under the menace of a multi-racial revolt on the part of non-white peoples. It is through a multi-racial revolt that native population, in overseas areas, are rising, politically and sub-politically, against what these populations - yellow, brown, black, mixed - consider to be, and to have been, for years, and even for centuries, not only an exaggerated predominance, but a crude exploitation, by the white man, of their resources, their energy, their work and, in some areas, a systematic oppression and destruction of those cultural values most connected with their racial non-European or non-white situations or conditions.

Soon after the Second Great War, Professor Herbert von Beckerath wrote, in a remarkable essay on the possible new relations of the so-called white civilization with new situations in non-Western or non-European areas: "The way back into the white man's world of 1914 and even of the late thirties is closed".4 He then expressed his view that "civilization can be vital and can be permanent only in its different national colours", since "we cannot do away with the colours and keep the spectrum".

The fact is that in the last two decades, national colours have become, in a number of cases, racial colours. The world is no more a white man's world with an imperial white civilization in face of more or less colonial non-white peoples, but increasingly a political combination, more or less peaceful, more or less well adjusted, of national states, some old, some young, that are also characterized by their racial situations and by the consciousness, on the part of most of the population of these national states, of their race or of the culture associated with their race. More, perhaps, to their racial and cultural situations, than to their formal or merely political national condition.

If this id how the world has been development in the last two decades, with a decline, in the second half on the 20th century, of the process of its internationalization, - a process now overcome by other developments, with even the powerful, supernational mystique of the Proletariat of the Marxist theory overcome by the mystique of races to be redeemed, through national, or narrowly nationalistic solutions - it is easy to understand why Race, with a capital R, has taken very largely the place of Class as a politically dynamic and, in some cases, a revolutionary force. National differentation or its contrary, supernational unification, of human groups, as these groups go through a difficult transition from a colonial to a national status, have taken race redemption, and race war rather than class war, as their main instrument.5

For Race, in these last decades, has acted in both ways: it has contributed to differentiation - to separating sharply non-Europeans from Europeans - and is contributing to unification through movements like Pan-Asianism, Pan-Africanism, that is, Negro Pan-Africanism, and Pan-Americanism. The latter is a Pan-Latin-Americanism based on the tradition of an Iberian relationship with Amerindians that, racially, would result in an Indo-Latin-American hybrid racial type, and naturally in a new Indo-Latin-American hybrid culture associated with this racial type. This culture can be more comprehensive than hybrid racial type. But it has a hybrid racial type as its symbol, with a considerable glorification of the Indian or Amerindian element of the Euro-American composition.

These is in the modern world an increasing development of a mestizo type - different expressions of it in terms of individuals, and of an already considerable number of mestizo cultures make the simple division, ethnic, cultural or political of the world, between whites and blacks or yellow or brown or reds, an inadequate one. Even some of the champions of certain racialist movements in favour of a pure black race, or of a pure African Negro culture, are mestizos. Mestizos are some of the most capable new leaders in some of the new nations. One may even suggest that mestizos are, perhaps, becoming the decisive force, political and cultural, in a considerable part of the world; and that human aesthetic tastes in regard to human from and, particularly, to feminine beauty, are being greatly affected by the increasing race mixture that is going on, not only in a large continental area like Brazil, but in other areas as well. These are producing combinations of from and colour that are no more regarded with emphasis on their cacogenic, negative, effects, but on their, sometimes, impressively eugenic and, hence physically positive, aesthetic, effects. I belong to the number of those who think that this aesthetic aspect should not be underestimated: the consideration of it by an increasing number of men, and when these are of different ethnic groups and of different cultures it may contribute greatly to giving a new dimension to the processes of cultural interpretation and race mixture in areas of the world where this process has been slow or almost ineffective.

As a white American of the United States, a well-known sociologist, Professor Everett C. Hughes, said recently (1963), in a presidential address to the American Sociological Association, most Americans of the United States "apparently go about tacitly accepting the cliché that whites and Negroes don't want to marry each other and that white women are never attracted sexually by Negro men, without considering the circumstances in which it would no longer be true (if it is indeed true now)". And he adds, about this, that certain novelists - meaning American novelists of the United States - have dealt already with this theme, "not merely frankly, but with penetration and some sense of the aesthetics of it".6 The "aesthetics of it" seems to some of us to be of increasing importance, since the last powerful argument against race mixture, now that theories of the mental inferiority of non-whites in relation to whites have lost most of their prestige, was the supposed cacogenic, mongrel, repulsive of the majority of mestizos. This argument, too, is rapidly losing its prestige, and one observes at present the tendency of creators of fashions for women in Paris and Rome, and even in Germany, to reinterpret the racial characteristics of non-white women, as positive, eugenic traits, in which they are finding inspiration for fashions of dress, hair dressing, and jewellery to be adapted for the white world. This adaptation, however, is being made possible, to a large extent, by mestizo types who are becoming, on the aesthetic level, a sort of plastic mediators between extremes. And what is happening on the aesthetic level is happening, to some extent, on the political level. In a number of areas where new national states are developing, now, mestizo, political forms are being found. These are not, on the one hand, a passive return to tribal, non-white crude systems - of government, and are not, on the other hand, passive imitations by non-whites of purely European or purely Anglo-American models.

This is true even in regard to interrelations of distinct groups of the white race. It is exemplified in the present revolt of a considerable number of French Canadians against Anglo-Saxon Canadians. Some of these French Canadians consider themselves, politically, the only white colonized people in the world and, indeed, one of the few colonized peoples, white or coloured: Not a few of them, very characteristically going so far, according to a Canadian write, Mr Mordecai Richler, (Encounter, December 1964) as to identify themselves with resurgent Africans of Africa and the American Negro - especially, perhaps, with the so called "Muslims" of the United States - and to see themselves as "Canada's white Negroes".7 This seems to indicate that, at present, in political movements with a racial aspect, some whites are imitating Negroes, while some Negroes are imitating whites in regard to demagogic forms of political control or of political opposition. Mr Richler informs us that a French Canadian intellectual, apparently of the separatist political movement, told him: "It was when I first saw on TV all those Africans in their flowing robes at the U.N. that I thought: "why not us too?" "White Negroes" or "White Browns" of other areas of the world may be inspired, in a similar way, to dress and act in such non-European ways as to express themselves politically through dress and acts. It would not be an entirely extravagant idea if delegates of Latin American nations, white, mestizo, Amerindian or Negroid, at the United Nations, would follow some of the Africans and Asians on this. They would thus contribute, with their colourful ponchos, a more picturesque aspect to the general Assemblies as well as giving a political significance to their presence there that would be a sort of demonstration of their independence, in such an important matter as dress, of European Anglo-American standards, on the one hand, and of race, as a physical expression on the other hand. For the "poncho" is not a racial but a cultural symbol.

Some of the French Canadian separatists are now insisting, on the basis of a racial mystique similar to that now to be found among Africans of new Negro nations, on forming a national State of their own in which there would be a great romantic - or pseudo-romantic - emphasis on traditional folk, poetic, French values; and, also, a realistic assimilation of modern industrial and urban techniques of Anglo-Saxon origin. The fact seems to be that French Canadians are already, sociologically, a mestizo culture, as the Negroes of the United States themselves and some of the politically conscious Negroes of Africa and Asia are products of mestizo cultures. All these mestizo cultures have, also, as some of their carriers, a number of biological mestizos, in one case, of Latin and Anglo-Saxons, in other cases, of Anglo-Saxons and Africans, or of Europeans and Africans, or Europeans and Asians, and Europeans and Amerindians.

If a new Marx were to appear now, he might address himself to the increasing number of mestizos, dynamically cultural as well as dynamically racial, in the world telling them: "Mestizos of the world, unite yourself!" This hypothetical union would possibly mean, if it would grow from a more sociological fiction into something else, a new anti-racist presence in international politics. This presence might express itself as a correction of extremes of racial conflict in contemporary politics, and as a broad sociological substitute for a Pax Romana or for a Pax Britannica - classical forms of international political equilibrium based on the rule of a single, pure, or apparently pure, race, or of a single, or apparently single, type of civilization, also emphatic about its purity, over all the other races of men and over their different cultures regarded as inferior by this or that imperial one. It would mean interpenetration - sociological and biological. And possibly the results of this double interpenetration, far from being uniformity, would be, for many of us, a most desirable combination of diversity with unity.

Is the vision of a humanity that, through increasing possibilities for the mixture of its most divergent types, and combination of its various cultural values, shall rise above race hatred and caste and colour and culture prejudices, a purely utopian one? It the so-called "sociological imagination" going too far, in this respect, in a sort of competition with the so-called political realism of the type that insists on such solutions as a rigid parallel development of the ethnic groups within a multi-racial society, and in an organization of the United Nations permanently divided by race consciousness and even by the symbols of race as a latent or potential racialism in international politics? As one who, being somewhat engaged in politics, is mainly, or considers himself to be principally, in regard to problems such as the ones of race and culture, a social scientist and, possibly, also a social thinker, and even a writer, I may too much under the influence of a sociological and even humanistic imagination. But my conviction is that it is within the responsibility of contemporary leaders, both of nations and of international politics, to favour, as much as possible through not only political but educational, religious, artistic and other means, solutions more on the lines of increasing racial, as well as cultural interpenetration, than in that of any form, North American or South African, of systematic politically and legally or sociologically effective segregation.

In "Retour aux sourcers" there is a tendency, on the part of non-Europeans, now organized politically, in nation-states, or seeking this status, of deep political significance. It is something that develops a racial consciousness on which citizens of these new States should base their claims to nationhood. The French Canadians are doing this as already pointed out not only through a historical, but through a folkloric movement of emphasis on their cultural, not entirely apart their racial differentiations, from the Anglo-Saxons. A similar movement is going on among the Jews, now organized in a national State through a folkloric idealization of an athletic remote figure of a racially eugenic Jewish youth. Similar movements have gone on among Indo-Americans in regard to a heroic Amerindian past whose memory has been kept through folklore rather than through history. Peoples of Africa and Asia are now engaged in such movements, in which the idealization of a future not entirely free from the desire, on the part of citizens of new States, to glorify virtues that, being cultural, are, nevertheless, glorified as racial.

As Professor Georges Ballandier has pointed out in his "Messinanismes et Nationalismes en Afrique Noir" (Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie), (Paris, XIV, 1953) and Professor G.M. Sundkler, in Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London 1948), in some of these idealizations, in which a racial mystique is associated with political aspirations, even Christian symbols have been used or abused. The growing tendency for Christianized non-European coloured peoples to paint and represent in sculpture, Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saints, Angels, as black, yellow or brown, although a healthy tendency from the point of view of a universalistic Christianity, may nevertheless, be used more politically than religiously. These new images of sacred figures may be made racial rather than religious symbols for predominantly political purposes. But is it not true that these political expressions of racism, or racialism, even through religious symbols are an answer to a narrowly ethnocentric and predominantly bourgeois presentation of Christianity by Europeans to coloured non-Europeans, with equally politically racial purposes behind this distortion of a universalistic religion? It is not true that for most of the Europeans most of the coloured peoples were, until recently, racially inferior; not deserving to be treated as equal but as subordinate and thus inspiring in some of these coloured non-Europeans attitudes, in regard to Europeans, based on racial feelings and motivations, through a, for some time, defensive, and, more recently, aggressive, counter racism? The so-called "racially discriminatory behaviour" having been, for a considerable period of time, the policy of most European in regard to non-Europeans, it is not to be considered anything but human, though not rational or proper, that the political behaviour of most of the non-Europeans, now organized in nation-states, is being coloured by an exaggerated race consciousness. How could they be, as if by some sociological magic, men and women of the so-called "colour-blind" social type, indifferent to the presence of race as a factor in politics when, for such a long time, they and some generations of their ancestors, lived under the impact of a racial, and not of a non-racial, European political domination over non-Europeans? We should not forget, in this connection, that the concept of race itself, as a political symbol or an expression of a political ideology, rather than as a term used by physical anthropologists, is - as Professor Everett C. Hughes reminds us in his essay on "New Peoples," - "very much the creation of the national movements of Europe in the nineteenth century".8 That is, a political invention.

Do peoples who do not prize, in any significant way, race purity, but make of miscegenation almost a national policy idealize a national physical type? Then do. Numerous Brazilians, for instance, idealize the so-called "Amarelinho" (the little fellow with a yellow skin) almost to the point of making of him, is a humorous, not in a solemn way, a hero. Who is the "Amarelinho"? He is a mestizo-rural, rustic, intuitive, but small, pale, apparently the opposite of the healthy brute though, in fact, strong, resistant, quick, - a sort of Japanese of the tropics, through his glorified capacity to overcome fatigue, malaria, hardships, and win any competition with white athletic giants: in real fights, in sports, in physical love. For it is part of the "Amerelinho's" Brazilian myth that a mestizo who disguises his hybrid vigour in his frail appearance, is, in fact, a David capable of defeating any white Goliath in any contest including sexual battles. The myth makes of him the favourite Romeo with women: a discreet but real hero.

It should be noted that this Brazilian idealization of the "little fellow with yellow skin" - the curious idealization of a caricature of the mestizo - is not a "retour aux sources on" the racial non-European level - for this would mean the idealization of an Amerindian or of a Negro ancestor. On the contrary it is the glorification of a mixed racial purity as an ideal - and the apparent glorification, through this type, of a dynamic process: that of a continuous miscegenation. This is a process that is creating, in Brazil, as in other nations, a variety of racially mixed types, intermediate from the purely nordic - there are Brazilians who racially are nordic - to purely black Negro or to the purely Amerindian or the purely yellow. For the unity of Brazil - that is remarkable in so vast a country - does not depend upon racial purity, a cult of real or idealized of racial uniformity. It depends rather on loyalty from Brazilians, ethnically diversified, to certain essential pan-Brazilian values that are of common importance to all of them. This, and not an ideal of racial purity, seems to be the decisive force in the modern development of Brazil: it shapes what is socially democratic in this development and it is beginning to inspire, in the field of international attitudes, a tendency for Brazilians to be particularly sympathetic to other racially mixed peoples or nations. A political attitude inspired not by race by an increasing disregard for race.

Some forty years ago, the United States white Anglo-American, Mr Roy Nash, in one of the most penetrating books ever written by a foreign observer about Brazil, anticipated other observers in pointing out that "Portuguese, Negroes and Indians, with a nineteenth century increment of Mediterranean peoples, Central Europeans and Asiatics, have fused into a Brazil thirty million strong". To him, the vision of a people - non eighty-five million - who shall rise above race hatred and caste, and colour, had already come true - or hand began to come true - in Brazil, half a century ago. it was a fusion unchecked by law or custom. "More than in any other place in the world" - he added - "readmixture of the most divergent types of humanity is there injecting meaning into the égalité of Revolutionary France and the human solidarity of philosophers and class-conscious proletarians". More: for Mr Nash destiny had erected in Brazil "a social laboratory which shall reveal the significance of "race" and either confirm or give the lie for all time to the superstition that the admixture of widely different stocks spells degeneration."9 At the time when Mr Nash - an Anglo-Saxon - expressed himself in such an emphatic way about miscegenation in Brazil, the use, by Brazilians, of the word "moreno", had not attained the extension and the social significance that it has attained in recent years. Its contemporary usage has left for only a very small number of Brazilian snobs the attitude of considering themselves and most of their fellow countrymen, as purely white, biologically and sociologically, and carriers, in Brazil, of a purely European culture: the Boer South African attitude applied by these snobs to Brazil.

Multi-racial in the ethnic composition of its population but, to a considerable extent, meta-racial in its consciousness, even in its behaviour - its political behaviour included - may be said to be the present situation of the Brazilian society as it is becoming dynamically more extra-European. This is not - and this should be repeated - anti-European or entirely ex-European, in its general form, or in its general forms, of being a society or a civilization. If this is happening in Brazil, then, its style or its technique of developing a new type of civilization, with evident political implications, may offer a few valuable suggestions or anticipations, if not to all, to some of the other multi-racial societies that face problems of integration similar to those that Brazil has faced, and is still facing, without becoming a victim to race-hatred or to race prejudice in its extreme or violent expressions. This style implies interpenetration of cultures, on the sociological level and, on the biological level, miscegenation. It implies also such ideologies as "negritude",10 in its narrower political-racial sense, and Indo-American, in its equally narrow political-racial sense, being superseded or supplanted by a disregard for race as a decisive or powerfully conditioning factor of political behaviour.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

1. James C. Davies, Human Nature in Politics, New York, London 1963, specially p.365 but also the whole chapter on "Distol groups in politics". Also, for a discussion of "the politics of ethnicity", chapter 17 of Robert E. Lance, Political Life, Glencoe, Illinois, 1959; the classic T. Adorno et al, Authoritarian Personality, New York, 1950; Lawrence H. Funcks, The Political Behaviour of American Fews, Glencoe, Illinois, 1956; and James Coleman, "Nationalism in Trop-cial Africa", The American Political Science Review, vol. XLVIII, no. 2, June 1954, pp. 404-424. On the European origin of nationalism (in some cases based on "race") as an influence in modern political life, see R.R. Mowat, The European States System, London, 1939. On some of the developments of both European nationalism and European Communism in Africa, see Teobaldo Filesi, Comunismo, Nazionalismo, Africa, Roma, 1958. On problems of fitness of non-Europeans for nationhood, see Stuart P. Dodd, "The Scientific Measurement of Fitness for Self-Government" and other essays in the section XIII of Underdeveloped Areas edited by Lyle W. Shannon, New York, 1957; and also Margaret Grant, editor, South Asia Pacific Crisis, New York, 1964, specially Barbara Ward, "Prospects for stability in Southeast Asia". Of Barbara Ward, see, besides this, The Rich Nation and the Poor Nations, London, 1962. See also Fernando Henriques" Jamaica, London, New York 1964.

2. Victor Raul Raya de la Torre - "La unidad latinoamericana" Cuadernos (Paris), no. 93, February 1965, pp. 12-16. In this article, de la Torre seems to express his agreement with some of the ideas of the African "consciencism". He also points out that racial mixture, as it has been going on, in Latin America, "as in no other underdeveloped continent", should be considered a positive factor of democratization among Latin-American agreeing, in this particular, with my own interpretation of this social-anthropological process. In de la Torre's words "la sola presencia del mestizage" having, as a result "la raza cosmica" of the Mexican Jose Vasconcelos, somewhat rhetorical characterization, "es la garantia normativa de una democracia autentica: porque es la no discriminacion racila un fundamento y condicion de igualdade, acaso mas estable"(p. 16)

3. Georges Le Brun Kerus - "La Crise d'Adaptation du Maroc", Completes Rendus Mensuels des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences d'Outre Mer, Tome XXIV, December 1964, Paris, pp.557-566. See also M. Fortes and E. E. Evans Pritchard African Political Systems, Oxford, 1940, and Basic Davidson, The Lost Cities of Africa, London, 1959. In another of his books, Basil Davidson refers to a modern "renaissance of Africa that he considers "inexhaustible, ever-quickened, keen with hope". (Black Mother), Boston/Toronto, 1961, p. 290.

4. Herbert von Beckerath - In Defence of the West, A Political and Economic Study, Durham, U.S.A., 1942, specially chapter V on "Collapse in the International Order". See also, Soetz Briefs, The Proletariat, New York, 1937. For present conflicts between orthodox class ideologies and African political movements with racial-cultural contents, see The Soviet Bloc, China and Africa edited by Sven Hamrell and Carl Gosta Widstrand, Uppsala, 1964. See also, Frank Tannenbaum Slave and Citizen, New York, 1947. It may be said of von Beckerath, that more than twenty years ago he foresaw the importance that Race would take in politics.

5. Senor Joaquin Maurin, in his "John Kennedy en el pedestal de la historia", Cuadernos (Paris), no. 90, November 1964, points out that "en esta segunda mitad del siglo en que vivimos, ya no se habla de la lucha de classes, que Marx consideraba como el eje de la historia. Encambio, el mundo vive ahora en plena fase de lucha de razes..." "En la punga entre China y Russia la cuestion racista - amarellos contra blancos - es inseparable de la diferencea en los objectivos nacionales".

6. Everett C. Hunhes - "Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination", American Sociological Review, vol. 28, no. 6, December 1963, pp. 879-890.

7. Mordecai Richler - "Quebec oui, Ottowa non", Encounter (London), December 1964, vol. XXIII, no. 6, pp. 76-84 specially p. 83.

8. In Andrew W. Lind (editor - Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1955, p. 102. See also, in the same publication, Kenneth Little "The African Elite in British Africa".

9. Roy Nash - The Conquest of Brazil, New York, 1926, p. 166. As Professor Joseph Maier points out in a recent essay, in Brazil "the coloured people are both acculturated and assimilated Brazilians. They think of themselves as Brazilians and Latins". ("The Problem of Colour in Race Relations"), Politics of Change in Latin America, edited by Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead, N.Y., 1964. Albert Gerard, "Origines historiques et destin litteraire de la negritude", Diogene, Paris, 1964. For a broad reinterpretation of "Negritude", see Leopold Sedar Senghor - "Latinidad y Negritude", Cuadernos (Paris), no. 92, January 1965. For some aspects of the present political conflict between Africanism and Communism, see George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism?, London, 1956. On the political attitude of the U.S.S.R. in regard to racial-political problems or situations, see David Morison - The U.S.S.R. and Africa (London, 1964, specially chapter II. On the present attitude of some Chinese Communist officials in regard to the same matter, see An African Student in China, London, 1963. See also, in connection with race prejudice in general, including its projection in politics, Margaret Grant, editor, South Asia Pacific crisis, New York, 1964.

10. Leopold Sedar Senglor, op. cit.