Origin of Lusotropicalism
In Brazil, the racial ideology that underpinned slavery was that the slaves, primarily of African negro origin, were inherently inferior of higher cultural achievement, and could only be used for labor in tropical environments. The Brazilian aboriginals proved not to be strong enough to withstand diseases from outside the New World nor decimation by the Europeans. Once slavery was abolished, the Brazilian elite realized that industrialization was the next phase of development and they were faced with a population that according to their ideologies was incapable of being an industrial worker. A new ideology was necessary. Lusotropicalism claimed that the mestizo in the tropics was superior to both European and Negro, and thus the only population capable of industrial labor in the Brazilian tropical environment.
"The book claimed that miscegenation had been a positive force in Brazil, and this argument helped turn the shame of a nation into a source of pride. The art, literature, and music created by Afro-Brazilian culture and miscegenation were suddenly held in great esteem. Racial mixing moved from a perceived liability to an asset, and Freyre credited the Portuguese tendency to miscegenation among colonized peoples for the uniqueness of Brazilian culture."
"Freyre turned the country's inferiority complex inside out and converted Brazil's multiracial past from a liability into an asset. ... They no longer needed to see scandal and shame in their racial mixture; instead they could look to their art, literature, music, dance, in short to their culture to discover a richness and a vitality that were a result of the fusion of races and civilizations."
"He argued that the Portuguese appreciation of tropical (non-European) values and peoples distinguished them as pioneers of modern tropical civilizations. His emphasis on Portuguese tolerance and assimilation of tropical values added a new dimension to the Portuguese ideology which, until then, had almost exclusively viewed the assimilation process in a unilinear fashion; that is assimilation had connoted the Europeanization of the Africans, not the reverse! Whenever African values and living patterns influenced the Portuguese, it was viewed as a setback."
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