Extract from Order and Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic, by Gilberto Freyre:
Amilcar Armando Botelho de Magalhães (b. 1880 in the interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro) states that he has been an abolitionist from a tender age. “I feel that it is a sign of backwardness to pretend to find supremacies among races whose development has been simultaneous and along parallel lines. But without having the slightest prejudice, I can recognize the inferiority of the Negro, who is superior only in a degree of emotionality. All the white elements and all the aborigines, on the other hand, given equal conditions of space and time, have made greater achievement in the progress of their civilization.” As for Brazil: “I believe that there is no real racial problem in Brazil as such and that the natural tendencies of individual selection, according to biological and sociological principles, will result in an amalgam and in an increasing stability. What is needed is to facilitate racial inbreeding and to avoid, through adequate measures, the perpetuation of basic types, Indian or Negro, as separate entities apart from the whites. But this fusion is possible only on the lower levels of these races, among the workers, the peasants, the persons of least education.” As for the personal question: “I would repudiate and do everything possible to prevent miscegenation within my own family. I have already done so in one specific instance. Such things are highly prejudicial.”
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