Segregation or miscegenation: the dilemmas of eugenics in Brasil in the first Decades of the 20th

Abstract

The eugenics moviment was born at the end of the 19th century, in Englad, with Francis Galton (1822-1911) as its main protagonista; in Brazil, the arrival of eugenics movement took  place at the turn of 19th to the 20th century, but it gained capillarity from the leading role of Renato Kehl (1889-1974). Eugenics supporters believed in its effectiveness to eliminate groups the presented abnormal behaviors, through birth control policies, creation of spaces for segregation, physical elimination and other methods. According to the history of eugenics, this article aims to discuss the factors that led to the birth of eugenics in Europe and the USA. In Brazil, we will try to demonstrate that although eugenics was received by intellectuals, doctors and those in line with eugenic precepts, however, eugenics was a fundamental mechanism to objectify segregation, miscegenation and elimination of black people, within Brazilian society. Such actions were carried out to constitute a Brazilian people, which in the opinion of eugenicists should be white and, at the same time, respond to the transformations that the country was being theater, that is, a context of modernization. In this way, the ideas of eugenicists were echoed in the articles published in the “Boletins de Eugenia”, a vehicle that had wide circulation between 1929 and 1933 in Brazil.