Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
by Carl N. Degler
Summary
Carl N. Degler compares two societies built on slavery, Brazil and the United States, to explain why they emerged from it with such different systems of race relations. Degler follows the demographic and legal record of both countries from the colonial period through the abolition of slavery, in Brazil in 1888 and in the United States after the Civil War, tracing how Portuguese colonization produced a society more willing to recognize people of mixed ancestry as a distinct group standing between white and Black, while English colonization in North America hardened over time into a rigid binary line that treated any African ancestry as disqualifying from whiteness.
Degler argues that this difference shaped everything that followed: patterns of manumission, the legal status of free people of color, and eventually the different racial classifications the two countries carried into the twentieth century. He draws on census records, legal codes and demographic studies from both countries to build the comparison, treating race not as a fixed biological fact but as a social and legal category each society constructed differently out of the same basic institution of slavery.
Degler writes as a historian working comparatively across two national literatures most American scholars of race had never put side by side, and reading the book means following that comparison in genuine depth, law and demography as much as narrative. It suits a reader interested in understanding American racial categories as a specific historical choice, thrown into sharper relief by a neighboring society that made a different one.
Historical Context & Significance
Neither Black nor White won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Degler, who taught at Vassar College before moving to Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1990, later served as president of the American Historical Association in 1986. The book helped open comparative slavery studies as a serious field within American history, encouraging later historians to test assumptions about race in the United States against the different systems that developed elsewhere in the Americas, and reviewers credited Degler with real rigor in balancing two very different national archives rather than treating either country as a simple model for the other. Degler also led the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association during his career, leadership that reflected how central his comparative approach to slavery had become to the wider profession.