On racial democracy, grammatical violence, and hinge certainties: how a myth becomes a rule in the brazilian imaginary

Abstract

This article investigates how the so-called hinge epistemology, developed by Wittgenstein, can shed light on the persistence of colonialism within Brazilian racial structures by critically taking the myth of racial democracy and the ideology of whitening as analytical axes. We argue that these narratives function as hinge certainties — foundational, unquestioned propositions that shape a particular worldview and, in this case, organize and guide social practices and ethno-racial hierarchies. Drawing on postcolonial theories (Quijano, 1992; Munanga, 2020), we maintain that such epistemological hinges sustain racial domination in the following ways: (1) the naturalization of miscegenation as a synonym for harmony conceals deep material inequalities and the grammatical violence of colonialism; (2) epistemicide (Carneiro, 2023) erases Black imaginaries by imposing a Eurocentric “mystified image”; and (3) the “narcissistic pact of brown Blackness” (Andrade, 2023) reveals assimilation as a survival strategy in hegemonically white spaces.