Teófilo Reis, Ph.D.

As a newer member of our community, there may be folks who aren’t familiar with you yet. To you, what are some of the things that you deem most important for us to know about you as a fellow community member?

It's important to know that I am somewhat skeptical of disciplinary boundaries and that really defines my work and it also speaks to who I am and how I see myself because although my research is about race, categorizing people and putting people into boxes, when it comes to thinking of disciplines, I know that disciplines are creations of the human mind. We created the disciplines to help us organize our knowledge. But we shouldn't believe disciplinary boundaries that much because the world is way more complicated than each discipline, than what we see through our specific disciplines. That informs a lot of my scholarship and also who I am and how I see the world because my ultimate goal is to live in a better world where you would have justice in multiple forms- racial justice, gender justice. To achieve this goal, this is not the work of one single discipline. One thing that is important about me is this suspiciousness concerning rigid disciplinary boundaries and a constant opening to interdisciplinary work because the ultimate judge is the world. The ultimate judge of our theories is the world. I do value and I try [to] practice this open mindedness to understand the world as it is and act on it. 

Since coming to Trinity one year ago, what has been something that has surprised you?

Not surprisingly, the amount of interdisciplinary work we do here. I won't say I was expecting that. Trinity is my first experience [at] a liberal arts college, so I was really excited about this idea. [I thought] I'll be in a place where people strive to offer a comprehensive education, and ideally, I would see that comprehensiveness in people's research, a lot of interdisciplinary work. So I was expecting [that] but frequently, our expectations do not meet reality or reality does not meet our expectations. I was surprised to see that, indeed, we see a lot of interdepartmental collaboration here and that makes me really happy. 

I'm really surprised by how interested many students are. I've had Incredible students. This is only my third semester and I've had many students who are really interested. They do the readings very carefully and they use them in my courses as lenses through which they can look at the world. This shows a real engagement with the text. It's not superficial engagement. It's not just like, “Okay, I'm reading this because this random person wrote this, this was deemed important, so I need to consume this text, and then it's over.” No, I see students connecting the threads and really thinking about the world. So that's something that really surprised me, positively, of course. It's something that I was expecting, but I didn't know whether it was realistic for me to expect that or not. It came as an excellent surprise. 

Although you are a professor of Philosophy here at Trinity, you recently obtained your Ph.D in Sociology. Congratulations! What led you to pursue this second doctorate and how do you see your work being informed by both disciplines?

Oh, this requires a somewhat long answer. So my field is the philosophy of race, and to my sociology supervisors’ dismay, I see myself as a philosopher of race who does sociologically informed work. I do not see myself as a sociologist, despite my background in sociology because the type of questions I ask are questions usually asked by philosophers, and many of my conversation partners are in philosophy departments, so the type of insight I offer is closer to philosophy than sociology. Although I do need sociology because I don't engage with race as an abstraction, but I want to see how race actually works in the real world and theorize from there. Some areas of philosophical practice have this tendency to be extremely abstract, and we can easily get lost in abstraction when we're doing philosophy. As someone who has a background in math, I have a taste for abstraction. Sociology is keeping me grounded. I can combine the contextual and the real in the sense of the actual phenomenon of race that I gain through sociology, and combine it with the more abstract approach that I have in philosophy, and, of course, all of that is also informed by history. So that's one of the reasons why I decided to pursue this second PhD in sociology. 

Another reason is that I couldn't study philosophy of race in Brazil when I made my first attempt at a PhD in philosophy, and that started 11 or 12 years ago. The phrase ‘philosophy of race’ wasn't even a thing in the Brazilian academy then. There were some people working in what we nowadays call philosophy of race, but it wasn't very well known or even acknowledged as real philosophy in Brazilian academia. When I tried to do that as part of the main topic of my PhD, I encountered some pushback and I had to find other possibilities. Back then, while philosophy wasn't very friendly to the discussion of race, we had already, in Brazil, enormous scholarship on race in sociology. So I found among the sociologists, a community that was welcoming to my topic, and with whom I could actually engage in serious conversation about race and that's another reason why I decided to pursue this degree in sociology. 

My degree in philosophy is from CUNY Graduate Center in New York. I do not encourage anyone to pursue two PhDs because it's a lot of work, but I have to say that I learned a lot from participating in two communities, in two different countries, [in] two different disciplines. I learned so much from being in these two different contexts that allowed me to look at race in ways that I don't think I [could’ve] look[ed] at race had I [not] pursued these two degrees in these two different areas. The most interesting things I've ever written and [that] I'm writing only exist because I am in constant dialog with these two communities. I'm also signaling that although I don't consider myself a sociologist, I do intend to keep the conversation with the sociologists [going] because [they are] excellent conversation partners and I keep learning from them and I heard that they also learn from me. That's the goal in academic work, right? We exchange knowledge and we learn from each other, and our knowledge of specific topics grows from there. 

In September, you participated on a panel here at Trinity titled “Reckoning with Facism in the 21st Century” and presented on Brazil’s adoption of fascist values, infatuation with Donald Trump, and the state of Brazil's political landscape in the last decade. Can you give a brief overview of what you have found and what do you think is on the horizon in these areas? 

So, I realized over time that I'm becoming some sort of brazilianist. That's a real surprise. Ten years ago, if you asked me or told me, “Oh, you will be a brazilianist in the future,” I would assume that you had lost your mind. But here I am, on my way [to] becoming a brazilianist, and although this is surprising, it's not unexpected because as a philosopher of race, I do a bit of comparative work and in my dissertations, I focus on Brazil and the US and these two countries, alongside with South Africa, are sometimes compared as characteristically difficult, intricate types of racism. 

So it's not unexpected that I would try and understand Brazil as a whole, because to understand race in a context, you need a good understanding of the entire context. Race in Brazil is a fundamental topic. When we think of the image that Brazil has created [of] itself, race is a central element. There’s this ideology of racial democracy. Sometimes, I compare it to the idea of color blindness in the US, not because they are similar in what they look like, but [because of] what they do, the color blindness discourse would not work in Brazil because this idea of racial democracy is part of the the self image that Brazil created [of] itself. So, what is this idea for racial democracy? It was popularized in the 1950s as this idea that in Brazil, people were [so] racially mixed that each of us have blood [from everyone], white blood, black blood and indigenous blood. Therefore, we are this melting pot. Each individual is mixed, so you can't even really tell who's white, who's black, who's native. However, when you analyze income distribution, you will see a disproportionate amount of white population in the top tiers. That forces us to ask a question. How is this idea of racial democracy a good description of this reality when the data tells another story?

This idea of racial democracy went through multiple phases, so nowadays it is in many spaces. It is described as the myth of racial democracy, but the idea persists and it does a lot of theoretical and practical work. It's not a surprise that in this scenario, this type of justification for the racial and social inequalities would be used by authoritarian regimes to explain why things are the way they are and why they should keep being as they are. So it's fascinating that during the civil military dictatorship in Brazil that lasted from 1964 to 1985, the dictatorship adopted the discourse of racial democracy as the official discourse on race in Brazil. We have a dictatorship saying, “Oh, we are a racial democracy.” Dictatorships and democracy, they don't mix but in this case, we have a dictatorship saying, “Yes, we are a racial democracy” because that discourse was mobilized to shut down any conversation about racism in the country, to the point that saying, “there's racism here” was understood as being anti-Brazilian, and maybe communist, and therefore you should not talk about that. You can see how race can be mobilized by authoritarian and fascist like discourses to determine what type of conversation is allowed and what type of vision the country has of itself and what kind of future the country wants to pursue. In the event you mentioned, I tried to provide some background to understand the effects of this type of discourse in Brazil, and how it informed the political scenario in the past decade, when we had the rise of this figure, Jair Bolsonaro, who was Brazil's far right president from 2019 to 2022 and although he's no longer in power, he is still a major political player in the Brazilian scenario.

What do you think is on the horizon in these areas?

I think we will see something interesting happening in multiple parts of the world. In Brazil, we can already see that some groups are already very, very excited. Bolsonaro himself is very excited about the future. As of now, he cannot run for presidency in the upcoming 2026 presidential election. Bolsonaro cannot run because of a decision from our Electoral Court. However, there will be a lot of pressure for that to change and he's very excited with Trump's win because he thinks that can have an impact on him being allowed to run once again for presidency. I expect a similar thing to happen in most other countries as well because of the rise of far right politics or groups. This is a global phenomenon and for those of us who understand that this type of thinking or politics is dangerous because of its connections to forms of dehumanization, we have an enormous challenge we are facing now. While we've been facing this challenge for a long time, this challenge changes. It's keen, so we are facing a new iteration of this challenge.

In the Brazilian case, we have to understand why this type of discourse is so seductive to so many people and how we can reconcile the ability to have hope for a better future, because at the end of the day, one of the reasons why I think this idea,[racial democracy] lasted for so long is that it would tell people that they matter. No matter who they are, they matter. They participate in this Brazilian soul. So, it doesn't matter whether you are black, native, indigenous or white person, you are part of brazilianness. Being seen is an important thing in politics and we have to understand that racial democracy tells people, you are part of something important, so you matter.

So, this idea of racial democracy and other types of discourse is that they can resist for a long time and even though they can resist for a long time, they can offer some source of hope to large swaths of the population. There is a lesson to be learned there for those of us who are trying to fight discourses of dehumanization. We have to ask ourselves how we are actually communicating [with] people and whether we are making ourselves understandable. We need to have a willingness to really engage in dialogue and not have this ivory tower attitude of speaking down to people and what we are offering in terms of hope because when you think of the idea of racial democracy can be understood and this is something I talk about in my dissertations. 

There is one reading of racial democracy, that is what we call in philosophy, normative or prescriptive. Reading racial democracy not as a descriptive element, not that Brazil is this type of society where race is not really important for your personal success, but reading it normatively as a goal to be achieved. So this offers hope because it says, “Well, ideally in the future, you should not worry about your race in terms of your probability of succeeding in whatever you choose to do in your life because race should be meaningless in that sense.” Most people would agree with that, unless those who are really convinced that racism is a correct form of thinking, which I want to think that most people are not, then this idea of a future in which race will not play a determinant role in your chances [of] success, embracing racial democracy makes sense, because who wouldn't embrace that as an ideal? 

But the problem is [that] the same discourse can be understood as an ideal and a description of the present, and we just adopt the reading of the concept as a description of the present and use that to decide on our next steps, chances are that we will never reach that ideal goal. So this ideal and hopes are important because they give us some justification to keep working, because life is hard, and so we need to be able to imagine a better future. Some discourses, they offer that and people in the same political arena as I am, we have to understand that having hopes and dreaming is part of what we all need. We must be able to offer that but not just realistic and easy hopes. Thinking about the Brazilian scenario, the hope is that the ultimate goal in someone's life is just to buy things. 

It's time to think of more fundamental things or have what this amazing author, Kim Tolbert, calls radical hope because we need to imagine a future where people are respected and valued as human beings, not according to how much money they have in their bank account, and where people can actually live a minimally decent life without having to work all the time or subject themselves to horrible conditions just to be alive. The type of radical hope that we need to offer and when we don't, other groups [will] and even if that other radical hope is not doable, it's not a surprise that many people will cling to that promise because we need hope. We need hope, but again, not this hope in the sense of, “Oh, I'll just hope that things will happen”, but a goal in life, a vision of a better future. In contemporary societies, I do think that understanding race and racial politics plays an important role in formulating this vision of a better future.