[1] The piece deals with the controversial racial theories of the late nineteenth century, and the phenomenon of the search for the gradual "branqueamento" of the generations of the same family through miscegenation.

[3] The painting is the fruit of a moment of post-emancipation,[4] marked by the adhesion of racialism in the public sphere and the "necessity" of actions in relation to the destiny of the black and mixed population in the free and republican order.

[8] Seated are the child's mother, who carries her on her knees, and a man with crossed legs – supposedly the white husband and responsible for the "bleaching" of the offspring.

[10] In addition, it is notable that the two characters who do not have white skin are women: the mother and the grandmother, establishing a color opposition to the baby and the father.

[9] The whole composition is strengthened when the viewer realizes that the ground on which the man treads is stone, showing an "evolution" in relation to the bare earth the women's feet touch.

[11] The period in which the work was produced was marked by intense scientific mobilizations; however, in referring to the biblical episode narrated in the book of Genesis, The Redemption of Ham seems to bet more on religion than science to corroborate its perspective.

As Tatiana Lotierzo and Lilia Schwarcz point out in the article "Gender, Race and Whitening Project: The Redemption of Cam" the adult women in the painting are disposed as if there was voluntarism from them in the process of laundering which sought to extinguish their own ethnic group.

[13] In the nineteenth century, the idea of society "whitening" (Portuguese: branqueamento) spread in Brazil, as an ideology which sought to erase black features from the Brazilian population.

[17] This pattern was based on the racialist thesis that the Europeans were the possessor of the greatest beauty, civilizational competence and health when compared to the "other races", the black (African), "red" (Indigenous) and "yellow" (Asian).

Some well-known names were part of the group:[17] Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho,[16] Olavo Bilac,[19] Alfredo Elli, Belisário Penna, Vital Brazil, Arthur Neiva, Luís Pereira Barreto, Antonio Austregésilo, Juliano Moreira, Afrânio Peixoto[17] and Monteiro Lobato.

In it, the painter himself appears as a character who recounts his visit on a planet where there is a policy of reproduction controlled by the state - the Agricultural Army and the Humanitarian Sisters - all white volunteers.

Even though it is a book of fiction, Brocos makes explicit his eugenic and racist ideas when, in one of the excerpts of the work, he says that humanity was not satisfied, because there still had to be a "unification of races".

In this context comes the eugenics and whitening as mentioned earlier, which proposed miscegenation as a solution, leaving the population with an increasingly European profile.

Lacerda's work, considered one of the main exponents of the "whitening thesis", came out in defense of the miscegenation, presenting the positivity of this process in Brazil and showing the supposed superiority of the white races in relation to the blacks and the indigenous.