Racial Democracy in Brazilian Marriage: Toward a Typology of Negro-White Intermarriage in Five Brazilian Communities

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Social Science on 2012-08-22 05:24Z by Steven

Racial Democracy in Brazilian Marriage: Toward a Typology of Negro-White Intermarriage in Five Brazilian Communities

The American Catholic Sociological Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer, 1960)
pages 146-164

Austin J. Staley, O. S. B.

Revised version of paper read at the Twenty-first Annual Convention of the American Catholic Sociological Society, Mundelein College, Chicago, Illinois, August 31-September 2, 1959.

It was Robert Park who summed up many observers’ impression of racial democracy in Brazil: “the people of Brazil have, somehow, regained that paradisaic innocence, with respect to differences of race.” After completing his study of intermarriage in São Paulo, Samuel Lowrie concluded that Brazil is “one of the largest, if not the largest, melting-pot of the races.” Brazil has been singled out as the great “laboratory of the races,” which offers a “magnificent field for experimental studies on the contacts of races and cultures.” No facet of the Brazilian culture has been studied as intensively by sociologists and anthropologists as the area included under race relations.

There is a near consensus of opinion among students of race relations at least on one issue. The crucial problem of race relations is that of Negro-white intermarriage. The common denominator and central nerve of the Negro problem is racial intermarriage. The ultimate case against integration and racial democracy…

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