Combating the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil |
Combating the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil
Primary Source: The Indiana University Undergraduate Journal of History
Volume IV: Issue I, Fall 2013
Page 17-22
While Brazil and the United States share a history of slavery, the changes to race relations in Brazil following emancipation differ greatly from the African American experience in the United States. The United States continuously enacted discriminatory laws against people of color such as Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. From this emerged a society with government-institutionalized racism. In contrast, Brazil did not experience the same type of institutionalized racism and did not have overtly racist discriminatory laws. This is not to say that Afro-Brazilians did not struggle for social and racial equality following emancipation; rather, Brazil saw substantial differences in their racial social hierarchy due to their unique reasons for emancipation. Out of this emerged the opinion that racial prejudice and stratification existed more along the lines of wealth and class as opposed to the color of one’s skin. Sociologist Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães wrote in his essay “The Misadventures of Nonracialism in Brazil” that “in Brazil racism developed in a different way, present in social practice – a racism of attitudes – but unrecognized by the legal system and denied by the nonracialist discourse of nationality.”1 Hence, a myth of racial democracy and inclusion emerged regarding Afro-Brazilians. Namely, this myth propagates that racism and inequality were not as prevalent in Brazil as they were in the United States and that blacks experienced little to no racial oppression…
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Tags: Primary Source, Primary Source: The Indiana University Undergraduate Journal of History, Rebecca Pattillo