Book Review/Compte rendu: Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Book Review/Compte rendu: Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Canadian Journal of Sociology
Volume 35, Number 1 (2010)
pages 189-191

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 304 pp. paper (978-0-8047-6278-6), hardcover (978-0-8047-6277-9)

Legacies of Race is a must-read for anyone who thinks they understand “race” in Brazil, since it successfully challenges many assumptions in the literature. It is also an important contribution to the literature on racial attitudes in the US, highlighting their distinctiveness. Finally, its discussion of the myth of racial democracy provides food for thought for debates on whether multiculturalist discourse can address emerging issues of racism in Canadian society.

For decades, foreign observers have wondered why the Brazilian Black Movement has had limited success mobilizing Brazilian blacks to fight for their rights, despite the existence of glaring inequalities correlated with skin color. Since the 1970s, social scientists have blamed this lack of black mobilization on the myth of “racial democracy” — the idea of Brazil as a unified mixed-race nation — used by Brazilian elites to downplay the extent of racial discrimination for most of the twentieth century. Scholars argued that black Brazilians failed to mobilize in large numbers because they were duped into thinking that racism was not a problem. Bailey demonstrates that this theory simply does not square with current survey data…

Read the entire book review here.

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