Quote: (08-06-2013 03:18 PM)Moma Wrote:
Quote: (08-06-2013 01:50 PM)Hencredible Casanova Wrote:
You really should visit Brazil to get a firsthand understanding of the social dynamic there. I've been there several times and even the most race-conscious people I know who have been will agree that racism as is known elsewhere is quite muted there.
Brazil is the most socially advanced country I've ever been to personally. Keep in mind it's not only a country with a large number of blacks but it also has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan and is home to the largest population of Lebanese people in the world (even more than in Lebanon). Yet you won't find racial/ethnic tension as it exists in most other parts of the world. The level of social cohesion in Brazil is pretty remarkable.
I will visit. I've wanted to ever since I was in the UK. And tell me, who holds the economic clout in the country? Is it as equally dispersed as the social climate you describe? Or is it in the graps of the usual few? I would love to see that and be proven wrong.
Brazil is a deeply unequal country period, just like many Latin American countries, regardless of how diverse they may or may not be.
Much of that inequality is a result of the persistence of the old colonial system following slavery which made land difficult to amass (wealthy descendants of original Portuguese settlers were given enormous tracts of land to save the colony in its earlier days from regional Spanish hegemony). That land ownership inequality has never been addressed until this day.
That's the thing about Brazil. As a black man from a relatively wealthy country you'd have a pretty awesome experience there where you would find race is not an obstacle or barrier to your goals.
Race isn't exactly a social identifier in Brazil, though class certainly is. To the extent the two relate has to do with historical reasons that I've already explained, which are similar to those that affect most Brazilians generally. The Italian immigrants to the coffee region near Sao Paulo, for example, did jobs that blacks once did.
But the notion that there's widespread conscious racism or even a cultural obsession with race as you find in the United States and elsewhere is untrue.