Quote: (08-06-2013 06:16 AM)Moma Wrote:
Samseau made a comment that mixing will do away with racism etc and I don't know if I agree with that. Brasil is an extremely mixed country and although I haven't gone there..it appears that the country is represented by the lightest group or the ones who are most European etc.
I don't think Brasil and the US can be compared as equals with respect to the topic of race. They've both had historically distinct ways of dealing with that issue.
In the case of Brazil, I think the reason why you find economic differences between people generally based on skin color is because of the absence of racism of the kind found in the US, not because of it. However, that's precisely the reason why Brazil is more socially advanced than the US in terms of race.
Brazil was late in abolishing slavery: 1889 (the last country in the Americas to do so). And after slavery ended, no program arose to promote the integration of blacks, which was an ironic byproduct of Jim Crow in the US - it forced blacks of all kinds to fight for economic and social equality, hence today blacks in the US being the most economically empowered kind in the world.
In Brazil, when blacks began migrating to urban areas, black women played a crucial role because they could get jobs there, particularly as maids. The men moving from the countryside to the cities formed the first wave of marginalized people, the first slums. So it took a long time to integrate blacks into a changing capitalist, market-based society. They had very low levels of education and remained mostly in the informal sector. This is a marked contrast from the millions of European immigrants who moved to Brazil during the 20th century, and whom possessed industrial skills, hence their prominence in the handling of many of the country's affairs.
Brazil never had what has always been commonplace in the US: races characterized legally as separate groups. They never had any equivalent of Jim Crow or legal segregation after the end of slavery.
Brazil also doesn’t have the sense of racial distinctions by blood. They never had this idea that one drop of “colored” blood makes a person “non-white.” The largest self-reported category in their census is simply "Brazilian."
In fact, the United States is the only country in the Western hemisphere that instituted the "one-drop rule." The US is also the only country to have instituted Jim Crow segregation laws following the end of slavery (for nearly 100 years officially, and still de facto in many places). Meanwhile, Brazilians were allowed to mix and integrate following the abolishing of slavery, and many, in fact, did just that. It is hard in Brazil to tell another’s precise lineage by appearance, because there are many mixed-race people with many shades of skin color. But the important thing is that no one cares. This puts the country in an odd situation. It allows it some social flexibility, but it also disguises prejudice. Its relatively liberal attitudes lead many to think that there are no significant problems, but this is not so.
Economic inequality in Brazil is certainly higher than in the US, but social attitudes towards race, on a whole, are definitely much better. I don't think most people who are deeply familiar with both cultures would tell you otherwise. You can even see in the televnovelas the presence of black males engaging in steamy sex scenes with beautiful women who are, for lack of a better term, "white." That's simply not the case in the US. Blacks in the US are better off economically and educationally than their Brazilian counterparts, but that's not due to racism, but the fact that the US has done a better job to improve economic opportunity for all (thanks to the countless social movements from different groups demanding for equality in this country). A big reason for that is that most blacks and people in Brazil generally identify as "Brazilians" but not as belonging to one race, unlike Americans. The official data for tracking racial disparity simply hasn't been there to the extent that you find in the US, but that's been changing in recent times.
The influence of African culture in Brazil is higher than any country outside of Africa. Brazil has more people of some level of African descent than any country in the world after Nigeria.
No one is saying there is no racism in Brazil, but as a black man, I'd feel more comfortable just about anywhere in that country, controlling for language and economic circumstance, than in many parts of the US where racism and racial animosity is endemic (most of the deep south, etc).
Another important fundamental difference is that in Brazil they don't have a “white culture” and “black culture” like we have in the US. Their music is black and white, and so is the food. The culture is essentially mixed, blended. Blacks became more accepted as part of Brazilian heritage because of the arts, and because of sports. They had integrated professional sports teams LONG before the US integrated theirs. Just have a look at Brazil's first world cup team and then go study when the US finally integrated MLB and the NBA. Brazil's greatest novelist, Machado de Assis, was a mulatto, but nobody identifies him that way. He didn’t write “black novels” as far as most people there are concerned; he wrote Brazilian ones.
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