The Changing World of Brazilian Race Relations?

Abstract

Brazil has occupied a privileged position in discussions of comparative race relations and racializations since its earliest days. Though Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery—doing so in 1888, two years after Cuba—the quality of Brazilian race relations and the extent of racial mixture were topics of frequent commentary by travelers and nationals, in terms of the treatment of slaves, the possibilities for upward mobility for ex-slaves and their descendants, and, above all, its avoidance of the more vicious race relations order in the United States. Over the last three decades, a vigorous debate has emerged on the validity of the claims that Brazilian race relations are more benign than those in other parts of the hemisphere. At the same time, there is an increasing tendency to transcend the official and unofficial celebrations of what became popularly known as “racial democracy,” which ostensibly provided “equality of opportunity” for all individuals to participate in the process of race mixture, irrespective of their racial backgrounds (Bacelar and Caroso, 1998; Crook and Johnson, 1999).