This paper examines the racial and ethnic composition of Brazil, tracing the historical roots of racism, the ideology of "whitening," and the socioeconomic inequalities faced by Afro-Brazilians. Drawing on scholarship by Bowser, Heringer, Daniel, Nascimento, and others, the paper compares Brazil's color-based classification system and its legal responses to racism — including the 2010 Racial Equality Statute — with racial dynamics in the United States. Topics covered include affirmative action in higher education, income and employment disparities by race, infant mortality, and the theory of ethnosympathy as a path toward cross-racial understanding in both nations.
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The paper demonstrates effective comparative analysis across two national contexts. Rather than treating Brazil and the United States as entirely separate cases, the author systematically identifies structural parallels — such as affirmative action backlash, income stratification by race, and disparities in educational access — while also highlighting where the two countries diverge in their racial classification systems and historical experiences. This technique allows the reader to understand Brazil's ethnic dynamics in a broader global frame.
The paper opens with a brief introduction establishing the comparative premise, then moves into a theoretical discussion of racism as a social construct. It transitions into side-by-side comparisons of race in the U.S. and Brazil, focusing on education and affirmative action, before examining Brazil's 2010 racial legislation. A dedicated section on Nascimento's research covers color classification, income, and health disparities in detail. The conclusion synthesizes the findings with a call for cross-cultural understanding.
The racial and ethnic composition of Brazilians is quite different from that of people in the United States, and unique in the world in many respects. How is the government dealing with ethnic and racial relations within this very large and culturally diverse country? This paper reviews the literature on the dynamics and history of this multi-ethnic, multi-racial South American nation. In addition, aspects of ethnicity and racial data in Brazil are compared and contrasted with those in the United States.
According to author Benjamin P. Bowser, racism is "a historic and cultural belief (in one race's inferiority and in another's superiority) that has been used by national elites" in order to maintain a kind of "social stratification" that leans in their favor (Bowser, 1995, p. 285). Racism has been "very useful" in "obscuring economic class interests by keeping opposing racial identities more important than class differences," Bowser writes (285). Moreover, racism provides a context "and explanation" as to why "race under specific conditions and circumstances triggers the human capacity to hate, fear other people," and treat other people with contempt (Bowser, 286).
In Brazil, even though racism is a crime, "punishable by imprisonment," it is not sufficient to "change behaviors," Rosana Heringer explains (Heringer, 1995, p. 205), and moreover it is not an easy task to arrest someone for racism in Brazil. Scientific research into racism used the U.S. pattern of relations between races "as a standard for comparison and contrast in their understanding of race in other societies, especially in Brazil," Heringer continues (209). In the U.S., racism was a "segregationist, conflictive, violent" pattern (known as Jim Crow); in this context, the rules of race were based on "biological reasoning that defined race" (Heringer, 209). However, in Brazil, the type of racism — as opposed to U.S. Jim Crow-style segregation — was based on economic differences, on "egalitarian laws," on an "etiquette of distancing," and on "an ambiguous but very complex system of identification based mainly upon color nuances" (Heringer, 209).
Racist theories imported from Europe helped shape attitudes in Brazil, the author continues. White blood was believed to possess a kind of purification power; it was thought capable of "exterminating black blood… [and hence] whitening was the response of a wounded national pride" in Brazil, and whitening was a way to "rationalize the feelings of racial and cultural inferiority" that 19th-century racism had produced (Heringer, 219).
Speaking of color differentiation in Brazil, the population census is taken not so much by "race" or "ethnic origin" as by color — "skin color, hair color and texture, and eye color" (Piza et al., 1999, p. 37). Some researchers have been able to document "social strategies that mask racism (through faulty or nonexistent data collection on color in the censuses) while proclaiming Brazil's apparent racial tolerance evidenced by the miscegenation process," Piza explains (38).
Author G. Reginald Daniel covers a wide swath of social and cultural viewpoints in his analysis of race in the U.S. and racial issues in Brazil. Skin color is part of the puzzle of how things work in both countries, the author explains. Daniel notes that African-American women are often subjected to "double oppression" in relation to both African-American men and men of European ethnicity; darker-skinned African-American men face a "double oppression" of their own. For African-American women with very dark skin, theirs is a "triple oppression" based on "gender, race, and color" (Daniel, 2007, p. 206). There is yet another layer of social stratification for darker-skinned African-American women who also live in low-income communities — a "quadruple oppression" involving race, class, gender, and color (206).
In Brazil, black women are economically and socially oppressed in ways similar to American black women: they have higher mortality rates, "suffer greater matrimonial instability, receive less education," and earn lower salaries (Goldani, 1999, p. 182). Similar to Black American women, Brazilian black women have increasingly become heads of household — twenty percent of Brazilian women now head their households, up from 10% thirty years ago (Goldani, 182).
Despite these parallels, there are important differences. In the United States, since Americans in great numbers have repudiated "white supremacist ideology" and have experienced the Civil Rights Movement, many doors have been opened to the black working class through affirmative action and "by expanding opportunities for educational achievement," Daniel explains (206). As a result, up to 30% of African Americans have "achieved upper- and middle-class status" (206).
Regardless of whether Brazilians of African descent identify as black or brown, they are not faring as well as those with lighter skin (Nascimento, 45). For example, 30% of black families earn only "up to 1/4 of the minimum wage" and 36% of brown families earn up to 1/4 of the minimum wage. (Brazil's minimum wage is approximately $327.00 per month.) Just 12% of black Brazilian families and 10.6% of brown families earn between one and two times the minimum wage. Only 0.8% of black families and 0.9% of brown families earn between five and ten times the minimum wage (Nascimento, 45). By contrast, 5.5% of white Brazilian families earn three to five times the minimum wage — a sharp contrast with families of African ethnicity.
Unemployment figures further illustrate these disparities. As of 2007 in Brazil, 6.6% of white workers were unemployed compared to 7.7% of black workers (including both pretos and pardos). In February 2009 in the U.S., 15.7% of Black workers were unemployed, 11.9% of Latino workers were unemployed, and 8% of white workers were out of work (Kirwan Institute). That data is skewed by the effects of the Great Recession, but even so, the racial disparity in employment is more pronounced in the U.S. than in Brazil. Some injustices are harder to compare directly across the two countries: in Brazil, 23% of Black people (compared with 7% of whites) "live in areas with inadequate water supply," and 48% of Black people (compared to 26% of whites) live in areas with "inadequate sewage facilities" (Nascimento, 47).
Perhaps the most telling socioeconomic comparison involves infant mortality rates. Infant mortality for Afro-Brazilian children up to one year old was "82% higher than for white children" (Nascimento, 48). In the U.S., 13 out of every 1,000 Black children die before their first birthday, compared with just 5.7 deaths per 1,000 white children (State Health Facts). These figures underscore the depth of racial health disparities in both nations, even when the specific figures differ.
Brazil is a country where "whiteness" lends a degree of respect — economically, culturally, and politically. The way in which that dynamic came to pass in this multicultural nation is quite different from the way in which whiteness emerged as the dominant culture in the United States, as this paper has shown. Through the comparative study of these two societies and their cultural and racial histories, a scholarly understanding can be achieved that is of great importance to both countries' futures. Knowledge, after all, is power, and understanding is the driver of that power.
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