Very interesting article.
This is easy for people to forget. All the mixed race people there are mixed because Portuguese slave masters were fucking black slaves like crazy as well as indigenous women. Not because people there now are mixing so much. You go up to the beach at Leblon and everybody looks white and rich, then go down to Copacabana beach and the skin hues are much darker and poorer looking. There's a surprising amount of self-segregation in Brazil. Especially for a country that touts itself as a racial democracy.
I do think though that Brazil handles interracial couples better than the US. I can tell this just from experience. If I'm anywhere in the US, even in liberal parts, being in company of white females in public always draws rubber-necking and gazes. While this didn't happen at all to me when I was in Brazil. Nobody seemed to notice or care. But racism in Brazil is a tough thing to grasp if you are used to American racism which is much more straight forward. For example, a few incidents happened to me within a 20 minute period in Lapa. I was about to walk into a restaurant where some friends were(white). The door guy was about to stop me from coming in, like I was a begger or something. Then we he saw I only spoke English and my friends were waving me over, he let me in. I sat down at the the table. There were some white Americans I'd made friends with as well as an attractive white Brazil woman and her husband. The white Brazilian woman started acting flirtateous and giving me kino right there in front of her boyfriend, but also saying some racist things, like that she doesn't see why the word "nigger" is offensive and that we Americans are way too sensitive and she uses racial terms to her non-white friends and nobody cares. I'm feeling like I'm in the twilight zone at this point. She then starts talking about sex and how she likes to mess around with girls too. She ended up inviting me to a BBQ party she was having in Santa Theresa and we exchanged info but that was the last I'd heard from her. Weird shit and kind of sums up why the complexity of race in Brazil can be so hard for Americans to wrap their heads around.
Quote:Quote:
This idealization of Brazil, however, is
clearly disproved by an examination of both the history of miscegenation and statistics of interracial
marriages. The racial mixing of the country’s past was never based on relations of
equality and analysis of contemporary Brazil reveals the rarity of racial mixing due to continued
marginalization of the black community (especially women) and the persistence of racist
sentiment reflected in family values and the media.
This is easy for people to forget. All the mixed race people there are mixed because Portuguese slave masters were fucking black slaves like crazy as well as indigenous women. Not because people there now are mixing so much. You go up to the beach at Leblon and everybody looks white and rich, then go down to Copacabana beach and the skin hues are much darker and poorer looking. There's a surprising amount of self-segregation in Brazil. Especially for a country that touts itself as a racial democracy.
I do think though that Brazil handles interracial couples better than the US. I can tell this just from experience. If I'm anywhere in the US, even in liberal parts, being in company of white females in public always draws rubber-necking and gazes. While this didn't happen at all to me when I was in Brazil. Nobody seemed to notice or care. But racism in Brazil is a tough thing to grasp if you are used to American racism which is much more straight forward. For example, a few incidents happened to me within a 20 minute period in Lapa. I was about to walk into a restaurant where some friends were(white). The door guy was about to stop me from coming in, like I was a begger or something. Then we he saw I only spoke English and my friends were waving me over, he let me in. I sat down at the the table. There were some white Americans I'd made friends with as well as an attractive white Brazil woman and her husband. The white Brazilian woman started acting flirtateous and giving me kino right there in front of her boyfriend, but also saying some racist things, like that she doesn't see why the word "nigger" is offensive and that we Americans are way too sensitive and she uses racial terms to her non-white friends and nobody cares. I'm feeling like I'm in the twilight zone at this point. She then starts talking about sex and how she likes to mess around with girls too. She ended up inviting me to a BBQ party she was having in Santa Theresa and we exchanged info but that was the last I'd heard from her. Weird shit and kind of sums up why the complexity of race in Brazil can be so hard for Americans to wrap their heads around.