Racism In Brazil Analysis

The heralded ideology that the Brazil, unlike the United States, experienced a unique miscegenation, pervasive mixing, and birth of the mulatto, thus eradicating racism provided the language to cite this phenomenon as the answer to all. Of course, this simplistic and false explanation contributes to the present day phenomenon of post-racialism. Race is not openly discussed because to be Brazilian means to have overcome racism. In Brazil, although Vargas did implement greater democratic policies, there was no significant inside-out restructuring of the government or rupturing of the social order that comes with Revolution. Because racial democracy was a “reality” only socially and in speech, then it constituted a surface level racial shift.

Almost 70 percent of people living in extreme poverty are black. And they are almost totally absent from positions of power. All 39 ministers of President Dilma Rousseff’s cabinet are white, except one: the head of the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality. In Brazil, econometric analyses reveal that brown, and especially black Brazilians, earn about 20 to 25 per cent less than whites with the same background, when age, work experience, educational level, sex, region, class origin and labor market characteristics are considered. Siblings of different skin colors, not an uncommon phenomenon in a country like Brazil, have different levels of education, where darker siblings are more likely to drop out of school at earlier ages than their white brothers or sisters. All factors besides discriminatory treatment based on race (by teachers, parents, etc.) are strictly taken into account. The consistent findings on social mobility, the econometric analysis of income and the comparison of education levels in siblings of different skin color demonstrate persistent racial discrimination (Hanchard,1999). The numbers clearly tell a story of economic segregation as well: Not a single one of the companies listed on Brazil’s primary stock exchange has a Black CEO. Further, a survey done this year by research institute IBGE found that Black or mixed-race Brazilian workers earn around half (about $862 per

They make up 62 percent of all people incarcerated nationwide. The oldest university affirmative action program has existed for 10 years, but it still faces strong criticism. One of the biggest Brazilian newspapers has taken a firm editorial stance against racial quotas in universities, holding that a system encouraging socioeconomic diversity would be enough. Over the last few decades, Brazil has begun to introduce affirmative-action programs, African diaspora history is being taught in schools, and a cabinet-level position has been created to deal with racial equality. But critics sometimes regard quotas as reverse discrimination, or worry that they might incite racial hatred in our imagined “racial democracy”.

Even though Brazil 's anti-racism laws target such incidents, which have long been considered un-Brazilian, subtle individual and institutional practices maintain and reproduce racial inequalities. Idiomatic racialized ways of thinking, in which racial hierarchies are accepted as natural, are as culturally embedded in Brazil as they are throughout the world. The statistics listed above have barely scratched the surface of racial inequality that pervades every corner of Brazil- especially evident in the favelas- that we have discussed extensively throughout the