Review Of Legal Suits In The Context Of The 1951 Anti-Discrimination Law

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Introduction Jerry Dávila’s “Challenging Racism in Brazil. Legal Suits in the Context of the 1951 Anti-Discrimination Law” and Paulina Alberto's “Para Africano Ver: African-Bahian Exchanges in the Reinvention of Brazil’s Racial Democracy, 1961-63” are articles that explore race relations in Brazil in the 20th century. Dávila examines how Afro-Brazilian activists challenged racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s through legal means. The article highlights the importance of the 1951 Anti-Discrimination Law in providing a legal basis for these challenges but also notes the limitations of the law and the challenges activists faced in its implementation. He argues that Afro-Brazilian activists used legal actions to protest racism in Brazil. …show more content…

The Brazilian government's initiatives to project a favourable image of Brazil abroad and foster contacts in unexplored markets. She argues these dialogues had a considerable impact on the emergence of a new racial discourse in Brazil. She points out that Afro-Brazilian activists tried to establish ties with African leaders and intellectuals because they considered themselves part of a greater African diaspora. These discussions posed a challenge to Brazil's prevailing racial democracy narrative, which claimed that racism did not exist there. Instead, they emphasized the forms of prejudice encountered by Afro-Brazilians and their attempt to form ties with other marginalized …show more content…

The declaration of a certain type of Brazilian Africanness by Bahian intellectuals and religious leaders at this time also changed the shape and substance of the nation's racial democracy ideals. Before reading the article, I did wonder if its size would come to be a problem, with the author trying to encompass so much in forty-one pages that the article would seem aimless. While I do think that the article goes over an amount of information that can be confusing at times, I enjoyed the way Alberto displayed and shared information. I found engaging how the author used the story of Romana da Conceição. Through her visit, we gain insight into the intricate ways in which a larger narrative of non-elite interactions between Brazil and Africa played a role in shaping state behaviour. The Brazilian democracy was undergoing a tumultuous period, with right-wing military factions amassing against the center-left government that had gained power through a groundswell of popular mobilization. Nonetheless, significant developments unfolded within Brazil's borders during the narrow

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