From The Black Agenda Report. “Brazil has the second largest black population in the world, only after Nigeria. Still, black history is a very recent discipline in schools. The country is considered one of the most unequal societies, where blacks are 90% in the poorest classes. But, nonetheless, we don’t attack government programs that benefit black people, because we don’t have them on such a large scale as the US has. And they are new programs, as almost everything done to benefit blacks has come in recent years.
“There are two reasons for me to list invisibility as the most significant difference between American and Brazilian racism: First, because invisibility is a secular, regular, ordinary custom, the most common form through which discrimination spreads among the population against black people. Brazilian society practices “non-existent” racism, as part of a collective bad character of Brazilian moral life. And its main property is to be diffuse, underground, disguised, treacherous and, so, very difficult to combat. How does one fight against a ghost? In general, Brazilian society believes so little in the existence of racism that some white people get offended when confronted with their own racist practices, as they like to say and believe that they are liberals. The second reason: being so, it is the best example to show how deep racism is in Brazilian whites. It is so entrenched in everyday life that nobody who is white will bother about being polite, educated, with Black people. We all know that, in the US, blacks sometimes are “invisible,” but, in Brazil, invisibility is the real racism.
TheStateOf . . . Brazil. So many brothers have been going to Brazil, I (J) would be interested to hear their opinions on this. I’ve never been but hope to go soon. I think the article makes some huge generalizations.
