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Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil
In the 1933 publication The Masters and the Slaves , Brazilian scholar and novelist Gilberto Freyre challenged the racist ideas of his day by defending the “African contribution� to Brazil’s culture. In so doing, he proposed that Brazil was relatively free of most forms of racial prejudice and could best be understood as a “racial democracy.� Over time this view has grown into the popular myth that racism in Brazil is very mild or nonexistent.
This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians� views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?
Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.
This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians� views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?
Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.
278 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 9, 2016
I read this a week after reading Freyre, both for grad school, and the contrast in books reinforced the complexities of race in Brazil. The depth of fieldwork here is impressive and lends a lot of nuance to the experience of race and racism in the favela in Rio. However, I'm hesitant to extend this experience as fully to the rest of Brazil and also find myself wondering how much of the similarities to the US racial experience come because the author is American.
April 5, 2013
This is an excellent study of racism in Brazil. Sheriff makes a distinction that other scholars before her time had not made, that is the distinction between the descriptive and prescriptive claims of democracy racial. In this way she asserts that democracia racial is a myth and also a dream.
June 18, 2007
An AMAZING study of race in Brazil.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
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