Prejudice And Racism In Brazil

Words: 807
Pages: 4

Majority of the African descendants living in the Americas all suffered from some type of discrimination that were based on their skin complexion and cultural ties that has been molded through their nation’s history. In this paper, I will be focusing on the main points the author describes in “A Question of Color” in The Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Brazil.
During the sixteenth century, the Americas received the highest influx of enslaved people that were brought over from Africa mainly to work on the sugar plantations or to be personal servants to the wealthy. Since then, the people who were brought over have created a world that is now turned into their own culture and heritage. Even though slavery had been abolished three hundred years
…show more content…
Racism in Brazil was something that doesn’t want to be talked about amongst the elites. Racism is much more subtle in Brazil than it would be in Dominican Republic, Haiti, or even the United States. Despite there being over 9 million African descendants in Brazil, the government in the early 1990’s, was pushing for racial mixing because it wanted to “whiten” the country. Mulattos were to be considered better than blacks and could pass off with white privileges in Brazil. In the 1970’s, the military regime was censoring anything that challenged the nature of race, which in reality dilutes any hard data that could prove the racism still existed. In 1977, the head of congress said that Brazil denied any form of racial prejudice in his country. He said your skin color didn’t deter you from your success in life but it depended on your individual effort and your good merits, which was far from the truth. Governmental own surveys showed the income gap amongst the different race groups were significant with education and occupational status widening the gap ever further. The problem was blacks and mulattos had less access to education and high-wage paying jobs. They were stuck in a cycle sociologist called: cumulative disadvantage. As black activist such as Unified Black Movement (UBM) who attempted to bring the racial discrimination to the table, but it wasn’t as successful because many were middle-class people and majority of the blacks that needed to be part of these organizations were poor and their main concern wasn’t discrimination but just surviving. This is what Luiza Buirros called, “the most successful raciest system in the