The significance of race in Brazilian society has long been a controversial topic in Brazil. Until recently, despite the country's ethnic and racial diversity, official thinking refused to acknowledge the existence of minority groups, promoting the concept of the Brazilian "racial democracy" and denying absolutely the existence of racism or racial discrimination. If, in a country where blacks and mulattos form at least half of the population, there are few dark-skinned people at the upper levels of society - so the theory runs - this simply reflects past disadvantages, in particular poverty and lack of education
Myth
No one contributed more to the consolidation of this myth of racial brotherhood than the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre . In the early 1930s he advanced the view that somehow the Portuguese colonizers were immune to racial prejudice, that they...
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Reality
Many visitors to Brazil still arrive believing in the melting pot, and for that matter many leave without questioning it. It is undeniable that Brazil has remarkably little in the way of obvious racial tension ; that there are no legal forms of...
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