Mapping the Terrain of Brazilian Racism (original) (raw)

Race & Class

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Mapping the terrain of Brazilian racism

France Winddance Twine
Race Class 1997 38: 49
DOI: 10.1177/030639689703800304
The online version of this article can be found at: http://rac.sagepub.com/content/38/3/49.citation

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[1]

Committee on Version of Record and Appl 997 27, 2013
What is This? ↩︎

FRANCE WINDDANCE TWINE

Mapping the terrain of Brazilian racism*

The movimento negro (black movement) has not been successful in generating an anti-racist movement in contemporary Brazil. If a viable anti-racist movement hopes to generate grassroots support among working class Afro-Brazilians, then the activists will need to generate some consensus on what constitutes an act of racism. Contemporary scholars of racial inequality in Brazil have documented pervasive racism in several spheres of Brazilian life, including educational achievement, occupation, residence patterns and marriage preferences. 1{ }^{1} However, despite widespread racial inequality, there has been minimal contestation of various forms of institutional racism by non-elite AfroBrazilians. 2{ }^{2} Afro-Brazilian activists have commented upon the difficulty of generating grassroots support for anti-racist organising. For example, Abdias do Nascimento, who was the first Afro-Brazilian specifically committed to anti-racism elected to the Brazilian National Congress (1982-86), put it like this: 'the black movement expends enormous energies trying to convince its own people that their situation is due to racial discrimination. Continuously we must answer the question, does racism really exist in Brazil? 3{ }^{3}

Why do Brazilians continue to believe that they live in a racial democracy? What scholars have not addressed is whether their

[1]

France Winddance Twine is Assistant Professor in the Women Studies Program, University of Washington, Seattle.
- Excerpted from a chapter in Racism in a Racial Democracy: the maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). Based on interviews and field work conducted by the author and Jonathan Warren between January 1992 and February 1994 in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
  Race & Class, 38, 3 (1997) ↩︎

conceptualisations and measures of racism correspond to those employed by ordinary Brazilians who are not involved in activist organisations. One reason for this sustained faith in the democracia racial (racial democracy), I believe, is that racism is defined in ways that exclude more subtle and less violent forms of contemporary racism. Some forms of institutional racism do not constitute racism as predominantly understood in the community.

A nuanced analysis of everyday racism has to begin with the question of what constitutes an act of racism. What criteria do nonelite Brazilians employ when defining racism compared to the Brazilian and non-Brazilian scholars investigating this issue?

The discussion that follows is based on data obtained from taped interviews and casual conversations conducted between January 1992 and February 1994 with more than 150 residents of the small urban community of Vasalia, and is an attempt to map the ideological contours of local definitions of racism. To identify the gaps between local definitions of racism and those forms of racism identified by Brazilian and non-Brazilian researchers is, for Brazilian activists, a first step in the attempt to mobilise grassroots support for anti-racist movements. What emerged from the research is that definitions of racism among the working class I interviewed involved forms of racism which are not the most typical of those found in their community.

When asked to define racism, the Vasalians interviewed usually began by describing patterns of racially based social exclusion in the past, similar to those of the segregated US, pre-civil rights. 4{ }^{4} Moreover, they described conditions which involved formal, legal and violently enforced racial segregation, and would contrast contemporary social relations with the past. Like North Americans in the United States, residents emphasised links between sexual and social equality. In his description of social relations between blacks and whites in Indianola, Mississippi, in the 1930s, John Dollard wrote of:

The various Jim Crow customs which isolated coloured people socially … the commonest of these taboos are those against eating at a table with Negroes, having them in the parlor of one’s house as guests, sitting with them on the front porch of one’s home, and the like. Any of these acts would imply social equality instead of social inferiority for the Negro. The white caste view on this matter is simple and logically consistent. It is felt that social equality would lead to sexual equality. 5{ }^{5}

Afro-Brazilians who described themselves as morenos or mulattos argued that racism does not exist today, but that in the past there was racially

based social segregation. Their examples parallel those of the Jim Crow American South. For example, Jorge, a 20-year-old light-skinned AfroBrazilian who self-identifies as moreno described racism as what happened ‘in the case of my grandparents who told stories about the plantation owners, who used to prohibit blacks from entering their homes. Blacks had to remain in the slave quarters. [Whites] didn’t want to mix with them … Blacks were not allowed inside of their houses, no! Blacks had to eat outside. Now today we don’t have racism any more because blacks can enter the kitchens and eat in the homes of whites.’

Joaquin, the 67-year-old grandson of slaves and of a Portuguese plantation owner recounted how much progress had occurred in this community by describing the segregation of the public streets in the past. ‘There was a very straight row of trees. At the time, the poor people, and people of colour walked on one side and the white people on the other side. That is, the uppity white people walked on the upper side-walks of the street. Even the public festivals and dances, it was customary to remain segregated by colour.’

Tatiana, a 51-year-old Afro-Brazilian homemaker and a member of the only Afro-Brazilian family living on the fashionable main street of the town, described the social segregation that had existed during most of the community’s history.

Segregation ended … It’s been about twenty-five years, more or less. That is when it was all coming to an end. But at the club, where the people used to like to go, to the dances … There was a club for whites and a separate club for blacks. Even if a black were someone like the father of Ariana, a lawyer, he still couldn’t enter because he was black … And at the white dances, even if a black had money, they could not attend. If they were black they couldn’t enter. And the main street was divided along racial/colour lines. We were so accustomed to it that we didn’t even get worked up about it. Even the stores where we did our shopping. The stores on the other side of the street, we didn’t go there. One side was for whites and the other side was for blacks.

The sexual sphere

When asked to define racism, light-skinned Afro-Brazilian women who were dating Euro-Brazilian men emphasised the absence of legal prohibitions against dating and marriage with Euro-Brazilians. A typical response can be taken from an interview with Catarina, a 27-year-old self-identified morena, who teaches in primary school. She responded to the question, ‘Does racism exist in Vasalia?’ with ‘No. Dating between the races is not prohibited here. I have a white boyfriend.’

These comments illustrate that legal prohibitions against interracial marriage and opposition to interracial dating are one of the primary signifiers of racism in this community. Sexual access to Euro-Brazilians emerged as a central theme in interviews with Afro-Brazilians. Sexual equality and access to white partners as potential spouses is emphasised, not the distribution of power or economic resources. I found that all of the Vasalians interviewed employed the acceptance or rejection of interracial romance as criteria for evaluating whether racism existed in their community.

Valeria, the daughter of Dona Rosario, had been married for nine years when I was introduced to her. Her husband was a once destitute white man who had worked as a day labourer on a coffee plantation. He had moved up and managed to purchase his own truck. She argued that she had never witnessed any racism and that racism was not a problem in Vasalia because her white in-laws had not opposed her marriage and accepted her. ‘The majority of people in my husband’s family are white. None of them have ever treated me any differently because of my colour. Next to [my husband] I am much darker, but no one has ever made this an issue or said anything about race, that I noticed.’

When asked to define racism, both working-class Afro- and EuroBrazilians provided examples of support for, or opposition to, interracial sexuality and romance. Thus, when evaluating whether they had personally encountered racism, Afro- and Euro-Brazilians emphasised the question of interracial social relationships, particularly interracial romance and/or marriage. Carlucci, a tall, charismatic and dignified 23-year-old dark-skinned man, works as a clerk in the mayor’s office. He completed secondary school, but could not afford to pay for the vestibular, the one-year college preparation course in which middle- and upper-class Euro-Brazilians enrol to prepare for the university entrance exams. He described the rejection and disapproval he experienced when he attempted to date a white female friend:

Listen, this didn’t happen and don’t allow this to be known, but there is a senhor here called … I used to be very good friends with his daughter. And I was always invited to their house, understand. Her father was the type of guy who drank quite a bit, a drunk … He used to say these [racist] things and I sensed that he didn’t approve of my presence in his home … My friend [his daughter] would invite me to have lunch with them and [he] would always start joking … ‘What is happening here? Blacks have to eat outside in the yard. Send this Nigger outside.’ Perhaps he was joking but I was offended by this statement and I believe that if I had attempted to date his daughter, he would have opposed this.
Carlucci described the public response to his current interracial relationship with a morena clara (light-skinned brunette).

When I used to walk down the street … I feel the stares of people, understand. Nothing precise is ever said, but listen, I have felt that [the community] does not support our romance. Including making comments as we walk by … ‘This type of man with a pretty white girl? How could you choose a black?’

Working-class Euro-Brazilians also invoked the theme of interracial sexuality as a measure of racism. However, they typically cited their families’ acceptance of dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians as evidence that racism does not exist in Vasalia. For example, in response to the same question, ‘Does racism exist in Vasalia?’, Vittorio, a 54-year-old retired soldier, poet and the grandson of Italian immigrants, immediately described how much the white male members of his family sexually desired mulattos. He replied, as other Euro-Brazilian men had in casual conversation, ‘I don’t know if you heard this, but a person of Italian origin, people that have the blood of Italy, 99 per cent of them like mulattos. The majority of them like mulattos.’ He then named all of his Afro-Brazilian relatives by marriage.

In stark contrast to Vittorio’s assessment of Italians as free of racism, Mario, a 52-year-old Luso-Brazilian plantation owner, argued that, if there was any racism in the local community, it was to be blamed upon the Italians, not the Portuguese, because the Italians opposed marriage with blacks: ‘I think racism exists today because of the Italians who immigrated here. They don’t like blacks. They used to think that Blacks couldn’t marry an Italian because normally Italians are white … the old ones. I used to hear them say that they were opposed to race mixture.’

In conversations with working-class, middle-class and elite EuroBrazilians, the same theme of interracial romance emerged but the emphasis was on their families’ opposition to it. All stressed their family members’ acceptance or rejection of Afro-Brazilians as a referent of racism. There was not a single reported case of interracial marriage involving a member of the white upper class and an AfroBrazilian in this community.

Isabela, a 34-year-old self-employed woman, described her family’s attitudes to interracial marriage: ‘If I had dated a mulatto or black man, I think that my father … I know that my father, he or someone in my family would have interfered. He would have said “Oh my God! But he is black, or he is a mulatto.” We say that we are not racists but … in reality, if we were to have a romantic life with a black man, relationships with my family members would change.’

A successful 41-year-old white doctor, Dr Giovanni, who married one of the great-granddaughters of the Italian-Portuguese founding families of the town, related what he was taught about interracial relationships by his family.

As always, [racism] was disguised. Racism is not something that is explicitly defined. It was never said that ‘we are going to discuss racial inequality’ but in family gatherings, during lunch … racial inequality was approached in the following manner. For me, this was always said very explicitly. My grandmother was of European origin, very light skinned, and very blue eyes, a Portuguese woman. Back then, she used to always say, ‘If God had wanted people to be [treated] equally, he would have made them look the same. Therefore if he cast them in different colours, one white and the other black, it is because he wanted them to be treated differently.’ Thus, this was the perspective of my grandmother. In my family, they would say, as everyone in Brazil says, there is no racism here. Everyone is equal. I observed this very clearly: blacks served us [as maids]. Blacks came to our home. Blacks ate with us, as friends. However, if you were to date a black or if anyone in the family loved a black person, the situation would change. ‘Ah, no!’ My mother, for example, used to say, ‘Ah, how could I look at my black grandchildren. My mulatto grandchildren with their kinky hair!’ Then it became clear. I am trying to say that for friendship, for studying together, for socialising, to bring blacks into our home to serve us and prepare our meals, this is fine. But to enter our family, to become part of our family. No!
Dr Giovanni’s comments demonstrate that a clear distinction was made in his family between social contact that could lead to marriage and membership in the family, and friendships or contact that would not involve sexual intimacy. Thus, the appearance of racial equality could be maintained because interracial, particularly same sex friendship was not opposed, but heterosexual romance leading to marriage was explicitly condemned.

What happens, though, when one moves from the private sphere of sexuality and romance to the public sphere? How did those interviewed see racism operating then? By and large, they described racism as the imposition of legal and state-sanctioned barriers to the public sphere such as education and employment. Since they had formal access to occupations and higher education, they argued that racism did not personally affect their life. If Afro-Brazilians are not formally prohibited by law from entering an institution - universities, for example then, according to this logic, racism does not exist in their community.

This can be illustrated by an excerpt from an interview with Fernando, one of the two highest-ranking Afro-Brazilian professionals identified by Afro- and Euro-Brazilians in Boa Vista and Vasalia.

Fernando had grown up and lived in Boa Vista but, since Vasalia had become a satellite of Boa Vista, he was considered a member of the Vasalia community. Although Fernando had a law degree, he had never practised as a lawyer, and instead continued operating a small gas station after completing his degree in law.

I never encountered racism. I was never a victim of this. No … I have always had free access to all places. I have never been restricted because of my race. I was allowed to take the university entrance exam. I passed. I was placed in one of the openings. I studied. I never noticed any racism among my colleagues.
Fernando reported that he had never experienced any racism and that racism did not exist today. On his office wall hung a photograph of his Law School class. Out of approximately 400 students, I counted about four individuals who were of obvious African ancestry (all males). When I asked Fernando about black representation among his classmates, he replied, ‘There were plenty. When my class entered … In 1972 there were 400 students. How many of the day students were black? I cannot calculate this but at night we had - maybe ten.’

Fernando’s description of ten non-white students as ‘plenty’ reveals not only his low expectations regarding non-white enrolment but also how the virtual absence of blacks as revealed by his class photographs was not defined as institutional racism because non-whites were not legally denied the right to take the entrance exam. Like most of the residents interviewed, he did not employ a concept of demographic or proportional representation of blacks as a measure of racial inequality.

A second dominant measure of racism in the public sphere for local residents is the informal exclusion of Afro-Brazilians from full participation in the social clubs and dances. This form of exclusion was described by Vasalians as ‘unBrazilian’, more typical of the US. Vasalians provided examples of both formal and informal practices which had the explicit intention of prohibiting Afro-Brazilians from all socio-economic backgrounds from participation in the social clubs.

The historian, George Reid Andrews, identified the middle-class social clubs as one of the remaining obstacles to the upward mobility of Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo.

For the Brazilian middle and upper classes, the social clubs are one of the most important mechanisms of social integration and advancement available to them: and for those unable to gain admission, the clubs function as one of the most effective means of social and economic exclusion. As a result, the clubs have constituted one of the most difficult hurdles for Afro-Brazilians to get over. 6{ }^{6}
In Vasalia, the social clubs play a critical role in signifying the acceptance and integration of Afro-Brazilians into middle-class life. This is

one arena where every upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilian interviewed reported that they had encountered opposition from the Euro-Brazilian club administrators. This opposition was not based on their socioeconomic status, but on race. Tatiana, the Afro-Brazilian housewife whose husband operates the city’s electric plant, and who is one of the few dark-skinned women who does not work as a domestic servant, provided an example of how middle-class Afro-Brazilians were rejected, solely on the basis of their colour, when they applied for membership at the Village Social Club.

I used to go to [the club] but I was not well received by [the white members] and I am not welcomed by them. When the [club] was inaugurated, the people of our colour wanted to buy a membership. We had enough money to purchase a membership but [the white administrator] wouldn’t sell us a membership because of our skin colour. Only in the end, after they sold membership titles to all of the whites, then they would sell to an exceptional black. It depended upon your job and such things. But they didn’t want to sell to people of colour. There were people with the money in their hands. They told them that they had sold out of all the memberships and that they could not sell any more … but that day, one of the blacks whom they had denied a membership loaned the money to a white girl. She went there to the club and they sold her a membership that same day.

Those Afro-Brazilians who were not denied membership often faced subtle forms of social exclusion and voluntarily withdrew from the club. Covert forms of racism operated against Afro-Brazilian professionals, preventing them from full participation in the club.

My father bought a membership in this club for us. For me, I went to the club only once because I automatically felt bad … It wasn’t that I didn’t know most of the people in the club. In a small city, everyone knows each other … but I think people spoke like this ‘Ah, now we’re going to go there [in the swimming pool] and get moreninha (dirtied/darkenened).’ In their minds, they were saying ‘What is that black going to do here?’ So I automatically didn’t feel comfortable … they [white members] could never imagine that I was going to refresh myself the same way they would … Or that I was there to shoot the breeze and drink a beer like a normal person. The first thing they did was stare at me.

Another social event, which Afro-Brazilian women and men described when asked to provide examples of racism, involved their exclusion from social events and their rejection as partners at dances which do not explicitly prohibit Afro-Brazilians from attending. Dances were identified as events where Afro-Brazilian women and men reported

experiencing social rejection and exclusion in the past. Maria, a 40-year-old Brazilian of African-descent who self-identifies as morena, described a whites-only social club which existed in her youth.

There was a Club of Thirteen that they held on Fridays … where the secretary of education is now located today. In the past it was called the Club of Thirteen. Only those that were wealthy and white went there. Then they used to have a dance every season. A special dance was held for the Spring when they invited the wealthy … They used to make new clothes. No one was able to copy the clothing and hair designs of another person. It was all kept secret, hair, nails, these things. Only whites were allowed to attend these events … If a black came to the door, he was prohibited from entering.

Carlucci related more recent events in today’s Vasalia, in which he was rejected by his white female peers:

During adolescence you begin to discover the world. You begin to get to know girls. I used to go to parties in order to socialise with the girls … The white girls only sought out the whites and I was one of the few blacks who participated in this social group. I was always left behind, always excluded. They dated among each other, but no one would ever select me as a dance partner. So I suffered a little with this problem in my adolescence. This suffering included having young white women who were drunk out of their minds say, ‘I’m so drunk that I am even willing to [become the lover of] Carlucci tonight.’ This made me feel rejected.

Similar stories were told by lighter-skinned Afro-Brazilian men who reported patterns of rejection by Euro-Brazilian women whom they attempted to date.

Aesthetic hierarchies

In Xuxa: the mega-marketings of gender, race, and modernity, Amelia Simpson argues that the blonde, blue-eyed Brazilian television star Xuxa, exemplifies an aesthetic hierarchy, which privileges whiteness. 7{ }^{7} This valorisation of whiteness has been naturalised in Brazil. Not one Vasalian whom I interviewed identified the Xuxa show, or other television shows which depict Afro-Brazilians primarily as laughing buffoons, mammies, dancing mulattos and prostitutes, as racist. Although there has been some recent introduction of middle-class Afro-Brazilian families to the television novellas, this arena was not identified as one where racial inequality operates.

Both Brazilian and non-Brazilian researchers have found that, in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians have little access to positive representations of themselves in the popular press, textbooks, television, and other media

forms. In his book on the negro movimiento (black movement) in Brazil, Hanchard points out the important role that US blacks played in producing positive images of blackness which were often the only images that Afro-Brazilians had in the 1970s: 'At the end of 1969 … I started seeing and buying black American magazines, Ebony, principally, which in this period had a revolutionary rhetoric. This journal reflected … the aesthetics element, the Afro-hairstyle and Afro clothing … It was a new image of blacks that came from the United States. 8{ }^{8}

In his research on Brazilian television, Conrad Kottak noted: 'Another striking culturally derived contrast between American and Brazilian television is in the representation of dark-skinned characters. Although Brazil is sometimes called a racial democracy, blacks, who are just as obvious in the Brazilian as in the American population, are much rarer on Brazilian television. 9{ }^{9}

One consequence of this aesthetic hierarchy is that Afro-Brazilians find few, if any, positive representations of themselves on television and thus white Brazilians symbolise the beautiful, the desired, the educated and the upwardly mobile. This reinforces the prestige of white skin, straight hair and features such as blue or hazel eyes, associated with European descended Brazilians. Carlucci, a 22-year-old dark-skinned Afro-Brazilian who self-identifies as negro illustrates this point:

I feel a little bad, you know. It’s all right that blue eyes are beautiful … and the straight hair too … but there exists beauty among blacks, too, right? They think that we are inferior. Consequently we are uglier … And to be inferior is to be uglier. So, when I hear comments about how blacks are ugly and whites are beautiful, or when I feel what they are thinking, I feel inferior.
Henrique, a 43-year-old dark-skinned Afro-Brazilian, married to a Euro-Brazilian, who self-identifies as mulatto and on occasion negro reflects the low self esteem that I found among dark-skinned AfroBrazilians. ‘Blacks marry whites because whites have good hair. They have good hair, their nose is not ugly. Blacks normally have very large lips, like an animal’s and people think this is ugly. I am trying to say that black people know that their features are ugly and white people also know that blacks are ugly.’

Institutional racism: the example of education

Brazilian scholars have documented extensive racism in Brazilian public schools, which is where Afro-Brazilians are concentrated. Further statistical analyses of educational achievement have demonstrated the overepresentation of brancos (whites) and the underrepresentation of Afro-Brazilians (pardos and pretos) in higher education in Brazil. In their analyses of the 1982 Brazilian census data,

the sociologists, Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva, noted that: 'To have white skin in Brazil represents the privilege of having 8.5 times more likelihood in comparison to pretos, and almost five times more probability in comparison to pardos, of access to a university. 10{ }^{10}

This pattern of whites being over-represented in higher education was confirmed in my interviews with Vasalians. Not one resident was able to identify any Afro-Brazilians from Vasalia who had fez faculdade (graduated from the university). Only Ariana, the daughter of Fernando (who had been to law school), had completed university. She was an exception.

In Vasalia, there are three Afro-Brazilians among the sixty public school teachers. There were another two Afro-Brazilians teaching in the private (Catholic) elementary schools. Four of the five Afro-Brazilians teaching in the public and private schools belonged to one family. I identified two other Afro-Brazilians who resided in Vasalia but taught in the rural countryside outside the urban centre. Not one Afro-Brazilian interviewed commented upon the exclusion of Afro-Brazilians from the universities when asked to define racism. They seemed to have no developed concept of institutional racism to draw upon.

None of the teachers interviewed could identify a single local AfroBrazilian student who had completed university. Afro-Brazilians are absent from those studying for the vestibular (preparatory course for the the university entrance exam). The disproportionate number of Euro-Brazilians who complete segunda grau (high school) and fez faculdade (complete university training) was not cited by any AfroBrazilian interviewed as evidence of racial inequality.

Finally, another area in which pervasive racism has been documented, but was not mentioned in interviews with local teachers, is in the representations of Afro-Brazilians in school textbooks. Neither Afronor Euro-Brazilians commented on this or the virtual absence of AfroBrazilians in material on contemporary Brazilian culture and society.

Several studies of school textbooks and institutional racism in the public school system conducted in the mid-1980s found that when blacks are presented in school textbooks they are depicted in a grotesque style and caricatured as animals. Moreover, blacks are depicted as the social inferiors of whites and they are less often given names. 11{ }^{11} No one interviewed considered the textbooks used in the local school system racist.

Conclusion

As the interviews conducted with working-class Afro- and EuroBrazilians show, there is a sharp disjuncture between the measures of racism employed by anti-racist activists and scholars and those used by members of this community. Consequently, several forms of racial

inequality in the public sphere are not recognised as forms of racism by the community.

By mapping the ‘common sense’ contours of racism as defined by local people and examining what forms of racism these definitions cannot account for, I have attempted to demonstrate how Vasalians have sustained their belief that their community is a racial meritocracy. Definitions of racism which are restricted to the social and sexual spheres, instead of the socio-economic and public spheres, account for the community’s lack of interest in organising against racism. For, when racism is defined, as in this community, in terms of legal, formal, state-sanctioned policies of segregation - as in the Jim Crow US and former apartheid South Africa - then it is not prevalent. But that leaves out of the reckoning the vast array of social, economic, representational and institutional practices, extensively documented by Brazilian researchers, which function on the basis of, and serve to perpetuate, an endemic racism.

References

My profound thanks go to Jonathan Warren, who conducted some of the interviews for this article, and thanks also to Julia O’ Connell Davidson, Caroline Chung Simpson, Martha Heller and Katharyne Mitchell for their detailed comments.
1 See C. Hasenbalg and N. do Valle Silva, Relações Racais No Brasil Contemporâneo (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1992). See also following articles based upon research by Brazilian quantitative and qualitative sociologists including: E. Telles, ‘Residential segregation by skin color in Brazil’, American Sociologist (Vol. 57, April, 1992), pp.186-97; R. P. Pinto, ‘A representação do Negro em livros didáticos de leitura’, Cadernos de Pesquisa (November, 1987), pp. 88-92; V. Figuera, ‘O preconceito racial no escola’, Estudos Afro-Asiaticos (No. 18, 1990), pp. 63-72; and F. Rosemberg, ‘Segregação espacial na escola paulista’, Estudos Afro-Asiaticos (No. 19, 1990), pp. 97-107.
2 M. Hanchard, Movimento Negro in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Princeton University Press, 1994).
3 A. do Nascimento, Brazil: Mixture or Massacre: Essays on the Genocide of Black People (Dover, MS., The Majority Press, 1979).
4 Several ethnographies provide rich descriptions of racism in the pre-civil rights South. See, e.g., H. Powdermaker, After Freedom: a cultural study of the Deep South (New York, 1939) and J. Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, 1937). For the perspective of a US black, see A. Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York, 1968).
5 Dollard, ibid. p. 351.
6 G. R. Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo: 1888-1988 (University of Wisconsin, 1991).

7 A. Simpson, Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race and Modernity (Temple University Press, 1993).
8 M. Hanchard, Movimento Negro in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, (Princeton University, 1994), p. 251.
9 C. Kottak, A Cultural Analysis of Brazilian Television (1990).
10 C. Halsenbalg and N. do Valle Silva, op. cit.
11 On the basis of interviews conducted with a sample of 442 students between the ages

of 7 and 18 years of age, Figueira, op. cit., concluded that in illustrations in school textbooks blacks were depicted as: 1) the social inferiors of whites, 2) not portrayed in families, 3) stereotyped as similar to animals, 4) excluded from references in history or social science texts and 5) when mentioned in history textbooks. AfroBrazilian contributions were limited to those of ‘traditional Africans’.