Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil

by Robin E. Sheriff

Brazil has the largest African-descended population in the world outside Africa. Despite an economy founded on slave labor, Brazil has long been renowned as a "racial democracy." Many Brazilians and observers of Brazil continue to maintain that racism there is very mild or nonexistent. The myth of racial democracy contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates Brazilian culture and social structure. To study the impact of this contrast on African Brazilians' views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff lived in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, where she explored the inhabitants' views of race and racism firsthand. 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 recognize the deceptions of the myth of racial democracy -- while embracing it as a dream of how their nation should be.

Genres: Read For School, Anthropology

278 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Rolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

An AMAZING study of race in Brazil.