• Mulatto: descendant of White and Negro

• Caboclo: descendant of White and Native Indians

• Cafuso: descendant of Negro and Native Indians

• Ainoco: descendant of White and Japanese

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.

Myths

Accepted with, if anything, even less questioning outside Brazil than within, the concept of a racial paradise in South America was eagerly grasped. For those outside Brazil struggling against the Nazis or segregation and racial violence in the USA, it was a belief too good to pass up. “Whereas our old world is more than ever ruled by the insane attempt to breed people racially pure, like race horses or dogs”, wrote the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in exile in Brazil, “the Brazilian nation for centuries has been built upon the principle of a free and unsuppressed miscegenation, the complete equalization of black and white, brown and yellow” (Brazil – Land of the Future, 1942). Brazil was awarded an international stamp of approval – and its international image is still very much that of the happy, unprejudiced melting pot.

Anomalies were easily explained away. A romanticized image of the self-sufficient Indian could be incorporated into Brazilian nationalism as, deep in the forested interior and numbering only a quarter of a million, they posed no threat. Picturesque Indian names – Yara and Iraçema for girls, Tibiriça and Caramuru for boys – were given to children, their white parents seeing them as representing Brazil in its purest form. Afro-Brazilian religion, folklore and art became safe areas of interest. Candomblé, practised primarily in the northeastern state of Bahia and perhaps the purest of African rituals, could be seen as a quaint remnant from the past, while syncretist cults, most notably umbanda, combining elements of Indian, African and European religion and which have attracted mass followings in Rio, São Paulo and the South, have been taken to demonstrate the happy fusion of cultures.

Reality

To say this in Brazil, even now, is to risk being attacked as “un-Brazilian”. Nevertheless, the idea that race has had no significant effect on social mobility and that socio-economic differentials of a century ago explain current differences between races is increasingly discredited. It is true that Brazil is a rigidly stratified society within which upward mobility is difficult for anyone. But the lighter your skin, the easier it appears to be. Clear evidence has been produced that, although in general blacks and mulattos (because of the continuing cycle of poverty) have lower education levels than whites, even when they do have equal levels of education and experience whites still enjoy substantial economic benefits. The average income for white Brazilians is twice that for black, and while there is a growing black Brazilian middle class, it is concentrated in the arts, music and sports – black people are still hugely under-represented in the middle and upper ranks of politics, business and industry.

Perhaps the most surprising realization is that, except amongst politically developed intellectuals and progressive sectors of the Church, there seems little awareness or resentment of the link between colour and class. The black consciousness movement has made slow progress in Brazil – although grassroots community groups and national coalitions of organizations representing black people have emerged over the past decade or two – and most people continue to acquiesce before the national myth that this is the New World’s fortunate land, where there’s no need to organize for improved status.