More on Race in Brazil

July 15th

        Today was an ordinary Monday in São Paulo. We had Portuguese class in the morning where we further discussed and practiced the usage of the imperfect subjunctive and read more poems by Brazilian authors. In the afternoon we had our last class with both of our American professors as one of them, Chris, is going back to the US with his family today as he has to move into his new house before the start of the semester. We spent all of our culture class discussing contemporary race identity in Brazil and how it related to what we had seen in the Museu Afro Brasil. It is absolutely fascinating to most North Americans how transmutable race is in Brazil, here it is class that is thought of as the major societal division. For example, people that we would clearly classify as ‘black’ in the US here might identify as ‘morena’ or even ‘white.’ There is also a prevailing consensus that people are discriminated against here based on their social class and not based on their racial appearance.

         One current example of this is attempting to explain to Brazilians the central racism issue in the Trayvon Martin case, most Brazilians understand discrimination and violence in class terms and they ask if he looked poor, and if Zimmerman was rich. The news here has also been confused over the questions that since both parties in the case were minorities could there be racism between minorities. This is in no way to say that there is not racism in Brazil or classism in the US, just that the consensus from the people in the US is that discourse of ‘class’ are a cover up for issues of ‘race’ in Brazil, and Brazilians think that in the US discourse of ‘race’ is a cover up for issues of ‘class.’ It is very interesting to try and rethink the fundamental (and ridged) understandings of what race is in the US once you realize that concepts of race are not the same in different countries with different histories.