{"id":15816,"date":"2011-08-23T03:55:45","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T03:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15816"},"modified":"2011-11-14T01:06:14","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T01:06:14","slug":"race-in-brazil-out-of-eden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15816","title":{"rendered":"Race in Brazil: Out of Eden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race in Brazil: Out of Eden<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Economist<\/a>
\n2003-07-03<\/p>\n

Brazil used to think it could be colour-blind. Alas, no longer<\/em><\/p>\n

JOANA, an actress and student, is white, or at least that is what her birth certificate says. She has a white father, a mixed-race mother and skin the colour of cappuccino. But she considers herself to be \u201cmore or less black\u201d. Joana’s ambiguity about her race is quintessentially Brazilian<\/a>. Brazil had slavery, but never apartheid or the formal segregation of the American south. Centuries of interracial coupling have produced a population that is 40% pardo<\/em> (mixed). But Joana’s description of herself as \u201cblack\u201d, or negra<\/em>, belongs to a new era in Brazil’s racial politics. It implies that racial mixing has done nothing to correct racism, that pardos <\/em>and pretos<\/em> (the census term for blacks) are in the same boat and that the solution is not to ignore race but to plant it at the centre of policies to overcome vast social and economic inequalities.<\/strong> Though most people are only dimly aware of it, their idea of what it means to be Brazilian is about to be challenged.<\/p>\n

The challenge is coming through racial quotas, which black leaders see as an indispensable corrective to discrimination. They are not widely used yet, but they are spreading. Three federal ministries recently introduced quotas of 20% for blacks in senior jobs. A handful of cities in S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a>, the industrial heartland, have introduced racial quotas in the past two years. Most contentiously, so have a few public universities, the institutions that decide who will be admitted to Brazil’s elite. Congress is considering a \u201cstatute of racial equality\u201d that would give quotas a big extra push. These and other affirmative actions add up to a \u201crevolution\u201d that is \u201cmuch bigger than people imagine,\u201d says Ivair dos Santos, advisor to the federal secretary for human rights…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race in Brazil: Out of Eden The Economist 2003-07-03 Brazil used to think it could be colour-blind. Alas, no longer JOANA, an actress and student, is white, or at least that is what her birth certificate says. She has a white father, a mixed-race mother and skin the colour of cappuccino. But she considers herself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,33,8,26,6940,394],"tags":[6366],"class_list":["post-15816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-slavery","category-socialscience","tag-the-economist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}