{"id":36719,"date":"2014-06-18T08:13:46","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T08:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36719"},"modified":"2014-06-18T08:13:46","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T08:13:46","slug":"black-identity-and-racism-collide-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36719","title":{"rendered":"Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Root<\/a>
\n2014-06-17<\/p>\n

Dion Rabouin<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The country\u2019s complex history with race gains the spotlight as the World Cup attempts to address the recent wave of racist attacks against black players.<\/em><\/p>\n

Before teams representing their countries from around the world arrived in Brazil, the country\u2019s president, Dilma Rousseff<\/a>, took the opportunity to label 2014 the \u201canti-racism World Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n

The declaration came after a wave of racist incidents<\/a> in soccer around the world targeting black players, many of whom are Brazilian. While it\u2019s a well-intentioned gesture and a particularly important one for a World Cup<\/a> being hosted in the country that\u2019s home to the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa, Brazil has a complex past and present when it comes to race.<\/p>\n

That complexity can perhaps best be illustrated by the fact that many black Brazilians don\u2019t think of themselves as black. Brazilian soccer star Neymar<\/a> is a great example. Asked during an interview in 2010 if he had ever experienced racism, his response was, \u201cNever.\u201d He added, \u201cNot inside nor outside of the soccer field. Even more because I’m not black, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

This denial of blackness may seem confusing to many Americans, because despite his long, straightened and occasionally blond hair, Neymar is clearly black. (Take a look at a picture<\/a> of young Neymar with his family.) But for Brazilians, being black is very different from what it is in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe darker a person is in Brazil, the more racism she or he is going to suffer. Light-skinned black people don\u2019t identify as black most of the time,\u201d says Daniela Gomes<\/a>, a black Brazilian activist who is currently pursuing a doctorate in African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas. \u201cA lot of people choose to deny their blackness. They don\u2019t believe they are black, but they suffer racism without knowing why.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gomes calls it a \u201cbrainwash\u201d that Brazilians go through in a country that likes to hold itself up as a model for racial harmony<\/a>. But she also points to differences in the histories of the United States and Brazil. \u201cWe never had segregation, we never had the one-drop rule<\/a>, we never had those kinds of things that are so normal for an African American,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat happened in Brazil was the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Integration and miscegenation<\/a> were actually government policy in Brazil. Around the time that slaves were freed, in 1888, the government sought to whiten its population through the importation of European immigrants. This idea was made law by Decree 528 in 1890 and opened the country\u2019s borders to foreign immigrants, except for those from Africa and Asia…<\/p>\n

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

Black Identity and Racism Collide in Brazil The Root 2014-06-17 Dion Rabouin The country\u2019s complex history with race gains the spotlight as the World Cup attempts to address the recent wave of racist attacks against black players. Before teams representing their countries from around the world arrived in Brazil, the country\u2019s president, Dilma Rousseff, took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,21,459,125,8,394],"tags":[11186,17516,3234],"class_list":["post-36719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","tag-daniela-gomes","tag-dion-rabouin","tag-the-root"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36719","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=36719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}