The great debate this week seems to revolve around whether rioting and looting and using violence can help or harm the fight for racial justice, which seems to be riling people up way more than the issue at hand, the murder of George Floyd and the systemic racism that made it possible. The answer is complex and slippery, but violence has, to some extent, given political agency to blacks in the United States, whereas nonviolence has kept their Brazilian counterparts hidden, tucked away and largely ignored.
The ways in which the United States and Brazil dealt with their populations descendant from the Africans they brought as slaves to build their colonies and enrich their elites were vastly different. The U.S. belongs to the group of nations that opted to end slavery but segregate blacks, establishing racist, but Constitutionally backed, laws.
Brazil, on the other hand, established dubious academic theses – dating back to the 19th century, even before slavery was outlawed – that supported racial whitening, in an effort to ‘breed out’ African features and genes from the Brazilian gene pool through miscegenation.
