Customer Reviews

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Read this book for a class. Intro chapter is hard going but it picks up after that and offers a lot of interesting and sometimes surprising info. Useful for students and researchers trying to get a handle on Brazilian society. Not intended for lay audiences.

The author has taken a tiger by the tail and allowed it to whip him whither and thither against the rough currents of Brazil multi-racial society until there is nothing left to understand.This whiplash of a story leaves the reader dizzy but in the end no better off than when he opened the first page of the book.

Is this purposeful obfuscation to mask Brazil's own dismal record of the "non-existent" Racial Democracy? From this dizzying presentation of meaningless graphics and a welter of unrelated and irrelevant facts, it is difficult to tell. The context and purpose of the book was to better understand the emerging realities of Brazil's racial situation by comparing and contrasting competing scholarly versions of that reality. However, neither version squares with the reality presented by Ms. Francis Winddance Twine, in her excellent book "Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil." Both versions of the author's chosen scholars seem grossly out of step with the reality depicted by Ms. Winddance Twine, and thus even if the author would have succeeded at his stated purpose (and he did not), what would he have proven?

But worse, it is equally difficult to discern from the subtext what the author really had in mind here other than to obscure what is already patently obvious: Brazil remains a profoundly racist nation, living on undeserved reputation of having been a racially enlightened nation.

After reading this book, only a few things remain clear, all of them unintended: (1) Brazil's so-called "racial Democracy" was an embarrassing, meaningless national racial sham; (2) those (Blacks) who fought to have it replaced had to go outside Brazilian society to put international pressure on the Brazilian government which had been living off of a borrowed and undeserving reputation and credit for its non-existent "racial Democracy;" (3) to the extent that there is race mixing in Brazil, most of it remains as it was during slavery: of the white male-on black female variety of sexual involvement; and (4) nothing has been done to redress existing racial inequities beyond official rhetoric (the same as was the case with the last two generations of so-called racial democracy).

Where have we all seen this tableau before? In Apartheid South Africa and legally and illegally segregated America. Thus one can only conclude that consciously or not, this book can only be purposeful obfuscation to preserve a fig leaf to cover brazil's exposed "private parts" when it comes to its colossal lack of motivation to deal with its race problems, which despite rhetoric to the contrary is every bit as bad, if not worse than in the U.S. One star.

There's a lot of quantative data in this book, but not a lot of analysis, real commentary, or much qualitative information. So with respect to solid data one might refer to in a report or debate, its great, but not always the most interesting reading.