Luke Ford

The Economist: Brazil took more African slaves than any other country, and now has nearly three times as many people whose ancestors left Africa in the past few centuries as America does. Yet black faces seldom appear in Brazilian newspapers outside the sports section. Few firms have black bosses. The government has not a single black cabinet member; its predecessor, which called itself progressive, had one—for equality and rights. On average black and mixed-race Brazilians earn 58% as much as whites—a much bigger gap than in America (see chart).

The gap in Brazil, as in America, used to be even wider. Much progress has come from anti-poverty schemes, which, though colour-blind in design, benefit darker-skinned Brazilians more, since they are poorer. More recently, Brazil has started to try explicit racial preferences (known in America as “affirmative action”). But American ideas cannot simply be transplanted to Brazil. Differences in how the two countries were colonised, and how the slave economy operated, led to distinct ideas of what it means to be “black”—and different attitudes to compensatory policies and whom they should target.

Of the 12.5m Africans trafficked across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866, only 300,000-400,000 disembarked in what is now the United States. They were quickly outnumbered by European settlers. Most whites arrived in families, so interracial relationships were rare. Though white masters fathered many slave children, miscegenation was frowned upon, and later criminalised in most American states.

As black Americans entered the labour market after emancipation, they threatened white incomes, says Avidit Acharya of Stanford University. “One drop” of black blood came to be seen as polluting; laws were passed defining mixed-race children as black and cutting them out of inheritance (though the palest sometimes “passed” as white). Racial resentment, as measured by negative feelings towards blacks, is still greater in areas where slavery was more common. After abolition, violence and racist legislation, such as segregation laws and literacy tests for voters, kept black Americans down.

But these also fostered solidarity among blacks, and mobilisation during the civil-rights era. The black middle class is now quite large. Ms Loras would not seem anomalous in any American city, as she did in São Paulo.

Colour card

In Brazil, unlike America, race has never been black and white. The Portuguese population—700,000 settlers had arrived at the start of the 19th century—was dwarfed by the number of slaves: a total of 4.9m arrived. Portuguese men were encouraged to consort with African women. Since most came without wives, such unions gained some legitimacy. Their offspring, referred to as mulatto, enjoyed a social status above that of pretos. They worked as overseers or artisans, but also doctors, accountants and lawyers. A mulatto, Machado de Assis, was regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer even during his lifetime in the 19th century.

Mixing led to a hotch-potch of racial categories. In 1976 the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) recorded 134 terms used by Brazilians to describe themselves, mostly by skin colour. Some were extremely specific, such as branca suja (literally “dirty white”) or morena castanha (nut-brown). The national census offers just a few broad categories—as in America, which offers five, though these days America’s also allows you to tick as many as you like and add a self-description. Tiger Woods, a golfer, calls himself “cablinasian” (a portmanteau of caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian).

Both black and white Brazilians have long considered “whiteness” something that can be striven towards. In 1912 João Baptista de Lacerda, a medic and advocate of “whitening” Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of São Paulo, explains, an individual could “whiten his soul” by working hard or getting rich. Tomás Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a dark-skinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too “used to be black”.

Though only a few black and mixed-race Brazilians ever succeeded in “becoming white”, their existence, and the non-binary conception of race, allowed politicians to hold up Brazil as an exemplar of post-colonial harmony. It also made it harder to rally black Brazilians round a hyphenated identity of the sort that unites African-Americans. Brazil’s Unified Black Movement, founded in 1978 and inspired by militant American outfits such as the Black Panthers, failed to gain traction. Racism was left not only unchallenged but largely unarticulated.