Subtitle: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil
Author: Robin E. Sheriff
Subject: Anthropology/Latin American Studies
Paper ISBN 0-8135-3000-8
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2999-9
Pages: 288 pp.
View the table of contents for Dreaming Equality
Read an excerpt from Dreaming Equality
Description: An analysis of how African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country that publicly denies its existence.
Brazil has the largest African-descended population in the world outside Africa. Despite an economy founded on slave labor, Brazil has long been renowned as a "racial democracy." Many Brazilians and observers of Brazil continue to maintain that racism there is very mild or nonexistent.
The myth of racial democracy contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates Brazilian culture and social structure. To study the significance of this contrast on African Brazilians views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff lived in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, where she explored the inhabitantss views of race and racism firsthand. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the communityor is it talked about at all?
Sheriffs analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians recognize the deceptions of the myth of racial democracywhile embracing it as a dream of how their nation should be.
Robin E. Sheriff is an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida International University.
Praise for Dreaming Equality
"In this ethnography, Sheriff challenges the decades-old claim that Brazil is relatively free of racial prejudice and functions as a democracia racial ("racial democracy") by examining how discourse there constructs cultural understanding. . . . Skillfully dismembering the concept of democracia racial and all its paradoxes, Sheriff offers an innovative method for analyzing racism in any country or locale, not just Brazil."Library Journal
"A compassionate, intelligent, and beautifully written study of racism in one of the worlds poorest slums. Through the intimate detail, the word, conversation, pause, and silence, Robin Sheriff exposes the contradictory reality that lies behind the myth and dream of racial democracy in Brazil. Dreaming Equality should be read by everyone interested in racismand equality."Vincent Crapanzano, distinguished professor of anthropology and comparative literature, CUNY Graduate Center
