The Brazilian Studies on Racial Relations in the United States
In the course of the last eighty years, Brazilian universities have rarely produced studies on the matter of racial relations in the United States. Furthermore, if the studies dealt with the American model of racial relations, they did not consider it as a source of inspiration to help explain the Brazilian racial reality, and rather adopted a different approach. Brazil has supposedly reached such a high level of racial integration that Brazilian black people are not exposed to the many kinds of explicit racial discriminations the American black people are. From 1997 on, there is an increase in Brazil of the number of studies and publications about affirmative action based on the American experience. These writings suggest that the Brazilian racial model has not contributed to raise the standard of living of Afro-Brazilian people even close to the black American’s, especially as far as economical power and political influence are concerned. They also reveal that the so-called universal policies did not contribute to enhance the level of equal opportunity in Brazil. Taking into consideration the actual North American racial context, we suggest that the American racial model can no longer be considered as the antithesis of the Brazilian racial model. Therefore it can no longer be ignored by the Brazilian intellectuals in their comparative studies of both these countries.