INTRODUCTION

Recently, the president of the United States asked the president of Brazil, "Do you have blacks, too?" Unbeknownst to President Bush and many other North Americans, that South American country currently has more than three times as many inhabitants of at least partial African origin as the United States. Both the United States and Brazil were colonized by a European power that dominated militarily weaker indigenous populations and eventually instituted systems of slavery that relied on Africans. In the Brazilian case, European colonists and their descendants enslaved and imported seven times as many Africans as their North American counterparts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both countries also received millions of immigrants from Europe as they sought to industrialize. Since then, the light-skinned descendants in the United States and Brazil have come to dominate their darker-skinned compatriots through discriminatory practices that derive from a racial ideology, creating what sociologists call racially stratified societies. Both societies have experimented with affirmative-action policies to promote blacks and members of other disadvantaged groups, beginning in the 1960s in the United States and only recently in Brazil. However, the major similarities between these two large multiracial countries regarding race may end there. For one, the vast majority of persons in the United States with any African origin are categorized as black. In Brazil, large numbers of persons who are classified and identify themselves as white (branco) have African ancestors, not to mention the brown (pardo, moreno), mixed race (mestiço, mulato), and black (preto, negro) populations. Unlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry. This difference, and many others regarding race matters, between the two countries derives from two distinct ideologies and systems of modern-day race relations. Although both racial systems are rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, their respective racial ideologies and patterns of race relations evolved in radically different ways as they responded to distinct historical, political, and cultural forces.

W.E.B. Du Bois arguably set the stage for the study of race relations in the first decade of the twentieth century when he declared the color line as the problem of the century. However, that assertion was clearly based on the bifurcated U.S. model, where blacks and whites were understood to be clearly separate groups. Had Du Bois witnessed the Brazilian case, he may have perceived that racism and discrimination were important social problems there, but he is unlikely to have identified the color line as the central problem. Also, Du Bois noted that blacks were exceptionally excluded from North American democracy; but for most of the twentieth century, there was no democracy in Brazil. Most of the population, including many whites, was excluded from access to even basic rights and subject to authoritarian domination.

Since Du Bois, the relation of blacks and whites in the United States has continued to serve as the paradigmatic case for the sociological understanding of race. Theories derived from the U.S. case are often then illegitimately applied to interpret other cases. In particular, mechanisms affecting race relations in the United States are often assumed to exist in other places like Brazil. But that is clearly not the case, as I will demonstrate in this book. Race is an important organizing principle in both Brazil and the United States but in very different ways. In the interest of building a universal sociology of race relations, I hope that this study will encourage a reexamination of sociologists' common conceptions of race relations, which too easily get translated into general knowledge despite their narrow empirical base.

In the last several decades, race relations have become a central area of sociological study which has uncovered a considerable body of evidence for understanding them. However, comparable evidence for Brazil continues to be relatively weak, largely because the small Brazilian social-science community considered the subject unimportant for that country. While a history of blatant and legal racism has undoubtedly contributed to making race an important area of study in the United States, racism in Brazil has generally been more subtle, and legal racial segregation has not existed since slavery. Indeed, the dominant assumption from Du Bois' time until recent years has been that race does not really matter in Brazil.

Such differences and similarities about race in the two countries have become common knowledge, but analysts are less certain of how other features of the two race systems compare. For example, analysts often note the existence of racial inequalities in Brazil as in the United States, but these are too easily explained as simply a product of racist practices that exist despite the absence of formal segregation. On the surface, that may be true, but there is much more to it than that. While it is becoming increasingly clear that racism is a universal phenomenon, it is less accepted that its manifestations may vary widely. Are the nature and levels of racial inequalities the same? Surely, history, politics, class structure, culture, and ideology are very distinct between the Brazil and the United States. Should these not have also affected the development of a distinct system of race relations?

Most notably, racial ideologies between the two countries contrast sharply. How did such distinct ideologies come about? Do they affect the social manifestations of race relations or merely their interpretations? A special problem in comparisons of race in Brazil and the United States has been the disentangling of ideology from social analysis. To what extent is research on race simply a reflection of the ideology? Do ideologies not have elements of truth? How much do they distort reality? Ideology also affects interpretations of sociological analysis. In other words, how do analysts present comparisons in ways that are compelling and make sense to both Brazilian and North American readers?

North American sociology has developed evidence-based theories for explaining the persistence of racism and racial inequality despite the end of formal segregation. For example, a key sociological text argues that racial residential segregation, which continues today in practice despite civil-rights reforms, forms the major basis for contemporary black disadvantage and other dimensions of race relations in the United States. It posits that the physical and social distance between blacks and whites, along...