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Juggling Race and Class in Brazil's Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard Graham
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There was never anything merely black or white about brazilian notions of race and the differences attributable to it. IT IS easy to see today that the poor tend to be darker than those in the middle and upper classes and that those of darker color are most often poor. Yet there are dark-skinned persons in positions of power and prestige, and many whites live cheek by jowl with nonwhites, especially but not only in poor neighborhoods. Despite regional variations, Brazil is characterized by the complex interweaving of racial and social categories, making it hard to separate color from class as the predominant marker of differentiation. Racial identity has always been a tangled business, and in the past the existence of a finely ranked but permeable social order meant that society could absorb individual mobility without becoming egalitarian.

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Type
Correspondents at Large
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008, pp. 1717 - 1722
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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