by CARMEN JOY KING
Race is a funny issue in Brazil. I have not met a Brazilian who didn’t boast that “there is no racism in Brazil”. They scoff at race issues in the US. “What’s the big deal,” they might say, “that Barack Obama is black? So what? Us Brazilians don’t see people in those terms. We’re color blind.”
Yet I have not seen one black politician and certainly not a black president. They openly joke about blackness and it’s not considered taboo or racist. In my family they call each other “Negrão,” which means something like “Big Blackie”. Non-racism is a Brazilian “fact” that was probably in large part created by Gilberto Freyre who wrote the infamous work “The Masters and the Slaves”.
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