Brian Winter: prediction

Transcript context

…What do you think is the most significant change of mind or change of opinion you’ve had in the last 10 years about race relations in Brazil? One reads a great deal about this. Obviously, it’s different from America, but since you’ve started, what is it you’ve changed your mind about? What new insights do you have now you didn’t have 10 or 20 years ago? Race is a subject in Brazil that I always approach with humility as an American, because we, of course, have our own amply documented issues. Racism in Brazil is different in some ways but similar in others. There has been a huge debate within Brazil about identity and the nature of Brazilian racism over the last 10 years or so. One consequence of this, Tyler, is that the percentage of people who identify as Black or mixed race has gone way up in census data in that time. It’s gone from, I believe, somewhere in the upper 40s to about 56 percent today. It’s not because Brazil became more Black or had more mixed-race people, but because people are more inclined to identify themselves with pride as being part of that group. It’s all a saga that has been going on for hundreds of years that has echoes in the same history that we have here in the US, but in some ways, it happens on a bigger scale in Brazil. Here’s a figure that Americans are always surprised to learn. Brazil imported more than 5 million people from Africa from the 16th century through 1850. That is more than 10 times the number of slaves that were imported into the United States. We’re talking about an issue that has had reverberations that in some ways are far bigger. At the same time, there was always more mixing of the races in Brazil. Segregation along racial lines was never a thing, in part because it was not feasible because there had been so much mixing. There was a long tradition in Brazil, especially among the elite, of claiming that there was no racism in Brazil. I think that the country has come to grips with the fact that that’s not true, that there was racism. It was different from racism in the United States, but racism nonetheless. People are grappling with that at the same time that they’re more inclined to identify themselves as Black, which is a fascinating thing to watch. For you, which is the most interesting ethnic small town in southern Brazil?…

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