nyameke: ok I had figured your statement was based on some of the inhumane atrocities perpetrated against dark skinned races in America.. But having said that , your statement should have been " being black in Brazil WAS hell of a lot better than being a black in America " because as far as I know blacks in Brazil are more or less like second class citizens as compared to their counterparts in America now ..
its debatable but nonetheless I will go as far and even say blacks in America have it better by whatever social equality perimeter or standard be it equal rights, economic equity etc than all the other blacks in the diaspora...
The good thing about blacks in America was and is that they sought , fought and are still fighting to obtain and enjoy the rights( equal, economic etc ) they currently have while south American blacks just settled with the status quo..
blacks in the Caribbean have it better at lease they value education and have Good HDI(exclude Haiti) most blacks in America value Butts, and Nicky shoes
jantavanta: ababda Please do not agree to consider them black Asians. It is a ploy by the poster to disconnect their African origin. The First civilizations were all Black Civilizations. Their connection to Africa makes White Europeans and White Asians uneasy. They fear the unity of Black People all over the world. Even the Black People of India are of African Origin. http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Indus_Valley_India_1.htm
anonymous6: I haven't finished watching the last documentary but the video does give in sight, when it comes to bringing affirmative action to Brazil, I feel it makes things complicated because Brazil are mostly mixed, it is hard to put people in a box but the reason why I feel this is Karma for the people against it is because these same people are not finding solutions on how to stop Blacks from all being poor and living in slums and all whites Brazilians controlling the wealth in Brazil, Until Brazilians start solving this problem affirmative action will start having more leg room in Brazil. I am not against or for it particularly in Brazil but when there is differences between what blacks and whites get in Brazil when it comes to progression this shouldn't be a surprise. Your videos are good though it is very complicated in that country due to the racial mixture.
the second video is funny, both twins look the same but are classified different racially, that one is just weird, doesn't make sense
remember blacks maybe the most disadvantage but they are not the majority of the poor since the make up about 7.6% you also got the Pardo/mixed(43.1%) which has probably more poor people and don't forget the natives and a sizable poor white pop so you just can't give only black special rights and plus it makes blacks look dumb . quotas for the poor makes more sense
anonymous6: Who denied what? and in 40:27 the black brazilian he was talking to said different, even the black Brazilian actress high lighted some of that in the documentary I just showed, any way watch these videos because this just shows what most live as second class citizens:
The only difference between Brazil and the rest of South America is that they at least admit their black african heritage or connection while some other south american countries refuse to admit the connection.
yeah i seen those vids anybody poor in south America are treat baldly(more or less) it is just most of the poor are black and native
Affirming a divide Black Brazilians are much worse off than they should be. But what is the best way to remedy that?
IN APRIL 2010, as part of a scheme to beautify the rundown port near the centre of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic games, workers were replacing the drainage system in a shabby square when they found some old cans. The city called in archaeologists, whose excavations unearthed the ruins of Valongo, once Brazil's main landing stage for African slaves.
From 1811 to 1843 around 500,000 slaves arrived there, according to Tânia Andrade Lima, the head archaeologist. Valongo was a complex, including warehouses where slaves were sold and a cemetery. Hundreds of plastic bags, stored in shipping containers parked on a corner of the site, hold personal objects lost or hidden by the slaves, or taken from them. They include delicate bracelets and rings woven from vegetable fibre; lumps of amethyst and stones used in African worship; and cowrie shells, a common currency in Africa. In this section
It is a poignant reminder of the scale and duration of the slave trade to Brazil. Of the 10.7m African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, 4.9m landed there. Fewer than 400,000 went to the United States. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Brazil has long seemed to want to forget this history. In 1843 Valongo was paved over by a grander dock to welcome a Bourbon princess who came to marry Pedro II, the country's 19th-century emperor. The stone column rising from the square commemorates the empress, not the slaves. Now the city plans to make Valongo an open-air museum of slavery and the African diaspora. “Our work is to give greater visibility to the black community and its ancestors,” says Ms Andrade Lima.
This project is a small example of a much broader re-evaluation of race in Brazil. The pervasiveness of slavery, the lateness of its abolition, and the fact that nothing was done to turn former slaves into citizens all combined to have a profound impact on Brazilian society. They are reasons for the extreme socioeconomic inequality that still scars the country today.
Neither separate nor equal
In the 2010 census some 51% of Brazilians defined themselves as black or brown. On average, the income of whites is slightly more than double that of black or brown Brazilians, according to IPEA, a government-linked think-tank. It finds that blacks are relatively disadvantaged in their level of education and in their access to health and other services. For example, more than half the people in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (slums) are black. The comparable figure in the city's richer districts is just 7%.
Brazilians have long argued that blacks are poor only because they are at the bottom of the social pyramid—in other words, that society is stratified by class, not race. But a growing number disagree. These “clamorous” differences can only be explained by racism, according to Mário Theodoro of the federal government's secretariat for racial equality. In a passionate and sometimes angry debate, black Brazilian activists insist that slavery's legacy of injustice and inequality can only be reversed by affirmative-action policies, of the kind found in the United States.
Their opponents argue that the history of race relations in Brazil is very different, and that such policies risk creating new racial problems. Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.
Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It's clear that racism exists in the US. It's clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.
Importing American-style affirmative action risks forcing Brazilians to place themselves in strict racial categories rather than somewhere along a spectrum, says Peter Fry, a British-born, naturalised-Brazilian anthropologist. Having worked in southern Africa, he says that Brazil's avoidance of “the crystallising of race as a marker of identity” is a big advantage in creating a democratic society.
But for the proponents of affirmative action, the veiled quality of Brazilian racism explains why racial stratification has been ignored for so long. “In Brazil you have an invisible enemy. Nobody's racist. But when your daughter goes out with a black, things change,” says Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist in Rio de Janeiro. If black and white youths with equal qualifications apply to be a shop assistant in a Rio mall, the white will get the job, he adds.
The debate over affirmative action splits both left and right. The governments of Dilma Rousseff, the president, and of her two predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, have all supported such policies. But they have moved cautiously. S[b]o far the main battleground has been in universities. Since 2001 more than 70 public universities have introduced racial admissions quotas. In Rio de Janeiro's state universities, 20% of places are set aside for black students who pass the entrance exam. Another 25% are reserved for a “social quota” of pupils from state schools whose parents' income is less than twice the minimum wage—who are often black. A big federal programme awards grants to black and brown students at private universities.[/b]
These measures are starting to make a difference. Although only 6.3% of black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education in 2006, that was double the proportion in 2001, according to IPEA. (The figures for whites were 19.2% in 2006, compared with 14.1% in 2001). “We're very happy, because in the past five years we've placed more blacks in universities than in the previous 500 years,” says Frei David Raimundo dos Santos, a Franciscan friar who runs Educafro, a charity that holds university-entrance classes in poor areas. “Today there's a revolution in Brazil.”
One of its beneficiaries is Carolina Bras da Silva, a young black woman whose mother was a cleaner. As a teenager she lived for a while on the streets of São Paulo. But she is now in her first year of social sciences at Rio's Catholic University, on a full grant. “Some of the other students said ‘What are you doing here?' But it's getting better,” she says. She wants to study law and become a public prosecutor.
Academics from some of Brazil's best universities have led a campaign against quotas. They argue firstly that affirmative action starts with an act of racism: the division of a rainbow nation into arbitrary colour categories. Assigning races in Brazil is not always as easy as the activists claim. In 2007 one of two identical twins who both applied to enter the University of Brasília was classified as black, the other as white. All this risks creating racial resentment. Secondly, opponents say affirmative action undermines equality of opportunity and meritocracy—fragile concepts in Brazil, where privilege, nepotism and contacts have long been routes to advancement.
Proponents of affirmative action say these arguments sanctify an unjust status quo. And formally meritocratic university entrance exams have not guaranteed equality of opportunity. A study by Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a sociologist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, found that the factors most closely correlated to attending university are having rich parents and studying in private school.
In practice, many of the fears surrounding university quotas have not been borne out. Though still preliminary, studies tend to show that cotistas, as they are known, have performed academically as well as or better than their peers. That may be because they have replaced weaker “white” students who got in merely because they had the money to prepare for the exam.
Nelson do Valle Silva, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says that the backlash against quotas would have been even stronger if access to universities were not growing so fast. For now, almost everyone who passes the exam gets in somewhere. It also helps, he says, that many universities have adopted less controversial “social quotas”. Mr Fry agrees that affirmative action has “become a fait accompli”. He attributes the declining resistance to guilt, indifference and the fear of being accused of racism.
The battle for jobs
For black activists, the next target is the labour market. “As a black man, when I go for a job I start from a disadvantage,” says Mr Theodoro. He notes that the United States, which is only 12% black, has a black president and numerous black politicians and millionaires. In Brazil, in contrast, “we have nobody”. That is not quite true: apart from footballers and singers, Brazil has a black supreme-court justice (appointed by Lula) and senior military and police officers. But they are exceptional. Only one of the 38 members of Ms Rousseff's cabinet is black (though ten are women). Stand outside the adjacent headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil company, and the National Development Bank in Rio at lunchtime, and “all the managers are white and the cleaners are black,” says Frei David.
Some private-sector bodies are starting to espouse racial diversity in recruitment. The state and city of Rio de Janeiro have both passed laws reserving 20% of posts in civil-service exams for blacks, though they are yet to be implemented. If unemployment rises from today's record low, job quotas are likely to create even more controversy than university entrance has.
What stands out from a decade of debate about affirmative action is that it is being implemented in a very Brazilian way. Each university has taken its own decisions. The federal government has tried to promote the policy, but not impose it. The supreme court is sitting on three cases addressing racial quotas. Some lawyers suspect it is deliberately dragging its heels in the hope that society can sort the issue out.
Society itself is indeed changing fast. Many of the 30m Brazilians who have left poverty over the past decade are black. Businesses are taking note: many more cosmetics are aimed at blacks, for example. The mix of passengers on internal flights now bears some resemblance to Brazil, rather than Scandinavia. Until recently, the only black actors in television soap operas played maids; now one Globo soap has a black male lead. Much of this might have happened without affirmative action.
The question facing Brazil is whether the best way to repair the legacy of slavery is to give extra rights to darker-skinned Brazilians. Yes, say the government and the black movement. Given the persistence of racial disadvantage that is understandable.
But the approach carries clear risks. Until the invasion of American academic ideas, most Brazilians thought that their country's racial rainbow was among its main assets. They were not wholly wrong. Mr do Valle Silva, a specialist in social mobility, finds that race affects life chances in Brazil but does not determine them. And if positive discrimination becomes permanent, a publicly funded industry of entitlement may grow up to entrench it and to promote divisive racial politics.
There may be better ways to establish genuine equality of opportunity and rights. Brazil has had anti-discrimination legislation since the 1950s. The 1988 constitution made both racial abuse and racism crimes. But there have been relatively few prosecutions. That is partly because of racism in the judiciary. But it is also because judges and prosecutors think the penalties are too harsh: anyone accused of racism must be held in jail both before and after conviction. And in Rio de Janeiro the black movement's preference for affirmative action led the state government to lose interest in measures aimed at attacking racial prejudice, according to a study by Fabiano Dias Monteiro, who ran the state's anti-racist helpline before it was scrapped in 2007.
The hardest task is to change attitudes. Many Brazilians simply assume blacks belong at the bottom of the pile. Supporters of affirmative action are right to say that the country turned its back on the problem. But American-style policies might not be the way to combat Brazil's specific forms of racism. A combination of stronger legal action against discrimination and quotas for social class in higher education to compensate for weak public schools may work better.
anonymous6: True to a extent but when it comes to opportunities to be given to Black Brazilians, it just isn't there at all, they have no opprotunities in the government, entertainment industry and etc
Thanks for this info I never knew about this guy, but this is where I will come and bring this up with you, [b]was he identified as a Black brazilian or closer then, or when he was known in Brazil was he painted as brazilian and more toward the white brazilian side because he can pass for white, so it makes you wonder will he had made it if he looked more black because obama looks more black then him, but any way your info is enlightening
i seen black in L. America on pbs. he denied it
Nilo Peçanha was born to Sebastião de Sousa Peçanha, a baker, and Joaquina Anália de Sá Freire, the descendent of a wealthy and noble family from northern Rio de Janeiro State. He was one of seven siblings (five boys and two girls). His family lived in a state of poverty in the remote and poor neighborhood of Morro do Coco, Campos dos Goytacazes, and moved to the downtown area when Peçanha started elementary education.
He was frequently described as being a mulatto and often ridiculed in the press for his skin color. During his youth, the local Campos dos Goytacazes social elite alluded to him as the "mestiço of Morro do Coco" (the half-breed from Morro do Coco district). In 1921, when he ran for the Presidency of Republic, letters falsely attributed to the other candidate Artur Bernardes were published by the press and caused a political crisis because they insulted both the former president Marshal Hermes da Fonseca and also Peçanha, another former president, claiming he was a mulatto. Gilberto Freyre mentioned his "mulatismo" in Brazilian politics as the same that prevailed in Brazilian soccer. According to some scholars, his presidential photographs were touched up to whiten his dark skin.
Some scholars assert that, despite his tez escura (dark skin color), Nilo Peçanha always hid his black origins, and to this day his descendants and family have denied that he was a mulatto. The official biography written by a relative Celso Peçanha does not mention his racial origins, but another later biography does so, thus some scholars express doubts. In any case, his origins were very humble: he used to claim that he had been raised on day-old bread and paçoca (cassava flour grounded with dried beef).
After finishing his primary studies in his home city, Peçanha went on to study at the Law Schools of São Paulo and Recife, where he earned his degree. As a student, he supported both the campaign to abolish slavery and the establishment of the Republic.
Peçanha was married to Ana de Castro Belisário Soares de Sousa, also known as "Anita", the descendant of an aristocratic and wealthy family from his birth city. She was a daughter of lawyer João Belisário Soares de Souza and of Ana Rachel Ribeiro de Castro, who was herself a daughter of the Viscount of Santa Rita, one of the richest men in northern Rio de Janeiro State. The marriage was a social scandal since the bride escaped her house to marry her poor and "mulatto" groom, despite his status as a promising young politician.
it seems blackness does not exist in Brazil for better or worse. racial quotas are being put in collages which is causing problems
anonymous6: Well maybe with history between both countries you may have points but in general NO, because at least african americans have a Oprah, Barack & Michelle Obama, Denzel Washington, Colin Powell, Condolessa Rice, and etc but in Brazil there can never be a Oprah & Obama there or a voice for Black Brazilians, the only voice they have is they admit that they have black african heritage compared to other or most South American countries that don't. I am not saying that Black Brazilians are going through a apartheid but when they can't have a voice in the government, entertainment industry, and etc in Brazil, while white Brazilians are controlling almost all that I listed, it makes you wonder.
Machado de Assis https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Machado_de_Assis_aos_57_anos.jpg "was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright, short story writer, and advocate of monarchism. Widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature, nevertheless he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. He was multilingual, having learned French, English, German, and Greek later in life.
Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and early 20th century. José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Woody Allen and Susan Sontag are among his admirers, the American critic Harold Bloom calls him "the supreme black literary artist to date"
Although many people believe he is the first black justice minister in Brazilian Supreme Court, he is actually the third one. He was preceded by:
Hermenegildo de Barros (from 1919 to 1937) Pedro Lessa (from 1907 to 1921)"
Nilo Peçanha the 7th President https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Nilo_Pe%C3%A7anha_02.jpg "was a Brazilian politician. He was Governor of Rio de Janeiro State (1903–1906), then elected Vice-President of Brazil in 1906. He assumed the presidency in 1909 following the death of President Afonso Pena and served until 1910. He was disputably the only mulatto president of Brazil."
[quote author=PAGAN 9JA]why didnt your slave ancestors fight to the death against the slavers rathar than face degradation and slavery if many of them would have martyred themselves, more slaves would not have been shipped from Africa and slavery would have ended sooner. .[/quote]
"Numerous black slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is documentary evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving ten or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.
The 1811 German Coast Uprising, which took place outside of New Orleans in 1811, involved up to 500 slaves. It was suppressed by volunteer militias and a detachment of the United States Army. They killed 66 black men in the battle, executed 16, and 17 escaped and/or were killed along the way to freedom.
Although only involving about seventy slaves, the Turner's 1831 rebellion is considered to be a devastating event in American history. Over sixty people were killed causing the slave-holding south to go into a panic. Fifty-five men women and children were killed as Turner and his fellow rebel slaves rampaged from plantation to plantation throughout Virginia. Fears afterward led to new legislation passed by southern states prohibiting the movement, assembly, and education of slaves, and reducing the rights of free people of color. Turner and the other slaves were eventually stopped as their ammunition ran out. Resulting in the hanging of about eighteen slaves, including Nat Turner himself.
John Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state). This raid was a joint attack by former slaves, freed blacks, and white men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to form a general uprising among slaves. It almost succeeded, had it not been for Brown's delay, and hundreds of slaves left their plantations to join Brown's force - and others left their plantations to join Brown in an escape to the mountains. Eventually, due to a tactical error by Brown, their force was quelled. But directly following this, slave disobedience and the number of runaways increased markedly in Virginia.
The historian Steven Hahn proposes that the self-organized involvement of slaves in the Union Army during the American Civil War composed a slave rebellion that dwarfed all others. Similarly, tens of thousands of slaves joined British forces or escaped to British lines during the American Revolution, sometimes using the disruption of war to gain freedom. For instance, when the British evacuated from Charleston and Savannah, they took 10,000 slaves with them. They also evacuated slaves from New York, taking more than 3,000 for resettlement to Nova Scotia, where they were recorded as Black Loyalists and given land grant"
San Miguel de Gualdape was the first European settlement inside what is now United States territory, founded by Spaniard Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. It was to last only three months of winter before being abandoned in early 1527. The first group of African Americans to set foot on what is now the United States were brought by Ayllón to erect the settlement. The employment of African slaves in the 1526 colony is the first instance of African slave labor within the present territory of the United States. Upon political disputes within the settlers, there was an uprising among the slaves, who fled to the interior and presumably settled with the native American people. This incident is the first documented slave rebellion in North America
Culture › Re: Racist Habits Die HARD by TerryCarr(m): 12:18am On Aug 31, 2012
. quotas for the poor makes more sense 
if many of them would have martyred themselves, more slaves would not have been shipped from Africa and slavery would have ended sooner. .[/quote]
