The United States and Brazil share a troubled history of slavery, yet they’ve developed strikingly different approaches to race relations. While America built a society around rigid racial categories and formal segregation, Brazil embraced a myth of racial democracy that obscured profound inequalities beneath a veneer of mixture and harmony. Understanding these differences reveals a possible future for American society as demographic shifts and cultural changes reshape the nation’s relationship with race.
Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so, yet it never implemented anything resembling Jim Crow laws. Instead, Brazilian elites promoted the idea that their country had transcended race through widespread miscegenation. The census recognized numerous racial categories based on skin tone and ancestry, from branco to preto with many gradations in between. This created what scholars call a “pigmentocracy” where social status correlates with skin color along a continuous spectrum rather than a black-white binary.
The famous Brazilian saying “money whitens” captures this fluidity perfectly. A wealthy person of African descent might be considered moreno or pardo rather than negro, while a poor person of similar appearance would face darker categorization. Race in Brazil functions as much as a class marker as an ancestral one, and social mobility can literally change how someone’s race is perceived and recorded.
American racial politics developed along entirely different lines. The one-drop rule meant that any African ancestry, no matter how distant, classified someone as Black. This hypodescent system created a rigid boundary that mixed-race individuals couldn’t cross, unlike in Brazil where they occupied an intermediate category. Segregation laws formalized this division, creating separate and unequal institutions that lasted a century after emancipation.
Yet beneath these obvious differences lie deeper similarities. Both countries used slavery extensively, imported similar numbers of enslaved Africans relative to their populations, and developed elaborate ideologies to justify racial hierarchy. Both have substantial populations of African descent concentrated at the bottom of the economic ladder. The key distinction isn’t the presence or absence of racism but rather how racism operates and how it’s acknowledged.
Contemporary America shows signs of evolving toward a Brazilian-style racial system. The fastest-growing census category is “two or more races,” and interracial marriage rates have increased dramatically since the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Latinos, who often don’t fit neatly into traditional American racial categories, now comprise nearly 20 percent of the population and have complicated the Black-white paradigm that dominated American thinking about race.The rise of terms like “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” and increasingly granular identity categories suggests a move away from the old binary system toward something more continuous. Meanwhile, the persistence of colorism within communities of color mirrors Brazilian dynamics where lighter skin confers advantages even among people who would all be classified as Black under traditional American rules.
Perhaps most tellingly, America appears to be developing its own version of racial democracy mythology. Polling consistently shows that many Americans, particularly white Americans, believe racism is largely a problem of the past. This optimism coexists with persistent and well-documented disparities in wealth, health, education, and criminal justice outcomes. The pattern resembles Brazil’s long-standing insistence that it had escaped American-style racism even as Afro-Brazilians remained systematically disadvantaged.The evolution toward a Brazilian model carries ambiguous implications. On one hand, greater acknowledgment of mixed heritage and the breakdown of rigid categories could reduce some forms of discrimination and expand people’s freedom to define themselves. The Black-white binary has always struggled to accommodate the complexity of American diversity, particularly as Asian and Latino populations have grown.
On the other hand, Brazil’s experience suggests that racial fluidity doesn’t eliminate racial hierarchy. It may simply make that hierarchy harder to name and challenge. When race operates along a spectrum rather than across a clear line, it becomes more difficult to organize politically around racial identity or to demand specific remedies for historical injustices. Affirmative action policies, for instance, have proven far more controversial and complicated in Brazil than in the United States precisely because of the difficulty in defining who qualifies as Black or pardo.
Brazil’s recent history also offers a cautionary tale. The country only began implementing affirmative action policies in the early 2000s, more than a century after abolition, and these policies remain contentious. The myth of racial democracy served elite interests by discouraging Afro-Brazilians from mobilizing around race and by allowing society to ignore persistent inequalities. When everyone can theoretically whiten through money or marriage, structural racism becomes nearly invisible.
American discourse around race has always combined denial and hyperawareness in complicated ways. The current moment features both unprecedented attention to systemic racism and fierce resistance to that framework. As the country becomes more diverse and categories become more fluid, it may become simultaneously more tolerant of individual difference and less capable of addressing collective disadvantage.
The demographic transformation underway in the United States doesn’t automatically lead to any particular outcome. Brazil’s path represents one possibility, where racial mixture and categorical ambiguity coexist with substantial inequality justified through cultural rather than explicitly racial logic. But nothing makes this trajectory inevitable, and Americans retain the ability to shape how their increasingly diverse society confronts questions of justice and inclusion.
What seems clear is that the old framework that structured American racial politics for centuries is breaking down. Whether what emerges resembles Brazil’s pigmentocracy, preserves some version of the existing system, or creates something entirely new will depend on choices made in the coming decades about how to talk about difference, how to measure disadvantage, and whether to prioritize formal equality or substantive justice.
