Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States
This high-quality collection offers a wealth of historical and socioeconomic detail on race relations in three countries. Each has an unfinished agenda for ending de facto discrimination against people of African descent. Brazil faces the highest hurdles, given that its emergence from years of denial is so recent and its black population is so undermobilized. Most chapters focus on domestic issues such as unequal educational opportunities, disparities in asset ownership and income, legal measures, affirmative action strategies, the role of nongovernmental organizations, and the double burden carried by black women. A few pieces contextualize patterns of inequality and redress within a framework of transnational pressures, including economic globalization and the gradual development of international legal conventions that stigmatize racial discrimination. An important theme throughout is the need to construct and reinforce broader national identities that define all groups as part of a single (but diverse) mainstream in which old hierarchies ultimately lose significance.¦
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