I was wondering if anyone could direct me to some good sources for understanding the history of slavery in Brazil and the history of Brazilian racial dynamics. I'm interested in comparing those topics to their counterparts in the United States, and I'm looking for sources that give a good overview of the topics.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a book called Coal to Cream where he described a vacation he took to Brazil some years ago. He gave a broad overview of some of the racial dynamics there, and suggested that the national narrative was that there was so much race mixing in Brazilian history that everyone is highly mixed, thus creating one Brazilian ethnicity. Robinson suggested that this was visibly untrue, and that he was easily able to identify racial categories on sight the way we do in America, but that people nevertheless seemed to largely buy into this national narrative. I'm wondering if this is an accurate assessment of things.
I would recommend Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century by Júnia Ferreira Furtado as a good place to start along with Inhuman Bondage by David Brion Davis (He devotes a chapter specifically to Brazil).
I think a film that really bears out what Robinson was getting at is City of God. If you have ever watched the film, the characters that are involved in criminal activity are almost all black and there is even an attempt by Benny, one of the drug dealers, to whiten himself (dying his hair, wearing American clothes, and wanting to be a farmer) when he decides to leave the criminal enterprise. Basically, there are evident racial divisions in Brazil no matter what any narrative might say otherwise.