Everyday Narratives on Race and Health in Brazil

Abstract

In 2006, Brazil approved a groundbreaking policy aimed at reducing significant racial health inequalities among its citizens. Like health disparities programs in the United States, Brazil's policy is based on the assumptions that racial identity and racism are important health determinants and that citizens who identify as "black" suffer disproportionately from a number of health problems. How do these assumptions compare to Brazilian citizens' conceptions of racial identity and health inequalities? To address this question, I present ethnographic data from two years of fieldwork in Brazilian public clinics and low-income neighborhoods. I show that a majority of research participants made no connection between race and better or worse health. Of those who perceived health inequalities by race, most believed that white Brazilians had more health problems than black or brown Brazilians. Finally, I consider the implications of these ethnographic findings for Brazil's health disparities campaign.

A cor da dor: iniquidades raciais na atenção pré-natal e ao parto no Brasil

“…In two nationwide Brazilian studies, carried out in 2003 and 2013, the main reasons identified for the perception of discrimination in health services were poverty and social class 47,48 . The explicit mention of race/color was much lower, occupying fifth place in both studies, which is in line with other analyses of social perceptions of relationships between race/color and health in Brazil 49 . It is worth highlighting that Boccolini et al showed that, though women did not report race/color as the main reason for discrimination, in the multivariate analysis black-skinned women were the ones who reported discrimination most, albeit for reasons other than just race/color 48 .…”

Race and Employment Practices in Northeast Brazil’s Ecotourism Industry: An Analysis of Cultural Capital, Symbolic Capital, and Symbolic Power

“…Not all of our nativo informants openly acknowledged the phenotypic and class differences between nativos and non-nativos as part of the symbolic value of non-nativos. This is consistent with patterns throughout Brazil in which low-income African-descendant Brazilians are less likely than middle-and upper-class black Brazilians to have racial consciousness and to acknowledge that racism exists (Pagano 2014). Employers likewise may not have been conscious of the fact that their employment preferences were based in race.…”

“…The ideology surrounding mestiçagem and discourses that compared racism in the United States to Brazil's nonracist society became central to the formation of the Brazilian nation-state and national identity (Pinho 2004(Pinho , 2009(Pinho , 2010. The intellectual discourse supporting mestiçagem and denying racism influenced Brazilians' perceptions of race and racism, their preference for discussing "color" instead of "race," and policies surrounding race (Pagano 2014;Sheriff 2001;Skidmore [1974Skidmore [ ] 1993. The Brazilian government used mestiçagem to justify discourses of a "racial democracy," a society free of discrimination based on skin color and other phenotypic traits, granting equal rights to all citizens.…”

“…The myth of the racial democracy leads to the "social lynching" of black people in Brazil, because rather than recognize that social inequality is based in racial discrimination, it is attributed to class instead (Smith 2016, 8). The myth disregards that black Brazilians make up the vast majority of people living below the poverty line (Lebon 2007) and 75 percent of the poorest 10 percent of the Brazilian population, whereas white Brazilians make up 83 percent of the richest 1 percent of the population (Pagano 2014). Twelve percent of income inequality in Brazil is the result of income differences that align with differences in skin color (compared to 2.4 percent in the United States) (World Bank 2004).…”

A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct

“…This specific history explains why critical and popular US discourses on race predominantly pivot on a binary black/white axis (Drake ). Comparative analyses of race in other geopolitical contexts, such as Latin America (Pagano ; Wade et al. ), the Caribbean (Castor ; Thomas ), or West Africa (Pierre ), reveal different systems of racialization and color/caste (A. Smedley ), social hierarchies, and patterns of racism.…”