Talk:Racism in Brazil

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aaldridge97. Peer reviewers: Gorditagirl21, Jackh18.

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The first reference (Brazilians Think Race Intefere on Quality of Life, but not Everyone is Concerned About Equality), which is quoted in the article, might not be a good source of information for statistics. The article does not cite where it gets its information from, and there are English mistakes throughout the article. I suggest removing the source and the information which uses it as a reference (or to find a reference which does clearly have valid information)Editfromwithout (talk) 21:14, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed Edits: 

For my edits, I hope to start off by providing some more context as to Brazil's demographics and the notion of the state of Brazil becoming a "racial democracy," which we have discussed in class. from there, I will be able to help fill some of the articles more alarming gaps, such as their statistical analysis, which I believe was a bit haphazard and sloppy. Additionally, I feel like the images and pictures could improve. Additionally, I lot of the information isn't properly cited, which I find a little suspect, so I will probably remove once I being to go more in-depth with the project.

Bibliography:

Brazil. Directed by Ricardo Pollack. PBS, 2011. Accessed February 23, 2018.

“Dain-Borges-Puffy-Ugly-Slothful-and-Inert-Degeneration-in-Brazilian-Social-Thought-1880-1940.Pdf.” Accessed February 13, 2018. https://brazil2018.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2018/01/Dain-Borges-Puffy-Ugly-Slothful-and-Inert-Degeneration-in-Brazilian-Social-Thought-1880-1940.pdf.

Graden, Dale Torston. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835-1900. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Lesser, Jeff. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1999.

“Telles-Introduction-from-Race-in-Another-America.Pdf.” Accessed February 13, 2018. https://brazil2018.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2018/01/Telles-Introduction-from-Race-in-Another-America.pdf.

Weinstein, Barbara. The Color of Modernity: S�o Paulo and the Making of Raceand Nation in Brazil. Radical Perspectives: A Radical History Review Book Series. Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Your proposed edits seem like they are going the right direction. I wish there were some of the new pictures you plan to include to gauge how they will go with the "racial democracy." I'm also curious to see what sources get taken off from the current article. The sources you have included looking really promising. Gorditagirl21 (talk) 01:22, 3 March 2018 (UTC)gorditagir21[reply]

Various racial statistics regarding the disproportionate homicide victimization of Afro-Brazilians are presented in the last body section of the article, with the apparent intention of portraying racism as the culprit behind this disparity. Although one may simply define racism in terms of severe inequalities of outcome between different groups in a particular society or the world as a whole, this definition is inconsistent with the one applied earlier in the article with the citation of a study revealing the direct discrimination of Brazilian schoolteachers against black students. To ameliorate this inconsistency, I would suggest that you either clarify the conception of racism utilized in this article or provide information demonstrating specific forms of structural or institutional discrimination to exist and bear consequences in contemporary Brazil. Jackh18 (talk) 06:37, 5 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The edits you made really helped the article have a better flow and have better. The figures you included really ties the whole article better and with a better understanding of how race works in Brazil since it is different from the US. Since it seems there is not a lot of English sources, the sections you included on existing scholarship and the homicide rate study is very helpful. Good job! Gorditagirl21 (talk) 17:20, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Dear colleagues, One editor is removing my contribution to this page about "Scientific racism in Brazil" without checking the scientific and historical accuracy of its contents, just because I quote myself (in a work reviewed by experts and published in a prestigious scientific journal) as well as I quote many other references which are not my own work. I cannot understand how come this editor just deleted the section on "scientific racism in Brazil" without checking that THE WHOLE SECTION was entirely taken from a doubled blind checked paper which has been reviewed and published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the History of Biology: the Journal of the History of Biology. All the content in the section I included and the many historical references I quoted (apart from my own work) were product of serious research and had been published in a prestigious scientific journal after been reviewed by experts before publication. My interest was not self citing -as this editor claims- but just supplying wikipedia with good scientific contents in an aspect that had not received any attention within the entry "Racism in Brazil": scientific racism in Brazil. Regarding my self citation, the work I quote is the only article written in English which has passed through expert scientific revision that you can find in Google Scholar and other scientific libraries including the issue "Scientific Racism in Brazil" explicitly in its title. Thereafter, I guess it's contents are especially appropriate for this page and that work is really worthy to be quoted it in this page. Not for self promotion, but in order to contribute to the diffusion of accurate knowledge about this particular topic! And I repeat: in the section which was unfairly deleted I QUOTED MANY OTHER HISTORICAL SOURCES WHICH ARE NOT MY OWN WORK! I hope that other editors in this page can check that the whole section I included is based on serious research and that it is worthy to be included in this page. In the following lines, I include the section as it appeared before it was inappropriately deleted. Thank you for your help! The section is the following:

=== Scientific Racism and Racial Policies in Brazil === ==

During the second half of the nineteenth century, different forms and degrees of racism penetrated biological discourses about human diversity in Brazil.^[1] Protected under the theoretical and rhetorical apparatus of the natural sciences, it was precisely their scientific status which provided these ethnocentric discourses with the greatest legitimacy in the Brazilian society. Thus, biology was (mis)used as a formidable symbolic apparatus for the naturalization of Brazilian social inequalities between different ethnic groups. Of course, it was not nineteenth century biology that invented racism in Brazil or Latin America. Ideas about the inferiority of the African People, the degeneration of the Indians and their mixed descendants, etc. had appeared long before in American history. Brazilian racism was not created by science, but at the end of the nineteenth century, it was absorbed and recreated into a new form of modern ideology by natural sciences. Scientific discourses in human biology, anthropology, evolutionary theory, craniometrics, obstetrics, psychiatry, etc., became, in many cases, perfect theoretical instruments for the legitimation of racial hierarchies after the abolition of slavery. In different moments along the nineteenth century, biology was invoked to justify the expulsion of indigenous people from their native lands^[2], or to foresee their extinction—along with that of Brazilian blacks and some mestiços- as a natural consequence of Darwinian inter-racial competition and sexual selection^[3][4]. Biology also served as an ideological weapon for the legitimation of racially biased immigration laws. Brain science was invoked to promote the application of different legal codes for each race, adapted to the supposed innate differences in the mental capacities of the different ethnic groups.^[5] Biological discourses were used to defend different forms of social programs, intended to improve the biological characteristics of the Brazilian population, making it ‘‘whiter’’ (which at the time was synonymous for ‘‘more intelligent’’ and ‘‘better’’)^{[6] [7]} Finally, human biology, combined with physical anthropology and legal medicine, were misused to stigmatize blacks and mestiços as degenerate human breeds, as well as potential innate criminals, such as in the work of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues.^[8] Immediately after the arrival of evolutionism at Brazilian universities, many scientists adopted polygenic models of human evolution, in an attempt to naturalize the social inequalities that the country had inherited from its colonial past. At the end of the nineteenth century, some of the best scientific institutions in the country, such as the medical School of Bahia, considered perfectly scientific to distinguish white and black people as different human species.^[9] For many Brazilian white scientists, this biological myth was, at those times, ‘‘the truth, based on the study of comparative anatomy, of embryological development, as well as on what is observed in the domains of phylogeny’’ ^[10] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Juan M.S. Arteaga (talk • contribs) 22:20, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't know why this was removed and by which other editor, but the section as a whole reads way too much like an argumentative essay, instead of like encyclopedic content. Drmies (talk) 23:48, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Dear Drmies, No wonder you don't know why it was removed, in deed it is difficult to understand the reasons that led to the deletion because they are based on erroneous assumptions. In what sense it doesn't look like encyclopedic content? It provides a lot of useful information and historical sources!! It was deleted by and editor (you can check his name in the record page) erroneously claiming self promotion, which makes no sense because I cited many other sources (not just my own work) and most of all, the section provides valuable contents to this topic.(User:Juan M.S. Arteaga)
    • In the meantime, I saw--part of the accusation is that you seem to be here to cite your own articles, and I can see that point. As unseemly as I find that, that is not my main problem. Rather, you are stating things in Wikipedia's voice which are a matter of interpretation, and need to be attributed. They cannot be stated as simple historical fact. Plus, sentences like "Thus, biology was (mis)used as a formidable symbolic apparatus for the naturalization of Brazilian social inequalities between different ethnic groups", that's not just argumentative, but also way too jargon-like for encyclopedic writing. I am not denying that this content can be very helpful, but it needs to be written up in a manner appropriate for an encyclopedia--we don't really do academic writing here, I'm afraid. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 00:13, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Do you mean that an excerpt from a paper which have been reviewed by experts in a scientific journal is more argumentative than the rest of the contents of this page? What particular facts cannot be stated as simple historical facts? Please I invite you to read the whole text of the quoted references in order to better understand the reasons that support all that is put in the section. Regarding the particular example of "jargon" you provide, you can just change the sentence like this if you prefer: "Thus, biology was (mis)used for the naturalization of Brazilian social inequalities between different ethnic groups". Thank you a lot for your comments. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Juan M.S. Arteaga (talk • contribs) 00:39, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        • No, I mean that your writing here is argumentative and states things as fact, in Wikipedia's voice, that are not necessarily established as historical facts. You do not need to tell me how journals work; I know how journals work. The very first article you cite, which I suppose you wrote, is from 2017 and makes a sweeping generalization about scientific work done over a half century. That's three years ago, one single article, and while the article apparently satisfied your reviewers, we can hardly accept that statement as well-established historical fact. That is why those kinds of claims need to be attributed--"According to person X, a historiographer of biology, ..." That sort of thing. Oh, statements about the work of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues cannot be cited to the work of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues--needs a secondary source. Again, there's probably lots of very useful content here but it needs to be written up in proper encyclopedic style. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 00:52, 5 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
          • Even if it seems that you consider yourself a better reviewer than experts on this topic -which really surprises me!- you keep stating your criticisms in a very vague way: "those kinds of claims", "that sort of ting"... What that exactly means? You do not provide any particular example of any statement that can not be accepted as well-established historical fact. I could give you lots of references but unfortunately most of the primary sources on this topic are written in Portuguese, so I guess they would not be useful here. By the way, regarding Nina Rodrigues..., I cannot think of a worst article and less-referenced article in wikipedia than the English page devoted to Nina Rodrigues, but you keep asking me to give you other references... My sincere impression is that you are not giving me a correct rationale for not including the section on Scientific racism in Brazil. Give me the exact sentences that are written in jargon so I can "translate" them to you. Give me the exact claims that cannot be considered as well-established facts and the reasons for that so I can give you a lot of sources where you can check their accuracy.  [[Juan M.S. Arteaga]]

This article suggests that Brazil is a Black-majority country. But this is a myth. The last Brazilian census, in 2010, shows that only 7.8% of the population is Black. 43% is Pardo (Multiracial), and this includes peoples of non-African descent. This article seems biased. Ciro Lyndo (talk) 07:47, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]