Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil

This essay is intended to introduce students and other nonspecialists to the current scholarly literature on slavery and race relations in Brazil. Brazil today is a truly multiracial society, populated by the descendants of Africans, Amerindians, Asians, Europeans, and the multiple mixtures among those "racial" groups. When Brazilians think or talk or write about race, however, they are usually thinking about the historical relationship between the two largest components of Brazil's racial mix: the European and the African. This essay therefore focuses on black/white race relations--or rather, on black/brown/white race relations, reflecting Brazil's tri-partite system fo racial categories--and on the origins of those relations in plantation slavery.