Marketing to Black Brazil

International Business

Marketing to Black Brazil

Homework – 7 – Essay

July 3, 2014

Marketing to Black Brazil

1. Describe the differences between the black population in the United States and the black population in Brazil.

Many other North Americans that South American country Brazil currently has more than three times as many inhabitants of at least partial African origin as the United States. Both the United States and Brazil were colonized by a European power that dominated militarily weaker indigenous populations and eventually instituted systems of slavery that relied on Africans.

In the Brazilian case, European colonists and their descendants enslaved and imported eleven times as many Africans as their North American counterparts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both countries also received millions of immigrants from Europe as they sought to industrialize. Since then, the light-skinned descendants in the United States and Brazil have come to dominate their darker-skinned compatriots through discriminatory practices that derive from a racial ideology, creating what sociologists call racially stratified societies. Both societies have experimented with affirmative-action policies to promote blacks and members of other disadvantaged groups, beginning in the 1960s in the United States and only recently in Brazil. However, the major similarities between these two large multiracial countries regarding race may end there. For one, the vast majority of persons in the United States with any African origin are categorized as black. In Brazil, large numbers of persons who are classified and identify themselves as white (branco) have African ancestors, not to mention the brown (pardo, moreno), mixed race (mestiço, mulato), and black (preto, negro) populations.

Unlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry. This difference and many others regarding race matters,...