Brazil’s extreme inequality was so entrenched it went unmentionable in polite society
Evidence
The ascent was not perfectly smooth. Just after Rio won the right to host the Olympics, drug traffickers in one of the city’s famous favela communities shot down a police helicopter. I knew that as a correspondent I would be tasked with answering embarrassingly gringo-centric questions like: “Is Brazil ready to host the World Cup?” and “Can Rio really put on the Olympics?” That was part of the job. The reality was that Brazil remained one of the world’s most unequal societies—nearly as bad as South Africa had been under apartheid—and the vast chasm separating the rich and the poor was so obvious that no one ever mentioned it. Indeed, that seemed prohibited in polite society. Working people suffered from violence and relied on woefully inadequate public services. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 169
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The Brazilian right muted itself because it had backed dictatorship — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 315; Brazilians held normalized race prejudice alongside a proud tradition of racial equality — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3577; Brazilian cordial racism is a mannered, race-denying form of exclusion — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1790 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Brazilian cordial racism is a mannered, race-denying form of exclusion
#expands(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1790 - Brazilians held normalized race prejudice alongside a proud tradition of racial equality
#complicates(0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3577 - Prejudice has mutated into benevolent forms that sustain inequality
#expands(0.75)