Obama has Brazil swooning over arrival of a black president - The Washington Post: ...Racial integration has long marked Brazilian society, and racism was never institutionalized as it was in the United States. Brazilians of all colors are proud of the African influence on their culture. But Brazil has had a complex and, according to some black activists, troubling racial history. Slavery was not abolished until 1888, 25 years after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. And some outsiders find it peculiar that Brazilians ascribe so many racial categories to themselves.
Brazilians of color are more likely than whites to be disenfranchised, attending the worst schools and residing in poverty-stricken regions. “The black community is fighting for space,” said the Rev. Jose Adilson Pontes, 49, a black Catholic priest in City of God. “All the spaces where there is exclusion, misery, death, a black man is present.”
But like the United States, Brazil has progressed on the racial front — and in ways many Afro-Brazilians once never thought possible.
