An excerpt from by Winston James' book Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998) is presented
Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil's self image as a racial democracy. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilization. In doing this, these studies unreflectedly take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation.
