Black lives matter in Brazil

Michelle Lamont and her collaborators examine the experiences and responses of racialized minorities in confronting racism in the United States, Brazil and Israel. Among their findings, they find that while U.S. blacks often confront offenders, black Brazilians respond by ignoring or humouring them. They often do not understand such situations as racial because of Brazilian narratives that extensive miscegenation has diminished racism and that class may be the major culprit. The book’s comparative approach permits them to leverage theoretical claims about race by examining it beyond the U.S. black–white experience. The authors interpret micro subjective experiences as responses to a macrocomparative context filtered through cultural repertoires, groupness and institutions. My main critique for Brazil is that conclusions are based on a highly selective sample of the educated elite in Rio de Janeiro.