Comparing Brazil And The United States Of America

During the 19th and 20th centuries, European countries competed to have the most territory in the newly discovered lands; two of these “New World” lands were Brazil and the United States. Brazil, colonized in 1500 remained under Portuguese rule until 1822, while the United States gained independence from Great Britain in 1776. While Brazil and the United States have differences, such as the regimes and racial classes, many similarities remain prevalent, including their origins as colonies and racial tensions. Although the states started off as a colony of a major European power, there paths diverged over time. The United States of America allowed Great Britain to experience serious economic prosperity due to the copious amounts of resources …show more content…

The United States and Brazil each contain “big minorities of indigenous peoples, of blacks (because both had slavery until the second half of the 19th-century), and of immigrants from Italy, Germany and Asia (Chinese predominate in the US; Japanese in Brazil)” (“Comparing Brazil and the United States: American Brothers”). The indigenous population was susceptible to the foreign diseases brought over to the colonies by the European settlers, making it difficult to use them as a labor force. Slavery became the only viable option for the Europeans if they didn’t want to do work themselves. Although both were major slaveholding societies, the difference between the United States of America and Brazil lies in the racial classes within the two states. The United States’ racial classes originate from the deep seeded segregation of people of European descent (Caucasians) being the privileged and ‘superior’ race, while the black population (originally taken from their countries and forced into slavery in the Americas) being the ‘inferior’ and lacking appropriate living standards. African Americans were subjected to legal segregation and discrimination, as well as attacks (including torturing and lynching) by a white supremacy group called the Ku Klux Klan (simply because of their skin color) created serious socioeconomic disadvantages for the black population that remains today. This black versus white mentality in the United States has remained dominant even in 2015, especially since 2014 saw the rise of murdered black Americans by the predominately white police force. While the United States government allowed for legal segregation and has a “historical duality between black and white” (Drogus and Orvis 188), Brazil’s racial classes are much more intricate. Brazil has had a long history of racial intermarriage that has created “seven major categories