Observers emphasize it would be a mistake to compare the racial situation in Brazil with the United States. For starters, the definition of who is black is significantly different.
"In the United States, a person who has one drop of black blood is considered black," Sotero said, pointing out that President Barack Obama is labeled as black although his mother was white.
"In Brazil, it's just the opposite," he said. "A person who has one drop of white blood is considered not black."
Brazil's initial pool of African natives also was much larger than in the United States. About 900,000 slaves survived the trip from Africa to the United States, Sotero said, while 3.7 million slaves made it to Brazil. The sheer weight of that many slaves made them a larger part of Brazilian society, he said.
Slavery became illegal in the United States in 1865 when Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, while Brazil outlawed slavery in 1888.
Sotero sees a major difference in the aftermath in the two countries, though, because much of the racism in the United States was codified into laws that were not overturned until the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
"There were no JIm Crow laws in Brazil, officially," Sotero said. "There was prejudice, but it was not categorized in law."
Says Hakim, "Brazil has a longer history of the two races living side by side."
Compared with the United States, he said, "the difference between blacks and whites in Brazil was never that dramatic."
As a result, he said, there's a big difference in how African descendants see themselves in each country.
"Blacks in the United States recognize themselves mostly as being black first," he said. "In Brazil, they see themselves as being black and Brazilian.
"In the United States, race tends to be all-determining. It's not the same in Brazil. There's lots of discrimination, but not this all-too-determining factor."
