re: #366 Decatur Deb

Brazilian Portuguese has a couple dozen terms for gradations of skin color, and a proverb: “Money makes the skin lighter”. IIRC, someone showed that the proverb was correct—richer Brazilians applied the terms differently to skin shades than the poorer populations.

South America has had, in many ways worse, history of racism. People were graded by range of ancestry. Starting with “White born in Europe” to “parent(s) born in Europe and ending with “Black born in Afrika”.

Strange, IMHO. When read about it I got so confused I wondered how anyone knew their place in the social strata and how anyone negotiated it.