@Setanta,
I neglected to reply to this the first time around so here's a late reply.
Setanta wrote:'Whenever anyone starts on this crap about Americans being obsessed about race, i immediately find it suspect. Tell us, Robert, about the attitudes of Brazilians toward the tribes in the Amazon basin, and how those tribes are treated.
First of all, the existence of racism elsewhere does little to indict what I said. When I say that American's have an obsession with race it does little to contradict it to show that other countries have racism.
But as to your question, in Brazil Indians are treated, by the general population, similar to how they are treated in America. As an afterthought because they've been repressed into near extinction. In all my years in Brazil I don't recall any negative conversations about Indians at all. They are out of sight and out of mind.
Brazil's racism is largely directed at black people. But it's a different kind of racism than in the US. More of a subtle institutional (largely do to enduring class lines) discrimination than violent hatred. Just about every Brazilian is part black, and while the whites from the south of Brazil discriminate against the blacks from the north of Brazil this is also largely due to class conflict. The blacks from the south also discriminate against the poor blacks from the north.
In Brazil, racism is more acceptable than in the US, because in general race and physical appearance is just not as big of a deal. If you are fat you are called fatso (gordo, not for women though), if you are blond you are called German, if you are Asian you are called Japa (lots of Japanese in Brazil), if you are big and you are black your name is negão (big black). These are used affectionately, even if I never did appreciate the familiarity of yelling out "hey fatso" or "hey big black" as names in Brazil. But it's just a lot more matter-of-fact than in America. People are more comfortable in their own skin and don't care as much about the skin of others. They care much more about the class, because there is more class conflict in Brazil than race conflict.
In America, there's an odd obsession with race in my experience. It's no "melting pot", they keep much more separate and hate each other much more. Brazil is much more like a melting pot, with most of the country being a mix of Indian, black and white. There's less anti-racism but less hatred of other races. It's just not nearly as big a deal as everyone makes it in America. They had an ugly history with slavery, but didn't have nearly as much of the violence and aggression in the civil rights movement and there is much less tension in race relations.
And just about everywhere I have lived, it's not as big of a deal. People tended to care less what race you were and it wasn't such a tense subtext to interracial relations. In some cases you could argue that it was due to more racism, like in Japan, but the country is so monolithic (they are the least likely to inter-marry of any nation) that it was never much of an issue in day-to-day exchanges and the race issues are very different. For them it has a lot more to do with being such a different culture and having a close-knit and closed culture than it was about hating other races. Jewish communities seem similar, it's a discrimination that has more to do with being close-knit than thinking others are inferior.
The only peoples I know that outdo American race obsession might be Australians (though it seemed less of an obsession, just similar or more levels of white supremacy) and most certainly South Africans (the most race centric peoples I had experience with).
It's hard to measure such things, but this is my experience. Outside of the US I just hear a lot less about race than inside the US. People don't ask me what race I am. I don't have to fill out forms and pick a race (or pick "other"). It's just not as big of a deal, for better or for worse.
