The article I will pursuing for my “clean up” project is “Racism in Brazil.” The most shocking part of this article is that it hardly talks about slavery in Brazil. Rather, most of its information doesn’t carry any historical context. Even though this is a Wikipedia page, I feel as though there should be more historical context within the article.
Additionally to the lack of context, the sections didn’t seem to be organized in any type of way. Hopefully, I can add more structure to the article, and provide some better examples than what was previously cited. To my dismay, there wasn’t a lot going on in the talk page. Perhaps this is an ambitious project, but I think it is one that is worth pursuing.
This will be a good idea on editing this article. “Racism in Brazil” is still a huge issue. I would recommend start writing racism from a historical timeline, so it will make more sense to readers about why racism took place in Brazil. It would be amazing if you put Brazilians’ opinion and perception on racism to make the article full of different perspectives.
The history section on the page just sort of lists out an incredibly vague explanation of slavery. It doesn’t mention the intermixing of slaves and masters, the fact that Portugal imported the largest number of slaves in the world, discrimination faced by the mixed population, or even the topic of your research project, colorisim! It’s infuriating that such a crucial topic is so barren for an English audience, whereas in Portuguese the entire page is incredibly detailed. I really think this is a great and crucial article to tackle, and you can make a real difference with your additions.
I think that this will be a useful addition to really provide context into different ideas of racism within the country and talking about how the belief that “racism does not exist” is false.
It seems like a major oversight that there is not at least a mention of slavery. Perhaps see if there’s an article for slavery in Brazil to help you figure out what would be best to add to this article.
In terms of historical context, I would also recommend talking about Brazil’s declaration of a “post-racial” society. This declaration seemed a bit abrupt and was never truly idealized. I think that could tie into the context of both slavery as well as modern day.