Canadian multiculturalism and Brazilian racial democracy in two newspapers: (post-?) colonial entanglements of race, ethnicity, nationhood, and culture

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of ‘culture’ in newspaper articles on multiculturalism in Canada and on racial democracy in Brazil from the 1950s to the 2010s. In the 1950s and 1960s, discourse on racial democracy in Brazil and multiculturalism in Canada relied on an idea of ‘culture’ akin to the notion of ‘civilization,’ i.e., an explicit recognition of the existence and particularity of the dominant language and religion and its location in dominant institutions, but often supported by an ethnocentric perspective. Since the 1980s, discourse on racial democracy and multiculturalism in the two newspapers increasingly discussed the topic of racism, but the idea of ‘culture’ has become associated with embodied characteristics of people of color, while the practices imposed by dominant institutions have become invisible or understood as universal. While race scholars suggest that we abandon the language of ‘culture’ to lay bare the reality of racism and social inequality, I argue that anti-racist agendas should also make visible the ongoing existence of culturally assimilationist practices and institutions and their colonial roots.