![]() ![]() ![]() Her reign as the “Rainha do Axé” (Queen of Axé music) is just one example of what people have come to define as “Bahian Apartheid”. In her music, she has defined herself as the “color of this city” (Salvador, Bahia), while she and three other women, Ivete Sangalo, Claudia Leitte, Márcia Freire, also all white, have received much more media visibility than black artists of the state. Mercury has made a career of singing Axé music, an Afro-Bahian style and representing herself as a sort of cultural ambassador of the state. A white woman, she is arguably the most popular singer from Bahia, a state long recognized for its large black population and cultural connections to Africa. The belief here would be that, ALL Brazilians participate in these cultural practices and, as such, we don’t have racial problems in Brazil.ĭaniela Mercury’s career has been a perfect example of this. As whites have long participated in the musical genre of samba, the martial art of capoeira, and Afro-Brazilian religions of Candomblé and Umbanda, these facets of black culture that were once prohibited, persecuted and demonized (and still are in the case of the religions), the interracial participation in these genres act as the cultural arm of racial miscegenation. As such, elites formulated the idea of exploiting elements of black culture as a means of uniting a nation that had enslaved Africans and their descendants as well as excluded and discriminated against them for, up to that period in the 1940s, about 400 years. ![]() After all, the idea here says that, if it black and white both participate in something, racism must not exist. As I’ve explained in a number of previous posts, one of Brazil’s most potent weapons of dousing out the rise of any sort of black rage within its black population has been the practice of adapting cultural practices that were previously known as “coisas do negro” (black things) and appropriating them so that they become “coisas do Brasil” (Brazil things). Note from BW of Brazil: You wanna know how Brazil has managed to skate under the radar of being one of the most racist countries in world for so long? Here’s a perfect example. ![]() Mercury 4 Still from Mercury video ‘Pantera Negra Deusa’ ![]()
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