Gonzalo Portocarrero (among others) says we should look at racism in daily life. The other day we went to a rather fancy lunch at RUSTICA and I noticed that many employees – many more than in most restaurants – were Afro-Peruvian. It had to be intentional.
Given the atmosphere the restaurant creates I decided this was superficially an attempt to demonstrate that we really were eating traditional Creole food, and more deeply, an attempt to satisfy our nostalgia for slavery. When the women employees got up on the bar and danced a festejo, I knew for certain that the restaurant was selling race and gender in addition to food, folklore and the chance to spend a few hours inside a beautifully restored early 19th century building.
I doubt anyone else in the restaurant had this reaction and I strongly suspect that had I said anything I would have been told that I was overly sensitive to racial issues like all Americans, that I was puritanical, and that I was imperialistically supposing that acts which might be considered racist in the U.S. are racist everywhere.
I think that although race may be expressed and understood differently in different places, racism is remarkably uniform.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
one way I have found to breach these conversations in such settings, is to ask what people think is being sold and how. As the conversation(s) unfold, the why often emerges. There is a tacit understanding of racial inequity in most of the LACS region and particularly once gender is also at play. It takes more conversations and more subtle turns to get to the heart of what you want to discuss but it can be done.
Yes, if the people you’re with are the ones you want to teach and you have a teachable moment, and so on.
Have you read ANTONIO SERGIO ALFREDO GUIMARAES’ work on race in Brazil? I am reading this and it is blowing my mind.
“I think that although race may be expressed and understood differently in different places, racism is remarkably uniform.”
Yup.