Michael G. Hanchard states that, in comparison to Brazil, with its propaganda of a racial democracy supported by the ideology and culture of whitening, no other pluralistic society in the Americas had similar success in elaborating a strategy that could neutralize claims of racial inequality (Hanchard, op. cit.). In fact, Brazilians' belief that there was no racism in their society made it difficult for national and foreign researchers to discuss the issue at universities or in other public arenas (Rocha, 2010).  
The significance of the Brazilian whitening ideology went beyond the belief that miscegenation would erase blackness, as proposed by intellectuals during the first part of the twentieth century, along with the instant increase of the white population via European immigration, heavily supported by the government. According to data from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), which carries out the population census, between 1850 and 1950, Brazil received more than 3.5 million immigrants from European countries and from Syria and Lebanon. Africans and blacks from the diaspora were banned from entering Brazil under immigration laws in place since the nineteenth century. Interpretations of article 121 of the 1934 Constitution made clear that black immigrants were not welcome based on the prohibition of immigrants of nationalities that were already represented in great number - in this case, the legislation considered Afro-Brazilians an immigrant group - and based on the arguments that black immigrants could threaten Brazilian ethnicity, and that they posed hygienic and health risks. Part of the argument against black immigrants also highlighted issues such as poverty, lower levels of development and, in the case of African-Americans, the risk that such immigrants could bring ideas of subversion and revolt (Geraldo, 2009, pp. 173-209; Skidmore, op. cit.; Andrews, 2004; Gomes, 2003, pp. 307-31).