# Racial paradise  
Between the 1930s and the 1970s, Brazil maintained the image of a racial paradise, a land without segregation or discrimination. Published in Brazil in 1933 and in the United States of America in 1946, Gilberto Freyre's seminal work, The Masters and the Slaves (op. cit.), explores the contributions of Indigenous, African and Portuguese peoples to the formation of Brazilian society, emphasizing the importance of miscegenation and society's tolerance of interracial sexual relationships. Freyre's thesis was that the nation was an exception in a period of radical racial discrimination and even segregation, explaining that the Portuguese colonizer was far more tolerant and accepting of miscegenation, which somehow mitigated the system of slavery in Brazil.  
Freyre's thesis has been challenged and examined by a number of intellectuals over its near-century of existence. African-American scholar Michael G. Hanchard, who conducted field research in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1980s, agreed with Freyre's proposition about Brazil's exceptionalism, while recognizing that Brazilian society was far from a racial paradise:  
My conceptualization of racial exceptionalism reflects an attempt to explain the subtle ideological shift from the common-sense belief that Brazil is a country without racial antagonisms to a qualified recognition of racial prejudice, discrimination, and subordination as a feature of Brazilian life, while maintaining the belief that relative to other multiracial polities Brazil is indeed a more racially and culturally accommodating society (Hanchard, 1994, p. 43).