Neither Black nor white

Until this groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the United States and Brazil. Brazil had never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum -- that Brazilian slavery was more humane -- the author points to a combination of demographic, economic and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.