Julia E. Sweig – The World Post, 9/10/2014

Stating the obvious can have its merits, so I’ll risk the inevitable criticism for stating the obvious: two women, one white, one black, are the top contenders for the presidency of one of the world’s largest democracies.

Maybe the NSA is blocking my access, but I spent the afternoon hunting around the Brazilian media for a discussion of gender and race in this election and found but a handful of articles. Perhaps the gender angle is easier to explain–Brazilian women have been running for president off and on for the last twenty years. The 2010 election may have been more of a breakthrough than 2014. But the muted, if absent reference to race surely owes more to the reluctance to talk about Brazil’s racial divide and the persistence of the myth of a race-blind society.

Why talk about race and gender when…