Even as the former slave owners set about diluting the country’s blackness, they also went to work on their cover story. In the Brazilian creation myth – the country’s version of Canada’s “cultural mosaic” or the U.S. “melting pot” – the country is a democracia racial, a racial democracy. This official story was built on the idea that from the day slavery ended, Brazilians of all colours were equal. After all, there was no segregation, no apartheid, no Jim Crow. Glossing over the massive disparities between the former owners and the newly freed slaves – who had no education, land or assets – the Brazilian elite, almost entirely white, declared the country uniquely equal and, in effect, postracial.

“It was ‘invisibilization,’” says Marcelo Paixão, who is black and a professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil, and you don’t need to discuss the inequality.”

The first census after the end of slavery, in 1890, asked not about race, but about colour: Citizens were asked if they were white, brown, black, yellow or caboclo – a Portuguese word for those with some indigenous ancestry, more commonly known here as being vermelha, or red. Over the next years, racial identity was steadily replaced with considerations of colour. In 1976, the national statistics institute, seeking to hone the precision of the census, surveyed thousands of Brazilians about what word they themselves used – and came back with a list of 136. They included terms such as amarela-queimada (burnt yellow), canela (cinnamon) and morena-bem-chegada: very nearly morena, a word for brown.

“It was ‘invisibilization’. The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil...” — Marcelo Paixão, a black professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

On some level, it was a progressive ideology, notes Prof. Paixão – it allowed for nuance instead of clear-cut indicators of racial purity. It also resulted in a more genuinely mixed culture, although that mixture is the outcome, in part, of appropriation. Cornerstones of black culture – such as samba music and the martial art capoeira, practised in secret by slaves – have been thoroughly co-opted into Brazilian identity.

But within that culture, and that society, there was an ineluctable hierarchy of what were to be considered racial traits. The dominant idea, propagated by whites, and eventually accepted by many black and mixed-race people as well, he explains, was that the “white” part of the mix brought a European rationality, while Africans brought happiness and creativity, a positive outlook – he ticks off adjectives and rolls his eyes. The more white that one was, the more of the “valuable” characteristics one had. To be whiter was to have a better chance of getting a job, and of earning more in that job. To be whiter, in other words, was to have it easier. Brazil became what is sometimes called here a “pigmentocracy.” (Prof. Paixão is among the fewer than five per cent of faculty members at the Federal University who are black.)

Meanwhile the division of power and wealth that locked itself into place at the time of slavery’s abolition was never addressed. Brazil’s freed slaves were “free,” as well, of the fundamental things needed to forge material equality: assets, education and access to capital. There was no land reform to break up the giant plantations and give the former slaves a way to support themselves. In Rio, former slaves were denied the right to live in the city proper, and so scrabbled for rough housing on the surrounding hills – this is the bleak origin of the favelas, or slums, that today are integral to the city’s postcard identity.

Race by neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro Out of Rio’s 6,320,446 people, 51 per cent identified as white in the 2010 census, 36.5 per cent as mixed (mixed race between white and black) and 11.5 per cent as black. In the neighbourhoods below, the darker the red, the higher the concentration of people who identified as white. The higher concentration of self-identified white people tends to lead to a higher average monthly income in the neighbourhood. White Black Mixed Other Population Average income THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS, 2010 Mouseover regions for details. Click to zoom in and out. Monthly income includes respondants with no income.

The legacy of slavery, and the failure to address it, is visible in myriad other ways as well. Brazil has seen enormous social progress in the past 13 years: more than 30 million people, nearly a sixth of the population, has moved out of poverty into the lower middle class. That boost came from both an economic boom (driven by vast offshore oil finds, and high commodity prices fuelled by Chinese demand) and from progressive social policies implemented by a series of left-wing governments that dramatically raised the minimum wage and used targeted cash transfers to bring economic security to the poor.

But that progress has not touched all Brazilians equally. Even after those 13 years of rapid change, black and mixed-race Brazilians continue to earn far less than do white ones: 42.2 per cent less. More than 30 per cent fewer of them finish high school. Black Brazilians die younger, and young black men die at dramatically higher rates, than do white ones, typically victims of violence, often at the hands of police.

Thanks to an economic boom and progressive social policies, average income in Brazil has risen across the board since 2003, however the large income gap between whites and non-whites remains. (Income in Brazilian Reais.)

Indeed, in many ways the economic and social progress has served only to bring into stark relief how entrenched the hierarchy of race and colour remains. At the last census, in 2010, 51 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black or of mixed race. But the halls of power show something else. Of 38 members of the federal cabinet, one is black – the minister for the promotion of racial equality. Of the 381 companies listed on BOVESPA, the country’s stock market, not a single one has a black or mixed-race chief executive officer. Eighty per cent of the National Congress is white. In 2010, a São Paulo think tank analyzed the executive staff of Brazil’s 500 largest companies and found that a mere 0.2 per cent of executives were black, and only 5.1 per cent were of mixed race.

A higher percentage of whites have had 15 or more years of education, while black Brazilians are most likely to have gone to school for less than a year.

Even interracial marriages are not the tribute to colour-blindness that they might appear to be. Disaggregate the data on who is marrying whom, and they show that such marriages are least common in the highest (predominantly white) income brackets, and most common among the lowest earners, who are almost entirely black or of mixed race. Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a white sociologist at Rio’s State University who studies race and economics, describes it as a sort of bleak bargain: When such marriages do occur, the darker-skinned partner usually has a higher level of education or a higher income or both. The relationship, at least on one level, is an economic transaction – each person is gaining social mobility, of one kind or the other.

There is also a sort of alchemy, Prof. Ribeiro explains, by which people with a mixed racial heritage who succeed in business or politics, such as billionaire media magnate Roberto Marinho, come to be viewed as white. Even in the two fields in which black Brazilians succeed at the highest levels – sports and music – that alchemy can work its dark magic. Soccer phenom Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., who presented as black when he first began to attract attention on the pitch, has, with his ascendancy, become in the popular perception, if not white, certainly not black.

Ms. de Araújo, right, was relieved when her daughter Sarah Ashley, centre, was born white like her husband, Mr. dos Praseres, left. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)

It was against this long and complex backdrop that Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres met 15 years ago as teenagers in a rough part of Rio. They hung out with a multiracial bunch of kids, and neither thought about race, they say, when they wound up kissing on a street corner one night. Mr. dos Praseres, shy and stocky, recalled in a recent Sunday afternoon conversation that he knew, from the minute he met her, that this willowy girl who could talk the birds out of the trees, was the one for him. He didn’t hesitate, even briefly, to bring her home to his family (Why would he? His own father is as dark-skinned as she is.) He says it went over just fine.

But that’s not quite how his wife remembers it. Turning to him with an expression of exaggerated surprise, she says: “They called me neguinha [little darkie] and all sorts of things! I heard people asking you, ‘You’re with that dark one?’ ”

At her family’s home, on the other hand, the new boyfriend was received differently. “They congratulated me,” she says matter-of-factly. “Because I was lightening the family, right? It felt like I was doing some great thing.”