Racial democracy (Portuguese: democracia racial) is a concept that denies the existence of racism in Brazil. Some scholars of race relations in Brazil argue that the country has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers cite the fact that most Brazilians claim not to view others through the lens of race, and thus the idea of racial discrimination is irrelevant.

Many sociologists and anthropologists, however, view the idea of racial democracy as myth or ideology that seeks to validate the ideal that Brazil is a place where people of all races can participate in society equally. They instead emphasize the compelling evidence of inequalities motivated by racism as well as cultural, social, and political structures that privilege white Brazilians.

It was a common view among Brazilian elites, from the end of the Second Reign until the beginning of the Republic, that Brazil had escaped the problem of racial prejudice, based on the theory that in Brazil there had been a kind of mild slavery and harmony between masters and slaves. It was also common to compare the racial situation observed in the United States at that time with the image that was formed of the national reality, concluding that in Brazil black people were treated much better.

But this was not true, and several authors contested this view already in the 19th century. Later research reaffirmed the falsity of the ideas of social harmony and mild slavery, showing how black people lived in rustic and often unhealthy housing, performed heavy labor in long working hours, received little medical assistance and low-quality food, and were systematically abused physically, morally, psychologically and sexually. Resistance to domination frequently resulted in brutal repression with humiliations and severe physical punishments that often led to mutilation, deformation, disfigurement or death. As noted by Leonardo Boff, "history was written by the white hand".

At the same time, the whitening of the Brazilian population was desired, supported by theories of eugenics and selective miscegenation and implemented through state colonization programs with populations of European immigrants. The whitening theory was regarded as a scientific truth and was widely disseminated until the mid-20th century. It was based on the presumption of white superiority, understanding miscegenation as a way to make the population lighter, based on the belief that the gene of the white race would prevail over the others and that people in general would seek partners lighter than themselves. Thus it was asserted that whitening would produce a healthy mixed-race population capable of becoming ever whiter, both culturally and physically. For this reason, the ideal of miscegenation was seen as an effective mechanism for the absorption of the mestizo and the long-term elimination of traits of the black ethnic group in the population. The objective of these mechanisms was neither to promote the social advancement of a certain portion of blacks and mulattos nor to establish racial equality, but, on the contrary, to preserve the hegemony of the dominant race. Reflecting the aforementioned ideal, João Batista de Lacerda, director of the National Museum, and the only Latin American to present a report at the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, went so far as to state:

Martiniano Silva explains that miscegenation is an ancient process of ethnic and cultural enrichment of peoples, capable of producing civilizations, and that it occurs spontaneously. He states that historically racial miscegenation in Brazil "was never treated and never existed as a free, spontaneous, and therefore natural process of union between two peoples". On the contrary, the black woman was exploited, dishonored and morally and sexually violated through forced unions imposed by fear and insecurity, producing children conceived without a legally recognized father, remaining in the status of slaves, thus producing no racial and cultural enrichment of any civilization. He concludes by saying that one must not confuse the discharacterization of a people through sexual violence with the myth of a racial democracy. However, there are numerous cases of black women married to white men, black women who slept with masters on their own initiative, and black women treated like princesses by white masters. What was not very common during the period were black men with white women.

The myth of racial democracy also gained strength from narratives pointing to the existence of many successful mixed-race individuals, but ignored the fact that these cases were a small minority and concealed a reality of discrimination even among mixed-race people, who, in view of the heavy burden of prejudices that fell upon blacks, often tried to hide their origins or deny them as a strategy for social survival. In this context, mixed-race individuals were often more or less accepted by white society by identifying them as "blacks with a white soul", which fit into the ideologies of population whitening.

However, according to the sociologist Oracy Nogueira, one of the first scholars of racism in Brazil, the presence of mixed-race individuals in the middle classes in Brazil is extremely widespread, yet the great majority of these people neither perceive themselves nor are perceived as mixed-race, but rather as white.