Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory. It is a country that has been able to maintain fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy for many centuries. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of an exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power. A democracy that subjugates a section of the population by virtue of the color of their skin cannot be said to be in the interest of that segment of the population but the perpetrator of segregation and dehumanization. In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine highlights the word shock as in the shock of racism, to problematize a dual feeling of action and nonaction on the part of Afro-Brazilians in the face of racism. She suggests that in order to contain the shock of racism, Afro-Brazilians have become silenced, coerced, and self-secluded. As a result, the more volatile act of challenging racism openly and directly is traded for “harmonious relations” thereby leaving white supremacy untouched. At work in this truism is what I call “vital force”: that ancestral strength and energy with which Afro-Brazilians cope and regenerate themselves through creative and cultural strategies that have their political implications even when they are not forcefully or apparently articulated.