Racism has been present in Brazil since its colony times and is pointed as one of the major and most widespread types of discrimination, if not the most, in the country by several anthropologists, sociologists, jurists, historians and others. The myth of a Racial Democracy, a term originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), is used by many people in the country to deny or downplay the existence and/or the broad extension of racism in Brazil. Racism has been made illegal under Brazil's anti-discrimination laws, which were passed in the 1950s after Katherine Dunham, an African-American dancer touring Brazil, was barred from a hotel. Nonetheless, race has been the subject of multiple intense debates over the years within the country. Definition of Race in Brazil Because the country has a long history of miscegenation, color lines in Brazil have long been blurred,. At the same time, more and more people see themselves as Black and seek to reclaim their Blackness due to the Black pride and Black power movements. The Brazilian Census organizes the population into five, albeit imperfect, racial groups. These are branco (white), preto (black), pardo (brown, or multi-racial), amarelo (yellow, or Asian), and indígena (indigenous). Because there was never a legal genetic definition for these categories, throughout history, each of these racial groups has been defined in different ways. Racial classification in Brazilian society is often inconsistent and influenced by a myriad of factors including: class, status, education, location and phenotype. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto. History Slavery and Abolition Soon after the Portuguese began to settle in Brazil in the year 1500, they began to enslave the indigenous population in order to sustain their growing sugar economy. However, European induced wars and disease quickly began to deplete the indigenous populations and Portuguese colonizers soon looked to Africa to satisfy their labor demands. By the end of the Slave Trade in 1850, the Brazilian colony had imported an estimated four million slaves from Africa, the largest number of any other country in the Americas and seven times more than what was imported to the United States.