Ivete Sacramento, who became Brazil’s first black president of a major university in 1998, said she’s saddened every day when she looks out the balcony of her upper middle-class apartment at the sprawling slum that sits just a few dozen yards away. (Carl Juste / MCT)
A great divide
Brazil’s public self-image of a ‘racial democracy’ is being challenged as black Brazilians struggle to overturn centuries of racism
Based on original article by Jack Chang posted on June 17, 2007
Footnotes (numbered in parentheses) written by Gatas Negras (please see bottom of article)
RIO DE JANEIRO — Aleixo Joaquim da Silva was working in this city’s famed seaside Copacabana neighborhood, far from the slum where he lives, when he was reminded that racism is alive and well. While refurbishing the service elevator of a high-rise apartment building, da Silva had to ride the elevator reserved for residents to fetch supplies. A white woman entered and, taken aback, ordered him out.
Aleixo Joaquim da Silva, 50, recounts an incident in a Copacabana neighborhood where he was discriminated against by a white woman. da Silva’s only part of a growing movement in Brazil, a country of 190 million people — it has the world’s second-largest black population, behind Nigeria — to turn back centuries of pervasive and largely unchallenged racism. Carl Juste/Miami Herald (Carl Juste/MCT)
“‘I’m not riding with a black!’ she told me. ‘The place of blacks is in the service elevator!'” da Silva recalled (1). Although black Brazilians have long endured such insults, many are deciding that they have had enough. The 50-year-old reported the woman to state authorities and had her convicted for breaking laws prohibiting discrimination (2). It was a small victory for da Silva, but he’s part of a growing movement in this country of 190 million people — it has the world’s second-largest black population, behind Nigeria’s — to turn back centuries of pervasive and largely unchallenged racism.
A multiracial crowd of commuters leaves the subway in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the central train station.
Brazil claims more than 90 million people of African descent out of a population of 190 million (3). It has more blacks than any country except Nigeria. In Rio’s slums, blacks make up the majority of residents. From university classrooms to television airwaves, black Brazilians are fighting for what they say is long-denied space in a society that has kept them on the margins.
They are pushing for two affirmative-action bills in Brazil’s Congress that would open up college enrollment and government payrolls to more Brazilians of African descent (4). Already, many state universities have implemented their own affirmative-action programs. In 2005, black entertainer José de Paula Neto (Netinho) launched the country’s first television station aimed at black audiences, TV da Gente (5). Meanwhile, hundreds of communities founded more than a century ago by escaped slaves and known as quilombos are winning recognition and federal protections.
And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Senator Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.
“The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you’ll see exclusion is endemic,” he said. “We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve.”
Da Silva said outrage over his treatment in the elevator pushed him to fight back.
“I couldn’t let it go, especially since it was done in such a flagrant manner,” he said. “It just hurt too much. It hurt my soul. We can’t go backward. We can’t stay quiet anymore.”
A game of dominoes provides a diversion for men in a ‘favela,’ or slum, in Salvador, a northeastern Brazilian city where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream. Despite racial disparities in the country, debate about race is rare. But now, black Brazilians have become more assertive about their rights.
TURNING POINT
The changes mark a dramatic shift in a country that claims more than 90 million people (3) of African descent but looks almost completely white on its TV screens and in its halls of power. Starting in the 16th century, Portuguese slave traders sent about 5.5 million Africans to Brazil, with more than 3.3 million surviving the journey, according to historians. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
That African legacy is clear in census numbers. About half of Brazilians identified themselves in a 2005 survey as black (preto) or pardo, meaning a mix of races but predominantly white and black. Another half identified themselves as white, and less than 1 percent were Asian or indigenous.
A young man makes the hand gesture of a bird as a sign of freedom and peace. A group of sixteen violent offenders are detained in a dark cell meant for four as they wait to be transported to a larger and more protective facility. The crime rate among Brazil’s poor has caused over crowding in its prison system. (Carl Juste/MCT)
DISPARITY ENTRENCHED
Despite their numbers, black Brazilians have long been poorer, less educated, less healthy and less powerful than white Brazilians.And although Brazilians regularly eat foods and use words that originated in Africa, their history books talk almost exclusively about the deeds of white heroes, said Emanoel Araújo, a renowned black sculptor and the curator of the Afro Brasil Museum in São Paulo.
“We need to redo the history of this country,” Araújo said, “and work around the premise and the perspective of the African not only as a slave but as the one who changed Brazilian society, the one who constructed Brazilian society, who constructed the wealth of Brazil.”
Emanoel Araújo
That day of acknowledgment is still far off, and Brazil, a country with one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor in the world, is sharply divided between its whites and non-whites.Census figures show that pardos and blacks earned about half of what white Brazilians made last year, with the gap actually widening among more educated Brazilians. In comparison, African-Americans (U.S. blacks) earned 62 percent of white American wages in 2004, and more schooling helped blacks approach white incomes.
A young girl is ushered past a man begging for change outside the historic Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Pretos. Many squatters have taken residence in historic Salvador where buildings were left abandoned until wealthy European started renovating them causing a revival of the area. (Carl Juste/MCT)
The U.N. Human Development Index, which measures countries based on health, income and other factors, paints an even worse picture. If measured separately, Brazilian whites would be ranked 44th in the world, on par with oil-rich Kuwait, while its blacks and pardos would be ranked 105th, about the same level as El Salvador.
“I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there’s widespread racism in Brazil,” said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil. “Racial and social inequality are strongly linked.”
Jailson de Souza e Silva, who runs a Rio de Janeiro anti-violence advocacy group, said the split is stark in his city’s violence-torn slums, where blacks make up the majority of residents. Two-thirds of the country’s homicide victims in 2004 were black.
“The objective here is not to preserve life, and hundreds of black men are dying every year,” de Souza e Silva said. “Meanwhile, in the rich, white parts of the city, every single death is big news. Our lives clearly don’t have equal value.”
Da Silva’s slum has been paralyzed in recent years by gang-related violence, and its middle-class neighbors have erected gated checkpoints around the slum to stop the killing from spilling into their streets.
“It’s another sign of the inequality here,” da Silva said while gesturing to the rutted dirt road running by his house. “The government doesn’t bother to pave the streets here. We’re just totally forgotten.”
A squatter named Beatriz, hanging laundry under the glare of a bare bulb, is one of many who occupy abandoned buildings in Salvador. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
GAP IN NORTHEAST
The divisions are felt even in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black and where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream.
Ivete Sacramento, who became the country’s first black president of a major university in 1998, said she is saddened every day when she looks out the balcony of her upper-middle-class apartment at the sprawling slum that sits just a few dozen yards away.
Except for her family and two other households, every resident in her 64-unit apartment tower is white. In the nearby slum, the racial equation is inverted, and white faces are rare. ‘‘No one has any idea that blacks can be anything more than maids,” said Sacramento, 54 (6).
‘‘The place of blacks in Brazil is still the place of slaves.”
Alberto Borges, a 31-year old aspiring boxer from the slum, said that just being from his neighborhood is a strike against him.
“If you live in one of these houses, the people outside will call you preto,” Borges said, using a word for black Brazilians that many consider derogatory. “If you try to find a job and tell them where you come from, they won’t call back.”
Despite the disparities, debate about race is rare in Brazil., and problems are more felt than spoken about.
Black Brazilians have never launched a civil-rights movement like that in the United States nor developed national black leaders in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. or South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. Also non-existent are black civic groups with the power of U.S. institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (7) or financial networks that could spur black entrepreneurship.
A couple embrace in a Salvador doorway, in a neighborhood popular with squatters. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A BACKLASH
Those who do speak out about racial disparities, such as TV da Gente,are accused — even by some prominent blacks — of fomenting racial divisions or of outright racism.
‘‘Every time we try to put together a project like this, we’re criticized by the government and everyone else who says there is no racism in Brazil,” said Hasani Damazio, TV da Gente’s director of international programs. “It’s clear that race is treated very differently here than in the U.S.”
A key difference is that Brazil never imposed legal racial segregation like the United States and South Africa, which meant that black Brazilians didn’t have an institutional injustice to rally around. Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the “racial democracy” vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.
Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races. Opponents of the pending affirmative-action bills have echoed key points of Freyre’s argument, especially those about miscegenation. Census statistics show that about 30 percent of Brazilian households in 2000 were headed by couples from different racial backgrounds — six times the U.S. ratio.
Ali Kamel, executive director of news for the country’s biggest television network, Globo, said Brazilians don’t think in terms of white and black, and argued that poverty affects all Brazilians. He blamed a collapse in public education and not racism for social disparities.
“Our big problem in Brazil is poverty, not racial discrimination,” Kamel said. “The racism here is at a degree infinitesimally less than in other countries.” (8)
Opposition to the affirmative-action bills also has come from some black leaders such as José Carlos Miranda, coordinator of Brazil’s Black Socialist Movement, who fear that race-based policies could aggravate racism.
“The worst thing we could do is pass laws that deepen divisions that already exist,” Miranda said. “What wounds us the most is class, and the only way to fight racism is to promote more equality.”
Other black activists, however, argue that race is the dividing factor and that racial mixing didn’t eliminate discrimination against non-whites.
A man in a wheelchair gets a ride from a caregiver in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
‘PREJUDICE ISSUE’
“The problem of Brazil always was this issue of thinking the mulatto and the pardo are outside of the prejudice issue,” Araújo said. ‘‘Yet, when you want to hit the soul of someone, you call him black.” More Brazilians are coming around to Araújo’s view, polls show, and the timeworn idea of a multi-hued racial democracy is losing its sway, even as the race debate heats up.
In its place has risen the begrudging admittance of a racially segregated country. A 2003 poll showed that more than 90 percent of Brazilians said racism existed here. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist activist and union leader, is credited with helping to spur the changes in attitudes.
Soon after taking office in 2003, he made race a key issue and appointed Brazil’s first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa. Lula da Silva also created a special secretariat for racial equality and launched initiatives such as requiring that Afro-Brazilian history be taught in all primary schools.
“Things have gotten worse,” said Antônio Carlos dos Santos, president of Ilê Aiyê, a community group in Salvador known for both its African-influenced Carnaval parades and its consciousness-raising social projects.
It’s a cynicism shared by ordinary Brazilians such as da Silva, who live every day with the country’s crushing inequalities. But in his case, and for many black Brazilians, cynicism is giving way to action.
Footnotes
1. Elevators in Brazilian apartments are where some of the most aggressive acts of racism occur. People who work in apartments are required to take the service elevators while inhabitants take the social elevator. The elevator is often a place that divides rich from poor and often black from white. One of the most infamous acts of racism in the past two decades occurred because of perceived, color-coded rights to an elevator in 1993. This incident will be the focus of a future article.
2. Although racism is outlawed in Brazil, it is not always easy or immediate to get justice because of discrimination. Many Afro-Brazilians don’t pursue actions because of the difficulty of proving the complaint or the ways that lawyers or even judges downplay racism or its interpretation according to the law. See the case of Simone Diniz for example.
3. In Brazil, activists consider the sum of pretos (blacks) and pardos (browns) to represent Brazil’s black or African descendant population. Today, some estimate the Afro-Brazilian population to be between 95-100 million while the overall Brazilian population stands at or near 200 million.
4. The battle over Affirmative Action policies have been raging in Brazil for the past decade with one side arguing that quotas are the answer to correct centuries of racialized inequality leveled against the Afro-Brazilian population while those against the policies argue that the system is unfair and unconstitutional. In April of this year, Brazil’s Supreme Court voted unanimously (10-0) in favor of the constitutionality of the quota system.
5. The channel has long since been defunct.
6. For a further exploration of how images and stereotypes affect black women in Brazilian society, see here and here.
7. Although none of Brazil’s black civil rights organizations match the NAACP in terms of prominence, the Movimento Negro, an umbrella term for hundreds of Afro-Brazilian rights organizations, has made great strides in the past decades pushing for and maintaining the system of quotas in universities as well as Lei 10.639/03 that obligates schools to teach African History and Afro-Brazilian History and Culture.
8. Kamel and a number of other prominent anti-quota intellectuals continue to deny the impact of racism in Brazilian society. For only a few examples of the daily bouts of racism in the lives of black Brazilians simply type in the word “racism” in the search box at the top of this blog.
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