The Difference Between Black Brazil and Black
U.S.
by Italo Ramos
"We black Brazilians don't blame our national black
leaders for inefficiency or inaccuracy, because we don't have any."
In the 16th
Century, the colonizers that went to Africa came from the same continent, a
vast and diverse Europe, as we know.
But, despite their different origins and cultures, they had two things
in common. First, their two main
motivations: 1) to pillage free natural resources; and 2) to appropriate free
labor. Second: they thought they had the right to do these things, because, in
their minds, they were superior human beings. This is a history that didn't
change, as racist whites have the same mindset even today about pillage and
slavery.
Although
their motivations were the same, European colonizers couldn't escape their
cultural differences, and so, the resulting contemporary racial relations in
two countries, Brazil and the US, couldn't be more different. Today, the American newspapers' editions, as
they report the contemporary history of US racial questions, are full of very
good examples of these two radically different streams of racial consciousness.
(In fact, the daily editions are, themselves, one of the big differences,
because it is not so easy to find news about
black and white differences in Brazilian newspapers.)
From
reading American newspapers. I discovered that Mr. Juan Williams, a
correspondent, news analyst and writer, wrote an article complaining that he
has been attacked since he published a book about racial issues, that holds
today's civil rights leaders accountable for serious problems inside black
America. He went on to say that "75% of
black America is taking advantage of 50 years of new opportunities...to create
the largest black middle class in history...."
"Contemporary racial relations in two countries, Brazil
and the US, couldn't be more different."
Now and
then, the businessman and former University of California Regent Ward Connerly
appears in the pages proclaiming satisfaction because "the demise of
affirmative action in America is fast approaching."
Then came
all the racial viciousness at Los Angeles' Laugh Factory with Michael
Richard, followed by the idea of banning the "N" word. In this particular
case, Noam Chonsky, the linguist, certainly would approve this movement, as he,
more than anyone else, knows the dangerous power of cultural and political
domination the language has.
More
recently, I read an article written by Vikram Amar and Richard H. Sander, two
professors from UC Davis School of Law and UCLA, respectively. They call our
attention to what they called the
"mismatch effect" - the possibility that Affirmative Action (AA) is not
functioning to blacks benefit. Citing
some researchers, they say that "50% of the black law students end up in the
bottom 10th of their classes...."
In Brazil, on the contrary, the students with AA help, are at the first
rank of their classes, ahead of white students. So, white people cannot claim that AA can be bad for blacks.
Instead, they say that it will be bad for the whole society, by separating
people by color and, thus, "creating a racist country."
"In Brazil, the students who are helped by AA help are at
the first rank of their classes, ahead of white students."
All this
reminds me of five years ago, when I first came to Los Angeles intending to do
some research on racial relations, and had my first shocking personal
experience of the differences I am writing about. Walking down Sunset Boulevard, I was surprised by a white,
slightly pink and widely smiling old lady who greeted me with: "Oh, you're
good-looking! How are you doing, today?," she asked. I'm not so naïve as to
suppose that she wanted an answer, so, while silently smiling back, my memory
was free to send me back to my country, where an old white lady in the streets
of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo would never have greeted me like that. And I
thought: Well, as I know I'm not that good-looking, maybe she is just a
racist feeling vulnerable by my black appearance and trying to determine if I am really a threat, by
observing my reaction to her greetings. Was I right? Or maybe she was just a liberal
white woman. Well, I will never know.
But there
is one thing I do know. In that old lady's attitude there was something I see
in many whites, in the predominantly white community where I live, in Brazil.
It is something too charming, extremely pleasant, excessively easy, that always
makes me uncomfortably distrustful. This something is artificially forged by
education, by politeness - the kind of civilized behavior that prevented the
old lady from being gratuitously hostile or, at least, ignoring my existence.
In fact, a kind of hypocrisy. But living in LA for some months every year, I
quickly learned that those attitudes can be seen as a sign of education, yes,
but must not be confused with
liberalism.
"For Brazilian media, the work done by our black movement
is an antipatriotic attempt to import American-style racial hate."
Reading all
this news about race in the US, more than just to learn about American racial
complexity, I could make sense of how big the differences are between Brazil
and the US, in terms of racial questions.
Here are some of them:
All the
space taken up in newspapers to debate black "affairs" would be unbelievable in
Brazil. As a matter of fact, the media,
in general, thinks and acts as if
Brazil is a "racial democracy."
So, for them, the work done by our black movement - which is growing
although still weak, considering the huge weight of our racism - is an
antipatriotic attempt to import American-style racial hate.
We don't
blame national black leaders for inefficiency or inaccuracy, because we don't
have any. There are so many blacks in
Brazil that to be anti-black is the same as being against gravity, as they are
everywhere. But without leadership, they are not organized, not mobilized and,
just like gravity, not a force, compared to the American black movement. We
have some black leaders in local communities, but none of them nationally
known. Our greatest leader, Zumbi
dos Palmares, fought against slavery, which ended one hundred years ago.
Today, we have some black politicians, in the Congress, fighting for laws to
benefit black population. And we have some black secretaries in the government, like the singer Gilberto Gil. But they
don't lead any national black organization or movement.
In the US,
black leaders may commit errors, not doing something they should do or not
doing anything to stop some abuses, but, at least in principle, black people
believe in them as honest individuals. In Brazil, black people always look at
an emerging leader suspiciously, believing that he is not sincere and only
wants to take personal advantage based on his race. So, if someone black wants to run for a political position, it is
better not to ask for votes saying "I'm a black man and will fight for racial
progress," because no one will vote for him.
Brazil has
the second largest black population in the world, only after Nigeria. Still,
black history is a very recent discipline in schools. The country is considered
one of the most unequal societies, where blacks are 90% in the poorest classes.
But, nonetheless, we don't attack government programs that benefit black
people, because we don't have them on such a large scale as the US has. And
they are new programs, as almost everything done to benefit blacks has come in
recent years.
"There are 40 universities adopting the quota system."
Affirmative
Action is a very new expression in Brazil, borrowed from the US
vocabulary. It started being practiced
in 2003, not in any federal institution, but by the initiative of the
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, with a quota of 40% for black
students. And while in the US AA is
being more and more contested and losing its strength, in Brazil, today, only
four years after being adopted, it is a volcano, expelling quotas around the
whole country. Americans can say it is
not the best kind of AA, but it is what Brazilian black people are depending on
to go to university. And in 2007, there
are 40 universities adopting the quota system.
We don't
have any part of the society taking advantage of new opportunities. First,
because new opportunities are very few; second, because we don't have a black
middle class. Blacks amount to 49% of a population of 180 million people, but
it is impossible to create a middle class without education and with salaries
51% less than the salaries of whites.
We never
had a Ku Klux Klan, but until today we have thousands of Samuel H. Bowers (the
assumed former KKK leader who died in prison) in many owners of industries,
commercial shops, hotels, and restaurants, ready to discriminate against black
people at the entrance.
As anyone
can see, these are very important differences, as they show how little black
consciousness there is in Brazil. But there is one that is the biggest.
The most
significant aspect to distinguish Brazilian and American racism, in its most
generalized form, is the concrete nature of American racism, in contrast with
the subjective character, the fluid state, the invisibility of Brazil's. The
difference is that, in the US, nobody would dare to deny its existence, but in
Brazil, racism is the essence of a substantive very...abstract. For a massive majority in Brazilian
society, it just doesn't exist. For many blacks, too. But, more fantastic than
that: At the same time it is invisible, it is naturally practiced by the
majority of the white population. And
they don't even notice what they are doing.
"In the US, nobody would dare to deny its existence, but
in Brazil, racism is the essence of a substantive very...abstract."
There are
two reasons for me to list invisibility as the most significant difference
between American and Brazilian racism: First, because invisibility is a
secular, regular, ordinary custom, the most common form through which
discrimination spreads among the population against black people. Brazilian society practices "non-existent"
racism, as part of a collective bad character of Brazilian moral life. And its
main property is to be diffuse, underground, disguised, treacherous and, so,
very difficult to combat. How does one
fight against a ghost? In general, Brazilian society believes so little in the
existence of racism that some white people get offended when confronted with
their own racist practices, as they like to say and believe that they are
liberals. The second reason: being so,
it is the best example to show how deep racism is in Brazilian whites. It is so
entrenched in everyday life that nobody who is white will bother about being
polite, educated, with Black people. We all know that, in the US, blacks
sometimes are "invisible," but, in Brazil, invisibility is the real racism.
The
millions of signs of racism in schools, at work or in the streets - the common
use of the word "crioulo" is a good example - mean so little that the latest
book, written this year, about racial questions, has the title "Nao Somos
Racistas" (We Are Not Racists). And I keep thinking that something makes it
necessary to write that book.
It is not
that white Brazilian society is all racist. Of course, there are many that take
advantage of discrimination, but who don't hate black people and don't think
they are inferior. These ones are opportunists, like the cheap thief that takes
our wallet while we're not looking. And
there is that majority thinking that racism doesn't exist. These ones can be
sincere, and I would dare to say innocent. The problem is that black people
have failed in giving white Brazilians the real image of the world they live
in. There are some attempts, mainly on
the academic level, but without the necessary frequency and wide national
repercussions. One of the most recent was given by a professor at the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, the
economist and sociologist Marcelo Paixao.
He published his dissertation in
2004, with some data proving, once more, that the color of poverty is black.
That is not a new fact, but he exposed it in a very surprising and intelligent
way. He split Brazilian society in two
parts, black and white, and applied to them, separately, the human development
program launched by the UN in 1990 to measure the quality of life in 173 countries
- income per capita, life expectancy, and scholarship. This index, that has "Happiness Index" as
its nickname, was created by the Nobel Prize laureate American economist Paul
Samuelson, in the 1970s, as the social counterpart of the National Growth
Product (NGP), which measures economic development. According to the UN, in 2002, Brazil, as a whole, was in 63rd
place, one step behind Namibia. Paixao's two countries, one white one black,
were compared, and the result is that if Brazil were a country with only white
people, it would be in 44th place. If it were populated only with
blacks, it would be the 105th. Paixao's study goes on, showing
that between 1992 and 2001, while the
number of Brazilian poor people decreased by 5 million, the number of poor
black people increased by 500,000, demonstrating that, while the whites got
richer, the blacks got poorer.
"In Brazil, the color of poverty is black."
The biggest
Brazilian university, Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), as its name says, is
located in the country's richest state, with a population of more than 30
million. Although the state's black
population is 27,4%, the black students at USP are only 1,4%. In 2005, USP
adopted a quota for black students in the masters programs of its law school. But it was the Ford Foundation that proposed
it and gave the money to be used for scholarships. So, if there is the money,
why not?
Personally,
I don't think that Mr. Juan Williams is a sellout, as his critics used to call
him. On the contrary, considering all he has written, he is a good black man.
But there are two things I don't understand in his thoughts. First: When he suggests that many black
people are capable of helping themselves, as a black man, he is legitimizing
the white racist arguments against Affirmative Action. Why does he do
that? Well, maybe that is why he is
being attacked, because, if "75% of black Americans are taking advantages of 50
years of new opportunities," it is also true that there is a large number of blacks in need of them in
the other 25%, and so, his mathematics becomes a very difficult social
equation. Second: When he pinpoints
education as a pre-requirement to achieve racial progress, what is he thinking
racial progress is? My point is: On the
white side of society, education does not seem able to cure racism; instead, it
simply gives to white persons a hypocritical, insincere attitude. If so, education cannot prevent black people
from being a target of racism, too. So, where is the progress? Is education
only a shield to protect black people against poverty and discrimination, or is
it so effective that is capable of assuring racial progress? After all, Hitler was surrounded by very
educated people. Well, if we don't put
education in its place, we'll be at risk of creating a society with undesirable
black families and workers, and full of white educated racists just like the
Third Reich was. Education is very important, who can deny it? But racism is a behavioral disturbance,
located in the moral terrain, although,
in the whole of Mr. Williams' article we cannot find the word morality one single time. That might go without saying, but, maybe,
that's another reason why he is being attacked.
As we
Brazilians don't have another good example, the adoption of AA in education is
the first step in Brazil to follow the path the US has been taking all these
years, since the 60s. But, being such a different society, my question is: are
we going the right way?
Italo Ramos is a Brazilian journalist. He can be
contacted at [email protected].