True Blue Moon
Superstar
Been playing with Spanish for a while now, but am more enthused about putting the work in to learn it these days. Gotta form bonds with more of my people.
Essential Afro-Latino/ Caribbean Current Events
- Thread starter Poitier
- Start date
AfroCubaWeb is a great starting pointThis is true. My man is black Cuban and doesn't tolerate that nonsense.
I would like to learn more about black Cubans and their movement as well.
For those who missed @Malta excellent thread of the diverse and beautiful Black women of Brazil: http://www.thecoli.com/threads/black-women-in-brazil.338916/
Female, black and feminist: Meet the new vice president of National Student Union
Note from BW of Brazil: In the last few decades, we’ve seen black Brazilian women assume posts and responsibilities that would have seemed impossible even as recently as the 1990s. This is not to over-estimate the progress that has been made; in Brazil, the image of the black woman is generally still associated with domestic work, the kitchen and Carnaval. The very fact that we still have to celebrate titles such as the“first black woman” to do anything shows that there is still a LLOONNGG ways to go before this parcel of the population is fairly represented in accordance with their representation in the Brazilian population, as well as in the minds of everyday Brazilians. No matter, we’ll keep presenting these achievements as long as they keep coming!
Woman, black and feminist: Meet the new vice president of UNE
Woman, young, Northeastern, black and a feminist. This is Moara Correa Saboia, 25, a native of Recife, Pernambuco, affirmative action student of Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the new União Nacional dos Estudantes (National Student Union) vice-president.
Engaged since adolescence in feminist collectives and the Movimento Negro (black movement), her experience has boosted her presence in the student movement. Her first activity was the Encontro de Mulheres Estudantes (EME or Meeting of Women Students) and then the Encontro de Negras e Negros da UNE (ENUNE or Meeting of Black Men and Women of UNE) in 2013.
“That’s when I saw that the student movement was related to my life beyond the university, it gave me motives and from there I started my militancy,” says Moara.
She then was elected general secretary of the União Estadual dos Estudantes de Minas Gerais (UEE-MG or State Union of Students of Minas Gerais), a position she held in the last two years before being elected vice president of the 54th Congress of the UNE, which took place between June 3rd and 7th in Goiânia, Goias.
Moara talks still about the Ocupe Brasília (Occupy Brasília) movement, which from the beginning of June has been protesting against cuts in education, fiscal adjustment and the reduction of legal age of criminal responsibility.
Learn a little more about our vice-president and everything that she’s planning for their next two years as a representative of thousands of students from all over Brazil.
Moara Correa Saboia, at right, has had a meteoric career in the student movement
YOU SPENT YOUR CHILDREN ON RECIFE?
I left Recife very young. My parents were born in the southeast and went to Pernambuco for economic reasons. As the Northeast didn’t have the development of today, they decided to return to Minas Gerais.
IN WHICH CITY IN MINAS GERAIS DO YOU LIVE?
I live in Contagem.
HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN THE STUDENT MOVEMENT?
What brought me to the student movement were the specific struggles: the debate on women and to combat racism. The first activity I went to was the Meeting of Women Students (EME) and then the meeting of Black Men and Women of UNE (ENUNE). That’s when I saw that the student movement was related to my life beyond the university, it gave me motives and from that I began my militancy in Kizomba. Then I realized that the fight that lies in this space was connected to my life.
AND WHEN WAS THIS?
It was only two years ago.
AND HOW HAS THAT PERIOD BEEN?
I’ve learned a lot. I had a lot of prejudice with the student movement. Sometimes, what comes to us from the base is much more dispute than what the student movement constructs. Participating in the EME was fundamental because it was an area in that hadn’t ben disputed, only policy construction. The ENUNE was the same thing. And when I came in my first Conune, it was the 53rd Congress of the UNE, I was amazed, I fell in love with ten thousand young people who came here to make noise to scream and dispute the best proposal and the direction of the country.
DID YOU IMAGINE THAT, TWO YEARS LATER, YOU WOULD BECOME THE VICE-PRESIDENT OF UNE?
No way. My trajectory was very quick. I went in and I went to the executive office of UEE-MG, much because as I already had an accumulation of social movement.
WHERE WERE YOU AN ACTIVIST BEFORE?
I was a national representative of the Fórum Nacional da Juventude Negra (National Black Youth Forum). I, since I was very young, around the age of fifteen, enjoyed being a militant in the spaces of struggle. The student movement came a little later in my fight. My trajectory in it was also quick because of understanding the reality that it proposed, to mobilize the university, the empowerment of women and blacks.
WHAT DO YOU INTEND TO DO AS VICE PRESIDENT OF UNE?
Two things are essential for me. The first is to understand the current situation. The UNE has advanced greatly over the past decade. In the last two it took a big leap. The last board of UNE was the one that won 10% of PIB (GDP) for education and 50% of the pre-salt (1) social fund. It was the one that popularized the access to university and transformed the working class into a student class. Now, we live in a time of crisis, and we understand that it should not be the student, the worker’s son, who should pay this bill. We radicalize the fight against all regression and against all conservatism. In addition, as a result of the June 2013 demonstrations, the UNE has to understand the new forms of organization of youth. CONEG and Conune are fantastic, but not everyone is able to organize these spaces. Democratizing and rethinking the spaces of UNE is also a very necessary task.
WHAT WOULD A NEW SPACE BE?
The Enune and EME are spaces that don’t take delegates and you only adopt resolutions by consensus. Why not transform these spaces into deliberative spaces? To participate in a CONEG, you need to be organized in an Academic Center or Central Directory of Students, and universities have thousands of other collectives. We have the challenge to bring these new actors, that don’t want to organize themselves into parties or into university entities, within the UNE.
THIS WOULD BE THE FIRST TIME THAT WE HAD A WOMAN IN THE PRESIDENCY AND VICE-PRESIDENCY OF UNE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?
It’s a great challenge. There has been much anticipation about this new configuration of the UNE. Carina Vitral [the new president of the entity] and I will be much pressured because of being women. These agendas to combat sexism and racism are central to the student movement. The student movement space doesn’t have to be masculine, it doesn’t have to be aggressive, but a space that can construct solidarity. We have a great challenge to construct a lot of unity to move forward and stop conservatism.
HAS THE NEW MANAGEMENT ALREADY STARTED EVERYTHING, WITH OCCUPY BRASÍLIA. HOW WAS THAT?
It was very important to the management of UNE to start in the struggle of Occupy Brasília, dawning at the Finance Ministry against cuts in education and end the day managing to postpone the vote of the commission for the redução da maioridade penal(reduction of age of criminal responsibility) was important. Already we were faced with these challenges that we will have for the next two years, with an anti-democratic National Congress, which does not respect popular participation, which places its police to verbally and physically assault students. Those first days set the tone of the challenges for the next period.
WHY YOU ARE AGAINST THE REDUCTION OF THE AGE OF CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Because it doesn’t solve the problem. It criminalizes whoever is the victim of violence in Brazil, not the culprit. We place this in this struggle because we fight for quality education for young people. If this young man is not alive, he will not be able to study. There is a serious public safety problem in Brazil and there is a problem of viewpoint of how security is treated in the country, criminalizing youth. We must strive to change that.
Source: UNE
Note
1. The Pre-salt layer is a geological formation on the continental shelves. It is the geological layers that were laid down before a salt layer accumulated above them during the Gondwana breakup. Some of the petroleum that was formed in the pre-salt layer has not leaked upward (see salt dome) to the post-salt layers above. This is especially common off the coast of Africa and Brazil. The amount of oil is not well known but is thought to be a significant fraction of world oil reserves. According to Petrobras, the oil and natural gas lie below an approximately 2000 m deep layer of salt, itself below an approximately 2000 m deep layer of rock under 2000-3000 m of the Atlantic. Drilling through the rock and salt to extract the pre-salt oil and gas is very expensive. Source
Female, black and feminist: Meet the new vice president of National Student Union
Note from BW of Brazil: In the last few decades, we’ve seen black Brazilian women assume posts and responsibilities that would have seemed impossible even as recently as the 1990s. This is not to over-estimate the progress that has been made; in Brazil, the image of the black woman is generally still associated with domestic work, the kitchen and Carnaval. The very fact that we still have to celebrate titles such as the“first black woman” to do anything shows that there is still a LLOONNGG ways to go before this parcel of the population is fairly represented in accordance with their representation in the Brazilian population, as well as in the minds of everyday Brazilians. No matter, we’ll keep presenting these achievements as long as they keep coming!
Woman, black and feminist: Meet the new vice president of UNE
Woman, young, Northeastern, black and a feminist. This is Moara Correa Saboia, 25, a native of Recife, Pernambuco, affirmative action student of Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the new União Nacional dos Estudantes (National Student Union) vice-president.
Engaged since adolescence in feminist collectives and the Movimento Negro (black movement), her experience has boosted her presence in the student movement. Her first activity was the Encontro de Mulheres Estudantes (EME or Meeting of Women Students) and then the Encontro de Negras e Negros da UNE (ENUNE or Meeting of Black Men and Women of UNE) in 2013.
“That’s when I saw that the student movement was related to my life beyond the university, it gave me motives and from there I started my militancy,” says Moara.
She then was elected general secretary of the União Estadual dos Estudantes de Minas Gerais (UEE-MG or State Union of Students of Minas Gerais), a position she held in the last two years before being elected vice president of the 54th Congress of the UNE, which took place between June 3rd and 7th in Goiânia, Goias.
Moara talks still about the Ocupe Brasília (Occupy Brasília) movement, which from the beginning of June has been protesting against cuts in education, fiscal adjustment and the reduction of legal age of criminal responsibility.
Learn a little more about our vice-president and everything that she’s planning for their next two years as a representative of thousands of students from all over Brazil.
Moara Correa Saboia, at right, has had a meteoric career in the student movement
YOU SPENT YOUR CHILDREN ON RECIFE?
I left Recife very young. My parents were born in the southeast and went to Pernambuco for economic reasons. As the Northeast didn’t have the development of today, they decided to return to Minas Gerais.
IN WHICH CITY IN MINAS GERAIS DO YOU LIVE?
I live in Contagem.
HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN THE STUDENT MOVEMENT?
What brought me to the student movement were the specific struggles: the debate on women and to combat racism. The first activity I went to was the Meeting of Women Students (EME) and then the meeting of Black Men and Women of UNE (ENUNE). That’s when I saw that the student movement was related to my life beyond the university, it gave me motives and from that I began my militancy in Kizomba. Then I realized that the fight that lies in this space was connected to my life.
AND WHEN WAS THIS?
It was only two years ago.
AND HOW HAS THAT PERIOD BEEN?
I’ve learned a lot. I had a lot of prejudice with the student movement. Sometimes, what comes to us from the base is much more dispute than what the student movement constructs. Participating in the EME was fundamental because it was an area in that hadn’t ben disputed, only policy construction. The ENUNE was the same thing. And when I came in my first Conune, it was the 53rd Congress of the UNE, I was amazed, I fell in love with ten thousand young people who came here to make noise to scream and dispute the best proposal and the direction of the country.
DID YOU IMAGINE THAT, TWO YEARS LATER, YOU WOULD BECOME THE VICE-PRESIDENT OF UNE?
No way. My trajectory was very quick. I went in and I went to the executive office of UEE-MG, much because as I already had an accumulation of social movement.
WHERE WERE YOU AN ACTIVIST BEFORE?
I was a national representative of the Fórum Nacional da Juventude Negra (National Black Youth Forum). I, since I was very young, around the age of fifteen, enjoyed being a militant in the spaces of struggle. The student movement came a little later in my fight. My trajectory in it was also quick because of understanding the reality that it proposed, to mobilize the university, the empowerment of women and blacks.
WHAT DO YOU INTEND TO DO AS VICE PRESIDENT OF UNE?
Two things are essential for me. The first is to understand the current situation. The UNE has advanced greatly over the past decade. In the last two it took a big leap. The last board of UNE was the one that won 10% of PIB (GDP) for education and 50% of the pre-salt (1) social fund. It was the one that popularized the access to university and transformed the working class into a student class. Now, we live in a time of crisis, and we understand that it should not be the student, the worker’s son, who should pay this bill. We radicalize the fight against all regression and against all conservatism. In addition, as a result of the June 2013 demonstrations, the UNE has to understand the new forms of organization of youth. CONEG and Conune are fantastic, but not everyone is able to organize these spaces. Democratizing and rethinking the spaces of UNE is also a very necessary task.
WHAT WOULD A NEW SPACE BE?
The Enune and EME are spaces that don’t take delegates and you only adopt resolutions by consensus. Why not transform these spaces into deliberative spaces? To participate in a CONEG, you need to be organized in an Academic Center or Central Directory of Students, and universities have thousands of other collectives. We have the challenge to bring these new actors, that don’t want to organize themselves into parties or into university entities, within the UNE.
THIS WOULD BE THE FIRST TIME THAT WE HAD A WOMAN IN THE PRESIDENCY AND VICE-PRESIDENCY OF UNE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?
It’s a great challenge. There has been much anticipation about this new configuration of the UNE. Carina Vitral [the new president of the entity] and I will be much pressured because of being women. These agendas to combat sexism and racism are central to the student movement. The student movement space doesn’t have to be masculine, it doesn’t have to be aggressive, but a space that can construct solidarity. We have a great challenge to construct a lot of unity to move forward and stop conservatism.
HAS THE NEW MANAGEMENT ALREADY STARTED EVERYTHING, WITH OCCUPY BRASÍLIA. HOW WAS THAT?
It was very important to the management of UNE to start in the struggle of Occupy Brasília, dawning at the Finance Ministry against cuts in education and end the day managing to postpone the vote of the commission for the redução da maioridade penal(reduction of age of criminal responsibility) was important. Already we were faced with these challenges that we will have for the next two years, with an anti-democratic National Congress, which does not respect popular participation, which places its police to verbally and physically assault students. Those first days set the tone of the challenges for the next period.
WHY YOU ARE AGAINST THE REDUCTION OF THE AGE OF CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Because it doesn’t solve the problem. It criminalizes whoever is the victim of violence in Brazil, not the culprit. We place this in this struggle because we fight for quality education for young people. If this young man is not alive, he will not be able to study. There is a serious public safety problem in Brazil and there is a problem of viewpoint of how security is treated in the country, criminalizing youth. We must strive to change that.
Source: UNE
Note
1. The Pre-salt layer is a geological formation on the continental shelves. It is the geological layers that were laid down before a salt layer accumulated above them during the Gondwana breakup. Some of the petroleum that was formed in the pre-salt layer has not leaked upward (see salt dome) to the post-salt layers above. This is especially common off the coast of Africa and Brazil. The amount of oil is not well known but is thought to be a significant fraction of world oil reserves. According to Petrobras, the oil and natural gas lie below an approximately 2000 m deep layer of salt, itself below an approximately 2000 m deep layer of rock under 2000-3000 m of the Atlantic. Drilling through the rock and salt to extract the pre-salt oil and gas is very expensive. Source
Female, black and feminist: Meet the new vice president of National Student Union
79-year old woman earns her degree in Rio de Janeiro
Note from BW of Brazil : Great story here! One of dedication, determination and desire. Educational inequality has a long history in Brazil que the system of affirmative action has only Begun to address in the past decades or so. For many years African-Brazilians Were denied the right to an education and- When it was legally possible, many Were simply not able to remain in school beyond the elementary level having to begin work in menial jobs Often the children to help Their families survive.Besides this, Brazil's education system ranks Among the worst in the world and it will take a complete overhaul to address long-standing structural problems before long term educational inequalities can truly be Addressed. Thus, today's story is bittersweet. Sweet because an elderly woman proved que one is never too old to learn and Achieve. But bitter due to collegues we will never know how her life may have differed had she had the same opportunities as others in such a racially and socially vastly unequal country of Brazil.
79 year old Leonides Victorino learned to read and write at age 67
Elderly woman learns to read and at age 79 graduates from university in Rio
Courtesy of Daily Sergipe
Leonides Victorino with one of her grandchildren
An elderly resident of the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Decided to learn to read and write at age 67. Today, at 79, Leonides Victorino, born in the Zona da Mata in the state of Minas Gerais, now has a university degree in Art History. The story was Told by RJTV, on Thursday, July 23 rd .
Leonides recently earned a degree at age 79
Leonides spent her childhood on the farm. She Began working as a maid and laundress, but never lost her focus. "I was kind of sad, people said I was illiterate que, it felt like there was a knife que cut through my heart," she said.
Leonides Victorino with her grandchildren
That's when she, at 67, Decided to put into practice her dream of learning to read and write, along with her five grandchildren.
In 2014 there was another achievement. Leonides graduated in Art History at the University of the Third Age (University of the Third Age) in UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro). "I dream big, not small dream, no," she joked.
Source: Daily Sergipe
79-year old woman earns her degree in Rio de Janeiro
Note from BW of Brazil : Great story here! One of dedication, determination and desire. Educational inequality has a long history in Brazil que the system of affirmative action has only Begun to address in the past decades or so. For many years African-Brazilians Were denied the right to an education and- When it was legally possible, many Were simply not able to remain in school beyond the elementary level having to begin work in menial jobs Often the children to help Their families survive.Besides this, Brazil's education system ranks Among the worst in the world and it will take a complete overhaul to address long-standing structural problems before long term educational inequalities can truly be Addressed. Thus, today's story is bittersweet. Sweet because an elderly woman proved que one is never too old to learn and Achieve. But bitter due to collegues we will never know how her life may have differed had she had the same opportunities as others in such a racially and socially vastly unequal country of Brazil.
79 year old Leonides Victorino learned to read and write at age 67
Elderly woman learns to read and at age 79 graduates from university in Rio
Courtesy of Daily Sergipe
Leonides Victorino with one of her grandchildren
An elderly resident of the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Decided to learn to read and write at age 67. Today, at 79, Leonides Victorino, born in the Zona da Mata in the state of Minas Gerais, now has a university degree in Art History. The story was Told by RJTV, on Thursday, July 23 rd .
Leonides recently earned a degree at age 79
Leonides spent her childhood on the farm. She Began working as a maid and laundress, but never lost her focus. "I was kind of sad, people said I was illiterate que, it felt like there was a knife que cut through my heart," she said.
Leonides Victorino with her grandchildren
That's when she, at 67, Decided to put into practice her dream of learning to read and write, along with her five grandchildren.
In 2014 there was another achievement. Leonides graduated in Art History at the University of the Third Age (University of the Third Age) in UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro). "I dream big, not small dream, no," she joked.
Source: Daily Sergipe
79-year old woman earns her degree in Rio de Janeiro
July of the Black seminar Promotes Black Women and Entrepreneurship in Salvador, Bahia
Note from BW of Brazil : With every passing year, more and more Afro-Brazilians are staking claims in Their entrepreneurial enterprises and a number of black women Have Been able to carve-out Their own niche in the so-called 'ethnic market' . And what's good to know que is the market is finally beginning to understand que catering to the Afro-Brazilian community Could open up a whole new world of opportunities for potential entrepreneurs and the que Consumers would be interested in Their products and services.
"The Black July" (July of Black Women) seminar Promotes Black Women and Entrepreneurship in Salvador, Bahia
by Claudia Alexander
On Wednesday, the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Sepromi or Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality) put on the part of the July of Black (July of Black Women) mobilizations, the seminar "Black Women and Entrepreneurship" (Black Women and Entrepreneurship). The activity was scheduled to start at 2pm, in the Black Community Development Council (CDCN or Development Council of the Black Community) in the historic Pelourinho district. Besides discussing prospects and challenges in the area, the black entrepreneurs of the Historical Downtown Salvador and the region will have the opportunity to exchange experiences.
The state government has already formalized a partnership with the Service to Support Micro and Small Enterprises (Sebrae - Service to Support Micro and Small Enterprises) to promote entrepreneurship of blacks and women. An edict was launched Also to support the historic uprising Uprising of Búzios (1) projects, with entrepreneurship Among its categories. The actions are part of efforts to implement the State Policy on Fostering Entrepreneurship Blacks and Women (State Policy on Fostering Entrepreneurship of Blacks and Women), established by Law 13,208 / 14.
Other Initiatives are being articulated, in this sense, such as financing options and notices que handsome this area. Civil Society Institutions que work with the segments are Also Involved. Coordinated by Sepromi, the management committee of the Policy is Also composed of Representatives of state departments of Policies for Women (SPM), Planning (SEPLAN), Finance (Sefaz) and Economic Development (SDE). Also part of the group are the departments of Labor, Employment, Income and Sport (Setre), the courts, Human Rights and Social Development (SJDHDS) and Agriculture, Irrigation, Agrarian Reform, Fisheries and Aquaculture (Seagri).
Julies of Black (July of Black Women)
Last week, on the 23rd, empowered, With Their turbans, black women public servants of the state Increased went up the ramp official of the Bahia Legislative Assembly (Alba), to the sound of the girl band Didá. It was a symbolic act of occupation of positions of power by the segment. The rite Preceded the seminar 'Promoting Gender Equality and Race in Bahia' (Promotion of Gender Equality and Racial in Bahia), organized the part of the mobilization of the 'July from Black' (July of Black Women). "The civil society organizations have carried many activities in October to give visibility to July 25 th [Day of the Latin American and Caribbean Black Woman] . The institutional spaces are What They need to absorb this wealth constructed by black and women's movements, what we do here today, "said the holder of the Secretariat of the Promotion of Racial Equality (Sepromi), Vera Lúcia Barbosa.
The manager Also pointed out the union of the various government bodies for realization of the Statute of Racial Equality and Combating Religious Intolerance State (Statute of Racial Equality and Against Religious Intolerance of the State), Which completed one year in June. "Our challenge now is to regulate Chapter VII, Which deals with the rights of black women. This important document is the result of a collective construction of the black community and the government, "she said.
Source : Nation Z , Red
Note
1. The Revolt of Búzios was one of the most important movements in Brazil because, apart from independence, it sought freedom of slaves and racial and social equality. It was the first libertarian manifestation where people had a role, reflecting Significantly, achievements after its outbreak in 1798.
July of the Pretas seminar promotes Black Women and Entrepreneurship in Salvador, Bahia
Note from BW of Brazil : With every passing year, more and more Afro-Brazilians are staking claims in Their entrepreneurial enterprises and a number of black women Have Been able to carve-out Their own niche in the so-called 'ethnic market' . And what's good to know que is the market is finally beginning to understand que catering to the Afro-Brazilian community Could open up a whole new world of opportunities for potential entrepreneurs and the que Consumers would be interested in Their products and services.
"The Black July" (July of Black Women) seminar Promotes Black Women and Entrepreneurship in Salvador, Bahia
by Claudia Alexander
On Wednesday, the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Sepromi or Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality) put on the part of the July of Black (July of Black Women) mobilizations, the seminar "Black Women and Entrepreneurship" (Black Women and Entrepreneurship). The activity was scheduled to start at 2pm, in the Black Community Development Council (CDCN or Development Council of the Black Community) in the historic Pelourinho district. Besides discussing prospects and challenges in the area, the black entrepreneurs of the Historical Downtown Salvador and the region will have the opportunity to exchange experiences.
The state government has already formalized a partnership with the Service to Support Micro and Small Enterprises (Sebrae - Service to Support Micro and Small Enterprises) to promote entrepreneurship of blacks and women. An edict was launched Also to support the historic uprising Uprising of Búzios (1) projects, with entrepreneurship Among its categories. The actions are part of efforts to implement the State Policy on Fostering Entrepreneurship Blacks and Women (State Policy on Fostering Entrepreneurship of Blacks and Women), established by Law 13,208 / 14.
Other Initiatives are being articulated, in this sense, such as financing options and notices que handsome this area. Civil Society Institutions que work with the segments are Also Involved. Coordinated by Sepromi, the management committee of the Policy is Also composed of Representatives of state departments of Policies for Women (SPM), Planning (SEPLAN), Finance (Sefaz) and Economic Development (SDE). Also part of the group are the departments of Labor, Employment, Income and Sport (Setre), the courts, Human Rights and Social Development (SJDHDS) and Agriculture, Irrigation, Agrarian Reform, Fisheries and Aquaculture (Seagri).
Julies of Black (July of Black Women)
Last week, on the 23rd, empowered, With Their turbans, black women public servants of the state Increased went up the ramp official of the Bahia Legislative Assembly (Alba), to the sound of the girl band Didá. It was a symbolic act of occupation of positions of power by the segment. The rite Preceded the seminar 'Promoting Gender Equality and Race in Bahia' (Promotion of Gender Equality and Racial in Bahia), organized the part of the mobilization of the 'July from Black' (July of Black Women). "The civil society organizations have carried many activities in October to give visibility to July 25 th [Day of the Latin American and Caribbean Black Woman] . The institutional spaces are What They need to absorb this wealth constructed by black and women's movements, what we do here today, "said the holder of the Secretariat of the Promotion of Racial Equality (Sepromi), Vera Lúcia Barbosa.
The manager Also pointed out the union of the various government bodies for realization of the Statute of Racial Equality and Combating Religious Intolerance State (Statute of Racial Equality and Against Religious Intolerance of the State), Which completed one year in June. "Our challenge now is to regulate Chapter VII, Which deals with the rights of black women. This important document is the result of a collective construction of the black community and the government, "she said.
Source : Nation Z , Red
Note
1. The Revolt of Búzios was one of the most important movements in Brazil because, apart from independence, it sought freedom of slaves and racial and social equality. It was the first libertarian manifestation where people had a role, reflecting Significantly, achievements after its outbreak in 1798.
July of the Pretas seminar promotes Black Women and Entrepreneurship in Salvador, Bahia
Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism
STEPHANIE NOLEN
Rio de Janeiro — The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jul. 31, 2015 3:23PM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Aug. 01, 2015 5:12PM EDT
Brazil’s national mythology is built on the idea of a democracia racial – a country whose population is uniquely mixed and has moved beyond racism.
The lived experience of its citizens, especially the majority who are black or mixed-race, tells a different story. Three residents of Bahia, known as the country’s “blackest” state, share their personal stories with The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.
‘It’s not easy to start working when you’re 12’
Cleusa de Jesus Santos was one of eight children whose father left when she was small. Her mother, illiterate and living in a slum, had no way to feed them all. “A friend of my mum’s said, ‘There is a person who needs a girl, just to watch her son, to keep him company.’”
So Ms. Santos was sent. “But when I got there, the reality was completely different: They said they were going to put me in school and so on, and they didn’t. I didn’t have vacation. I couldn’t see my family.”
For eight years, she was fed leftovers, clothed in castoffs – and never paid. It was, she says, essentially slavery – and extremely common in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. “Being a slave is doing everything the boss says without questioning anything,” she explains in an angry rush. “You understand? Being there, working, available 24 hours a day, at their disposal, without demanding anything. Only saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘yes, ma’am.’”
It wasn’t until her third job that she finally obtained a small salary. Then one day she learned of a union for domestic workers whose staff told her she had a right to sick leave, vacation and social security, and explained how to discuss such things with her boss.
But she lost her next job when the boss saw her on TV. “I was doing an interview, and I said: ‘If the boss doesn’t have the means [to pay for social security etc.], they shouldn’t hire. They should clean their own bathrooms, do their laundry.’”
She laughs at the memory. “They think we already have too many rights. ‘You have a home, you have food, right? What else do you want?’”
A national federation of domestic workers has achieved some ground-breaking reforms in recent years, limiting a maid’s work to 42 hours and not more than six days a week, while requiring that employers pay minimum wage (which in Bahia equals $310 a month). Yet there is little enforcement of the law, Ms. Santos says, and because the majority of domestic workers live (in tiny rooms) in their employers’ homes, their exploitation is largely hidden from view.
But this is changing, Ms. Santos says: Young women who enter domestic work today often do it for only six months or a year, long enough to make the money to pay for professional training. She takes courses at night, recently earned her high-school diploma and now plans to study psychology in university.
She also wants to help other women. “Because it’s not easy to start working when you’re 12 years old, your boss always telling you, ‘Oh, you’re not going anywhere. You’re a pig, you’re black. If you leave here, you will become a prostitute.’ Listening to all this, you internalize it, and it’s hard to shed.”
‘I don’t know white people – I don’t even know where they live’
Paulo Rogerio runs the only black media company in the country. He is 33, grew up in a favela in Salvador, and learned English by listening to the lyrics of Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists. Eventually, he won a Fulbright scholarship and went to study in the U.S. – where, through mentorship programs, he met lawyers and politicians and prominent business people.
Now that he’s seeking to expand his business, the Ethnic Media Institute, a digital nonprofit, he is looking for investors there as well. “I come from the favela – I don’t have connections in Brazil. Here I don’t know white people – I don’t even know where they live. White media would never be interested in a partnership …
“In Brazil we do talk about race but not in an honest way – about white privilege, concentration of power, about the importance of diversity – no, we talk about how we’re all Brazilian, we’re all mixed.
“Our conversation about race is not even close to what you have in Canada or the U.S. or Europe. There are a lot of reasons – one is media. The media in this country are very concentrated – it’s families. There’s no black radio or TV and there’s one magazine with a circulation of 40,000 copies. Second, economic power – we don’t have economic power in this country. Because of segregation, they had it in the U.S. – in a strange way it was helpful. There had to be black lawyers, black doctors, there was a black Wall Street in the 1950s. You can’t have black media or black education, with private schools to teach the history [like the U.S. had], if nobody has any money.”
‘It’s my history and I can’t negate it’
Lorene Pinto Silva graduated from the Federal University of Bahia medical school more than 30 years ago, taught there for decades and in 2011 was named its director. She is the first woman to hold the post; soon a portrait of her in ermine-trimmed academic robes will be added to three centuries’ worth of portraits of white men.
Dr. Silva identifies as morena, brown or mixed-race, because, she says, all families in Bahia have racial mixing in their backgrounds. She is a strong advocate of the “quota” policy that reserves some seats in the medical school for black and mixed-race students and for those who graduated from public schools.
“Since I’ve been here, there have only been students from the same schools and families. Since the quotas, I’ve been saying, ‘We’re seeing Bahia arrive in our school.’”
Some of the affirmative-action students struggle initially, she says, because they do not have the same solid academic background, but that is no reason to keep them out. “I argue the opposite. The university can’t close itself to the rest of the country – we have to reach out. …
“The entrance of these students has been making the university re-evaluate its role in society – it’s not their fault [they are insufficiently prepared]. The university can’t reject them … the responsibility is ours. It’s my history and I can’t negate it.”
Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism
STEPHANIE NOLEN
Rio de Janeiro — The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jul. 31, 2015 3:23PM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Aug. 01, 2015 5:12PM EDT
Brazil’s national mythology is built on the idea of a democracia racial – a country whose population is uniquely mixed and has moved beyond racism.
The lived experience of its citizens, especially the majority who are black or mixed-race, tells a different story. Three residents of Bahia, known as the country’s “blackest” state, share their personal stories with The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.
‘It’s not easy to start working when you’re 12’
Cleusa de Jesus Santos was one of eight children whose father left when she was small. Her mother, illiterate and living in a slum, had no way to feed them all. “A friend of my mum’s said, ‘There is a person who needs a girl, just to watch her son, to keep him company.’”
So Ms. Santos was sent. “But when I got there, the reality was completely different: They said they were going to put me in school and so on, and they didn’t. I didn’t have vacation. I couldn’t see my family.”
For eight years, she was fed leftovers, clothed in castoffs – and never paid. It was, she says, essentially slavery – and extremely common in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. “Being a slave is doing everything the boss says without questioning anything,” she explains in an angry rush. “You understand? Being there, working, available 24 hours a day, at their disposal, without demanding anything. Only saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘yes, ma’am.’”
It wasn’t until her third job that she finally obtained a small salary. Then one day she learned of a union for domestic workers whose staff told her she had a right to sick leave, vacation and social security, and explained how to discuss such things with her boss.
But she lost her next job when the boss saw her on TV. “I was doing an interview, and I said: ‘If the boss doesn’t have the means [to pay for social security etc.], they shouldn’t hire. They should clean their own bathrooms, do their laundry.’”
She laughs at the memory. “They think we already have too many rights. ‘You have a home, you have food, right? What else do you want?’”
A national federation of domestic workers has achieved some ground-breaking reforms in recent years, limiting a maid’s work to 42 hours and not more than six days a week, while requiring that employers pay minimum wage (which in Bahia equals $310 a month). Yet there is little enforcement of the law, Ms. Santos says, and because the majority of domestic workers live (in tiny rooms) in their employers’ homes, their exploitation is largely hidden from view.
But this is changing, Ms. Santos says: Young women who enter domestic work today often do it for only six months or a year, long enough to make the money to pay for professional training. She takes courses at night, recently earned her high-school diploma and now plans to study psychology in university.
She also wants to help other women. “Because it’s not easy to start working when you’re 12 years old, your boss always telling you, ‘Oh, you’re not going anywhere. You’re a pig, you’re black. If you leave here, you will become a prostitute.’ Listening to all this, you internalize it, and it’s hard to shed.”
‘I don’t know white people – I don’t even know where they live’
Paulo Rogerio runs the only black media company in the country. He is 33, grew up in a favela in Salvador, and learned English by listening to the lyrics of Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists. Eventually, he won a Fulbright scholarship and went to study in the U.S. – where, through mentorship programs, he met lawyers and politicians and prominent business people.
Now that he’s seeking to expand his business, the Ethnic Media Institute, a digital nonprofit, he is looking for investors there as well. “I come from the favela – I don’t have connections in Brazil. Here I don’t know white people – I don’t even know where they live. White media would never be interested in a partnership …
“In Brazil we do talk about race but not in an honest way – about white privilege, concentration of power, about the importance of diversity – no, we talk about how we’re all Brazilian, we’re all mixed.
“Our conversation about race is not even close to what you have in Canada or the U.S. or Europe. There are a lot of reasons – one is media. The media in this country are very concentrated – it’s families. There’s no black radio or TV and there’s one magazine with a circulation of 40,000 copies. Second, economic power – we don’t have economic power in this country. Because of segregation, they had it in the U.S. – in a strange way it was helpful. There had to be black lawyers, black doctors, there was a black Wall Street in the 1950s. You can’t have black media or black education, with private schools to teach the history [like the U.S. had], if nobody has any money.”
‘It’s my history and I can’t negate it’
Lorene Pinto Silva graduated from the Federal University of Bahia medical school more than 30 years ago, taught there for decades and in 2011 was named its director. She is the first woman to hold the post; soon a portrait of her in ermine-trimmed academic robes will be added to three centuries’ worth of portraits of white men.
Dr. Silva identifies as morena, brown or mixed-race, because, she says, all families in Bahia have racial mixing in their backgrounds. She is a strong advocate of the “quota” policy that reserves some seats in the medical school for black and mixed-race students and for those who graduated from public schools.
“Since I’ve been here, there have only been students from the same schools and families. Since the quotas, I’ve been saying, ‘We’re seeing Bahia arrive in our school.’”
Some of the affirmative-action students struggle initially, she says, because they do not have the same solid academic background, but that is no reason to keep them out. “I argue the opposite. The university can’t close itself to the rest of the country – we have to reach out. …
“The entrance of these students has been making the university re-evaluate its role in society – it’s not their fault [they are insufficiently prepared]. The university can’t reject them … the responsibility is ours. It’s my history and I can’t negate it.”
Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism
THE LUNCH
No barrier’s too big for Brazilian hair-care pioneer
STEPHANIE NOLEN
RIO DE JANEIRO — The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 20, 2015 6:18PM EDT
Last updated Friday, Mar. 20, 2015 6:44PM EDT
Midway through lunch with Leila Velez, she mentions that in 2005 she flew to Miami with the leadership team from her hair-care products company for a crucial meeting. They went two days early, she told me, so they could visit Disney World – and I laughed: Brazilians, I have learned, adore Disney.
I imagined the workaholic Ms. Velez, who grew up poor, rewarding herself with a once-unimaginable visit to the Magic Kingdom. But even though we were still on the salad course, I should have known Ms. Velez better: This was no joyride to meet Cinderella.
“Disney is well known around the world for being a place with great service, and a lot of lineups, and we said, ‘They manage to make people want to come back, to line up in the sun, 40 degrees, with families and kids, and still everybody loves it. They have to have some secret we can learn from,’” Ms. Velez went on in a rush. “After Disney, we changed the whole circuit of our salons.”
We were lunching at Rascals, a vast airy restaurant in Barra da Tijuca, the sprawling suburb to the west of Rio’s traditional core that has emerged as a competing business hub. Ms. Velez, 41, likes the buffet – bright vegetables and fresh pastas – here, not far from the headquarters of Instituto Beleza Natural, the chain of hair salons that is one of the most remarkable business success stories of emerging Brazil.
At 14, Ms. Velez got a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s; by 16, she was the youngest-ever manager in the franchise in Brazil. She struck up a friendship with a co-worker, Rogerio Assis, and met his sister Zica. Ms. Assis was then a hairdresser, trying, in her spare time, to invent a better hair relaxer for Afro-descendant Brazilians who wanted to loosen and tame tight curls. The only product available back then left your scalp charred, Ms. Velez recalled. Ms. Assis finally came up with a formula (after several attempts that left her guinea pig brother bald) and they decided to launch a salon of their own using what they called their “super relaxer.” She was 19.
“We had our angel investor,” Ms. Velez says, a tiny smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Zica’s husband sold his old car; he was a taxi driver.” She and Rogerio, by then her husband, put up their savings from the fast-food chain.
Ms. Velez had fallen in love with McDonald’s standardized production and she planned their new business with the fast-food model in mind, breaking the hair-relaxing treatment down into stages so that each could be performed faster by a specialist who had only one skill to master. Then they could afford to offer their treatment at a price point accessible to her target market.
Ms. Velez always carefully uses the phrase “curly haired women” to describe her client base, and notes that 70 per cent of Brazilian women have hair that lies on the spectrum from Afro to wavy. This is a reflection of the country’s racial heritage, a legacy of slavery and European colonialism. Some 55 per cent of Brazilians identify as black or mixed race; not all poor Brazilians are black, but a disproportionate number of black and mixed-race people are low income. And they are the market for her super-relaxer product and Beleza Natural salons (it means “natural beauty” in Portuguese).
Their first salon was barely bigger than a closet – but they took pains to make it feel entirely different from the usual establishments for their target market: impeccably clean, with fresh flowers and coffee served in chic cups. That, and the soon-patented super relaxer, drew a huge word-of-mouth crowd, Ms. Velez recalls: Before long they were keeping the salon open from 6 a.m. to midnight, and women were lining up outside, holding their numbers on slips of paper. Caravans of women were coming by bus from outside Rio, making a day of it, and within a year and a half, Beleza Natural was expanding.
But they couldn’t get a business bank account for ages – despite standing in the bank with sacks of cash for hours to wait for a manager who never bothered to appear for the meeting. And they couldn’t get factories to take the contracts to make their products – because no one believed in the business model.
“They wouldn’t even consider it a real business because it was focusing on a solution they could never understand – most of them come from a very high-end social group and most of them don’t have curly hair, they don’t understand the issue, the needs,” she says, in a delicate reference to race: There is not a single company on Bovespa, the Brazilian bourse, headed by someone who is not white.
Today, the company has 29 salons in five Brazilian states, a factory of its own, and in 2013 sold a stake to GP Investments for $32-million (U.S.). At the end of 2013, Beleza Natural was valued at 210-million reais, then about $100-million (Canadian); they plan to add 120 stores in the next five years.
Ms. Velez tells her story in near-perfect English, one of myriad things that makes her different from the typical Brazilian chief executive, in a country where English is still a rarity. She grew up in some of Rio’s poshest neighbourhoods, where her father was a janitor (a post that often comes with a tiny apartment in the back of a luxury building): She saw rich kids taking English classes at private institutes and, at 13, persuaded one school to let her swap her services as a cleaner at night for free classes.
Beleza Natural’s business model is built on harnessing the buying power of the group known in Brazilian marketing parlance as Class C – those whose family income is between about $580 and $1,700 a month. Their lives have been changed substantially by new jobs, higher minimum wages and a network of social programs, and in turn their new consumption habits have driven much of the economic growth here in the past 15 years. Beleza Natural’s backers believe Ms. Velez’s intimate understanding of their behaviour as consumers gives the company a huge edge.
We order lemonade – hers sweetened with a sugar substitute – and then Ms. Velez explains: A typical resident of a favela – a poor hillside neighbourhood – has only one bathroom for the family, and so will most often wash her hair in the main sink, bent over (she demonstrates, whisking her own tumble of shiny black curls to one side) and will likely get suds in their eyes, so no-tears is critical. They have tiny bathrooms, and no counter space, so products have to have pump-tops, not lids to be screwed off and set down.
Other companies think the way to tap the Class C consumer is to make a lower-quality, cheaper product, she says, while a spinach ravioli in tomato sauce and shredded mozzarella cools on her plate. They’re wrong: “Sometimes the person wants to buy the most expensive one, in order to show a daughter or a boyfriend that they care – so they pay for it with a lot of struggle, in a thousand instalments, but they want the best.”
After the Disney World visit, Beleza Natural remade its salons so that at each station on the circuit, there was an experience – a specialist describing new treatments, a guest lecturer talking about parenting, an Internet kiosk for free surfing – the equivalent of Mickey Mouse entertaining the folks in line for Space Mountain. And of course, the visit winds up in a shop, with Beleza Natural products to purchase for home.
Working flat-out on the business and raising two kids, Ms. Velez also carved out time to get an undergraduate degree and then an MBA. She knew now they needed help to expand, and in 2005 she learned about Endeavor, the international non-profit incubator that nurtures entrepreneurs. She managed to get a chance to pitch them – a room full of Brazil’s top entrepreneurs, including Jorge Paulo Lehmann, of 3G Capital, the country’s wealthiest person, better known in Canada as the man who bought Tim Hortons. They were, of course, all white, and all men. Ms. Velez and her team were the only people of colour in the room.
“Our first impression was, ‘A hair salon, are you serious?’” Paulo Veras, who at the time was managing director in Brazil for Endeavor, told me later. They had never been pitched such a thing before. “But we knew in two minutes,” when Ms. Velez started talking, that they would take on Beleza Natural – a nod given to only 1 per cent of those who pitch Endeavor.
“We knew it could be 10 times bigger in 10 years. We look for businesses that can be huge.”
Ms. Velez, who is tall with a light dusting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, was a big part of the appeal, he said. “I’ve seen very few people in my life as driven as her. There are so many people complaining that it’s difficult in Brazil – she says, ‘I’m gonna make it, don’t get in my way.’ She feels invincible and in a way she’s been proven right.”
Through Endeavor, Ms. Velez had the chance to take business programs at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford universities, and to draw on mentors and advisers. A few years ago, she concluded that Beleza Natural needed a partner and drew up a profile of her dream investor: “It should be someone who won’t buy a majority of shares, someone in it for the long term, an investment fund that gives freedom in managing the company.”
Fersen Lambranho, chairperson of GP Investments, had been her mentor at Endeavor, and watched the firm grow. “He said, ‘I think you’re big enough for us.’” Ms. Velez reacted with horror – GP is known for taking a controlling stake, appointing a CEO and focusing on short-term returns. “I said, No way – I love you as a mentor, but …”
The flinty Mr. Lambranho, however, persuaded her to consider it. She sent him out to visit salons and customers – while she asked for a list of people to talk to, to hear the good and the bad about a GP investment.
“I said, ‘I want to really get to know what the day after looks like.’” But even the bad things she heard sounded good – “that they are very demanding in terms of results, they are very serious in terms of the speed of the growing process – this was music for me, this is exactly what I want.” After nine months of talking, GP bought 33 per cent, and 18 months later, Ms. Velez says it’s still a honeymoon.
The company employs 3,200 people today, but aims for 15,000 through the expansion; Ms. Velez talks about these employees, and the transformation she hopes the company will make in their lives, with a sort of missionary zeal.
Ms. Velez ends her meal with a carioca coffee – the local word for a Rio denizen, it’s a watered-down espresso shot. Despite the fact that economic growth in Brazil has stalled to zero and inflation above 6 per cent is taking a bite out of the small disposable income of her target market, Ms. Velez does not seem overconcerned about the impact on her business.
“We won’t give up our expansion plan, but maybe we will do it a little slower than we would like to, maybe this year or the next one,” she said. “Maybe this year will be a tougher year, but it will pass and Brazil will still have 200 million consumers looking for new solutions with low prices, with good quality.”
And after that? Well, she says with a grin, there are plenty of countries with lots of curly haired women.
***
In Her Own Words
On mixing business and family: Ms. Velez and Rogerio Assis were married for 20 years and have two teenage children, but are now amicably divorced; he reports to her as vice-president in charge of expansion. She says there is no conflict: “It’s important for us that the company comes first, so it’s easy.” Today, Zica Assis is the company’s brand ambassador – a household name in Class C Brazil – while her husband Jair sits on the board.
On hiring newbies: For 90 per cent of Beleza Natural’s employees, their job with the company is their first experience of formal employment. Most are women, and a great many are single mothers supporting their children and their parents; Ms. Velez calls them “warriors.” Since the new recruits have no résumés or references, Beleza Natural looks for other signs of leadership: women who have responsibilities at their church, for example. “Anything that gives us a hint that that person cares about others, really takes pleasure in serving, in leading – that’s what we look for.”
Racism in Brazil: “People deny: They would never never say to you, ‘Oh I have issues with race.’ But look around this restaurant. See if you can see any black woman or man who is not cleaning or serving tables. That is our reality. And if there is a black man being served, people will say, ‘Wow, maybe he’s a soccer player, maybe he’s a samba singer.’ That’s the truth. I experience it every day.”
On change: “For a few years now, we’ve been watching a slight change in terms of economic power that these people have now. When they have more consuming power, they become more important and they are a lot more visible and this importance changes the way people think about themselves – there’s new confidence, new self-esteem.”
Serving low-income consumers: “There is a huge gap in education, and if we say ‘20-per-cent discount’ people won’t know what it means, but they won’t say so. There is a huge sense of community, everyone helps each other, so they are motivated to promote products they love, and that means word-of-mouth is hugely important. Say they can afford to buy juice once in a month – if they buy it and it’s not good, that’s it.”
Succeeding in Brazil: “There’s a tendency here, when you achieve a certain amount of success, to enter a comfort zone: ‘It’s okay, that’s it.’ I think you can be a lot more than that. As an entrepreneur, I have a commitment to changing this country and showing that it’s possible to be honest, to be serious, to have a company that is not dependent on corruption, to create jobs and create growth for people – that it’s possible.”
No barrier’s too big for Brazilian hair-care pioneer
No barrier’s too big for Brazilian hair-care pioneer
STEPHANIE NOLEN
RIO DE JANEIRO — The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 20, 2015 6:18PM EDT
Last updated Friday, Mar. 20, 2015 6:44PM EDT
Midway through lunch with Leila Velez, she mentions that in 2005 she flew to Miami with the leadership team from her hair-care products company for a crucial meeting. They went two days early, she told me, so they could visit Disney World – and I laughed: Brazilians, I have learned, adore Disney.
I imagined the workaholic Ms. Velez, who grew up poor, rewarding herself with a once-unimaginable visit to the Magic Kingdom. But even though we were still on the salad course, I should have known Ms. Velez better: This was no joyride to meet Cinderella.
“Disney is well known around the world for being a place with great service, and a lot of lineups, and we said, ‘They manage to make people want to come back, to line up in the sun, 40 degrees, with families and kids, and still everybody loves it. They have to have some secret we can learn from,’” Ms. Velez went on in a rush. “After Disney, we changed the whole circuit of our salons.”
We were lunching at Rascals, a vast airy restaurant in Barra da Tijuca, the sprawling suburb to the west of Rio’s traditional core that has emerged as a competing business hub. Ms. Velez, 41, likes the buffet – bright vegetables and fresh pastas – here, not far from the headquarters of Instituto Beleza Natural, the chain of hair salons that is one of the most remarkable business success stories of emerging Brazil.
At 14, Ms. Velez got a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s; by 16, she was the youngest-ever manager in the franchise in Brazil. She struck up a friendship with a co-worker, Rogerio Assis, and met his sister Zica. Ms. Assis was then a hairdresser, trying, in her spare time, to invent a better hair relaxer for Afro-descendant Brazilians who wanted to loosen and tame tight curls. The only product available back then left your scalp charred, Ms. Velez recalled. Ms. Assis finally came up with a formula (after several attempts that left her guinea pig brother bald) and they decided to launch a salon of their own using what they called their “super relaxer.” She was 19.
“We had our angel investor,” Ms. Velez says, a tiny smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Zica’s husband sold his old car; he was a taxi driver.” She and Rogerio, by then her husband, put up their savings from the fast-food chain.
Ms. Velez had fallen in love with McDonald’s standardized production and she planned their new business with the fast-food model in mind, breaking the hair-relaxing treatment down into stages so that each could be performed faster by a specialist who had only one skill to master. Then they could afford to offer their treatment at a price point accessible to her target market.
Ms. Velez always carefully uses the phrase “curly haired women” to describe her client base, and notes that 70 per cent of Brazilian women have hair that lies on the spectrum from Afro to wavy. This is a reflection of the country’s racial heritage, a legacy of slavery and European colonialism. Some 55 per cent of Brazilians identify as black or mixed race; not all poor Brazilians are black, but a disproportionate number of black and mixed-race people are low income. And they are the market for her super-relaxer product and Beleza Natural salons (it means “natural beauty” in Portuguese).
Their first salon was barely bigger than a closet – but they took pains to make it feel entirely different from the usual establishments for their target market: impeccably clean, with fresh flowers and coffee served in chic cups. That, and the soon-patented super relaxer, drew a huge word-of-mouth crowd, Ms. Velez recalls: Before long they were keeping the salon open from 6 a.m. to midnight, and women were lining up outside, holding their numbers on slips of paper. Caravans of women were coming by bus from outside Rio, making a day of it, and within a year and a half, Beleza Natural was expanding.
But they couldn’t get a business bank account for ages – despite standing in the bank with sacks of cash for hours to wait for a manager who never bothered to appear for the meeting. And they couldn’t get factories to take the contracts to make their products – because no one believed in the business model.
“They wouldn’t even consider it a real business because it was focusing on a solution they could never understand – most of them come from a very high-end social group and most of them don’t have curly hair, they don’t understand the issue, the needs,” she says, in a delicate reference to race: There is not a single company on Bovespa, the Brazilian bourse, headed by someone who is not white.
Today, the company has 29 salons in five Brazilian states, a factory of its own, and in 2013 sold a stake to GP Investments for $32-million (U.S.). At the end of 2013, Beleza Natural was valued at 210-million reais, then about $100-million (Canadian); they plan to add 120 stores in the next five years.
Ms. Velez tells her story in near-perfect English, one of myriad things that makes her different from the typical Brazilian chief executive, in a country where English is still a rarity. She grew up in some of Rio’s poshest neighbourhoods, where her father was a janitor (a post that often comes with a tiny apartment in the back of a luxury building): She saw rich kids taking English classes at private institutes and, at 13, persuaded one school to let her swap her services as a cleaner at night for free classes.
Beleza Natural’s business model is built on harnessing the buying power of the group known in Brazilian marketing parlance as Class C – those whose family income is between about $580 and $1,700 a month. Their lives have been changed substantially by new jobs, higher minimum wages and a network of social programs, and in turn their new consumption habits have driven much of the economic growth here in the past 15 years. Beleza Natural’s backers believe Ms. Velez’s intimate understanding of their behaviour as consumers gives the company a huge edge.
We order lemonade – hers sweetened with a sugar substitute – and then Ms. Velez explains: A typical resident of a favela – a poor hillside neighbourhood – has only one bathroom for the family, and so will most often wash her hair in the main sink, bent over (she demonstrates, whisking her own tumble of shiny black curls to one side) and will likely get suds in their eyes, so no-tears is critical. They have tiny bathrooms, and no counter space, so products have to have pump-tops, not lids to be screwed off and set down.
Other companies think the way to tap the Class C consumer is to make a lower-quality, cheaper product, she says, while a spinach ravioli in tomato sauce and shredded mozzarella cools on her plate. They’re wrong: “Sometimes the person wants to buy the most expensive one, in order to show a daughter or a boyfriend that they care – so they pay for it with a lot of struggle, in a thousand instalments, but they want the best.”
After the Disney World visit, Beleza Natural remade its salons so that at each station on the circuit, there was an experience – a specialist describing new treatments, a guest lecturer talking about parenting, an Internet kiosk for free surfing – the equivalent of Mickey Mouse entertaining the folks in line for Space Mountain. And of course, the visit winds up in a shop, with Beleza Natural products to purchase for home.
Working flat-out on the business and raising two kids, Ms. Velez also carved out time to get an undergraduate degree and then an MBA. She knew now they needed help to expand, and in 2005 she learned about Endeavor, the international non-profit incubator that nurtures entrepreneurs. She managed to get a chance to pitch them – a room full of Brazil’s top entrepreneurs, including Jorge Paulo Lehmann, of 3G Capital, the country’s wealthiest person, better known in Canada as the man who bought Tim Hortons. They were, of course, all white, and all men. Ms. Velez and her team were the only people of colour in the room.
“Our first impression was, ‘A hair salon, are you serious?’” Paulo Veras, who at the time was managing director in Brazil for Endeavor, told me later. They had never been pitched such a thing before. “But we knew in two minutes,” when Ms. Velez started talking, that they would take on Beleza Natural – a nod given to only 1 per cent of those who pitch Endeavor.
“We knew it could be 10 times bigger in 10 years. We look for businesses that can be huge.”
Ms. Velez, who is tall with a light dusting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, was a big part of the appeal, he said. “I’ve seen very few people in my life as driven as her. There are so many people complaining that it’s difficult in Brazil – she says, ‘I’m gonna make it, don’t get in my way.’ She feels invincible and in a way she’s been proven right.”
Through Endeavor, Ms. Velez had the chance to take business programs at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford universities, and to draw on mentors and advisers. A few years ago, she concluded that Beleza Natural needed a partner and drew up a profile of her dream investor: “It should be someone who won’t buy a majority of shares, someone in it for the long term, an investment fund that gives freedom in managing the company.”
Fersen Lambranho, chairperson of GP Investments, had been her mentor at Endeavor, and watched the firm grow. “He said, ‘I think you’re big enough for us.’” Ms. Velez reacted with horror – GP is known for taking a controlling stake, appointing a CEO and focusing on short-term returns. “I said, No way – I love you as a mentor, but …”
The flinty Mr. Lambranho, however, persuaded her to consider it. She sent him out to visit salons and customers – while she asked for a list of people to talk to, to hear the good and the bad about a GP investment.
“I said, ‘I want to really get to know what the day after looks like.’” But even the bad things she heard sounded good – “that they are very demanding in terms of results, they are very serious in terms of the speed of the growing process – this was music for me, this is exactly what I want.” After nine months of talking, GP bought 33 per cent, and 18 months later, Ms. Velez says it’s still a honeymoon.
The company employs 3,200 people today, but aims for 15,000 through the expansion; Ms. Velez talks about these employees, and the transformation she hopes the company will make in their lives, with a sort of missionary zeal.
Ms. Velez ends her meal with a carioca coffee – the local word for a Rio denizen, it’s a watered-down espresso shot. Despite the fact that economic growth in Brazil has stalled to zero and inflation above 6 per cent is taking a bite out of the small disposable income of her target market, Ms. Velez does not seem overconcerned about the impact on her business.
“We won’t give up our expansion plan, but maybe we will do it a little slower than we would like to, maybe this year or the next one,” she said. “Maybe this year will be a tougher year, but it will pass and Brazil will still have 200 million consumers looking for new solutions with low prices, with good quality.”
And after that? Well, she says with a grin, there are plenty of countries with lots of curly haired women.
***
In Her Own Words
On mixing business and family: Ms. Velez and Rogerio Assis were married for 20 years and have two teenage children, but are now amicably divorced; he reports to her as vice-president in charge of expansion. She says there is no conflict: “It’s important for us that the company comes first, so it’s easy.” Today, Zica Assis is the company’s brand ambassador – a household name in Class C Brazil – while her husband Jair sits on the board.
On hiring newbies: For 90 per cent of Beleza Natural’s employees, their job with the company is their first experience of formal employment. Most are women, and a great many are single mothers supporting their children and their parents; Ms. Velez calls them “warriors.” Since the new recruits have no résumés or references, Beleza Natural looks for other signs of leadership: women who have responsibilities at their church, for example. “Anything that gives us a hint that that person cares about others, really takes pleasure in serving, in leading – that’s what we look for.”
Racism in Brazil: “People deny: They would never never say to you, ‘Oh I have issues with race.’ But look around this restaurant. See if you can see any black woman or man who is not cleaning or serving tables. That is our reality. And if there is a black man being served, people will say, ‘Wow, maybe he’s a soccer player, maybe he’s a samba singer.’ That’s the truth. I experience it every day.”
On change: “For a few years now, we’ve been watching a slight change in terms of economic power that these people have now. When they have more consuming power, they become more important and they are a lot more visible and this importance changes the way people think about themselves – there’s new confidence, new self-esteem.”
Serving low-income consumers: “There is a huge gap in education, and if we say ‘20-per-cent discount’ people won’t know what it means, but they won’t say so. There is a huge sense of community, everyone helps each other, so they are motivated to promote products they love, and that means word-of-mouth is hugely important. Say they can afford to buy juice once in a month – if they buy it and it’s not good, that’s it.”
Succeeding in Brazil: “There’s a tendency here, when you achieve a certain amount of success, to enter a comfort zone: ‘It’s okay, that’s it.’ I think you can be a lot more than that. As an entrepreneur, I have a commitment to changing this country and showing that it’s possible to be honest, to be serious, to have a company that is not dependent on corruption, to create jobs and create growth for people – that it’s possible.”
No barrier’s too big for Brazilian hair-care pioneer
STEPHANIE NOLEN
NOVA IGUACU, BRAZIL — The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2015 10:29PM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2015 10:29PM EDT
Chauan Cezario and his friends came back from the beach on a February Friday night, to Palmeirinha, a Rio favela. The power was out, so they couldn’t watch TV and instead goofed around in the dark but crowded street, using one of their cellphones to record a video.
Then Mr. Cezario heard shots, and he was falling, and he saw that his friend Alan Lima was falling too, and as blood poured from his chest, it occurred to Mr. Cezario that somehow he had been shot. He began to pray, while his friend moaned. Then police officers with assault rifles were standing over them, demanding to know what they had been doing.
Playing, Mr. Cezario said, as blood pooled around him. Just playing.
After half an hour, police permitted neighbours to lift the two men into a patrol car and then drove them to hospital. Alan, 15, was dead. Mr. Cezario, 19, was left caked in both their blood, and to his astonishment, handcuffed; eventually, a police officer said he was being charged with illegal possession of a firearm and resisting arrest.
And with that, Mr. Cezario might have disappeared into the Brazilian prison system, bullet still lodged in his chest, he and his friend two more among the tens of thousands of young black men killed or jailed in Brazil at rates far higher than their white counterparts.
Except for this: The video camera in Alan’s cellphone kept filming even as it fell from his hands. The phone recorded his own murder, and now, it is being used to exonerate his friend – and to give Brazilians who allege systematic abuse by police a rare opportunity to make their case.
“He is able to prove it because of the video,” said Mr. Cezario’s mother, Maria Claudia Jambre. “But what about all the others?”
Six people are killed by police in Brazil each day; they are overwhelmingly young black men. But Alexandre Ciconello, human-rights adviser with Amnesty International Brazil, says police are nearly always exonerated. “Every investigation finds that police were reacting to aggression,” he said. “In almost every case the witnesses are other military police officers. And if someone in the community saw something, they are afraid to go to the police.”
Rio’s military police killed one out of every 23 people they arrested in 2008, the year they launched a “pacification” program in some favelas, ousting gangsters and installing military police units with new training in community policing. (The comparable figure for the United States is one in 37,000.) The number of people killed by police has since fallen dramatically in pacified areas: While in 2008 police killed 122 people in alleged conflicts in pacified favelas, in 2014 they killed just 10. However, less than a third offavelas have been pacified and, in the city as a whole, the number of people killed by police increased by 25 per cent from 2013-14.
A story such as Mr. Cezario’s, of police planting evidence or alleging a shooting that never happened, is not uncommon, Mr. Ciconello said – but Mr. Cezario’s ability to offer proof of his version of events is highly unusual.
Media reports in Brazil consistently repeat the police version of events, identifying all men killed by police as criminals and rarely investigating these deaths. The video from Alan’s phone has now been widely played on media here and viewed millions of times, providing a rare counterpoint to the usual narrative about police killing drug dealers caught in the act.
Ms. Jambre kept one hand on her son’s shoulder while she talked about the night he was shot; her awareness of how close she came to losing her boy was palpable. The bullet, still in his chest, moves visibly beneath the skin when he raises his arm. The shy and clean-cut Mr. Cezario is much loved at his evangelical church, where he co-ordinates youth activities. But none of that would have mattered if it wasn’t for the video, his mother says. “If you’re black, you’re guilty,” she said.
Mr. Cezario’s legal file contains a number of depositions – Ricardo Vagner, the police officer who did the shooting, says he was “surprised by various men with guns” while on an operation in the favela, that “when they saw the police car, they started shooting in my direction” and he returned fire, that when the shooting ended he approached the spot and found two injured men and two guns in the street.
Then there are a stack of statements from witnesses, from Mr. Cezario’s friends who were shot at, from his cousin. They all tell the same story, of teenagers goofing around, and a police car with its lights off peeling into the street, with a police officer hanging out a window and opening fire. All of the witnesses agree there were no guns on the teens and none found in the road.
But when Mr. Cezario’s case was brought before a judge the day after the shooting, the judge quickly concluded that the police officer was telling the truth, while all the other witnesses were lying and had somehow found a way to corroborate their stories in the chaos of the shooting. He ordered Mr. Cezario held until trial.
His parents, however, had called their pastor, and he in turn had called a congregration member who is a lawyer. The two came to the hospital, where their intercession prompted staff to wipe some of the blood off Mr. Cezario, give him water and stitch his wound, although without the nicety of anesthetic. The lawyer, Fernando Cruz, asked Mr. Cezario what had happened. When he heard that the young men were making a video, he dispatched Mr. Cezario’s father to investigate the whereabouts of the cellphone with Alan’s family.
Police took Mr. Cezario to a holding cell at a nearby police station, where the next day the judge ordered him taken to jail. But Mr. Cruz was able to use that video to persuade the judge to release him.
Mr. Cezario’s cousin Fabiane Barbosa, who cradled him and Alan on the hospital journey in the police car, has also made a sworn statement that she overhead the officers talking on the drive. “Dude, I think we shot an innocent guy,” one said to the other.
Nevertheless, the charges against Mr. Cezario have not yet been dropped. Mr. Cruz hopes that is a bureaucratic matter and will be resolved before long; meantime, he is preparing a civil suit against the police, seeking moral and financial damages. Weeks before the shooting, Mr. Cezario had won a place at a tryout for a professional soccer club – a dream he had nursed since he was a tiny child. He missed it.
Mr. Vagner and eight other police officers are being investigated for their roles in the death of Alan and the shooting of Mr. Cezario, and suspended with pay from the force.
Amnesty International has a campaign in Brazil called “Young, Black and Alive,” to call attention to the disproportionately high rate at which young black men are killed (77 per cent of murder victims between ages 15 and 29 in 2012, but just 53 per cent of the population.) “The narrative is that they are criminals or dealers and it’s very difficult to break that if you don’t have strong evidence like a video, because the authorities don’t believe the testimony of the people who live in the communities,” said Mr. Ciconello, the human-rights adviser.
And if the victim did happen to be dealing drugs, or otherwise involved in crime, the family never bothers to seek justice, he said – despite the fact that drug dealers are also entitled to protection from extrajudicial execution.
A Rio think tank called the Igarape Institute is piloting the use of cellphone cameras on police; so far, 25 police officers in pacification units are wearing cameras in a Kevlar case on their chests, recording through their shifts. Robert Muggah, a Canadian who co-founded the institute, said the hope is that the cameras will help erode the culture of violence and impunity – by keeping police from using excessive force, because they know their actions are being recorded; by introducing an audit trail for accountability and by symbolically shifting the power dynamic. “The act of introducing a technology intended to monitor and oversee police sends out an important and symbolic message,” he said.
Alan’s family has not decided if they will proceed with legal action against the police; his sister, Girlaine, said her parents are crippled by their grief. Mr. Cezario’s family feels they must sue. “To make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Ms. Jambre said.
The family moved from Palmeirinha five years ago, to this satellite town outside the city, trying to get away from the drug traffickers and gang wars in the favela. But within a year or two the violence had spread out here, too; a makeshift barricade put up by criminals to mark their territory stands on the street outside the church that is the centre of the family’s life. Mr. Cezario often went back to the favela to visit friends, as he had on the night of the video. Ms. Jambre said she always worried about her son when he was in Palmeirinha, but she worries about him in the streets here, too.
Mr. Cezario, who turned 20 eight days after the shooting, now does not leave the house without at least one family member. That night he was in the police station, while his lawyer showed the video to the judge, police officers heard that one of their own was being implicated by the cellphone, and turned up en masse, in a show of solidarity the family found frightening.
“The ones who shot him aren’t arrested, and more than that, we know they have friends,” Ms. Jambre said. The family has installed a dashboard camera in their car. “We have the protection of God,” she said. “But if anything happens, we will need proof.”
With a report from Manuela Andreoni in Rio de Janeiro
Shot-in-the-dark video shines light on issue of police abuse in Brazil
Brazil’s colour bind
By Stephanie NolenPublished July 31 2015
When Daniele de Araújo found out six years ago that she was pregnant, she set out from her small house on a dirt lane in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and climbed a mountain. It is not a big mountain, the green slope that rises near her home, but the area is controlled by drug dealers, so she was anxious, hiking up. But she had something really important to ask of God, and she wanted to be somewhere she felt that the magnitude of her request would be clear.
She told God she wanted a girl, and she wanted her to be healthy, but one thing mattered above all: “The baby has to be white.”
Ms. de Araújo knows about the quixotic outcomes of genetics: She has a white mother and a black father, sisters who can pass for white, and a brother nearly as dark-skinned as she is – “I’m really black,” she says. Her husband, Jonatas dos Praseres, also has one black and one white parent, but he is light-skinned – when he reported for his compulsory military service, an officer wrote “white” as his race on the forms.
And so, when their baby arrived, the sight of her filled Ms. de Araújo with relief: Tiny Sarah Ashley was as pink as the sheets she was wrapped in. Best of all, as she grew, it became clear that she had straight hair, not cabelo ruim – “bad hair” – as tightly curled black hair is universally known in Brazil. These days, Sarah Ashley has tawny curls that tumble to the small of her back; they are her mother’s great joy in life. The little girl’s skin tone falls somewhere between those of her parents – but she was light enough for them to register her as “white,” just as they had hoped. (Many official documents in Brazil ask for “race and/or colour” alongside other basic identifying information.)
Daniele de Araújo with Jonatas dos Praseres and their daughter, Sarah Ashley: Her family ‘congratulated me,’ she says, when they first met her future husband, ‘because I was lightening the family, right? It felt like I was doing some great thing.’ Still, she prayed that Sarah Ashley be born light-skinned. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres keep the photos from their 2005 wedding in a red velvet album on the lone shelf in their living room. The glossy pictures show family members of a dozen different skin colours, arm in arm, faces crinkled in stiff grins for the posed portraits. There are albums with similar pictures in living rooms all over this country: A full one-third of marriages in Brazil are interracial, said to be the highest rate in the world. (In Canada, despite hugely diverse cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, the rate is under five per cent.) That statistic is the most obvious evidence of how race and colour in Brazil are lived differently than they are in other parts of the world.
But a range of colours cannot disguise a fundamental truth, says Ms. de Araújo: There is a hierarchy, and white is at the top.
Many things are changing in this country. Ms. de Araújo left school as a teenager to work as a maid – about the only option open to a woman with skin as dark as hers – but now she has a professional job in health care and a house of her own, things she could not have imagined 15 years ago. Still, she says, “This is Brazil.” And there is no point being precious about it. Black is beautiful, but white – white is just easier. Even middle-class life can still be a struggle here. And Sarah Ashley’s parents want her life to be easy.
Brazil’s history of colonialism, slavery and dictatorship, followed by tumultuous social change, has produced a country that is at once culturally homogenous and chromatically wildly diverse. It is a cornerstone of national identity that Brazil is racially mixed – more than any country on Earth, Brazilians say. Much less discussed, but equally visible – in every restaurant full of white patrons and black waiters, in every high rise where the black doorman points a black visitor toward the service elevator – is the pervasive racial inequality.
Brazil’s experience stands in marked contrast with the way those issues are playing out in the United States. A mass shooting like that in Charleston, S.C., allegedly carried out by a white supremacist, would be unimaginable here. So would a speech by the president calling on the country to confront its racial inequality. What happened to Rachel Dolezal – a blue-eyed white woman who chose to pass as black, and was pilloried – is equally alien to Brazil, where racial identity is always fluid, and has been wilfully subsumed into questions of colour. Many Brazilians, of all races, contrast their own country favourably with the U.S., where the discussion of racism is overt and often angry.
Yet discrimination is every bit as powerful a force in Brazil, and it exacts a high price here, too. This cost takes obvious forms (for example, the disproportionately huge number of young black men in prison) and more subtle ones, such as the conversations that Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres have about their daughter, and whether she is white “enough.”
But there is change afoot here, as well: It is sluggish, may prove to be transient, and is certainly fragile. But for all that, it is happening, through both institutional reforms and personal choices. In the process, it is calling into question centuries-old constructions of identity, and offering people such as Ms. de Araújo whole new ways of imagining their lives.
PART 2
The road to pigmentocracy
Ana Maria de la Merced Guimarães knew, of course she knew, that Brazil once had slavery. They did not teach much about it when she was in school 40 years ago, but the black faces of some of her neighbours were evidence that many Brazilians have roots in Africa. Still, it was not something people ever talked about.
Ms. Guimarães, who is white, certainly wasn’t thinking about it back in 1996, when she decided to renovate her home. It’s a row house with a tiled roof, about 150 years old, on a Rio street soaked in history: Samba was invented in this neighbourhood, and the city’s first Carnaval celebrations were held nearby. Ms. Guimarães, who ran a small pest-control business, wanted to add a second floor to make space for her growing family.
Workers began to excavate the foundation, planning to reinforce it. After a day of digging, they found bones that appeared to be human. “At first, I thought it was a murder victim,” says Ms. Guimarães, now 58, in the cool interior of the house. She lowers her voice as she recalls her unease. “And then they found more bones. I thought, ‘It was a serial killer.’ But then there were more bones and more bones, and I thought, ‘No, there is no such perfect crime that someone could have killed all these people and it wasn’t discovered.’ ”
So she called city hall, and a few days later an expert arrived to investigate. Ms. Guimarães was informed that her house stood atop what was once called the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos – the Cemetery of the New Blacks. Right here, she learned, was where the city once dumped the bodies of Africans who had survived the brutal journey across the Atlantic but died before they could be sold in the slave market that stood at the end of the road.
“We call it a cemetery, but it’s not: It’s a grave where they were dumped and they rotted there and then they burned them and ground them up and pushed them out of the way to put new people in,” she says. “No one was buried intact. The more I learned about the history, the more upset I got – many are children, there are babies, and there are so many, more than 50,000, I think.”
Eventually Ms. Guimarães learned that the cemetery had been used to bury about 2,000 people each year from the 1760s until about 1830, when the British abolitionist movement began to slow the arrival of slave ships in Rio’s harbour. A generation later, the mass grave was cobbled over, and the first row of houses, including hers, was built on the site in about 1876. “They were trying to erase the memory,” she says.
And they did a fine job.
There is a $4-billion (U.S.) project under way today to rehabilitate Ms. Guimarães’s neighbourhood. It features commercial real estate and condominium towers and a giant Museum of Tomorrow. There is not, however, a museum of the past – nothing to commemorate that this port was once the global capital for the trade in humans.
The Dinner, an 1839 lithograph that drives home the great divide between master and servant, is the work of French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848) who spent 15 years in Brazil capturing the daily life of a society built on slavery. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)
Brazil imported more slaves than any other country. Fully 20 per cent of all the people abducted from Africa to be sold were brought here – an estimated five million people; 400,000 went to the U.S. and Canada.
The journey to Brazil was cheaper than the one to North America because of both proximity and wind patterns, which meant that the slaves were cheaper, too. Slave owners saw no point in spending money to feed their slaves well or care for them; it made more sense to work them to death and replace them. As a result, slaves in Brazil had dramatically shorter life spans than those who went to the United States. But they were essential for the development of the economy – the sugar plantations, the coffee farms, the gold mines. More than two million slaves came through Rio alone, fed in the casas de engorda(“fattening houses”) near Ms. Guimarães’s street before they were paraded naked, inspected and sold in the squares. Brazil was the last country in the world officially to end slavery.
Official list of slaves
Two slaves, Maria, 28, and Carolina, 36, are listed as belonging to Ms. Rita Leopoldina Andreno. The document, from 1872, shows their places of birth, colour, work skills and profession.
By 1888, when abolition finally came, there were more black than white people in Brazil, and also a large population that could be described as “mixed race” – the product of a settlement history that saw Portugal export mostly male settlers here for 300 years. At first, those men had sexual relationships, both consensual and forced, with indigenous women. When the indigenous population failed to provide the captive labour force the Portuguese wanted – fleeing into the interior rather than working on the new plantations, or dying of infectious diseases –the colonizers turned to the import of African slaves, who were routinely raped by their owners.
When slavery was ended, members of the white elite were left feeling anxious and outnumbered. They were also vexed, explains Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist and educator in Rio: How, they wondered, could they build a productive and prosperous nation if the predominant stock of the citizenry was the offspring of African savages? The obvious solution, they concluded, was to import better genes.
The government actively discouraged their former owners from giving the slaves paid work, and launched an effort to woo poor white Europeans to the country as a new labour force – with the overt intention to “embranquecer,” to whiten, the population.
“The founding principle of the first republic was eugenics,” is Mr. dos Santos’s sardonic assessment. This was eventually enshrined in an immigration law that stated, “The admission of immigrants will comply with the necessity of preserving and developing, in the ethnic composition of the population, the characteristics that are more convenient to its European ascendancy.”
PART 3
The long shadow of slavery
Even as the former slave owners set about diluting the country’s blackness, they also went to work on their cover story. In the Brazilian creation myth – the country’s version of Canada’s “cultural mosaic” or the U.S. “melting pot” – the country is a democracia racial, a racial democracy. This official story was built on the idea that from the day slavery ended, Brazilians of all colours were equal. After all, there was no segregation, no apartheid, no Jim Crow. Glossing over the massive disparities between the former owners and the newly freed slaves – who had no education, land or assets – the Brazilian elite, almost entirely white, declared the country uniquely equal and, in effect, postracial.
“It was ‘invisibilization,’” says Marcelo Paixão, who is black and a professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil, and you don’t need to discuss the inequality.”
The first census after the end of slavery, in 1890, asked not about race, but about colour: Citizens were asked if they were white, brown, black, yellow orcaboclo – a Portuguese word for those with some indigenous ancestry, more commonly known here as being vermelha, or red. Over the next years, racial identity was steadily replaced with considerations of colour. In 1976, the national statistics institute, seeking to hone the precision of the census, surveyed thousands of Brazilians about what word they themselves used – and came back with a list of 136. They included terms such as amarela-queimada(burnt yellow), canela (cinnamon) and morena-bem-chegada: very nearlymorena, a word for brown.
“It was ‘invisibilization’. The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil...”— Marcelo Paixão, a black professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
On some level, it was a progressive ideology, notes Prof. Paixão – it allowed for nuance instead of clear-cut indicators of racial purity. It also resulted in a more genuinely mixed culture, although that mixture is the outcome, in part, of appropriation. Cornerstones of black culture – such as samba music and the martial art capoeira, practised in secret by slaves – have been thoroughly co-opted into Brazilian identity.
But within that culture, and that society, there was an ineluctable hierarchy of what were to be considered racial traits. The dominant idea, propagated by whites, and eventually accepted by many black and mixed-race people as well, he explains, was that the “white” part of the mix brought a European rationality, while Africans brought happiness and creativity, a positive outlook – he ticks off adjectives and rolls his eyes. The more white that one was, the more of the “valuable” characteristics one had. To be whiter was to have a better chance of getting a job, and of earning more in that job. To be whiter, in other words, was to have it easier. Brazil became what is sometimes called here a “pigmentocracy.” (Prof. Paixão is among the fewer than five per cent of faculty members at the Federal University who are black.)
Meanwhile the division of power and wealth that locked itself into place at the time of slavery’s abolition was never addressed. Brazil’s freed slaves were “free,” as well, of the fundamental things needed to forge material equality: assets, education and access to capital. There was no land reform to break up the giant plantations and give the former slaves a way to support themselves. In Rio, former slaves were denied the right to live in the city proper, and so scrabbled for rough housing on the surrounding hills – this is the bleak origin of the favelas, or slums, that today are integral to the city’s postcard identity.
Race by neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro
Out of Rio’s 6,320,446 people, 51 per cent identified as white in the 2010 census, 36.5 per cent as mixed (mixed race between white and black) and 11.5 per cent as black. In the neighbourhoods below, the darker the red, the higher the concentration of people who identified as white. The higher concentration of self-identified white people tends to lead to a higher average monthly income in the neighbourhood.
Identifing as white (%)20406080100
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS, 2010
Mouseover regions for details. Click to zoom in and out. Monthly income includes respondants with no income.
The legacy of slavery, and the failure to address it, is visible in myriad other ways as well. Brazil has seen enormous social progress in the past 13 years: more than 30 million people, nearly a sixth of the population, has moved out of poverty into the lower middle class. That boost came from both an economic boom (driven by vast offshore oil finds, and high commodity prices fuelled by Chinese demand) and from progressive social policies implemented by a series of left-wing governments that dramatically raised the minimum wage and used targeted cash transfers to bring economic security to the poor.
But that progress has not touched all Brazilians equally. Even after those 13 years of rapid change, black and mixed-race Brazilians continue to earn far less than do white ones: 42.2 per cent less. More than 30 per cent fewer of them finish high school. Black Brazilians die younger, and young black men die at dramatically higher rates, than do white ones, typically victims of violence, often at the hands of police.
Average income in Brazil, 2013
White
Black/Mixed
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS, CONTINUOUS NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD SAMPLE SURVEY (PNAD)
02004006008001,0001,2001,4001,6001,8002,0002,200$R2,400Adjusted for inflation200320082013
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Thanks to an economic boom and progressive social policies, average income in Brazil has risen across the board since 2003, however the large income gap between whites and non-whites remains. (Income in Brazilian Reais.)
Indeed, in many ways the economic and social progress has served only to bring into stark relief how entrenched the hierarchy of race and colour remains. At the last census, in 2010, 51 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black or of mixed race. But the halls of power show something else. Of 38 members of the federal cabinet, one is black – the minister for the promotion of racial equality. Of the 381 companies listed on BOVESPA, the country’s stock market, not a single one has a black or mixed-race chief executive officer. Eighty per cent of the National Congress is white. In 2010, a São Paulo think tank analyzed the executive staff of Brazil’s 500 largest companies and found that a mere 0.2 per cent of executives were black, and only 5.1 per cent were of mixed race.
Education in Brazil by Race, 2010
Less 1 year
1-3 years
4-7 years
8-10 years
11-14 years
15+ years
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS
020406080100%WhiteMixedBlack
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A higher percentage of whites have had 15 or more years of education, while black Brazilians are most likely to have gone to school for less than a year.
Even interracial marriages are not the tribute to colour-blindness that they might appear to be. Disaggregate the data on who is marrying whom, and they show that such marriages are least common in the highest (predominantly white) income brackets, and most common among the lowest earners, who are almost entirely black or of mixed race. Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a white sociologist at Rio’s Federal University who studies race and economics, describes it as a sort of bleak bargain: When such marriages do occur, the darker-skinned partner usually has a higher level of education or a higher income or both. The relationship, at least on one level, is an economic transaction – each person is gaining social mobility, of one kind or the other.
There is also a sort of alchemy, Prof. Ribeiro explains, by which people with a mixed racial heritage who succeed in business or politics, such as billionaire media magnate Roberto Marinho, come to be viewed as white. Even in the two fields in which black Brazilians succeed at the highest levels – sports and music – that alchemy can work its dark magic. Soccer phenom Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., who presented as black when he first began to attract attention on the pitch, has, with his ascendancy, become in the popular perception, if not white, certainly not black.
Ms. de Araújo, right, was relieved when her daughter Sarah Ashley, centre, was born white like her husband, Mr. dos Praseres, left. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
It was against this long and complex backdrop that Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres met 15 years ago as teenagers in a rough part of Rio. They hung out with a multiracial bunch of kids, and neither thought about race, they say, when they wound up kissing on a street corner one night. Mr. dos Praseres, shy and stocky, recalled in a recent Sunday afternoon conversation that he knew, from the minute he met her, that this willowy girl who could talk the birds out of the trees, was the one for him. He didn’t hesitate, even briefly, to bring her home to his family (Why would he? His own father is as dark-skinned as she is.) He says it went over just fine.
But that’s not quite how his wife remembers it. Turning to him with an expression of exaggerated surprise, she says: “They called me neguinha [little darkie] and all sorts of things! I heard people asking you, ‘You’re with that dark one?’ ”
At her family’s home, on the other hand, the new boyfriend was received differently. “They congratulated me,” she says matter-of-factly. “Because I was lightening the family, right? It felt like I was doing some great thing.”
By Stephanie NolenPublished July 31 2015
When Daniele de Araújo found out six years ago that she was pregnant, she set out from her small house on a dirt lane in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and climbed a mountain. It is not a big mountain, the green slope that rises near her home, but the area is controlled by drug dealers, so she was anxious, hiking up. But she had something really important to ask of God, and she wanted to be somewhere she felt that the magnitude of her request would be clear.
She told God she wanted a girl, and she wanted her to be healthy, but one thing mattered above all: “The baby has to be white.”
Ms. de Araújo knows about the quixotic outcomes of genetics: She has a white mother and a black father, sisters who can pass for white, and a brother nearly as dark-skinned as she is – “I’m really black,” she says. Her husband, Jonatas dos Praseres, also has one black and one white parent, but he is light-skinned – when he reported for his compulsory military service, an officer wrote “white” as his race on the forms.
And so, when their baby arrived, the sight of her filled Ms. de Araújo with relief: Tiny Sarah Ashley was as pink as the sheets she was wrapped in. Best of all, as she grew, it became clear that she had straight hair, not cabelo ruim – “bad hair” – as tightly curled black hair is universally known in Brazil. These days, Sarah Ashley has tawny curls that tumble to the small of her back; they are her mother’s great joy in life. The little girl’s skin tone falls somewhere between those of her parents – but she was light enough for them to register her as “white,” just as they had hoped. (Many official documents in Brazil ask for “race and/or colour” alongside other basic identifying information.)
Daniele de Araújo with Jonatas dos Praseres and their daughter, Sarah Ashley: Her family ‘congratulated me,’ she says, when they first met her future husband, ‘because I was lightening the family, right? It felt like I was doing some great thing.’ Still, she prayed that Sarah Ashley be born light-skinned. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres keep the photos from their 2005 wedding in a red velvet album on the lone shelf in their living room. The glossy pictures show family members of a dozen different skin colours, arm in arm, faces crinkled in stiff grins for the posed portraits. There are albums with similar pictures in living rooms all over this country: A full one-third of marriages in Brazil are interracial, said to be the highest rate in the world. (In Canada, despite hugely diverse cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, the rate is under five per cent.) That statistic is the most obvious evidence of how race and colour in Brazil are lived differently than they are in other parts of the world.
But a range of colours cannot disguise a fundamental truth, says Ms. de Araújo: There is a hierarchy, and white is at the top.
Many things are changing in this country. Ms. de Araújo left school as a teenager to work as a maid – about the only option open to a woman with skin as dark as hers – but now she has a professional job in health care and a house of her own, things she could not have imagined 15 years ago. Still, she says, “This is Brazil.” And there is no point being precious about it. Black is beautiful, but white – white is just easier. Even middle-class life can still be a struggle here. And Sarah Ashley’s parents want her life to be easy.
Brazil’s history of colonialism, slavery and dictatorship, followed by tumultuous social change, has produced a country that is at once culturally homogenous and chromatically wildly diverse. It is a cornerstone of national identity that Brazil is racially mixed – more than any country on Earth, Brazilians say. Much less discussed, but equally visible – in every restaurant full of white patrons and black waiters, in every high rise where the black doorman points a black visitor toward the service elevator – is the pervasive racial inequality.
Brazil’s experience stands in marked contrast with the way those issues are playing out in the United States. A mass shooting like that in Charleston, S.C., allegedly carried out by a white supremacist, would be unimaginable here. So would a speech by the president calling on the country to confront its racial inequality. What happened to Rachel Dolezal – a blue-eyed white woman who chose to pass as black, and was pilloried – is equally alien to Brazil, where racial identity is always fluid, and has been wilfully subsumed into questions of colour. Many Brazilians, of all races, contrast their own country favourably with the U.S., where the discussion of racism is overt and often angry.
Yet discrimination is every bit as powerful a force in Brazil, and it exacts a high price here, too. This cost takes obvious forms (for example, the disproportionately huge number of young black men in prison) and more subtle ones, such as the conversations that Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres have about their daughter, and whether she is white “enough.”
But there is change afoot here, as well: It is sluggish, may prove to be transient, and is certainly fragile. But for all that, it is happening, through both institutional reforms and personal choices. In the process, it is calling into question centuries-old constructions of identity, and offering people such as Ms. de Araújo whole new ways of imagining their lives.
PART 2
The road to pigmentocracy
Ana Maria de la Merced Guimarães knew, of course she knew, that Brazil once had slavery. They did not teach much about it when she was in school 40 years ago, but the black faces of some of her neighbours were evidence that many Brazilians have roots in Africa. Still, it was not something people ever talked about.
Ms. Guimarães, who is white, certainly wasn’t thinking about it back in 1996, when she decided to renovate her home. It’s a row house with a tiled roof, about 150 years old, on a Rio street soaked in history: Samba was invented in this neighbourhood, and the city’s first Carnaval celebrations were held nearby. Ms. Guimarães, who ran a small pest-control business, wanted to add a second floor to make space for her growing family.
Workers began to excavate the foundation, planning to reinforce it. After a day of digging, they found bones that appeared to be human. “At first, I thought it was a murder victim,” says Ms. Guimarães, now 58, in the cool interior of the house. She lowers her voice as she recalls her unease. “And then they found more bones. I thought, ‘It was a serial killer.’ But then there were more bones and more bones, and I thought, ‘No, there is no such perfect crime that someone could have killed all these people and it wasn’t discovered.’ ”
So she called city hall, and a few days later an expert arrived to investigate. Ms. Guimarães was informed that her house stood atop what was once called the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos – the Cemetery of the New Blacks. Right here, she learned, was where the city once dumped the bodies of Africans who had survived the brutal journey across the Atlantic but died before they could be sold in the slave market that stood at the end of the road.
“We call it a cemetery, but it’s not: It’s a grave where they were dumped and they rotted there and then they burned them and ground them up and pushed them out of the way to put new people in,” she says. “No one was buried intact. The more I learned about the history, the more upset I got – many are children, there are babies, and there are so many, more than 50,000, I think.”
Eventually Ms. Guimarães learned that the cemetery had been used to bury about 2,000 people each year from the 1760s until about 1830, when the British abolitionist movement began to slow the arrival of slave ships in Rio’s harbour. A generation later, the mass grave was cobbled over, and the first row of houses, including hers, was built on the site in about 1876. “They were trying to erase the memory,” she says.
And they did a fine job.
There is a $4-billion (U.S.) project under way today to rehabilitate Ms. Guimarães’s neighbourhood. It features commercial real estate and condominium towers and a giant Museum of Tomorrow. There is not, however, a museum of the past – nothing to commemorate that this port was once the global capital for the trade in humans.
The Dinner, an 1839 lithograph that drives home the great divide between master and servant, is the work of French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848) who spent 15 years in Brazil capturing the daily life of a society built on slavery. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)
Brazil imported more slaves than any other country. Fully 20 per cent of all the people abducted from Africa to be sold were brought here – an estimated five million people; 400,000 went to the U.S. and Canada.
The journey to Brazil was cheaper than the one to North America because of both proximity and wind patterns, which meant that the slaves were cheaper, too. Slave owners saw no point in spending money to feed their slaves well or care for them; it made more sense to work them to death and replace them. As a result, slaves in Brazil had dramatically shorter life spans than those who went to the United States. But they were essential for the development of the economy – the sugar plantations, the coffee farms, the gold mines. More than two million slaves came through Rio alone, fed in the casas de engorda(“fattening houses”) near Ms. Guimarães’s street before they were paraded naked, inspected and sold in the squares. Brazil was the last country in the world officially to end slavery.
Official list of slaves
Two slaves, Maria, 28, and Carolina, 36, are listed as belonging to Ms. Rita Leopoldina Andreno. The document, from 1872, shows their places of birth, colour, work skills and profession.
By 1888, when abolition finally came, there were more black than white people in Brazil, and also a large population that could be described as “mixed race” – the product of a settlement history that saw Portugal export mostly male settlers here for 300 years. At first, those men had sexual relationships, both consensual and forced, with indigenous women. When the indigenous population failed to provide the captive labour force the Portuguese wanted – fleeing into the interior rather than working on the new plantations, or dying of infectious diseases –the colonizers turned to the import of African slaves, who were routinely raped by their owners.
When slavery was ended, members of the white elite were left feeling anxious and outnumbered. They were also vexed, explains Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist and educator in Rio: How, they wondered, could they build a productive and prosperous nation if the predominant stock of the citizenry was the offspring of African savages? The obvious solution, they concluded, was to import better genes.
The government actively discouraged their former owners from giving the slaves paid work, and launched an effort to woo poor white Europeans to the country as a new labour force – with the overt intention to “embranquecer,” to whiten, the population.
“The founding principle of the first republic was eugenics,” is Mr. dos Santos’s sardonic assessment. This was eventually enshrined in an immigration law that stated, “The admission of immigrants will comply with the necessity of preserving and developing, in the ethnic composition of the population, the characteristics that are more convenient to its European ascendancy.”
PART 3
The long shadow of slavery
Even as the former slave owners set about diluting the country’s blackness, they also went to work on their cover story. In the Brazilian creation myth – the country’s version of Canada’s “cultural mosaic” or the U.S. “melting pot” – the country is a democracia racial, a racial democracy. This official story was built on the idea that from the day slavery ended, Brazilians of all colours were equal. After all, there was no segregation, no apartheid, no Jim Crow. Glossing over the massive disparities between the former owners and the newly freed slaves – who had no education, land or assets – the Brazilian elite, almost entirely white, declared the country uniquely equal and, in effect, postracial.
“It was ‘invisibilization,’” says Marcelo Paixão, who is black and a professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil, and you don’t need to discuss the inequality.”
The first census after the end of slavery, in 1890, asked not about race, but about colour: Citizens were asked if they were white, brown, black, yellow orcaboclo – a Portuguese word for those with some indigenous ancestry, more commonly known here as being vermelha, or red. Over the next years, racial identity was steadily replaced with considerations of colour. In 1976, the national statistics institute, seeking to hone the precision of the census, surveyed thousands of Brazilians about what word they themselves used – and came back with a list of 136. They included terms such as amarela-queimada(burnt yellow), canela (cinnamon) and morena-bem-chegada: very nearlymorena, a word for brown.
“It was ‘invisibilization’. The discourse was that we don’t have race in Brazil, so you don’t have race problems in Brazil...”— Marcelo Paixão, a black professor of economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
On some level, it was a progressive ideology, notes Prof. Paixão – it allowed for nuance instead of clear-cut indicators of racial purity. It also resulted in a more genuinely mixed culture, although that mixture is the outcome, in part, of appropriation. Cornerstones of black culture – such as samba music and the martial art capoeira, practised in secret by slaves – have been thoroughly co-opted into Brazilian identity.
But within that culture, and that society, there was an ineluctable hierarchy of what were to be considered racial traits. The dominant idea, propagated by whites, and eventually accepted by many black and mixed-race people as well, he explains, was that the “white” part of the mix brought a European rationality, while Africans brought happiness and creativity, a positive outlook – he ticks off adjectives and rolls his eyes. The more white that one was, the more of the “valuable” characteristics one had. To be whiter was to have a better chance of getting a job, and of earning more in that job. To be whiter, in other words, was to have it easier. Brazil became what is sometimes called here a “pigmentocracy.” (Prof. Paixão is among the fewer than five per cent of faculty members at the Federal University who are black.)
Meanwhile the division of power and wealth that locked itself into place at the time of slavery’s abolition was never addressed. Brazil’s freed slaves were “free,” as well, of the fundamental things needed to forge material equality: assets, education and access to capital. There was no land reform to break up the giant plantations and give the former slaves a way to support themselves. In Rio, former slaves were denied the right to live in the city proper, and so scrabbled for rough housing on the surrounding hills – this is the bleak origin of the favelas, or slums, that today are integral to the city’s postcard identity.
Race by neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro
Out of Rio’s 6,320,446 people, 51 per cent identified as white in the 2010 census, 36.5 per cent as mixed (mixed race between white and black) and 11.5 per cent as black. In the neighbourhoods below, the darker the red, the higher the concentration of people who identified as white. The higher concentration of self-identified white people tends to lead to a higher average monthly income in the neighbourhood.
Identifing as white (%)20406080100
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS, 2010
Mouseover regions for details. Click to zoom in and out. Monthly income includes respondants with no income.
The legacy of slavery, and the failure to address it, is visible in myriad other ways as well. Brazil has seen enormous social progress in the past 13 years: more than 30 million people, nearly a sixth of the population, has moved out of poverty into the lower middle class. That boost came from both an economic boom (driven by vast offshore oil finds, and high commodity prices fuelled by Chinese demand) and from progressive social policies implemented by a series of left-wing governments that dramatically raised the minimum wage and used targeted cash transfers to bring economic security to the poor.
But that progress has not touched all Brazilians equally. Even after those 13 years of rapid change, black and mixed-race Brazilians continue to earn far less than do white ones: 42.2 per cent less. More than 30 per cent fewer of them finish high school. Black Brazilians die younger, and young black men die at dramatically higher rates, than do white ones, typically victims of violence, often at the hands of police.
Average income in Brazil, 2013
White
Black/Mixed
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS, CONTINUOUS NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD SAMPLE SURVEY (PNAD)
02004006008001,0001,2001,4001,6001,8002,0002,200$R2,400Adjusted for inflation200320082013
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Thanks to an economic boom and progressive social policies, average income in Brazil has risen across the board since 2003, however the large income gap between whites and non-whites remains. (Income in Brazilian Reais.)
Indeed, in many ways the economic and social progress has served only to bring into stark relief how entrenched the hierarchy of race and colour remains. At the last census, in 2010, 51 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black or of mixed race. But the halls of power show something else. Of 38 members of the federal cabinet, one is black – the minister for the promotion of racial equality. Of the 381 companies listed on BOVESPA, the country’s stock market, not a single one has a black or mixed-race chief executive officer. Eighty per cent of the National Congress is white. In 2010, a São Paulo think tank analyzed the executive staff of Brazil’s 500 largest companies and found that a mere 0.2 per cent of executives were black, and only 5.1 per cent were of mixed race.
Education in Brazil by Race, 2010
Less 1 year
1-3 years
4-7 years
8-10 years
11-14 years
15+ years
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS
020406080100%WhiteMixedBlack
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A higher percentage of whites have had 15 or more years of education, while black Brazilians are most likely to have gone to school for less than a year.
Even interracial marriages are not the tribute to colour-blindness that they might appear to be. Disaggregate the data on who is marrying whom, and they show that such marriages are least common in the highest (predominantly white) income brackets, and most common among the lowest earners, who are almost entirely black or of mixed race. Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a white sociologist at Rio’s Federal University who studies race and economics, describes it as a sort of bleak bargain: When such marriages do occur, the darker-skinned partner usually has a higher level of education or a higher income or both. The relationship, at least on one level, is an economic transaction – each person is gaining social mobility, of one kind or the other.
There is also a sort of alchemy, Prof. Ribeiro explains, by which people with a mixed racial heritage who succeed in business or politics, such as billionaire media magnate Roberto Marinho, come to be viewed as white. Even in the two fields in which black Brazilians succeed at the highest levels – sports and music – that alchemy can work its dark magic. Soccer phenom Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., who presented as black when he first began to attract attention on the pitch, has, with his ascendancy, become in the popular perception, if not white, certainly not black.
Ms. de Araújo, right, was relieved when her daughter Sarah Ashley, centre, was born white like her husband, Mr. dos Praseres, left. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
It was against this long and complex backdrop that Ms. de Araújo and Mr. dos Praseres met 15 years ago as teenagers in a rough part of Rio. They hung out with a multiracial bunch of kids, and neither thought about race, they say, when they wound up kissing on a street corner one night. Mr. dos Praseres, shy and stocky, recalled in a recent Sunday afternoon conversation that he knew, from the minute he met her, that this willowy girl who could talk the birds out of the trees, was the one for him. He didn’t hesitate, even briefly, to bring her home to his family (Why would he? His own father is as dark-skinned as she is.) He says it went over just fine.
But that’s not quite how his wife remembers it. Turning to him with an expression of exaggerated surprise, she says: “They called me neguinha [little darkie] and all sorts of things! I heard people asking you, ‘You’re with that dark one?’ ”
At her family’s home, on the other hand, the new boyfriend was received differently. “They congratulated me,” she says matter-of-factly. “Because I was lightening the family, right? It felt like I was doing some great thing.”
PART 4
‘If you’re not white, you’re black’
There is a cost, for Brazil, in this determination to let race continue to dictate opportunity: in the huge numbers of black men who find themselves in prison rather than in schools or workplaces, in successive generations of black women consigned to domestic work because that is all for which they are perceived to be suitable. In 2008, Jose Vicente, rector of Universidade da Cidadania Zumbi dos Palmares in São Paulo, calculated that Brazil’s gross domestic product would be two per cent higher if blacks were full participants in the economy. This costs everyone, notes Prof. Paixão, and yet the captains of industry who maintain nearly all-white work forces are still “too shortsighted” to see it.
And then there is another kind of cost, the kind that comes in an intimate moment between mother and daughter. Sarah Ashley sometimes sits in her mother’s lap and holds her own arms against Ms. de Araújo’s.
“I wish I looked like you,” the five-year-old says. “I wish my skin was like yours; your skin is beautiful.” Her mother gently corrects her. “I tell her, ‘My skin is ugly. This colour is ugly.’ ”
“I believed I was the worst of the worst, the ugliest. I believed everyone was looking at me.”— Daniele de Araújo, on how she felt as a child when her mother made comments that Ms. de Araújo thought were about her darker skin colour
Ms. de Araújo clearly struggles with the contradictions in her own ideas about race. She moves with the confidence of a woman who knows she is beautiful. And as an evangelical Christian, she does not want to suggest that God could have made a mistake when he created her. But those innately felt truths are sometimes hard to reconcile with what she has been told all her life. When she was growing up, her mother, who is white, said things such as, “I found you in the garbage.”
“She didn’t say it in a mean way, exactly,” Ms. de Araújo says. Yet her mother never made comments like that to her sister. “I always wondered if it was because my sister was older, or because she was lighter,” she recalls. “I believed I was the worst of the worst, the ugliest. I believed everyone was looking at me.”
Ms. de Araújo and her family live in Nova Iguaçu, a dormitory city that is only 40 kilometres inland from the palm trees and white sand of Copacabana. But it could be another universe. The roads are terrible, the police swoop through only to collect bribes, and people live in rough brick houses behind high walls. But there is space out here, away from the more expensive, congested favelas in the city centre, and a chance to build a house like she and her husband have; extended families move here seeking a toehold in the new middle class. Ms. de Araújo’s grandmother, Nadir de Mattos Corrêa, lives about two blocks away, with her daughters, Daniele’s aunts Simone and Michelle, and their families. They pop in and out of each other’s houses all the time.
Ms. de Araújo is close to her aunt, Simone Vieira de Lucena, whose skin is as dark as hers, and who grew up, like Daniele, as the darkest of her multihued siblings. Ms. de Araújo often uses the family nickname for her: Neguinha.
Simone Vieira de Lucena is Ms. de Araújo’s aunt, and the two are close: Both grew up darker-skinned than any of their siblings. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
“I’m the darkest – so they always called me that,” says Ms. de Lucena, 42. When she was a kid, she says, her sisters told her that someone with her nose, her hair, could not hope to find a husband. The idea took such firm hold that she would not let anyone take her photo until she was in her 20s. Like Ms. de Araújo, she credits the church for somewhat improving her sense of self-worth. And, she says, as she got tired of hoping, fruitlessly, to be lighter. She and her niece refer to each other as preta, black, sometimes, instead of by name, and Simone calls her best friend, whose skin is darker than hers, macaca (monkey) or fumaça (smoke). They do it, Simone and Daniele say, with complete affection. “It’s different,” says Simone, “when it’s between us.”
When she fills out the census, Ms. de Lucena ticks the box for “negra.” Her husband, Joacinei Araújo de Lucena, 48, has a black parent and a white one, just like she does, but identifies himself as “pardo,” or brown. He insists that he, Ms. de Lucena and their two children are mixed – not one, not the other – and that mixed is a race of its own. Ms. de Lucena doesn’t buy it. “Não passou por branco é preto,” she often says, often tells their teenagers: If you’re not white, you’re black.
Such bluntness makes Simone’s mother flinch. At 68, Ms. Corrêa says she has no memory of racial discord in the house; she rejects the idea that some of her daughters could have used race to torment each other. And she insists she was blind to race, too.
“It’s true, I’d be with her in line somewhere and people would say, ‘She’s cute, is she adopted?’ and I’d say, ‘No, she’s mine,’ ” she recalls, sitting on the couch in Simone’s small living room.
“It was just because she looked different. But I treated everyone the same.”
Nadir de Mattos Corrêa, Ms. de Lucena’s mother and Ms. de Araújo ‘s grandmother, says she treated all her children the same regardless of their skin colour. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
Simone, listening to this, is so frustrated she can’t stay in the room, and goes to dry dishes – vigorously – in the kitchen. Her childhood, as she recalls it, was marked by the fact that no one in the family could or would take on the task of styling her hair, and instead her mother kept it in a buzz cut. “I looked like a boy.”
Nadir disputes this. “I took care of it,” she assures a visitor.
Simone cannot help herself; she pops her head back in the room and glares. “Mother, tell the truth!”
Nadir looks defensive. “Her hair is not so awful,” she says.
Simone stalks out again.
These are not conversations that Brazilians have easily. Although Simone and Daniele can call each other preta, among strangers, it is polite to describe colour by using a word that implies lightness: Call the person you’re looking for morena, not negra, even though her skin is black.
And for sensitive topics, it is better not to use the word at all. There is auniversal gesture – hold out one arm, then take a finger from the other hand and rub a bit at the skin, as if you are testing a cream. That’s code for black. Ms. de Araújo remembers adults at school doing it, with a significant lift of the eyebrows, when something went missing in the classroom and a thief was suspected. And when Ms. de Lucena’s son Rodrigo, now 23, wants to let her know why he isn’t interested in dating that nice girl from church – he does it, too. It makes his mother throw her hands up in exasperation.
PART 5
A black doctor in Liberdade
They call Liberdade the blackest place outside Africa. It’s a neighbourhood – a city within a city, really – in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. The state is 80-per-cent black; Liberdade, even blacker. Freed slaves settled here, below the formal town; today the neighbourhood is a jumble of small stores and coffee shops, brick houses perpetually awaiting another storey, and creaking buses navigating narrow alleys. Liberdade is under the control of criminal gangs who run drugs, and extract extortion payments from the small businesses; it is also full of kids playing in the street and old men gossiping on sunny stoops.
The two-storey Santa Mônica Health Post stands on a crowded corner where the guy with the fruit cart doubles as a lookout for the drug runners. The clinic is crowded from the moment it opens each day; it serves 6,500 people, or twice as many as it is meant to on paper, and it has a star attraction: Dr. Ícaro Vidal.
Dr. Ícaro Vidal puts on his lab coat in his office at the Santa Mônica Health Post in the Liberdade neighbourhood of Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
He is one of two doctors at the clinic. Six-foot-four and lanky, with hipster glasses and a funky T-shirt under his white coat, he has a joke and a smile for everyone, and the line outside his door lasts all day long. “Everyone loves Ícaro,” says Ana Cláudia Sousa Farias, who has staffed the clinic reception desk for the past 12 years. But it wasn’t always that way; when he first began to work here, many people were dubious, she recalls, the old ladies, especially: They didn’t trust his hair.
About that hair. Some days Dr. Vidal wears it in narrow braids gathered in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Sometimes, he leaves it loose, in a nimbus like a late-season dandelion. He never cuts it short, the way most black Brazilian men do. “Proper hair,” he calls that, with a derisive snort.
Still, he understands the unspoken questions; he knows why people push open his office door, look at him in his white coat, then ask when the doctor will be back. He is the first black physician most of his patients have ever had. When he graduated from the medical school at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), just two years ago, he was the only black student on the stage. He grew up here, in Liberdade. “Doctors don’t come from here,” he says.
PART 6
Progress and pushback
For 130 years, Brazil’s census data showed one steady trend: Every time the government counted its citizens, more of them were white. The successive waves of immigration played the biggest role in this. But so did a less tangible process: the slippery business of “passing,” through which mixed-race people took on a white identity.
And then, in 2010, came a change that startled demographers. For the first time since the slavery era, there were more black and mixed-race Brazilians than white ones. The census enumerates adults, so the birth rate doesn’t explain the change – and in any case, that rate is nearly equal across races.
Brazil’s population by race
White
Mixed
Black
Other
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS
0102030405060708090100110%187218901940195019601980199120002010
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In 2010, for the first time since slavery ended in 1888, the Brazilian census recorded more citizens as black or mixed-race than as white. The shift is attributed not to the birth rate but to a change in the way that people see themselves.
Something else is going on, says Sergei Soares, who heads the national Institute For Applied Economic Research. It’s a shift in self-identification. “You could say that what’s happening is not that Brazil is becoming a nation of blacks, but that it is admitting it is one,” says Mr. Soares, who is white. There has been a black movement here since before the end of slavery, but it has never been influential. With the end of two decades of military dictatorship in 1985, however, there began to be new space for debate about rights.
The constitution adopted in 1988 awarded some descendants of former slaves title to the land they lived on. By 1996, there was a national human-rights action plan, and it included a directive on the need to compensate black people for slavery, although no plan for how to do it. Slowly, there began to be a public conversation about the legacy of slavery as more than just a range of skin tones and their corresponding adjectives.
That conversation began just in time for Ícaro Vidal.
His grandmothers on both sides were illiterate; two generations before, his ancestors had been slaves. Dr. Vidal’s mother, Raimunda dos Santos, finished eighth grade, and moved from the countryside to Salvador to be a maid. At 21, she married a man with a basic education, like her own; he was a low-ranking member of the military police force, part of the vast pool of low-paid black men (and lately women) Brazil uses to do most of its street policing.
The couple had two children; his work often took him away, while Ms. dos Santos got a job as a cashier in a furniture store. The boss urged her to bring her young son Ícaro in to help out in busy seasons, the way other employees did with their kids – but she found ways to dodge the invitation. Instead, she sought out English lessons to fill his afternoons. English is still not widely spoken in Brazil; at the time, it was a preposterous pursuit for a poor black kid. Everyone thought so, except Ms. Santos.
Dr. Vidal with his sister Isis Carine Vidal dos Santos and mother Raimunda Vidal dos Santos in Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
“I didn’t think it was fair: Me working hard, the father working hard, so they could be like us?” she recalls in a conversation in the living room her son renovated and filled with new furniture, using his first paycheques. “What kind of ladder doesn’t go up?”
Ícaro and his sister, Isis, absorbed this sense of ambition. “I wanted a professional, comfortable job working Monday to Friday with a salary that let me travel two or three times a year – to have leisure and security,” Dr. Vidal says nonchalantly, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to want in a neighbourhood where the only kids who ever had new shoes were the ones who ran packages for the drug lords.
But his plan required a university education. And that presented a conundrum. Brazil has two kinds of universities: There are private ones, which are either exceedingly expensive or of very poor quality. And there are public ones, run by the federal and state governments, which tend to be of a much higher calibre – and are free. But because competition for spots in the public schools is fierce, only applicants who have had a private-school education, and the benefit of months or even years of private coaching for the entrance exam, can pass the entrance test.
But in 2004, UFBA introduced a new policy: 36 per cent of seats would now be reserved for black and mixed-race students. For years, black activists had been targeting the universities, as the ultimate symbols (and purveyors) of the elite, for a first effort at affirmative action. In 2002, university administrations began to adopt ad hoc strategies, reserving spots for non-white students. The quotas, as they are baldly called here, applied to every faculty, but they had an outsized impact on the prestigious schools of law, medicine and engineering, which, even in majority-black Bahia, had long graduated all-white classes, year after year.
Students attend a lecture at the Steve Biko Institute in the city of Salvador in Bahia state. It offers a free, year-long course for black students from low-income families to prepare them for the grueling entrance exam for federal universities. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
The quotas pushed the normally veiled discussion about race in Brazil into the open. Students and faculty staged large, angry protests against them. Television news programs showed weeping white mothers describing how their children had prepared their whole lives to follow in their parents’ footsteps but suddenly were being denied their birthright. The harshest critics of affirmative action insisted the policy was introducing racial discrimination into Brazil – rather than working to mitigate it – simply by noting the very existence of a hierarchy between the races.
The policy “costs Brazil the mixed identity created in the beginning of the 20thcentury and that’s an important thing because if you see yourself like a mixed person, you don’t have racial politics,” says Demétrio Magnoli, a prominent white sociologist whose criticisms of the quotas are widely published in Brazil. “I am against racism – so I prefer we don’t have racial questions.”
The goal of the quotas, he says, is to help a small slice of middle-class blacks – not because the government particularly likes them, but because they are a useful political constituency. “If you create races in the law, you create races in politics. And I don’t want to live in a country like that.”
The essential argument against affirmative action is this: that Brazil’s chief problem is economic inequality and, that as this is reduced, the lives of the poor, who happen to be majority black, will improve – that there is no need to target intervention on race. The argument, notes the activist Ivanir dos Santos, neatly sidesteps the discussion of the historical roots of the inequality, or the need to compensate for it.
In 2005 Dr. Vidal wrote the UFBA entrance exam, applied as a black student, and was accepted in the first class under the quota system. He says that he and a handful of other affirmative-action students, while not publicly identified as such, were startlingly visible against the backdrop of the all-white student body. There was rarely overt hostility – racism in Brazil is never overt, Dr. Vidal notes sardonically – but opposition to the policy was palpable. A professor, looking somewhere over Dr. Vidal’s head as he sat in a lecture hall, one day observed that the average grade on a test had been quite low but “that’s the effect of the quota.” Other students talked about it in groups, just loud enough for Dr. Vidal to overhear. “People would say, ‘All my life I studied and now someone comes who’s not as good as me or my friend, and this space is taken by someone who is not as qualified.’ ” Brazil would no longer reward those with merit, they said – only those with certain physical characteristics.
Dr. Vidal, who graduated at the top of his class, examines young patient Davi Luca as his mother, Liliane Soares da Silva, looks on. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
When people said that to his face, he had a succinct response: “I said, ‘You know, merit starts when you’re a child. If you have a room of your own in which to study, all the food you need to eat, if we’re at the same school and you don’t have to start working at 13 to look after other children or earn money to feed them – then we’re all competing on equal ground, and then we’ll talk about merit.’ ”
Research at UFBA and other Brazilian universities has found that affirmative-action students do as well as or, in many cases, outperform their classmates. Dr. Vidal graduated at the top of his class and promptly began a residency in the family-health program in his old neighbourhood. The older women soon made peace with his hair. All the pregnant ladies began to seek him out, for his patience and that 1,000-watt smile.
“When he started, people were dubious – you heard it in the community – because he was black and young: Black patients had even more skepticism than white ones – they think white people have more capacity to study or learn,” Mônica Nascimento França, a 39-year-old teacher jittery with anxiety over an imminent first baby, confides one afternoon in the stuffy waiting room. “But you can see it in the kind of doctor he is, that he’s Afro-Brazilian and from this community – you know how much prejudice there is here. And he faced it.”
PART 7
Seeking truth, and equity
On a sunny day last November, Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, presided over a reception to mark the opening of a 22-storey office tower. Waiters passed trays of canapés, and smartly dressed guests lounged on white leather sofas. The tower is the first new building in that multibillion-dollar redevelopment project, which the mayor calls the Porto Maravilha – the Marvellous Port he vows will reclaim the blighted inner city.
Mr. Paes, who is white, talked at length about Rio’s glorious history, but in a few words glossed over the previous period during which it was the centre of the slave trade.
The new tower had been built by a U.S. development company, and its CEO, a white American named Rob Speyer, spoke that day about how happy he was to be in Brazil, where “different ethnicities blend together” in “wonderful unity” – so preferable, he said, to the violent demonstrations then under way back home, in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. His listeners nodded approvingly. There were about 200 people at the event; of the eight who were not white, six were waiters or other staff.
While the mayor was opening the tower, another event was unfolding less than a kilometre up the road. Brazil’s Black Bar Association had gathered about 100 people (all but two of them black) in a conference hall looking out over the harbour, and announced the launch of a “truth commission” to explore the history and repercussions of slavery in Brazil, and what redress might be made for the descendants of slavery.
“We always say: All whites now, who are alive today, are not responsible for the slavery process, but they benefit until this day from this system.”— Marcelo Dias, member of a new truth commission on slavery
At the meeting, Marcelo Dias was named to head the commission’s work in Rio; he called the initiative “the most important moment for Afro-Brazilians since the end of slavery.” From their seats on the dais, the new commissioners vowed to probe precisely which companies got rich on forced labour, and to dig deeply into the atrocities visited on the Africans who were brought here – details that have received little public airing. They said they would push the federal government to make their initiative a national effort, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concluded last year, that investigated decades of human-rights abuses during military rule in Brazil.
But in the months to come, the commission foundered. Public meetings were sparsely attended, and received scant media coverage. The federal government made no move to take over the commission or even endorse it. And the commissioners struggled to find sources for the truth they wanted told – for a variety of reasons, including the fact that, because few slave owners were themselves literate, there is a much thinner surviving historical record of Brazilian than, for example, American slavery.
One question, of course, is what happened here; another is what its victims are owed. Commissioners made cautious use of the word “reparations” – a subject of growing debate in other countries that have a history of sharp racial inequality, such as South Africa and the United States – but one that is almost never discussed in Brazil.
“We always say: All whites now, who are alive today, are not responsible for the slavery process, but they benefit until this day from this system,” Mr. Dias explained in an interview before the meeting began. The commissioners discussed the model that was implemented in Germany after the Second World War, but concluded that it would be impossible, hundreds of years later, to calculate a value that is owed to individuals – and in any case government would never pay.
“Affirmative action already generates a heated debate. Imagine when we hand them the bill,” Mr. Dias said the first day, laughing heartily. “ ‘Look, here it is, your bill. Half of what you own is ours. We want it back.’ There would be a civil war here!”
As Mr. Dias notes, affirmative action benefits only a minority of rare individuals (such as Dr. Vidal) who are able to take up spots at elite universities. And yet broad-based reparations cannot be made in the form of straightforward monetary compensation. So his commission proposes they take the form a fund that invests in majority-black communities – new spending on hospitals, transport, schools, social services and job creation. And museums, more ambitious and official than that of Ms. Guimarães, with her living-room-based exposé of the slave graveyard: Brazil needs a genuine effort at telling an accurate story of slavery, Mr. Dias says, of making it public instead of paving it over.
A teen dives off the rocks in front of the Gamboa de Baixo community in Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail).
“I don’t know if we will be strong enough to obtain these reparations from the state,” he said, when the commission had been in operation for four months. “But we need to create this debate in society.”
In 2003, the federal government created the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality; it oversees the implementation of affirmative action and of anti-discrimination laws covering everything from hate speech (most frequently applied to racist fans at football games) to bias in hiring, housing and school enrolment. After universities began to adopt affirmative-action policies, the federal government moved to implement them for other institutions as well. Roughly 20 per cent of jobs in state governments, plus some federal institutions such as the diplomatic corps, are reserved for applicants who identify as black and mixed race.
In late June, the National Council of Justice, which manages judicial appointments, announced that, from now on, 20 per cent of seats on the bench would be reserved for black applicants – an apparently straightforward plan that crystallizes the challenges of trying to build diversity in the centres of power. But it is doubtful that there are enough black lawyers in the country to fill that many spots, even if they were all to apply. And, as with the university-entrance tests, the exam given to potential new judges is so difficult that, by the council’s own admission, the only people who pass it are those who can take years off to prepare.
Mr. Dias and others want to see the reservation policy extended to private-sector jobs. That suggestion is viewed dimly in Brazil’s boardrooms and political caucuses. But it is increasingly uncommon to hear it repudiated in public.
Marcelo Nilo, for example, was once an outspoken critic of quotas of any kind. Mr. Nilo, 60, is a slick conservative politician who, after seven consecutive terms as an assembly member, rose to be president of the state legislature in Bahia. But a few years ago he switched parties, when power shifted and left-wing parties came to dominate – a move that allowed him to keep the top job. That meant championing quotas. So when a reporter recently came calling in his vast office in the Brutalist concrete state assembly, he set out to defend affirmative action.
A man walks near the Santa Mônica Health Post in the predominantly black neighbourhood of Liberdade, in the city of Salvador in Bahia, the state represented by Marcelo Nilo. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images Assignment for The Globe and Mail)
“Today, Brazil has evolved a lot, because white people and black people have the same rights, but black people have yet to achieve the same economic power,” he began, then trailed off, then began again. “To get into university, in my point of view, blacks don’t have difficulties; there is no prejudice against them. There’s discrimination against poor people. … If you put a quota for blacks, are you discriminating against whites? I am in favour, because I know black people have a hard time to access these jobs. But some people aren’t.”
Mr. Nilo says that progress on racial equality is evident in the assembly he represents. The Congress in Brazil’s blackest state appears, at first glance, almost uniformly white. Asked who, exactly, is black, he shouts out the name of the two mixed-race deputies, before turning to a gaggle of white aides who fill a row of sofas in his office: “That guy, that guy, what’s his name? We have him!” An assistant flicks frantically through a list on her phone, trying to come up with the name of a black congress member.
Anyway, Mr. Nilo continues, skin colour is irrelevant. “I’ve talked to all the congressmen here, and I don’t know one racist. I’ve talked to them all and I swear I don’t know one racist one. Yes, all are white, and married white women. But that’s because they like the colour white better … It’s a question of affinity.”
He pauses to offer small cups of coffee, carried in by a black waiter, while two security guards, both black, look on. In fact, Mr. Nilo says, it is specious to talk about skin colour when everyone in Bahia has a mixed racial heritage. “I’m not white,” says the deputy, whose skin glows like a first snowfall. “My father wasmoreno,” he adds, using the word that means brown, and is the catch-all term for mixed-race.
He then sends the aide to fetch a picture of his father, who also appears white to the uninformed observer. Mr. Nilo concedes that many people probably read his father, who was also a politician, and mayor of their town for years, as white. But no matter, he concludes, “I’m moreno.”
PART 8
Missing: an explicit conversation
Ten years ago, Daniele de Araújo moved from her job as a domestic worker to one as a telemarketer – she was fiendishly good at it, but she had even bigger ambitions. So she went back to school, and now is about to graduate as a radiation technician with a specialty in bone-density scans. Her husband Jonatas left the military after seven years and now works as a security guard at a steel plant – a union job that comes with an excellent benefits package. Sarah Ashley goes to a private school where the curriculum includes English classes – the stamp of aspiration.
It’s tempting, says Marcelo Paixão, the black economist, to believe that the narrowing of economic inequality in recent years will also, in time, reduce the racial inequality. And yet, he notes, while the income disparity has shrunk, the rate of police violence against blacks, for example, has actually risen. There needs, he says, to be an explicit conversation that acknowledges that all poor people are not equal. “Can Brazil transform itself without examining racial inequality? I believe it’s impossible.”
For now, that conversation remains muted. In Brazil’s federal election last year, for example, one of the three candidates for president was a black woman, Marina Silva. She came close to winning. But, Prof. Paixão says with a laugh, you would “have to remind her” she is black, so little mention did she, or anyone else, make of it through her campaign.
But in Salvador, Icaro Vidal finds himself talking about race more and more. One day during Carnaval festivities last year, a guard snapped the velvet rope down in front of him as a line of his friends (all white) filed into a party in a club. “I said to the security guy, ‘You know what your problem is? You believe that black people like us can only be the ones holding the rope.’ ”
The guard apologized, and waved him through. Dr. Vidal went dancing. His hair was loose, and wildly curly. He knew people were talking about it. And that was just fine.
Brazil’s colour bind: How one of the world's most diverse countries is just starting to talk about race
‘If you’re not white, you’re black’
There is a cost, for Brazil, in this determination to let race continue to dictate opportunity: in the huge numbers of black men who find themselves in prison rather than in schools or workplaces, in successive generations of black women consigned to domestic work because that is all for which they are perceived to be suitable. In 2008, Jose Vicente, rector of Universidade da Cidadania Zumbi dos Palmares in São Paulo, calculated that Brazil’s gross domestic product would be two per cent higher if blacks were full participants in the economy. This costs everyone, notes Prof. Paixão, and yet the captains of industry who maintain nearly all-white work forces are still “too shortsighted” to see it.
And then there is another kind of cost, the kind that comes in an intimate moment between mother and daughter. Sarah Ashley sometimes sits in her mother’s lap and holds her own arms against Ms. de Araújo’s.
“I wish I looked like you,” the five-year-old says. “I wish my skin was like yours; your skin is beautiful.” Her mother gently corrects her. “I tell her, ‘My skin is ugly. This colour is ugly.’ ”
“I believed I was the worst of the worst, the ugliest. I believed everyone was looking at me.”— Daniele de Araújo, on how she felt as a child when her mother made comments that Ms. de Araújo thought were about her darker skin colour
Ms. de Araújo clearly struggles with the contradictions in her own ideas about race. She moves with the confidence of a woman who knows she is beautiful. And as an evangelical Christian, she does not want to suggest that God could have made a mistake when he created her. But those innately felt truths are sometimes hard to reconcile with what she has been told all her life. When she was growing up, her mother, who is white, said things such as, “I found you in the garbage.”
“She didn’t say it in a mean way, exactly,” Ms. de Araújo says. Yet her mother never made comments like that to her sister. “I always wondered if it was because my sister was older, or because she was lighter,” she recalls. “I believed I was the worst of the worst, the ugliest. I believed everyone was looking at me.”
Ms. de Araújo and her family live in Nova Iguaçu, a dormitory city that is only 40 kilometres inland from the palm trees and white sand of Copacabana. But it could be another universe. The roads are terrible, the police swoop through only to collect bribes, and people live in rough brick houses behind high walls. But there is space out here, away from the more expensive, congested favelas in the city centre, and a chance to build a house like she and her husband have; extended families move here seeking a toehold in the new middle class. Ms. de Araújo’s grandmother, Nadir de Mattos Corrêa, lives about two blocks away, with her daughters, Daniele’s aunts Simone and Michelle, and their families. They pop in and out of each other’s houses all the time.
Ms. de Araújo is close to her aunt, Simone Vieira de Lucena, whose skin is as dark as hers, and who grew up, like Daniele, as the darkest of her multihued siblings. Ms. de Araújo often uses the family nickname for her: Neguinha.
Simone Vieira de Lucena is Ms. de Araújo’s aunt, and the two are close: Both grew up darker-skinned than any of their siblings. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
“I’m the darkest – so they always called me that,” says Ms. de Lucena, 42. When she was a kid, she says, her sisters told her that someone with her nose, her hair, could not hope to find a husband. The idea took such firm hold that she would not let anyone take her photo until she was in her 20s. Like Ms. de Araújo, she credits the church for somewhat improving her sense of self-worth. And, she says, as she got tired of hoping, fruitlessly, to be lighter. She and her niece refer to each other as preta, black, sometimes, instead of by name, and Simone calls her best friend, whose skin is darker than hers, macaca (monkey) or fumaça (smoke). They do it, Simone and Daniele say, with complete affection. “It’s different,” says Simone, “when it’s between us.”
When she fills out the census, Ms. de Lucena ticks the box for “negra.” Her husband, Joacinei Araújo de Lucena, 48, has a black parent and a white one, just like she does, but identifies himself as “pardo,” or brown. He insists that he, Ms. de Lucena and their two children are mixed – not one, not the other – and that mixed is a race of its own. Ms. de Lucena doesn’t buy it. “Não passou por branco é preto,” she often says, often tells their teenagers: If you’re not white, you’re black.
Such bluntness makes Simone’s mother flinch. At 68, Ms. Corrêa says she has no memory of racial discord in the house; she rejects the idea that some of her daughters could have used race to torment each other. And she insists she was blind to race, too.
“It’s true, I’d be with her in line somewhere and people would say, ‘She’s cute, is she adopted?’ and I’d say, ‘No, she’s mine,’ ” she recalls, sitting on the couch in Simone’s small living room.
“It was just because she looked different. But I treated everyone the same.”
Nadir de Mattos Corrêa, Ms. de Lucena’s mother and Ms. de Araújo ‘s grandmother, says she treated all her children the same regardless of their skin colour. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
Simone, listening to this, is so frustrated she can’t stay in the room, and goes to dry dishes – vigorously – in the kitchen. Her childhood, as she recalls it, was marked by the fact that no one in the family could or would take on the task of styling her hair, and instead her mother kept it in a buzz cut. “I looked like a boy.”
Nadir disputes this. “I took care of it,” she assures a visitor.
Simone cannot help herself; she pops her head back in the room and glares. “Mother, tell the truth!”
Nadir looks defensive. “Her hair is not so awful,” she says.
Simone stalks out again.
These are not conversations that Brazilians have easily. Although Simone and Daniele can call each other preta, among strangers, it is polite to describe colour by using a word that implies lightness: Call the person you’re looking for morena, not negra, even though her skin is black.
And for sensitive topics, it is better not to use the word at all. There is auniversal gesture – hold out one arm, then take a finger from the other hand and rub a bit at the skin, as if you are testing a cream. That’s code for black. Ms. de Araújo remembers adults at school doing it, with a significant lift of the eyebrows, when something went missing in the classroom and a thief was suspected. And when Ms. de Lucena’s son Rodrigo, now 23, wants to let her know why he isn’t interested in dating that nice girl from church – he does it, too. It makes his mother throw her hands up in exasperation.
PART 5
A black doctor in Liberdade
They call Liberdade the blackest place outside Africa. It’s a neighbourhood – a city within a city, really – in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. The state is 80-per-cent black; Liberdade, even blacker. Freed slaves settled here, below the formal town; today the neighbourhood is a jumble of small stores and coffee shops, brick houses perpetually awaiting another storey, and creaking buses navigating narrow alleys. Liberdade is under the control of criminal gangs who run drugs, and extract extortion payments from the small businesses; it is also full of kids playing in the street and old men gossiping on sunny stoops.
The two-storey Santa Mônica Health Post stands on a crowded corner where the guy with the fruit cart doubles as a lookout for the drug runners. The clinic is crowded from the moment it opens each day; it serves 6,500 people, or twice as many as it is meant to on paper, and it has a star attraction: Dr. Ícaro Vidal.
Dr. Ícaro Vidal puts on his lab coat in his office at the Santa Mônica Health Post in the Liberdade neighbourhood of Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
He is one of two doctors at the clinic. Six-foot-four and lanky, with hipster glasses and a funky T-shirt under his white coat, he has a joke and a smile for everyone, and the line outside his door lasts all day long. “Everyone loves Ícaro,” says Ana Cláudia Sousa Farias, who has staffed the clinic reception desk for the past 12 years. But it wasn’t always that way; when he first began to work here, many people were dubious, she recalls, the old ladies, especially: They didn’t trust his hair.
About that hair. Some days Dr. Vidal wears it in narrow braids gathered in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Sometimes, he leaves it loose, in a nimbus like a late-season dandelion. He never cuts it short, the way most black Brazilian men do. “Proper hair,” he calls that, with a derisive snort.
Still, he understands the unspoken questions; he knows why people push open his office door, look at him in his white coat, then ask when the doctor will be back. He is the first black physician most of his patients have ever had. When he graduated from the medical school at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), just two years ago, he was the only black student on the stage. He grew up here, in Liberdade. “Doctors don’t come from here,” he says.
PART 6
Progress and pushback
For 130 years, Brazil’s census data showed one steady trend: Every time the government counted its citizens, more of them were white. The successive waves of immigration played the biggest role in this. But so did a less tangible process: the slippery business of “passing,” through which mixed-race people took on a white identity.
And then, in 2010, came a change that startled demographers. For the first time since the slavery era, there were more black and mixed-race Brazilians than white ones. The census enumerates adults, so the birth rate doesn’t explain the change – and in any case, that rate is nearly equal across races.
Brazil’s population by race
White
Mixed
Black
Other
THE GLOBE AND MAIL » SOURCE: BRAZILIAN INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS
0102030405060708090100110%187218901940195019601980199120002010
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In 2010, for the first time since slavery ended in 1888, the Brazilian census recorded more citizens as black or mixed-race than as white. The shift is attributed not to the birth rate but to a change in the way that people see themselves.
Something else is going on, says Sergei Soares, who heads the national Institute For Applied Economic Research. It’s a shift in self-identification. “You could say that what’s happening is not that Brazil is becoming a nation of blacks, but that it is admitting it is one,” says Mr. Soares, who is white. There has been a black movement here since before the end of slavery, but it has never been influential. With the end of two decades of military dictatorship in 1985, however, there began to be new space for debate about rights.
The constitution adopted in 1988 awarded some descendants of former slaves title to the land they lived on. By 1996, there was a national human-rights action plan, and it included a directive on the need to compensate black people for slavery, although no plan for how to do it. Slowly, there began to be a public conversation about the legacy of slavery as more than just a range of skin tones and their corresponding adjectives.
That conversation began just in time for Ícaro Vidal.
His grandmothers on both sides were illiterate; two generations before, his ancestors had been slaves. Dr. Vidal’s mother, Raimunda dos Santos, finished eighth grade, and moved from the countryside to Salvador to be a maid. At 21, she married a man with a basic education, like her own; he was a low-ranking member of the military police force, part of the vast pool of low-paid black men (and lately women) Brazil uses to do most of its street policing.
The couple had two children; his work often took him away, while Ms. dos Santos got a job as a cashier in a furniture store. The boss urged her to bring her young son Ícaro in to help out in busy seasons, the way other employees did with their kids – but she found ways to dodge the invitation. Instead, she sought out English lessons to fill his afternoons. English is still not widely spoken in Brazil; at the time, it was a preposterous pursuit for a poor black kid. Everyone thought so, except Ms. Santos.
Dr. Vidal with his sister Isis Carine Vidal dos Santos and mother Raimunda Vidal dos Santos in Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
“I didn’t think it was fair: Me working hard, the father working hard, so they could be like us?” she recalls in a conversation in the living room her son renovated and filled with new furniture, using his first paycheques. “What kind of ladder doesn’t go up?”
Ícaro and his sister, Isis, absorbed this sense of ambition. “I wanted a professional, comfortable job working Monday to Friday with a salary that let me travel two or three times a year – to have leisure and security,” Dr. Vidal says nonchalantly, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to want in a neighbourhood where the only kids who ever had new shoes were the ones who ran packages for the drug lords.
But his plan required a university education. And that presented a conundrum. Brazil has two kinds of universities: There are private ones, which are either exceedingly expensive or of very poor quality. And there are public ones, run by the federal and state governments, which tend to be of a much higher calibre – and are free. But because competition for spots in the public schools is fierce, only applicants who have had a private-school education, and the benefit of months or even years of private coaching for the entrance exam, can pass the entrance test.
But in 2004, UFBA introduced a new policy: 36 per cent of seats would now be reserved for black and mixed-race students. For years, black activists had been targeting the universities, as the ultimate symbols (and purveyors) of the elite, for a first effort at affirmative action. In 2002, university administrations began to adopt ad hoc strategies, reserving spots for non-white students. The quotas, as they are baldly called here, applied to every faculty, but they had an outsized impact on the prestigious schools of law, medicine and engineering, which, even in majority-black Bahia, had long graduated all-white classes, year after year.
Students attend a lecture at the Steve Biko Institute in the city of Salvador in Bahia state. It offers a free, year-long course for black students from low-income families to prepare them for the grueling entrance exam for federal universities. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
The quotas pushed the normally veiled discussion about race in Brazil into the open. Students and faculty staged large, angry protests against them. Television news programs showed weeping white mothers describing how their children had prepared their whole lives to follow in their parents’ footsteps but suddenly were being denied their birthright. The harshest critics of affirmative action insisted the policy was introducing racial discrimination into Brazil – rather than working to mitigate it – simply by noting the very existence of a hierarchy between the races.
The policy “costs Brazil the mixed identity created in the beginning of the 20thcentury and that’s an important thing because if you see yourself like a mixed person, you don’t have racial politics,” says Demétrio Magnoli, a prominent white sociologist whose criticisms of the quotas are widely published in Brazil. “I am against racism – so I prefer we don’t have racial questions.”
The goal of the quotas, he says, is to help a small slice of middle-class blacks – not because the government particularly likes them, but because they are a useful political constituency. “If you create races in the law, you create races in politics. And I don’t want to live in a country like that.”
The essential argument against affirmative action is this: that Brazil’s chief problem is economic inequality and, that as this is reduced, the lives of the poor, who happen to be majority black, will improve – that there is no need to target intervention on race. The argument, notes the activist Ivanir dos Santos, neatly sidesteps the discussion of the historical roots of the inequality, or the need to compensate for it.
In 2005 Dr. Vidal wrote the UFBA entrance exam, applied as a black student, and was accepted in the first class under the quota system. He says that he and a handful of other affirmative-action students, while not publicly identified as such, were startlingly visible against the backdrop of the all-white student body. There was rarely overt hostility – racism in Brazil is never overt, Dr. Vidal notes sardonically – but opposition to the policy was palpable. A professor, looking somewhere over Dr. Vidal’s head as he sat in a lecture hall, one day observed that the average grade on a test had been quite low but “that’s the effect of the quota.” Other students talked about it in groups, just loud enough for Dr. Vidal to overhear. “People would say, ‘All my life I studied and now someone comes who’s not as good as me or my friend, and this space is taken by someone who is not as qualified.’ ” Brazil would no longer reward those with merit, they said – only those with certain physical characteristics.
Dr. Vidal, who graduated at the top of his class, examines young patient Davi Luca as his mother, Liliane Soares da Silva, looks on. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail)
When people said that to his face, he had a succinct response: “I said, ‘You know, merit starts when you’re a child. If you have a room of your own in which to study, all the food you need to eat, if we’re at the same school and you don’t have to start working at 13 to look after other children or earn money to feed them – then we’re all competing on equal ground, and then we’ll talk about merit.’ ”
Research at UFBA and other Brazilian universities has found that affirmative-action students do as well as or, in many cases, outperform their classmates. Dr. Vidal graduated at the top of his class and promptly began a residency in the family-health program in his old neighbourhood. The older women soon made peace with his hair. All the pregnant ladies began to seek him out, for his patience and that 1,000-watt smile.
“When he started, people were dubious – you heard it in the community – because he was black and young: Black patients had even more skepticism than white ones – they think white people have more capacity to study or learn,” Mônica Nascimento França, a 39-year-old teacher jittery with anxiety over an imminent first baby, confides one afternoon in the stuffy waiting room. “But you can see it in the kind of doctor he is, that he’s Afro-Brazilian and from this community – you know how much prejudice there is here. And he faced it.”
PART 7
Seeking truth, and equity
On a sunny day last November, Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, presided over a reception to mark the opening of a 22-storey office tower. Waiters passed trays of canapés, and smartly dressed guests lounged on white leather sofas. The tower is the first new building in that multibillion-dollar redevelopment project, which the mayor calls the Porto Maravilha – the Marvellous Port he vows will reclaim the blighted inner city.
Mr. Paes, who is white, talked at length about Rio’s glorious history, but in a few words glossed over the previous period during which it was the centre of the slave trade.
The new tower had been built by a U.S. development company, and its CEO, a white American named Rob Speyer, spoke that day about how happy he was to be in Brazil, where “different ethnicities blend together” in “wonderful unity” – so preferable, he said, to the violent demonstrations then under way back home, in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. His listeners nodded approvingly. There were about 200 people at the event; of the eight who were not white, six were waiters or other staff.
While the mayor was opening the tower, another event was unfolding less than a kilometre up the road. Brazil’s Black Bar Association had gathered about 100 people (all but two of them black) in a conference hall looking out over the harbour, and announced the launch of a “truth commission” to explore the history and repercussions of slavery in Brazil, and what redress might be made for the descendants of slavery.
“We always say: All whites now, who are alive today, are not responsible for the slavery process, but they benefit until this day from this system.”— Marcelo Dias, member of a new truth commission on slavery
At the meeting, Marcelo Dias was named to head the commission’s work in Rio; he called the initiative “the most important moment for Afro-Brazilians since the end of slavery.” From their seats on the dais, the new commissioners vowed to probe precisely which companies got rich on forced labour, and to dig deeply into the atrocities visited on the Africans who were brought here – details that have received little public airing. They said they would push the federal government to make their initiative a national effort, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concluded last year, that investigated decades of human-rights abuses during military rule in Brazil.
But in the months to come, the commission foundered. Public meetings were sparsely attended, and received scant media coverage. The federal government made no move to take over the commission or even endorse it. And the commissioners struggled to find sources for the truth they wanted told – for a variety of reasons, including the fact that, because few slave owners were themselves literate, there is a much thinner surviving historical record of Brazilian than, for example, American slavery.
One question, of course, is what happened here; another is what its victims are owed. Commissioners made cautious use of the word “reparations” – a subject of growing debate in other countries that have a history of sharp racial inequality, such as South Africa and the United States – but one that is almost never discussed in Brazil.
“We always say: All whites now, who are alive today, are not responsible for the slavery process, but they benefit until this day from this system,” Mr. Dias explained in an interview before the meeting began. The commissioners discussed the model that was implemented in Germany after the Second World War, but concluded that it would be impossible, hundreds of years later, to calculate a value that is owed to individuals – and in any case government would never pay.
“Affirmative action already generates a heated debate. Imagine when we hand them the bill,” Mr. Dias said the first day, laughing heartily. “ ‘Look, here it is, your bill. Half of what you own is ours. We want it back.’ There would be a civil war here!”
As Mr. Dias notes, affirmative action benefits only a minority of rare individuals (such as Dr. Vidal) who are able to take up spots at elite universities. And yet broad-based reparations cannot be made in the form of straightforward monetary compensation. So his commission proposes they take the form a fund that invests in majority-black communities – new spending on hospitals, transport, schools, social services and job creation. And museums, more ambitious and official than that of Ms. Guimarães, with her living-room-based exposé of the slave graveyard: Brazil needs a genuine effort at telling an accurate story of slavery, Mr. Dias says, of making it public instead of paving it over.
A teen dives off the rocks in front of the Gamboa de Baixo community in Salvador, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images for The Globe and Mail).
“I don’t know if we will be strong enough to obtain these reparations from the state,” he said, when the commission had been in operation for four months. “But we need to create this debate in society.”
In 2003, the federal government created the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality; it oversees the implementation of affirmative action and of anti-discrimination laws covering everything from hate speech (most frequently applied to racist fans at football games) to bias in hiring, housing and school enrolment. After universities began to adopt affirmative-action policies, the federal government moved to implement them for other institutions as well. Roughly 20 per cent of jobs in state governments, plus some federal institutions such as the diplomatic corps, are reserved for applicants who identify as black and mixed race.
In late June, the National Council of Justice, which manages judicial appointments, announced that, from now on, 20 per cent of seats on the bench would be reserved for black applicants – an apparently straightforward plan that crystallizes the challenges of trying to build diversity in the centres of power. But it is doubtful that there are enough black lawyers in the country to fill that many spots, even if they were all to apply. And, as with the university-entrance tests, the exam given to potential new judges is so difficult that, by the council’s own admission, the only people who pass it are those who can take years off to prepare.
Mr. Dias and others want to see the reservation policy extended to private-sector jobs. That suggestion is viewed dimly in Brazil’s boardrooms and political caucuses. But it is increasingly uncommon to hear it repudiated in public.
Marcelo Nilo, for example, was once an outspoken critic of quotas of any kind. Mr. Nilo, 60, is a slick conservative politician who, after seven consecutive terms as an assembly member, rose to be president of the state legislature in Bahia. But a few years ago he switched parties, when power shifted and left-wing parties came to dominate – a move that allowed him to keep the top job. That meant championing quotas. So when a reporter recently came calling in his vast office in the Brutalist concrete state assembly, he set out to defend affirmative action.
A man walks near the Santa Mônica Health Post in the predominantly black neighbourhood of Liberdade, in the city of Salvador in Bahia, the state represented by Marcelo Nilo. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images Assignment for The Globe and Mail)
“Today, Brazil has evolved a lot, because white people and black people have the same rights, but black people have yet to achieve the same economic power,” he began, then trailed off, then began again. “To get into university, in my point of view, blacks don’t have difficulties; there is no prejudice against them. There’s discrimination against poor people. … If you put a quota for blacks, are you discriminating against whites? I am in favour, because I know black people have a hard time to access these jobs. But some people aren’t.”
Mr. Nilo says that progress on racial equality is evident in the assembly he represents. The Congress in Brazil’s blackest state appears, at first glance, almost uniformly white. Asked who, exactly, is black, he shouts out the name of the two mixed-race deputies, before turning to a gaggle of white aides who fill a row of sofas in his office: “That guy, that guy, what’s his name? We have him!” An assistant flicks frantically through a list on her phone, trying to come up with the name of a black congress member.
Anyway, Mr. Nilo continues, skin colour is irrelevant. “I’ve talked to all the congressmen here, and I don’t know one racist. I’ve talked to them all and I swear I don’t know one racist one. Yes, all are white, and married white women. But that’s because they like the colour white better … It’s a question of affinity.”
He pauses to offer small cups of coffee, carried in by a black waiter, while two security guards, both black, look on. In fact, Mr. Nilo says, it is specious to talk about skin colour when everyone in Bahia has a mixed racial heritage. “I’m not white,” says the deputy, whose skin glows like a first snowfall. “My father wasmoreno,” he adds, using the word that means brown, and is the catch-all term for mixed-race.
He then sends the aide to fetch a picture of his father, who also appears white to the uninformed observer. Mr. Nilo concedes that many people probably read his father, who was also a politician, and mayor of their town for years, as white. But no matter, he concludes, “I’m moreno.”
PART 8
Missing: an explicit conversation
Ten years ago, Daniele de Araújo moved from her job as a domestic worker to one as a telemarketer – she was fiendishly good at it, but she had even bigger ambitions. So she went back to school, and now is about to graduate as a radiation technician with a specialty in bone-density scans. Her husband Jonatas left the military after seven years and now works as a security guard at a steel plant – a union job that comes with an excellent benefits package. Sarah Ashley goes to a private school where the curriculum includes English classes – the stamp of aspiration.
It’s tempting, says Marcelo Paixão, the black economist, to believe that the narrowing of economic inequality in recent years will also, in time, reduce the racial inequality. And yet, he notes, while the income disparity has shrunk, the rate of police violence against blacks, for example, has actually risen. There needs, he says, to be an explicit conversation that acknowledges that all poor people are not equal. “Can Brazil transform itself without examining racial inequality? I believe it’s impossible.”
For now, that conversation remains muted. In Brazil’s federal election last year, for example, one of the three candidates for president was a black woman, Marina Silva. She came close to winning. But, Prof. Paixão says with a laugh, you would “have to remind her” she is black, so little mention did she, or anyone else, make of it through her campaign.
But in Salvador, Icaro Vidal finds himself talking about race more and more. One day during Carnaval festivities last year, a guard snapped the velvet rope down in front of him as a line of his friends (all white) filed into a party in a club. “I said to the security guy, ‘You know what your problem is? You believe that black people like us can only be the ones holding the rope.’ ”
The guard apologized, and waved him through. Dr. Vidal went dancing. His hair was loose, and wildly curly. He knew people were talking about it. And that was just fine.
Brazil’s colour bind: How one of the world's most diverse countries is just starting to talk about race
Does ol' boy live in Salvador? If what he's saying is true I might as well go live there.
