The Difference Between Black Brazil and Black U.S.
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
by BAR contributing editor
Italo Ramos
African Americans sometimes embarrass themselves, often
without know it, by assuming that others from the Diaspora see the
world in the same way as themselves. Blacks from other nations are
also frequently puzzled and confused by U.S. Black behavior, and even
the concept of Blackness that prevails in the United States.
Afro-Brazilian journalist Italo Ramos shares his notebook of
impressions on the ways being Black - and the assumptions of whites -
are different in the two countries. One example: in Brazil,
affirmative action in education is spreading like wildfire, while in
the U.S. it is under whithering assault. The author explores the
reasons why.

The Difference Between Black Brazil and Black U.S.
by Italo Ramos

"We black Brazilians don't blame our national black
leaders for inefficiency or inaccuracy, because we don't have any."
In the 16th Century, the colonizers that went to Africa
came from the same continent, a vast and diverse Europe, as we know.
But, despite their different origins and cultures, they had two things
in common. First, their two main motivations: 1) to pillage free
natural resources; and 2) to appropriate free labor. Second: they
thought they had the right to do these things, because, in their
minds, they were superior human beings. This is a history that didn't
change, as racist whites have the same mindset even today about
pillage and slavery.
Although their motivations were the same, European
colonizers couldn't escape their cultural differences, and so, the
resulting contemporary racial relations in two countries, Brazil and
the US, couldn't be more different. Today, the American newspapers'
editions, as they report the contemporary history of US racial
questions, are full of very good examples of these two radically
different streams of racial consciousness. (In fact, the daily
editions are, themselves, one of the big differences, because it is
not so easy to find news about black and white differences in
Brazilian newspapers.)
From reading American newspapers. I discovered that Mr.
Juan Williams, a correspondent, news analyst and writer, wrote an
article complaining that he has been attacked since he published a
book about racial issues, that holds today's civil rights leaders
accountable for serious problems inside black America. He went on to
say that "75%% of black America is taking advantage of 50 years of new
opportunities...to create the largest black middle class in
history...."

"Contemporary racial relations in two countries, Brazil
and the US, couldn't be more different."
Now and then, the businessman and former University of
California Regent Ward Connerly appears in the pages proclaiming
satisfaction because "the demise of affirmative action in America is
fast approaching."
Then came all the racial viciousness at Los Angeles' Laugh
Factory with Michael Richard, followed by the idea of banning the "N"
word. In this particular case, Noam Chonsky, the linguist, certainly
would approve this movement, as he, more than anyone else, knows the
dangerous power of cultural and political domination the language has.
More recently, I read an article written by Vikram Amar
and Richard H. Sander, two professors from UC Davis School of Law and
UCLA, respectively. They call our attention to what they called the
"mismatch effect" - the possibility that Affirmative Action (AA) is
not functioning to blacks benefit. Citing some researchers, they say
that "50%% of the black law students end up in the bottom 10th of their
classes...." In Brazil, on the contrary, the students with AA help,
are at the first rank of their classes, ahead of white students. So,
white people cannot claim that AA can be bad for blacks. Instead, they
say that it will be bad for the whole society, by separating people by
color and, thus, "creating a racist country."

"In Brazil, the students who are helped by AA help are at
the first rank of their classes, ahead of white students."
All this reminds me of five years ago, when I first came
to Los Angeles intending to do some research on racial relations, and
had my first shocking personal experience of the differences I am
writing about. Walking down Sunset Boulevard, I was surprised by a
white, slightly pink and widely smiling old lady who greeted me with:
"Oh, you're good-looking! How are you doing, today?," she asked. I'm
not so naïve as to suppose that she wanted an answer, so, while
silently smiling back, my memory was free to send me back to my
country, where an old white lady in the streets of Rio de Janeiro or
Sao Paulo would never have greeted me like that. And I thought: Well,
as I know I'm not that good-looking, maybe she is just a racist
feeling vulnerable by my black appearance and trying to determine if
I am really a threat, by observing my reaction to her greetings. Was I
right? Or maybe she was just a liberal white woman. Well, I will never
know.
But there is one thing I do know. In that old lady's
attitude there was something I see in many whites, in the
predominantly white community where I live, in Brazil. It is something
too charming, extremely pleasant, excessively easy, that always makes
me uncomfortably distrustful. This something is artificially forged by
education, by politeness - the kind of civilized behavior that
prevented the old lady from being gratuitously hostile or, at least,
ignoring my existence. In fact, a kind of hypocrisy. But living in LA
for some months every year, I quickly learned that those attitudes can
be seen as a sign of education, yes, but must not be confused with
liberalism.

"For Brazilian media, the work done by our black movement
is an antipatriotic attempt to import American-style racial hate."
Reading all this news about race in the US, more than just
to learn about American racial complexity, I could make sense of how
big the differences are between Brazil and the US, in terms of racial
questions. Here are some of them:
All the space taken up in newspapers to debate black
"affairs" would be unbelievable in Brazil. As a matter of fact, the
media, in general, thinks and acts as if Brazil is a "racial
democracy." So, for them, the work done by our black movement - which
is growing although still weak, considering the huge weight of our
racism - is an antipatriotic attempt to import American-style racial
hate.
We don't blame national black leaders for inefficiency or
inaccuracy, because we don't have any. There are so many blacks in
Brazil that to be anti-black is the same as being against gravity, as
they are everywhere. But without leadership, they are not organized,
not mobilized and, just like gravity, not a force, compared to the
American black movement. We have some black leaders in local
communities, but none of them nationally known. Our greatest leader,
Zumbi dos Palmares, fought against slavery, which ended one hundred
years ago. Today, we have some black politicians, in the Congress,
fighting for laws to benefit black population. And we have some black
secretaries in the government, like the singer Gilberto Gil. But they
don't lead any national black organization or movement.
In the US, black leaders may commit errors, not doing
something they should do or not doing anything to stop some abuses,
but, at least in principle, black people believe in them as honest
individuals. In Brazil, black people always look at an emerging leader
suspiciously, believing that he is not sincere and only wants to take
personal advantage based on his race. So, if someone black wants to
run for a political position, it is better not to ask for votes saying
"I'm a black man and will fight for racial progress," because no one
will vote for him.
Brazil has the second largest black population in the
world, only after Nigeria. Still, black history is a very recent
discipline in schools. The country is considered one of the most
unequal societies, where blacks are 90%% in the poorest classes. But,
nonetheless, we don't attack government programs that benefit black
people, because we don't have them on such a large scale as the US
has. And they are new programs, as almost everything done to benefit
blacks has come in recent years.

"There are 40 universities adopting the quota system."
Affirmative Action is a very new expression in Brazil,
borrowed from the US vocabulary. It started being practiced in 2003,
not in any federal institution, but by the initiative of the
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, with a quota of 40%% for
black students. And while in the US AA is being more and more
contested and losing its strength, in Brazil, today, only four years
after being adopted, it is a volcano, expelling quotas around the
whole country. Americans can say it is not the best kind of AA, but
it is what Brazilian black people are depending on to go to
university. And in 2007, there are 40 universities adopting the quota
system.
We don't have any part of the society taking advantage of
new opportunities. First, because new opportunities are very few;
second, because we don't have a black middle class. Blacks amount to
49%% of a population of 180 million people, but it is impossible to
create a middle class without education and with salaries 51%% less
than the salaries of whites.
We never had a Ku Klux Klan, but until today we have
thousands of Samuel H. Bowers (the assumed former KKK leader who died
in prison) in many owners of industries, commercial shops, hotels, and
restaurants, ready to discriminate against black people at the
entrance.
As anyone can see, these are very important differences,
as they show how little black consciousness there is in Brazil. But
there is one that is the biggest.
The most significant aspect to distinguish Brazilian and
American racism, in its most generalized form, is the concrete nature
of American racism, in contrast with the subjective character, the
fluid state, the invisibility of Brazil's. The difference is that, in
the US, nobody would dare to deny its existence, but in Brazil, racism
is the essence of a substantive very...abstract. For a massive
majority in Brazilian society, it just doesn't exist. For many blacks,
too. But, more fantastic than that: At the same time it is invisible,
it is naturally practiced by the majority of the white population. And
they don't even notice what they are doing.

"In the US, nobody would dare to deny its existence, but
in Brazil, racism is the essence of a substantive very...abstract."
There are two reasons for me to list invisibility as the
most significant difference between American and Brazilian racism:
First, because invisibility is a secular, regular, ordinary custom,
the most common form through which discrimination spreads among the
population against black people. Brazilian society practices
"non-existent" racism, as part of a collective bad character of
Brazilian moral life. And its main property is to be diffuse,
underground, disguised, treacherous and, so, very difficult to combat.
How does one fight against a ghost? In general, Brazilian society
believes so little in the existence of racism that some white people
get offended when confronted with their own racist practices, as they
like to say and believe that they are liberals. The second reason:
being so, it is the best example to show how deep racism is in
Brazilian whites. It is so entrenched in everyday life that nobody who
is white will bother about being polite, educated, with Black people.
We all know that, in the US, blacks sometimes are "invisible," but, in
Brazil, invisibility is the real racism.
The millions of signs of racism in schools, at work or in
the streets - the common use of the word "crioulo" is a good example -
mean so little that the latest book, written this year, about racial
questions, has the title "Nao Somos Racistas" (We Are Not Racists).
And I keep thinking that something makes it necessary to write that
book.
It is not that white Brazilian society is all racist. Of
course, there are many that take advantage of discrimination, but who
don't hate black people and don't think they are inferior. These ones
are opportunists, like the cheap thief that takes our wallet while
we're not looking. And there is that majority thinking that racism
doesn't exist. These ones can be sincere, and I would dare to say
innocent. The problem is that black people have failed in giving white
Brazilians the real image of the world they live in. There are some
attempts, mainly on the academic level, but without the necessary
frequency and wide national repercussions. One of the most recent was
given by a professor at the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, the
economist and sociologist Marcelo Paixao. He published his
dissertation in 2004, with some data proving, once more, that the
color of poverty is black. That is not a new fact, but he exposed it
in a very surprising and intelligent way. He split Brazilian society
in two parts, black and white, and applied to them, separately, the
human development program launched by the UN in 1990 to measure the
quality of life in 173 countries - income per capita, life expectancy,
and scholarship. This index, that has "Happiness Index" as its
nickname, was created by the Nobel Prize laureate American economist
Paul Samuelson, in the 1970s, as the social counterpart of the
National Growth Product (NGP), which measures economic development.
According to the UN, in 2002, Brazil, as a whole, was in 63rd place,
one step behind Namibia. Paixao's two countries, one white one black,
were compared, and the result is that if Brazil were a country with
only white people, it would be in 44th place. If it were populated
only with blacks, it would be the 105th. Paixao's study goes on,
showing that between 1992 and 2001, while the number of Brazilian
poor people decreased by 5 million, the number of poor black people
increased by 500,000, demonstrating that, while the whites got richer,
the blacks got poorer.

"In Brazil, the color of poverty is black."
The biggest Brazilian university, Universidade de Sao
Paulo (USP), as its name says, is located in the country's richest
state, with a population of more than 30 million. Although the
state's black population is 27,4%%, the black students at USP are only
1,4%%. In 2005, USP adopted a quota for black students in the masters
programs of its law school. But it was the Ford Foundation that
proposed it and gave the money to be used for scholarships. So, if
there is the money, why not?
Personally, I don't think that Mr. Juan Williams is a
sellout, as his critics used to call him. On the contrary, considering
all he has written, he is a good black man. But there are two things I
don't understand in his thoughts. First: When he suggests that many
black people are capable of helping themselves, as a black man, he is
legitimizing the white racist arguments against Affirmative Action.
Why does he do that? Well, maybe that is why he is being attacked,
because, if "75%% of black Americans are taking advantages of 50 years
of new opportunities," it is also true that there is a large number
of blacks in need of them in the other 25%%, and so, his mathematics
becomes a very difficult social equation. Second: When he pinpoints
education as a pre-requirement to achieve racial progress, what is he
thinking racial progress is? My point is: On the white side of
society, education does not seem able to cure racism; instead, it
simply gives to white persons a hypocritical, insincere attitude. If
so, education cannot prevent black people from being a target of
racism, too. So, where is the progress? Is education only a shield to
protect black people against poverty and discrimination, or is it so
effective that is capable of assuring racial progress? After all,
Hitler was surrounded by very educated people. Well, if we don't put
education in its place, we'll be at risk of creating a society with
undesirable black families and workers, and full of white educated
racists just like the Third Reich was. Education is very important,
who can deny it? But racism is a behavioral disturbance, located in
the moral terrain, although, in the whole of Mr. Williams' article we
cannot find the word morality one single time. That might go without
saying, but, maybe, that's another reason why he is being attacked.
As we Brazilians don't have another good example, the
adoption of AA in education is the first step in Brazil to follow the
path the US has been taking all these years, since the 60s. But, being
such a different society, my question is: are we going the right way?
Italo Ramos is a Brazilian journalist. He can be contacted
at iramos@cyberspace.com.brThis email address is being protected from
spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .
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