>>
>>
>> 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
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blackagendareport.com - The
>> Difference Between Black Brazil and Black U.S."
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>>
>> "The worst trait in the Caucasian ethnic groups is their
>> belief in the necessity of ethnic hatred, greed,
>> roguery, deception, lying, and using extreme violence
>> against innocent populations as a means of hue-man uplift"
>>
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