I asked him what he saw in Brazil’s future. Was he optimistic that the situation might improve? I was curious to see how he’d respond to the question. I was expecting, I think, some kind of visceral explosion. Instead, Nascimento was very calm and seemed to have long ago formed his answer.
“If I weren’t an optimist, I would have hung myself,” he told me. “This action is so repetitive—this thing that has been going on for five hundred years. So if I weren’t an optimist, I would have hung myself.”
Everything Nascimento said made me more eager to see more of Brazil as it truly is. The Brazil of my imagination had its place. Brazil’s vision of itself has its own life. But for this journey to have meaning, I needed to witness the Brazil of the real world. And there could be no better place than Rio de Janeiro. I roamed widely through the wealthy neighborhoods, Copacabana and Ipanema, walking the beaches and driving around the lovely homes. I began to recognize the wisdom in Nascimento’s words. There were very few black people anywhere. I stopped at a newsstand and looked at the magazine covers, slowly taking in what I was seeing: rows upon rows of white faces, white models, a white Brazil. I could have been in Switzerland. As I looked for even one brown face among these pictures, I thought of Zezé Motta’s story. If someone asked me for proof that we were standing in a majority-black country, I couldn’t have produced it at that newsstand.
I asked myself what black Brazilian I could remember having seen consistently in the media in the United States. Pele, the Albert Einstein of soccer, came to mind first, but then so did Ronaldo, Robinho, Ronaldinho, Neymar, and other soccer players. Maybe a musician or two, such as Milton Nascimento, and a model or two. That was it.
I went on, looking for black Brazil. And I found it—not at Ipanema or Copacabana but in Rio’s famous slums, the favelas. I arrived in the particularly infamous neighborhood called the City of God, one of Brazil’s most famous favelas, if only because it was the title of a very popular and well-made film released in 2002. Here, among some of the world’s worst slums, Afro-Brazilian life was vibrant, visible, omnipresent, and distressfully poor.
The City of God is where Brazil’s most famous rapper, MV Bill, was born and raised. I knew he still lived there—even though his fame made it more than possible to leave. He was happy to talk to me about what life is really like for Afro-Brazilians. I started by asking him why he still lives in the same poverty-stricken favela. In the United States, hip-hop stars tend to move to Beverly Hills or a comparable neighborhood when they make it, no matter where they came from.
“I don’t condemn those who make money, leave the ghetto, and go to live somewhere else,” he replied. “But my thing with the City of God is different, independent of whatever money I make. Living here is part of my identity.”
The City of God looked like the opposite of wealthy Rio—here, all the faces were different shades of the darker browns. I asked MV Bill if everyone in the neighborhood is black.
“The majority,” he answered, nodding his head. “The City of God is considered one of the blackest neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. But even here in a black neighborhood, it is the smaller population of lighter people that have the best opportunities in life.”
The remains of whitening, I thought immediately. Those who appear to fit the European dream of branqueamento are doing better than their darker neighbors, even after all this time.
“But in Brazil, we’re not allowed to talk like this,” MV Bill said, interrupting my thoughts. “We have to live in a racial democracy that doesn’t exist. There is no equality.”
I told MV Bill that my own experience had reflected that. During any travels, I was fortunate to stay in nice hotels and to eat at good restaurants, but I had often been the only black person who was not serving. MV Bill only seemed surprised to hear I’d been treated so well.
“It’s because of your social standing,” he explained. “But there will be many places where you’d be the only black man and you’d still be treated badly.”
I had assumed that MV Bill would be treated well wherever he went. After all, the man is a star. But now I asked him if he had ever suffered poor treatment just for being black.
“Of course,” he answered readily, “before, during, and after my fame.”
“Why is Brazil so racist?” I finally said, for the first time on my journey. “It’s the second-largest black nation in the world.”
MV Bill nodded. He knew what I was asking, even if he didn’t have an answer. “We have lived under the myth of racial democracy,” he replied. “But this is exposed as a lie when we look at the color of the people who live in favelas, the color of the people who are in prison, the color of the people who survive by committing crimes. People will tell you that our problem in Brazil is an economic problem or a social problem, anything but a racial problem—it can never be racial. But it is.”
His words struck an emotional chord. In the United States, too, blacks are often accused of being at fault for their own poverty.
“There are a lot of people who don’t have jobs because they have not had access to education,” he went on. “And without access to education, they have not been able to get any professional qualifications. And without any qualifications—on top of all the prejudices against those who live in a place like this—it is very hard to get good jobs. We have a lot of people who are not criminals, who are not drug addicts, but who don’t have an occupation, who are not doing anything.”
I sat back, trying to process his comments. While it is true that racial segregation was outlawed in Brazil, the legacies of slavery—so recently abolished, relatively speaking—persist, as does color prejudice. Although segregation had never been legal, as it had been in the United States, it manifests itself throughout Brazilian society. As I would find to be true throughout Latin America, the darkest people in these societies tend to be at the bottom of the social scale. Racial democracy was a beautiful and alluring ideal, but had it ever been more than a romantic white worldview, designed to keep Afro-Brazilians in their place? After all, a black-pride movement is not needed, is it, in a society in which racial democracy obtains? As Abdias do Nascimento explained to me quite perceptively, because of this ideology of the country as blessedly free of racism, Brazil never had a civil rights movement, like the one we had in the United States, because it did not have de jure segregation to rail against. Brazil’s racism was informal—devastatingly effective, but informal nonetheless. And this meant that blacker Brazilians never have had a chance to demand redress for the racism that they still feel they suffer.
I turned to watch children playing in the street, young lives full of potential. I asked MV Bill if he thought any of these children might one day become the Barack Obama of Brazil.
“I think so, yes,” he said, smiling. “But there is only one way: through education. And education in Brazil is a luxury item. I think our greatest revolution will be to have young people like these becoming lawyers, having political power, influencing the judicial system. Those are the signs we hope for.”
I left MV Bill and his inspiring spirit of hope, in the City of God. But our conversation lingered in my mind. The cycle of poverty is inevitably vicious—no money means no education, no education means no job, no job means no money And the cause for this cycle, most scholars and activists agree, is the legacy of slavery and a function of the lingering remnants of anti-black racism. What was Brazil doing to right this wrong, to begin, systematically, to put an end to the inequality that slavery visited on persons of African descent and their descendants?
The answer won’t surprise Americans, but it has taken hold only recently in Brazil: affirmative action. The future, the hopes, and the very lifeblood of Afro-Brazilians lie in the hands of the country’s university system. But unlike affirmative-action programs in the United States, Brazil has embarked on a most radical, and extremely controversial, form, one destined to stir even more controversy in many quarters of Brazilian society than affirmative action has done
in the United States.
The first program designed to offer poor blacks a road out of poverty was launched in 2003 at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. It set aside 20 percent of the university’s admissions for black students, and it was the only program of its kind anywhere in the country. Now, similar programs have spread through Brazil, leading to often fierce debates. The goal? To help achieve the dreams articulated so eloquently by MV Bill and Abdias do Nascimento: to integrate the middle class, in the same way that affirmative-action programs did in the United States starting in the late sixties, so that black children could grow up to become engineers, lawyers, and doctors in relative proportion to their percentage in the population.
I knew the introduction of affirmative action had been very controversial in Brazil. So I scheduled an appointment to hold a debate with a class taught by Professor Marilene Rosa at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She offered to speak with me about what affirmative action means for her country and how both blacks and whites feel about it.
“I started teaching at this university in 1995,” she told me. “There was already a debate surrounding affirmative action at that time, although it took until 2003 for any laws to be passed.”
But then, virtually overnight, the student body at this traditionally white university began to reflect the cultural diversity of Brazil as a nation. I asked her what happened when the program went into effect and what the reaction of the community had been. Rosa shook her head.
“It suffered criticism from all sides,” she said, “criticism that said the level would fall, saying the university would fall behind other universities, and it didn’t happen. On the contrary, at present I’m coordinating a study group, and my best students are the quota students.”
Supporters argued that without affirmative action, Afro-Brazilian children had no chance to achieve equality, much less become leaders who could represent their communities in society and government. Slavery and racism left blacks at a disadvantage, keeping generation after generation of black youth trapped in poverty. Only through affirmative action, and through quotas, they argued, could blacks succeed in numbers proportionate to their share of the population. And then, perhaps, social equality could follow.
Critics of the policy were just as vocal. They argued that affirmative action would only increase interracial friction—by forcing Brazilians to focus on race rather than to dismiss it as irrelevant. Brazil’s many categories of blackness didn’t help soothe any tensions. After all, who was “black”? Rosa spent a fair amount of time directing students toward different resources that they needed to thrive. Defining blackness, she explained, was defining who got into the university.
“There was even a debate at one point between the students, who created a sort of court to determine who the quota students would be by looking at them,” she explained. Ultimately, however, who was “black” was left to self-identification—a very good thing, too, since I couldn’t imagine the judgments of such a court dictating young people’s futures! But Rosa laughed at my indignation. She saw young people fighting for their blackness, their identity, and it gave her hope for the future.
“I used to say, ‘How good when someone declares themselves black to get somewhere,’” she said, smiling broadly. “The idea of declaring yourself black is already a victory.”
Many public universities followed the lead of Rosa’s school, and some have put even higher quotas in place. (The Federal University of Bahia, perhaps fittingly, reserves 40 percent of its spaces for poor and black students.) But these were wrenching changes, she stressed to me, and her students continue to argue about affirmative action among themselves, to this day. As a professor, I know that a debate among students can be quite enlightening. So I asked her to set up a debate, and she graciously obliged. What I saw did not disappoint.
“Are we not perhaps camouflaging a much deeper problem?” one student asked urgently. “If the aim is to end racism, aren’t we just reinforcing it in reverse?”
“It’s not a way of camouflaging racism,” another answered. “It’s a way of showing that we’re trying to readdress it. Because for four hundred years, blacks were enslaved, and when it was abolished, they were excluded.”
“What we are doing is attacking the consequence,” a young woman countered, “and not the cause.”
“Whoever benefits from it is in favor, and whoever doesn’t is against it,” another student said wearily.
“There are 130 million active voters today,” said a young, Afro-coiffed man (one of half a dozen students who belonged to the black student union, who had come to the debate wearing identical T-shirts), whose tone and attitude reminded me of black students in the United States in the late sixties. “Out of these 130 million, only 3 percent hold a university diploma. There are 40 million illiterate people in the country today. The university is already an oligarchic space, an aristocratic space. All of us here are in a privileged position. This is a privilege, do you understand? This is not debatable.”
“The role of the public university is to educate all parts of society,” one young man piped in. “The public university is not there to cater to the elite.”
“I’d like him to itemize the privileges he says the elites get,” another student shot back, “because I don’t see whites being privileged but, instead, blacks or lower-income people being privileged when they’re able to opt for the quota system.”
This is getting good, I thought.
“You don’t know what the privileges are?” another student asked, incredulous. “In higher education, 1 percent of professors are black. In the health system, black women get less anesthesia in labor than whites. This is official data. Black people with the same education as white people get paid 35 percent less while doing the same job.”
I watched these passionate young people, the black nationalists among them growing ever more vocal, more adamant, taking pride in displaying contempt for foes of affirmative action, and thought about scenes like this from the late sixties back at Yale, when ours was the first affirmative-action generation and many of us acted out our political convictions and our anxieties in similarly offensive, impatient ways. I also thought about the privileges of my own life, privileges enabled by my inclusion among that pioneering generation. In 1966, Yale University graduated six black men. The class of 1973, which entered three years later, consisted of ninety-six black men and women.
I wanted to let these students speak and argue and hash it out for themselves, but I also wanted them to know that I would never have gone to Yale without affirmative action. Barack Obama would not have attended Columbia University, and it’s likely he would not have attended Harvard Law School. Affirmative action—by which I mean taking into account ethnicity, class, religion, and gender as criteria for college admission—is not a perfect remedy for a history of discrimination, by any means; but it is the best system we have in the United States to address a past that can’t be altered. “Not even God can change the past,” Shimon Peres is fond of saying. But equal access to elite college education can help to change the effects of structural inequities we inherit from the past. And ultimately, I believe, in Brazil or in the United States, education will be the only way to redress the most pernicious effects of centuries of race-based slavery and a century of anti-black racism, formal and informal. Diversifying the middle class—changing the ratio of black Brazilians to white Brazilians in the upper economic classes, aiming for some sort of curve of class more reflective of Brazil’s ethnic composition—is the only way to achieve the “racial democracy” of which Brazil so proudly boasts. Even with the quite drastic form of affirmative action that some of its universities have decided to implement (and Brazil’s Supreme Court is soon to weigh in on the legality of these rigid quotas, just as the US Supreme Court did in our country), this sort of class redistribution among Brazil’s large black population is going to take a very long time.
I have to say that I found myself somewhat sad to learn f
rom the black people I interviewed that “racial democracy” was at best a philosophical concept, perhaps a dream or a goal, and at worst an often bandied about slogan, rather than a revolutionary anomaly that had been piercing itself across centuries of racial discrimination in Brazil. I remember my excitement when I first encountered this idea in the late sixties, hoping that someplace existed in the Western Hemisphere in which black people in a mixed-race society had been accorded their due as full and equal citizens—a place in which white people didn’t discriminate against black people because they were black. There is so much that I love about Brazil, the largest African outpost in the whole of the New World: Candomblé, Carnaval, capoeira; its astonishing menagerie of classifications of brown skin; languidly sensual music forms such as samba and bossa nova; films such as Black Orpheus and City of God that startle with their bold innovations in the representation of blackness; feijoada, its national comfort food of pork and beans; the enticing sensuality more or less openly on display on its beaches; the seamless manner in which practitioners of Roman Catholicism marry this religion to Candomblé; and, always, its soccer teams, among many other things.
Nevertheless, Gilberto Freyre’s “racial democracy” is a very long way from being realized—so far away today, it occurs to me, that I wonder if he meant it to be a sort of call to arms, a rallying cry, an ideal to which Brazilians should aspire. How much farther away must it have been in 1933, when he formulated it? I had expected to find an immense, beautiful, rich landscape, occupied by one of the world’s most ethnically diverse people, whose identity has been informed over half a millennium by a rich and intimate interplay among indigenous peoples, Africans, and Portuguese. I certainly found those things. I discovered an Afro-Brazilian experience that is vibrantly alive, evolving, impatient, engaged—right now, today.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 69