World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  To Robinson, however, “it was obvious at first glance” that Velma was primarily a descendant of African slaves, and he blurted out, “But you must be, Velma. I’m black, and you’re as dark as I am.” Velma, however, maintained that she most definitely was not black and, moreover, that as far as she was concerned, Robinson wasn’t really “black” either. Later, after Velma had left, another Brazilian explained to Robinson “that Velma had long, straight hair, and that she also enjoyed the considerable status and income that came from her job as a lawyer. So naturally—and this was said as if it were the most natural thing in the world, though it made no sense at all to me—she called herself white.”

  At first Velma’s reaction causes Robinson to question his own American inclination to identify as “black” anyone who has a visible African heritage. Gradually, however, Robinson sheds his initial infatuation with Brazil, which, on first encounter, seemed “a great black nation—unadvertised as such,” a wonderful “mélange of blacks and browns and tans and taupes, of coppers and cinnamons.” As Robinson looks deeper into Brazil, he begins to see a startling degree of racial inequity combined with pervasive racial denial.36

  The millions of African slaves brought over to work Brazil’s plantations far exceeded the number brought into the United States. Slavery in Brazil outlasted that in the United States by a generation. Today, Brazil’s tens of millions of grotesquely impoverished, slum-dwelling or cane-cutting pobres are, again by U.S. standards, overwhelmingly black. Dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians occupy Brazil’s lowest-rung jobs and fill Brazil’s disease-ridden prisons. As late as 1988, poor blacks in Brazil were disenfranchised on illiteracy grounds. Meanwhile, “mulattoes” or persons of “mixed race,” although said to enjoy slightly greater mobility than their darker-skinned counterparts, are starkly underprivileged as compared to the “white” minority.37

  For years the myth of racial democracy has covered over these stark ethnic disparities in wealth. It may be wondered whether the poorest, dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians ever believed in this myth. Nevertheless, many Brazilians high and low often insist that “race” is not an important factor in Brazil, because “people are always passing” and because “people can essentially become ‘white’ by becoming wealthy.” They argue that the distinctly African influences on Brazil’s music, food, religion, even standards of beauty have gone a long way in eliminating the harshest aspects of racism.

  In emphasizing that poor African-blooded Brazilians can achieve upward mobility by “lightening themselves”—for example, by making a fortune (which almost never happens) or by marrying someone with lighter skin (which more often does)—Brazilians don’t seem to see the extent of racism and ethnic self-hatred that pervades Brazilian society. As Eugene Robinson eventually realized, “In Brazil, most people with some measure of African blood”—again a large majority of the country’s population—“demanded to be not thought of as black.” As a result, concludes Robinson, there was no black consciousness or indignation: “[N]obody saw these neighborhoods that were running with blood as black neighborhoods. Nobody saw that blood that was flowing as black blood.”38

  Brazil, moreover, is not exceptional in this regard. Throughout Latin America, centuries of ethnic degradation and discrimination, not to mention disenfranchisement and violence, have left deep, lasting psychological scars. A dashing blond, water-skiing Bolivian recently assured me that “in my country everyone is mestizo, everyone has some Indian blood,” then later in the same conversation asserted, with equal equanimity, that “no member of the upper class would even think of marrying a Quechua.”

  Treated as “subhuman,” even “bestial,” Latin America’s indigenous populations have internalized a profound and debilitating sense of inferiority. It is no wonder that throughout Latin America—right up to the cusp of the twenty-first century—ethnicity had little appeal. During most of the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America’s poor have not wanted to think of themselves as “Indian” or “indigenous.” Political, even populist movements have been organized around class, almost never ethnic, lines. And because in election after election, despite coup after coup, political and economic power always remained in the same light-skinned, “illustrious-blooded” hands, “apathy and fatalism” among the indigenous populations spread and deepened.

  Globalization and the Kindling of Ethnic Resentment

  All this, however, is changing. To the extent that ethnicity has been downplayed in the last several decades in Latin America, globalization, together with the demise of Marxism, is revitalizing it. Capitalism, it is often said, “transcends national boundaries,” but so too can ethnic consciousness, ethnic demagoguery, and ethnic anger—with just as much speed and even greater intensity and passion.

  Along with global markets and global media, “Indian-ness” is spreading across Latin America with technologically unprecedented zeal. Particularly in those countries where Amerindians constitute a majority of the population—and even in countries like Mexico, Chile, or Venezuela, where they do not—Latin America’s poor masses are being ethnicized, increasingly through radio, television, and most recently the Web. They are being reminded—by cellphone-wielding leaders like Bolivia’s El Mallku, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, or Mexico’s Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos—that they are Aymaras, pardos, Indians, cholos, whatever identity best mobilizes great numbers of frustrated, long degraded, dark-skinned masses.

  Peru’s Amerindian Alejandro Toledo, who swept to landslide victory in the 2001 presidential elections, offers the best of examples. “You’re one of us—win for us!” shouted thousands of wrinkled Amerindian women in bowler hats, weeping as Toledo campaigned through the streets in a truck emblazoned with the ancient Inca symbol of the sun. Reversing five hundred years of ethnic degradation, Toledo—who many insist resembles Pachacutic, the Incas’ greatest ruler—highlighted his indigenous origins, wearing Indian garb, calling himself el cholo, and appealing explicitly to Peru’s dark-skinned majority “who look like I do.” Indeed, reclaiming ethnic pride was Toledo’s central campaign message. “After so many years of bowing our heads, it’s time we all held them up in pride,” declared Toledo, who rose out of poverty in Peru’s coastal slums to study at Stanford University. “For as long as I can remember, we have been taught to hate the Indian inside us,” explained a Quechuan supporter of Toledo’s. “But now I see that self-hate fading. After so many servile years, we are finally asking important questions like ‘How dare they look down on me because I am proud of my culture?’”39

  But there are dangers, too—dangers that the region’s white elites have always been aware of. (“Bolivia’s rulers have always harbored a deep fear that the country’s Indian majority might one day rise up and kill them in their beds—or more realistically, trap them in their cities,” William Finnegan recently wrote in The New Yorker.)40 Alejandro Toledo’s approval ratings have plummeted to 32 percent, as it has become increasingly clear that his pro-market policies will not immediately improve the lives of Peru’s impoverished majority. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Latin America, distinctively ethnic resentment against market-dominant light-skinned elites is on the rise.

  In Ecuador, for example, the vigorously pro-market government led by President Jamil Mahuad was toppled in January 2000 by an Amerindian uprising that turned into a military coup. At the time of the uprising President Mahuad’s approval ratings had dropped to just 6 percent, and the coup appears to have been supported by a majority of Ecuador’s impoverished population, 40 percent of whom say they are “pure Indians” and 90 percent of whom are increasingly identifying themselves as “indigenous-blooded.” One triggering event for the coup was the decision by Mahuad—who is ethnic Lebanese, Harvard-educated, and part of the country’s white business elite—to replace Ecuador’s currency with the U.S. dollar as part of a larger plan to open up the country’s battered economy to international investors. The “dollarization” program was bitterly opposed by Ecuador’s largely Amerindian peasa
nt majority, who saw “the measure as just another scheme by bankers and businessmen to further impoverish them.” “The dollar may be fine for mestizos and the big folks, but we are peasants and do not know how to manage dollars,” seethed Apolinario Quishpe, one of thousands of Amerindian farmers who marched on Quito.41

  Ecuador’s recent upheaval was intensely anti-market and anti-globalization. It was also an explicitly Amerindian-based movement, led by the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), and deeply, angrily ethnic in its mobilizing rhetoric. “The shamans say change is coming,” thundered Fernando Villavicencio, one of Conaie’s leaders. “They say we are entering the age of the condor; they say that the Red Warrior has returned!”42 In a country where not long ago newspaper advertisements offered haciendas for sale with Indians and cattle included in the price, Villavicencio’s championing of Amerindian blood has galvanized large, formerly “apathetic” segments of the population, unifying urban and rural poor alike, and pitting them against an “arrogant,” often corrupt white elite that represents only 7 percent of the population.

  Even in Brazil, globalization is increasing racial and ethnic consciousness. Black identity and black power have begun to hit Brazil’s marginalized youth, in part through the ripple effect of American popular culture. Throughout the country’s garbage-filled favelas, or shantytowns, the angry lyrics of a U.S.-influenced but distinctly Brazilian rap and hip-hop movement can be heard. This movement is openly “un-Brazilian” in its relentless attacks on the country’s racial inequality. In songs like “The Periphery Continues Bleeding,” “Just Another Wake,” and “Surviving in Hell,” rappers aggressively expose social injustice against blacks, emphasizing that only 2 percent of Brazil’s university students are black, that three out of four people killed by the police are black, and that every four hours a black man dies violently in São Paulo.

  In place of a “racial democracy,” Brazil’s urban favelados increasingly see an impoverished, humiliated black majority and a privileged, powerful white minority. Almost overnight, the hot group Racionais—which recently won a number of prestigious Brazilian MTV awards—has popularized expressions like “4P” “poder para o povo preto” (“power for the black people”) and “preto tipo a”—literally “class A black” but referring to blacks who are proud and fight for their rights. Similarly, in “Stop Sucking Up,” hip-hop star MV Bill scathingly attacks Brazilian blacks who deny their African heritage. A recent poll revealed that a startling 93 percent of those surveyed in Rio de Janeiro now believe that racism exists in Brazil.43

  Nonetheless, the reality so far is that racial consciousness remains surprisingly muted in Brazil, with the myth of Brazilian racial democracy still broadly defended by many Brazilians spanning different social classes. As a Brazilian graduate student recently said to me, “For better or worse, there is no serious sign of ethnic conflict or ethnic mobilization in Brazil. Poor favelados are totally marginalized and Brazilian rap is certainly not changing that or posing any real threat to whites. In fact, Brazilian hip-hop is extremely popular among white university students.” Most Brazil watchers agree that the economic and political dominance of a white elite in Brazil is probably guaranteed for a long time to come.

  Obviously, Latin America differs from Southeast Asia in countless respects. Because of extensive miscegenation, ethnic and racial lines in this region are not nearly as starkly drawn, and Latin America has been able to avoid the extreme ethnic animus and violence seen in Southeast Asia. Moreover, throughout Southeast Asia economic and political power have historically been divorced, with entrepreneurial Chinese minorities always at the political mercy of the indigenous majorities around them. By contrast, in Latin America a small landowning and to a certain extent hereditary elite has historically held both economic and political power.

  Nevertheless, despite these and other differences, the same striking phenomenon holds. Like the indigenous populations of Southeast Asia, the uneducated, disease-ridden, desperately poor but numerically vast Indian- or African-blooded majorities of Latin America experience little or no economic benefit from privatization and global markets while finding themselves suddenly filled with contradictory new materialistic and consumerist desires. Meanwhile, along with their foreign investor partners, a tiny, well-connected, ethnically distinguishable minority dominates virtually every aspect of the modern economy, from export agriculture to wireless telecom, and uses liberalization, privatization, and globalization to increase its advantages. Moreover, despite the vast incidence of ethnic intermixing in Latin America, Latin America’s white elite tend, like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, to be surprisingly endogamous, intermarrying only amongst themselves. As in Southeast Asia, so too in Latin America these by-now hypercapitalized market-dominant minorities are, as a practical matter, economically untouchable.

  They may not, however, be politically untouchable. In 1998, to the shock of Venezuela’s business elite, former paratrooper Hugo Chavez swept to landslide presidential victory, attacking free markets and “oligarchs” and championing the rights of the country’s brown-skinned pardo majority. A silver-haired tycoon I met in Bolivia predicted worse for his country. “Bolivia,” he said, “is a country where 3 percent of us control everything, and 65 percent of the population have no future. This place is definitely going to blow. It’s only a matter of time.” Most of my former student Augusto’s other friends were not nearly so pessimistic. But this is the subject of Part Two.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Seventh Oligarch

  The Jewish Billionaires

  of Post-Communist Russia

  In the spring of 2000, a professor whom I’ll call Jerry White was furiously trying to finish up an article on the debacle of Russian privatization. Jerry and his coauthors had served as legal advisers to the Russian government during the country’s mass privatization process in the late 1990s. The article described, from an insider’s hindsight perspective, how Russia’s pro-market reforms (which he and other Western advisers had helped devise) had gone horribly awry. Instead of dispersing ownership and creating functioning markets, these reforms had allowed a small group of greedy industrialists and bankers to plunder Russia, turning themselves almost overnight into the billionaire-owners of Russia’s crown jewels while the country spiraled into chaos and lawlessness. Although not yet published, the article had already created a stir. It was to be a major mea culpa, a candid exposé of the naïveté of Western advisers, in hopelessly over their heads.

  I stopped by Jerry’s office one day after reading a near-final version of the article. Something about the ruthless, looting, self-dealing kleptocrats-turned-oligarchs described in his article had struck me, and I wanted to run it by him.

  It seemed to me, I said to Jerry, that most of the key players in the privatization and eventual economic takeover of Russia were Jewish. Was it possible?

  “Oh, no,” Jerry replied instantly, with a frown. “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?” I pressed him. “If you look at their names—”

  “You can’t tell anything from names,” Jerry snapped impatiently, clearly not wanting to discuss the topic any further.

  As it turns out, six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest and (at least until recently) most powerful oligarchs are Jewish. This fact became public knowledge in the United States just a few months after my conversation with Jerry, when Chrystia Freeland in Sale of the Century offered a journalist’s firsthand account of how, without actually breaking the law, a handful of cold-blooded, extraordinarily savvy businessmen—all but one of them Jewish—used the privatization process to become the owners of vast amounts of Russia’s mineral wealth and the overwhelming victors in Russia’s “gladiator capitalism.”1 Around the same time, John Lloyd wrote in a cover story for the New York Times magazine that “in a country where Jewishness is best kept quiet, nearly all [of Russia’s] oligarchs are Jewish.”2 Yet Jerry, who was there in Russia, himself Jewish, and moreover writin
g an article meant to be provocative, wasn’t willing to touch the Jewish question.

  Not all Jews, of course, react like Jerry. When I first mentioned to my husband, who is Jewish, that six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest tycoons are Jewish, he raised an eyebrow. “Just six?” he asked calmly. “So who’s the seventh guy?”

  The seventh oligarch—the only “full-blooded ethnic Russian” among them—is Vladimir Potanin. (“While the other oligarchs were still decorating their offices with leopard skins and mirrors, Potanin was buying graciously battered English antiques,” writes Freeland.)3 The six Jewish businessmen most frequently called oligarchs are: Roman Abramovich, Pyotr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Together, these men came over the course of the 1990s to wield mind-boggling political and economic influence.

  The height of their oligarchic influence was reached in 1996, when the Yeltsin government hung on the verge of political and financial collapse. Among other problems, Yeltsin had suffered a heart attack; his approval ratings hovered between 5 and 8 percent; the Russian treasury was strapped for cash; and in the parliamentary elections the Communists and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s extreme nationalists had captured two-thirds of the seats of the lower house, paralyzing the government.4

  Already wealthy by that time, the oligarchs collectively put forth the so-called “loans-for-shares” deal—now notorious, but at the time grudgingly endorsed by Western advisers and Russian economists as well as England’s The Economist. Essentially, the oligarchs offered loans and political support to the government in exchange for majority shares—at a fraction of their potential market value—in the behemoths of the Russian economy, a half dozen massive enterprises breathtakingly rich in nickel, gold, and oil deposits. When in 1996 it appeared that Boris Yeltsin might lose his reelection to the Communists, the oligarchs poured millions into Yeltsin’s campaign and began flooding the television airwaves (which they owned) with pro-Yeltsin “news” items while conspicuously failing to give any airtime to the opposition.5