Life
Black in Brazil
Prejudice Issue
“The problem of Brazil always was this issue of thinking the mulatto and the pardo are outside of the prejudice issue,” Araujo said. ‘‘Yet, when you want to hit the soul of someone, you call him black.”
More Brazilians are coming around to Araujo’s view, polls show, and the timeworn idea of a multi-hued racial democracy is losing its sway, even as the race debate heats up.
In its place has risen the begrudging admittance of a racially segregated country. A 2003 poll showed that more than 90 percent of Brazilians said racism existed here.
Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist activist and union leader, is credited with helping to spur the changes in attitudes.
Soon after taking office in 2003, he made race a key issue and appointed Brazil’s first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa. Lula da Silva also created a special secretariat for racial equality and launched initiatives such as requiring that Afro-Brazilian history be taught in all primary schools.
Many black leaders are skeptical that the latest changes will have any lasting impact. They point out that although the country’s 1988 constitution criminalized racism, few people have served jail time for breaking the law. The woman who insulted da Silva in the elevator was sentenced to community service but has appealed the ruling.
“Things have gotten worse,” said Antônio Carlos dos Santos, president of Ilê Aiyê, a community group in Salvador known for both its African-influenced Carnaval parades and its consciousness-raising social projects.
“Sure, we have people who are more conscious about the situation, but this is a land that’s stepping backward,” he said. “We are almost 80 percent of this state, but we’re still controlled by the white minority.”
It’s a cynicism shared by ordinary Brazilians such as da Silva, who live every day with the country’s crushing inequalities. But in his case, and for many Afro-Brazilians, cynicism is giving way to action.
Source: The Miami Herald
