Racism exists in Brazil as it does here, but it is not nearly as overt, argues Mungo Soggot
IN a hall which could comfortably swallow three tennis courts dance hundreds of sensual Brazilians to an ear-splitting drum beat. The dazzling couples, some of whom include outrageously camp homosexuals, are products of what must be one of the world’s most exquisite gene pools; immaculate concoctions from the cocktail of races that make up a population of 160-million, the black contingent of which is the largest outside Africa.
For the race-conscious South African abroad, there can be few more sobering experiences than a few hours at one of Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools, where dancers train every Saturday night till dawn on Sunday. This looks like a real rainbow nation at play.
But away from the jubilation at the samba school, and from the Copacabana beachfront in Rio where scores of mixed couples walk the promenade, are elements of a more familiar story. More than 100 years after slavery was abolished in Brazil, the black population remains low on the rungs of the country’s social and economic ladders.
The perception that Brazil is a racism-free country has, however, existed for some time. As early as 1942 American sociologist Robert Park wrote: “The people of Brazil have regained that paradisiac innocence with respect to differences of race which the people of the United States have somehow lost”.
As Brazil cashes in on the major economic reform programme instituted by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazilian blacks have a small political voice, despite unofficial estimates that they comprise 40% to 50% of the population. Official estimates place blacks at less than 30% of Brazilians.
Research on police aggression in 1988 found 10,7% of all blacks were abused by the police compared with 3,9% of whites.
Brazil’s 27 states have had seven black governors in the past decade. Two weeks ago Sao Paulo, the country’s commercial capital, elected its first black mayor, Celso Pitta, the child of a civil servant.
One editor at a top newspaper in Sao Paulo who is familiar with South Africa says blacks in Brazil and South Africa live in similar social and economic conditions.
Asked what would happen if two identically qualified job applicants, one black and one white, applied for the same post, she said the white would almost always be picked first. On the other hand, she said, one survey recently found that Pele, the black football star, was Brazil’s most popular personality.
Brazil does not share South Africa’s blatant obsession with race. This lack of interest makes it difficult to glean a clear picture of race relations.
Most Brazilian commentators interviewed indicated racism was not a priority on the country’s political and economic agendas. A 1995 race survey by the Sao Paulo newspaper Folha da Sao Paulo found that 77% of non- white respondents felt they had never actually experienced racial discrimination themselves. However, 90% believed whites were prejudiced towards blacks.
Bolivar Lamounier, founder of the Instituto de Estudos Economicos de Sao Paulo, said race was not an issue in Brazilian politics. Another commentator, David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia, said there was progressively less integration between blacks and whites the higher up the social and economic ladder they were.
It has become fashionable in academic circles to compare South Africa and Brazil and to argue that the two can learn from each other. Research institutes from both countries recently published a book, based on a conference held in Rio earlier this year, Comparing Brazil and South Africa: Two transitional states in political and economic perspective. The book includes two papers on race and class in the two countries.
Both Brazil, which has moved from military dictatorship to democracy, and South Africa, have enormous disparities of income. Brazil’s ruling classes constitute a similarly small proportion of the population – its elite national financial and political newspaper, Gazeto Mercantil, has a circulation of 100 000, comparable to the 35 000 copies of Business Day that serve South Africa’s 40-million people. As the book’s introduction notes: “[in both countries] democratisation must contend with the very real prospect that political and economic change will only benefit a section of society, leaving millions of citizens largely untouched”.
But comparing the two countries’ economies is problematic if only because, unlike South Africa, Brazil sits right in the middle of a massive market to which to sell: the rest of South America. The other feature of Brazil’s economy which sets it apart is its history of hyper-inflation. The disease survived a spate of economic plans until two years ago when inflation was savaged with the introduction of the Real plan by President Cardoso – replacing the “funny-money” currency with one pegged to the dollar.
Judging by the frequency with which Brazilian economists and politicians discuss Cardoso’s defeat of inflation, it is impossible to underestimate the effect of hyper-inflation on a nation’s psyche. Executives at Anglo American’s headquarters in Sao Paulo say that the job of arranging personal finances to dodge the effects of hyper-inflation ate at least a working day a month. One economist told the story of how workers at a factory town near Sao Paulo asked their bosses to randomise pay day – to dodge the town shopkeepers’ habit of bumping up prices on pay day.
There is more mileage in a comparison of the country’s race relations. The book’s co- ordinators, the Centre for Policy Studies’ Steven Friedman and the Foundation for Global Dialogue’s Garth le Pere, deal a blow to the samba-school theory of Brazil’s racial harmony: “In both countries, race plays an important role in the allocation of income and opportunity.”
Perhaps the most striking information in the book is the extraordinary efforts on the part of black Brazilians to not call themselves black: a 1976 National Household Survey came up with 136 names by which blacks identified themselves. Sueli Carneioro of the Geledes Institute for Black Women argues in The Myth of Racial Democracy, that this behaviour stems in part from the efforts on the part of Brazil’s colonisers to create various categories of “mixed-race” people. She writes: “Embedded in Brazil’s national imagination is the illusion that a `drop of white blood’ inside someone signifies a lost Europeanness … This concept of `changing yourself white’ … becomes an ideal within which people’s degree of whiteness establishes the amount of lost Europeanness which they can claim.” She says that whereas there is no significant difference between blacks and coloureds in the social and demographic data generated by demographic surveys, it is clear mixed-race Brazilians have a greater possibility of social mobility. Another commentator describes this as the “mulatto [mixed-race] escape hatch”.
The book’s chapter which dealt with the 1995 Folha da Sao Paulo survey found that non- whites in Brazil faced “multiple handicaps”.
In comparing Brazil and South Africa, some Brazilian sociologists argue that it is the lack of awareness of racism in Brazil that makes it so dangerous.
Both Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have on separate occasions been urged by black activist groups to make statements that the invidious, subtle Brazilian brand of racism is worse than the legislated version perfected by the National Party. Both men refused.
Mungo Soggot recently visited Brazil as a guest of the Brazilian government