Brazil's Denial of Race
Reichmann, Rebecca
Racial discrimination is endemic in Brazilian society. Yet mystification and denial of racial differences are widespread, sustained by the social construction of a supraracial Brazilian...
...Until late in the 1980s, leftists avoided discussions of racism and sexism, focusing exclusively on the luta 39 39 VOL XXVIII, NO 6 MAY/JUNE 1995REPORT ON BRAZIL geral-the class struggle...
...and Fulvia Rosemberg and Edith Piza, "Analfabetismo, RaCa e Genero nos Censos Brasileiros," unpublished manuscript, Sao Paulo, 1993...
...VOL XXVIII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1995 national legislation or through proposals for policies founded in 'universal' human rights standards have been obstructed by the denial of racism...
...One of the earliest advocates of equal opportunity, Senator Benedita da Silva, who currently has a proposal before Congress to increase blacks' representation in the media, voiced skepticism about the efficacy of such policies...
...The International Women's Rights Action Watch (IWRAW), for example, claims that all governments should be held responsible for citizens' discriminatory acts, in compliance with international conventions that affirm the principle of non-discrimination: If the international community can insist that governments adhere to established standards of governmental conduct as to citizens' basic human rights, it can insist that governments move to eliminate discrimination in their conduct towards citizens and in citizens' conduct toward each other...
...Even Brazil's then-candidate for the presidency, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, declared himself a mulatinho ("little mulatto") last year, announcing to the press that he had "one foot in the kitchen" himself...
...Blacks who had finished college by 1976 earned less, on average, than white Brazilians with a junior high-school education.7 In Sdo Paulo, twice as many African Brazilians as white Brazilians were working in low-paying construction and domestic services in 1987...
...They'll say, 'No, you're a candidate as an individual person, not as a black.' So it's harder...
...Crawford Young, ed., Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay...
...The race item was not included at all in the 1970 census and was reintroduced in 1980, using self-identification and four color categories: white, black, brown and yellow...
...As the country that imported the largest number of slaves to the new world and officially encouraged cohabitation among Portuguese colonizers and African women, Brazil has for over two decades promoted a singular national identity that transcends racial categories...
...Among those who defended miscegenation as central to Brazil's national identity was a white entrepreneur of Brazil's famous "mulatta" shows, photographed by the newspaper lolling in the arms of a dozen beautiful dark-skinned women...
...See also Melissa Nobles, "'Responding with Good Sense': The Politics of Race and Censuses in Contemporary Brazil," Ph.D...
...Carvalho, The Demography of/nequality in Brazil(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988...
...even those who finished college (less than one percent) did not enjoy the benefits of wages commensurate with their education...
...Affirmative action or equality policies are almost universally perceived as enforced quota systems, identified in many cases as reverse discrimination (with a negative connotation) or, among those who are sympathetic, as "positive discrimination...
...The climate of impunity is pervasive, and all too often, cases denouncing discrimination are not taken seriously by the courts [see "Racism in the Courts," p. 39...
...Article 2(2) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination reads: "State Parties shall, when the circumstances so warrant, take, in the social, economic, cultural and other fields, special and concrete measures to ensure the adequate development and protection of certain racial groups or individuals belonging to them, for the purpose of guaranteeing them the full and equal enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms...
...Moreover, unprecedented numbers of poor African Brazilians have begun to participate in force in electoral politics as a result of a 1985 law authorizing illiterate citizens to vote...
...Ten years ago, Brazil emerged from 21 years of authoritarian rule, during which any mention of racial inequality was considered subversive...
...1 7 Foremost among them is the complexity of racial classifications in Brazil...
...In The Demography of Inequality in Brazil, demographers Charles Wood and J.M...
...In Brazil's climate of pervasive impunity, even official recognition of international principles and standards may have little effect...
...Despite these signs of potential, African Brazilians have not amassed political clout...
...I'm for Benedita, I'm not prejudiced...
...2 3 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON BRAZIL VOL XXVIII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1995 41 VOL XXVIIl, NO 6 MAY/JUNE 1995 41REPORT ON BRAZIL PDT-appointed Secretary of Public Security in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Colonel Nazareth Cerqueira, an African Brazilian, confirmed Senator da Silva's concerns in his response to a question about whether the 1989 anti-discrimination law (Lei Ca6) was being enforced, particularly with regard to police violence: No...
...Michael George Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sto Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994...
...The overwhelming majority of African Brazilians are excluded from advanced employment opportunities by education or skill requirements they are not prepared to meet because of 35REPORT ON BRAZIL the inadequate schools in their neighborhoods...
...33 (July, 1992), pp...
...When pressed to take a position, as in the televised presidential-candidates debate sponsored by the National Council for Women's Rights in July, 1989, PT candidate Luis Indcio "Lula" da Silva vowed to assure proportionate representation of women, blacks and workers among appointees, using a quota system...
...7. National Household Surveys, 1987 and 1976...
...African Brazilian representation among leadership of the tradeunion movement cannot in fact be measured, as one director of the Teachers Union in Porto Alegre, Tania Silva, observed: "The unions don't ask for color on the membership form, because up to now, they had the idea that this would be discriminating against the unionist...
...29...
...number of caveats stand in the way of equalopportunity policies in Brazil...
...In part, those attacks draw upon a nationalist defense of the status quo, but they also reflect a more profound critique of the dominant model of universal individual rights and remedies-a model often loosely associated with U.S.-style affirmative action...
...Interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, November, 1992...
...Discrimination and inequality have endured there, even after legal barriers to race and gender equality were removed and affirmative remedies applied...
...Forqa Sindical President Luiz Antonio Medeiros illustrated the problem in a 1994 interview after listening to speeches by African American and African Brazilian unionists at the Inter-American Trade Union Conference on Racial Equality...
...Sometimes the newspapers report discrimination, or the black-movement groups send reports, but concretely, there are just a few, usually generic, claims that the Military Police discriminate, that the police discriminate, but 'John Doe policeman discriminated against John Doe citizen,' doesn't really come in, though we know it exists...
...Before he opened with my mulatas in his club," the entrepreneur said, "[Fulano] had a smash success with his cabrochas show, and [Beltran] had driven the gringos wild with the hip grinding of his pastoras...
...Brazil's experience may suggest not only how international legal strategies to reverse inequality must be adaptable to diverse cultural and political settings, but it also calls for farther-reaching policies to confront deep-seated social attitudes...
...In response, a front-page article in the entertainment section of Brazil's major daily, Jornal do Brasil, claimed that the recommendation "crashed like a bomb" among artists, scholars and activists alike...
...Now you have to admit first that racism exists...
...Senator Benedita da Silva discussed the parties' blind spot in an analysis of her failed 1992 Workers Party (PT) bid for the mayoralty of Rio de Janeiro: Our campaign didn't prioritize race issues in defense of the people of Rio de Janeiro...
...The author wishes to thank Maria Aparecida Silva Bento and the Center for the Study of Labor Relations and Inequality (CEERT...
...Interview with author, Belo Horizonte, December, 1992...
...IBGE now publishes much of its statistical data on race in dichotomous form, grouping pretos and pardos in the negro category...
...Racial discrimination is endemic in Brazilian society, but mystification and denial of race differences are widespread, sustained by the social construction of a supraracial Brazilian national identity...
...They are still poorly represented among the leadership of Brazil's hundreds of trade unions and 26 political parties.1 4 In any case, most black elected officials, such as Democratic Workers Party (PDT) governors Alceu Collares of Rio Grande do Sul and Albuino Azeredo of Espirito Santo, have failed to address racial inequality head-on...
...The Brazilian Ministry of Culture's Palmares Foundation proposed in 1993 that the word "mulatto" be stricken from Brazilian dictionaries...
...He went on to describe how difficult equal-opportunity policies would be to enforce, because of the identity problem: It's a really difficult struggle, because discrimination is so cynical, done in such a subtle, subliminal way, and we are just now becoming conscious of this...
...2 2 Among union and party officials, knowledge of international experiences with affirmative-action or equal-opportunity policies is extremely limited, and the concept of "diversity" as a positive value is not part of progressive discourse at all...
...In the United States, affirmative action's gains are now widely challenged...
...Our regionalisms constitute variations of our basic culture, born of the encounter of Western [culture] with Portuguese, African and indigenous [cultures...
...Union and labor-party discourse were chosen for analysis because their proponents formally represent the interests of large numbers of the organized poor and the working classes, play a leading role in advocating policy reform, and are most likely to have been exposed to the new social movements...
...In November, 1994, Benedita da Silva, an African Brazilian woman from a Rio de Janeiro favela, was elected to the national Senate, and political analysts now question whether a referendum on a proposed district voting mechanism will be influenced by preferences of African Brazilians.13 Among the new social actors in Brazil's burgeoning civil society, a core of Brazilian lawyers, trade unionists and black-movement activists is now 37 37 VOL XXVIII, NO 6 MAY/JUNE 1995REPORT ON BRAZIL A black rural family in the northern state of Pard...
...Interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, December, 1992...
...African Brazilians are more likely than whites to be arrested and convicted, and serve longer sentences for similar crimes.10 Informal social mechanisms-especially the persistence of media images of African Brazilians in subordinate and criminal roles-reinforce blacks' exclusion from social opportunities...
...Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993...
...Neuza Maria Mendes Gusmao, "Socializagao e Recalque: A crianca negra no rural," EducaqCo e Diferenciagqo Cultural, Cadernos Cedes, Vol...
...As a key outcome of the conference, Brazil's three labor confederations united in a campaign to enforce the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 111, which provides for non-discriminatory salary equity, ratified by Brazil in 1964...
...In a study of children's drawings in poor schools in rural Rio de Janeiro, Neuza Gusmdo found that children project extreme 'sC S1 racial stereotypes by the age of 7 or 8. Children's drawings of black figures were dressed in rags, engaged in manual labor or marginal activities, and had unhappy faces, while whites were welldressed, working in offices, or standing near large cars...
...Note that skin color (rather than ethnic origin) denotes racial categories...
...5 With rare exceptions-such as PDT Governor Leonel Brizola's futile 1993 call for special admissions quotas for black cariocas in the new Rio de Janeiro State University at Campos-the public-policy platforms of labor and party officials almost never explicitly advocate affirmative-action or equal-opportunity policies...
...Moreover since the "color line" in Brazil is unconsciously drawn, the problem may be too profound to be regulated by law alone...
...I believe it's a necessary stage...
...IBASE, Negros no Brasil: Dados da Realidade (Petropolis: Vozes, 1989...
...I think this helped create a climate for these issues to be debated within the party, since race is very difficult to bring up, to focus on, in any party, and the left's class analysis has rarely discussed it...
...In one of the most advanced initiatives, Vicente da Silva, president of the Unified Workers Central (Central Unica de Trabalhadores or CUT), and the SAo Paulo-based Center for the Study of Labor Relations and Inequality (CEERT) organized an InterAmerican Trade Union Conference for Racial Equality in November, 1994...
...Interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, November, 1992...
...PT Federal Deputy Jos6 Genoino echoed that NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON BRAZIL pledge in a December, 1992 interview...
...Today, public discourse about racial discrimination-a topic integral to politics for well over three decades in the United States-is novel and still tentative in Brazil...
...9 Job-seekers' appearance (boa aparMncia, an implicit allusion to race) is still applied as a hiring criteria for many jobs, including banktellers, receptionists and secretaries, restaurant workers, and store clerks...
...In this article, the convention adopted by African Brazilian organizations will apply: "black" (preto), "brown" (pardo) and negro will be translated either as "black" or "African Brazilian," except where otherwise specified...
...and by enforcement problems stemming from Brazil's authoritarian past...
...4. Charles Wood and J.M...
...1 8 Pointing to the enormous variety of racial and ethnic terms-many of which are considered affectionately playful-most Brazilians refuse to narrow the choices to a black/white dichotomy.19 Identity is perhaps the most thorny barrier to equality policies-a kind of thicket surrounding the subject...
...Brazil's Denial of Race Research for this article was supported by the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program in Peace and International Cooperation...
...espite the population's daily encounter with racial stratification and discrimination, limited access to statistics documenting race differences combined with Brazil's unique construction of a supraracial national identity contribute to the widespread belief in the country that racism is not a problem...
...See Peter R. Eccles, "Presumed Guilty: Blacks, the Law and Human Rights in Brazil," unpublished manuscript, Harvard Law School, 1989...
...Their resistances would represent the 'best case' scenarios, revealing the potential and limits of large-scale mobilization to combat discrimination in Brazil...
...People will laugh: 'So you are crazy, you're insane, what are you thinking of?' Right...
...Interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, December, 1992...
...Although identity politics as such are not part of political discourse, the mobilization of African Brazilian activists has noticeably increased public awareness of discrimination in the past decade...
...Neither were women's issues a priority...
...Interview with author in Porto Alegre, December, 19921 15...
...Carlos Alberto Ca6, Rio de Janeiro's PDT Secretary of Labor and author of the 1988 Lei Ca6 (Brazil's first anti-discrimination legislation with teeth), described how political discourse about race had evolved in the 1970s and early 1980s: Brazilian society was dominated by conservative thinking that reviled the class analysis and simply ignored the issue of race...
...See Luis Felipe de Alencastro and Elza Berquo, "O0 surgimento do voto negro," Novos Estudos (Sao Paulo: CEBRAP), No...
...1. Jornal do Brasil, May 11, 1993...
...25-34...
...2. According to the 1798 census, slaves represented 48.7% of the Brazilian population...
...Patricia Williams (1991) addresses this question in her discussion of the difference between rights and needs in the U.S...
...The people aren't accustomed yet to making complaints, to criticizing the police...
...Sergio Adorno, "Racial Discrimination in Sao Paulo's Criminal Justice System," unpublished manuscript (Sao Paulo: Nucleus for the Study of Violence, 1994...
...We Brazilians are a people with great cultural homogeneity," he said...
...77 (May, 1991), pp...
...and Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva, Estrutura Social, Mobilidade e Raca (Sao Paulo: V6rtice, 1988...
...The thinking of serious leftists was reductionist-at the base of everything was the class struggle-and they also ignored race, obviously using a different argument than the conservatives...
...See also Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva, "Rata e oportunidades educacionais no Brasil," Relacoes Racias no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo Editora, 1992...
...2 5 Notwithstanding the statist convictions among many Brazilians both on the left and the right, many Brazilians would disagree with this formulation, less on grounds of privacy than due to lack of consensus about what constitutes discriminatory behavior...
...She was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison, but the case is still under appeal...
...2 4 Part of the enforcement problem stems from Brazil's recent authoritarian experience...
...4 Racial discrimination has been outlawed in Brazil since 1951, yet it functions effectively through informal mechanisms, including institutional and social norms and values...
...For example, 40 different racial terms combining color categories and phenotypical referents were reported to researchers in the 1960s...
...The escalating social violence is not usually labelled "racial" in nature, but racial associations are embedded in the public's concept of this violence, and in fact its victims are overwhelmingly African Brazilian...
...1 " After faltering in a vacuum of government accountability for decades, Brazil's young democracy is failing to contain endemic social and institutional violence...
...6. Fulvia Rosemberg, "Raja e Educaago Inicial," Cadernos de Pesquisa (Sao Paulo), Vol...
...This is likely to be the case in a new 'non-racial' South Africa as well...
...Compensatory laws would be incredibly difficult to implement," she said, "because the Constitution itself has not been enforced to date...
...n this context, it has been argued that Brazil should apply some variation of the non-discrimination policies specified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination...
...by the left's claim that the class struggle is prior to and inclusive of anti-racism goals...
...The Foundation argued that the label had a pejorative cast since it was derived from the word "mule," which was the label that Portuguese colonizers had given to children born of sexual unions between slaves and colonizers...
...32 (1993), pp...
...See Peggy A. Lovell, "Race, Gender and Development in Brazil," Latin American Research Review, Vol...
...See also IBASE, Negros no Brasil: Dados da Realidade...
...Such victories are partial, however, as African Brazilian organizations and their colleagues in unions and parties are frequently attacked for uncritically adopting foreign ideology and promoting policies that don't reflect the "Brazilian reality...
...A final problem that equality policies confront is the difficulty of legally enforcing them...
...trade unionists to exchange strategies for combatting racism in the workplace and to debate the role of the labor movement in advocating anti-discriminatory social policies...
...The murkiness in this area of Brazilian law is evidenced by the virtual absence of legal precedent...
...The cabrocha (young goat) and pastora (goat-herd) are terms for (usually "mulatta") samba dancers and singers that also draw upon associations of bestiality in their etymology, if not in the public imagination...
...There is little agreement on how to define racial identity for the purpose of designing such policies...
...9. Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 1980 Census...
...I'm telling you, how can we include the race issue, the fight against dis- crimination, in the life of the unions...
...Identification with African roots is promoted as integral to the overall national identity, and not necessarily associated with specific ancestry, skin color, hair texture or other observable characteristics...
...Even after accounting for its unique supraracial identity, Brazil's reluctance to take discrimination and equality more seriously is paradoxical in today's global context, where ethnic populations throughout the world are questioning nation-state identities, and where traditional class-based politics in the United States shares air time with increasingly forceful politics based on ethnic, racial, gender or other identifications...
...dissertation, Yale University, Department of Political Science (expected) 1995...
...During the past decade, increasingly vocal black-movement organizations have engaged in identity politics, advocating cultural and public-policy reforms to confront racism...
...2 9 History has shown that legal and policy gains are limited by the Brazilian government's inability or unwillingness to enforce national laws already on the books...
...The conservatives always promoted (for export, in fact) the idea that the races were harmonious in Brazilian society, that conflicts were residual, by proclaiming the myth of racial democracy...
...2 6 Nonetheless, Brazil is a State Party to the Anti-Discrimination Convention, and is therefore compelled to comply with its provisions...
...Even the directors of the unions don't want to admit it and they say, 'No, forget about that, we have more important things...
...International human rights organizations insist that core human rights are universal and that their guarantee is the state's responsibility...
...African Brazilians are excluded from many private clubs...
...A school director who segregated black from white children during the school lunch hour in Campinas, Sao Paulo was charged with racial discrimination in 1991...
...International Women's Rights Action Watch, Human Rights in the Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesta Press, 1993...
...Folha de S&o Paulo, May 31, 1994...
...nor of constructing statements of need, in a world of abundantly apparent need...
...Sociologist Luiz Claudio Barcelos discovered that by age six, extreme racial differences appear in national literacy rates...
...Geledes attorney Dr...
...Carvalho discuss how Brazilians use such fine distinctions in identifying race that all data are subject to question...
...Brazil is notorious, for example, for its thousands of gorously defended by "street kids...
...23 (December, 1992...
...Disenfranchised individuals and groups (not unlike Kennedy, the black character in Patria Minha) are reluctant and unaccustomed to taking on the police, employers or other powerful interests to defend their rights...
...2 0 Another obstacle facing equality policies is the tendency of social activists in Brazil to focus on the inequitable class structure as the single factor underlying all of the nation's socioeconomic disparities...
...It was important that the PT was forced to confront this situation in the campaign...
...For country-specific accounts of how identity politics have been employed by national social movements, see Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition 1960-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992...
...Extremely few African Brazilians are found in higher education, executive positions, public office or the media...
...Because the unions don't even know where to start...
...Meeting, paras 8-14...
...2 7 Article 2(2) of the Convention may be interpreted as requiring State Parties to adopt affirmative-action programs when circumstances warrant it.28 But the Brazilian legal and institutional context is not favorable to enforcement of equal-opportunity policies, according to lawyer Peter Eccles, who notes that actions to obligate states to implement this standard may be blocked by disagreements over the definition of "minority" in international law...
...49-84...
...What they said was that racial and ethnic conflict and racial discrimination were a ploy by the right to divide the working classes.2 1 Today, the fear of "dividing" the working class is still present, taking the form of an alert against reverse discrimination...
...29, No...
...I The coverage-and the fact that it was located in the entertainment section-is a fitting commentary on the state of debate about race and gender in Brazil, a country that defines itself as a "racial democracy...
...Because people don't identify themselves that way...
...Although a 1951 law made discrimination on the basis of skin color a misdemeanor offense and the 1988 Constitution upgraded it to the equivalent of a felony (regulated by the Lei Ca6), the Geledes Black Women's Institute reports that only four cases of racial discrimination have ever been brought to trial in Brazil...
...Eccles found, for example, that Brazilian officials have argued in UN fora that African Brazilians may not be defined as a minority group meriting special attention...
...Antonio Arruda notes that "the judiciary doesn't want to convict in the first place, and the law is so poorly written that it fails to clearly define what constitutes a racist act, so that it's almost impossible to prosecute...
...Yet mystification and denial of racial differences are widespread, sustained by the social construction of a supraracial Brazilian national identity...
...attempting to define legal strategies for equality through recourse to the authority of international conventions and affirmative-action principles...
...Reflecting this new 36NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON BRAZIL activism, the Sdo Paulo-based Geledes Black Women's Institute initiated court proceedings in November, 1994, to call attention to racist portrayals of African Brazilians in the prime-time television serial, Patria Minha [see "TV Serial Charged with Racism," this page...
...Various scholars have analyzed National Household Survey data from the 1980s on day care, preschool and early elementary education, finding that educational opportunities for black children are of the worst quality available, even when compared to schools for white children of the same socioeconomic levels.6 In 1987, just over 2% of all Mulatashowgirlsarel African Brazilians had completed many as one of Brazil' more than 12 years of school, but products...
...We must concretize the issue with specific proposals, to break through the official farce that in Brazil there is no racism, but also to try 'positive discrimination'places in the universities, quotas," he said...
...But the fact that I was a black woman made the party confront this debate...
...Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991...
...They are afraid, or they make a complaint at the time, but drop the case later...
...But attempts to redress racial discrimination through Rebecca Reichmann is an independent consultant who has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 1988...
...Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (London: MacMillan, 1991...
...2 In his January 1, 1995 inauguration speech, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso reinforced the deeply ingrained belief that the nation's unique character is distilled from three ethnic groups...
...Racial inequalities are still widely dismissedeven among progressive groups-as the result of African Brazilians' inability to compete economically after the abolition of slavery...
...27...
...We have to stay united, work together.' So I think it's complicated, blacks claiming a percentage...
...This section of the article draws on a preliminary analysis of over 100 in-depth interviews of Brazilian union and labor-party officials, analysis of campaign platforms and public discourse about race and gender among unions and Brazil's two workers parties (PT and PDT) during the two years leading up to Brazil's 1994 national general elections...
...I think I should be able to get along with my mestizas...
...it shouldn't be permanent, but it is necessary...
...1 2 When it does acknowledge bigotry, the Brazilian public tends to define racism as individual acts of discrimination, rather than analyzing how social structures reinforce institutional racism...
...5. Luiz Claudio Barcelos, "Educato: um quadro de desigualdades racials," Estudos Afro-Asiaticos, No...
...In recent years, activists have been able to support their claims with official statistical evidence of racial inequalities-statistics that did not exist a decade ago because government agencies didn't disaggregate socioeconomic data by race...
...3 (1994), p. 10...
...1 6 Significant sectors of global civil society are increasingly well-informed about malignant racial, ethnic and gender violence in virtually all of the world's regions, and in response, are calling for enforceable global standards to curtail inter-group conflict...
...Small groups of African Brazilian activists within political parties and labor unions have begun to establish departments to promote their interests, and many progressive Brazilian political leaders are now beginning to confront their own longstanding convictions about the "cordiality" of Brazilian race relations...
...These children and proudest national adolescents living in the streets are mainly black and among the chief casualties of urban violence...
...Interview with author, Salvador Bahia, November, 1994...
...77-88...
...Eccles cites the UN General Assembly Official Records, 16th Session, Third Committee, 1103 RD...
...3 0 The psychological denial identified by Patricia Williams was at work, for example, when enthusiastic party supporters of Benedita da Silva in 1992 distributed hundreds of campaign T-shirts proclaiming, "Sou Benedita, sem pre-conceito...
...African Brazilians hold less than 5% of all nationally elected congressional posts...
...Poverty alone does not explain these racial differences in literacy...
...8. SEADE 40/41, Pesquisa de Emprego e Desemprego na Grande Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo: SEADE, 1988...
...Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986...
...Rather the goal is to find a political mechanism that can confront the denial of need...
...Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women's Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992...
...The widespread and extremely common social mechanisms that sustain the subordination of African Brazilians in Brazil are rarely contested, as demonstrated by the vigorous defense and promotion of "mulattas" as Brazil's national product...
...He extended his arm to look at it and said, "Until today, I thought I was white...
...Moreover, across all sectors (except domestic services), white Brazilians earned more than African Brazilians in the same occupations by 57% to 73%.8 African Brazilians face discriminatory hiring practices in non-manual occupations: only 2.7% of economically active blacks have attained management positions while over 55% are engaged in manual work...
...The conference convened unionists representing all three of Brazil's labor confederations to meet with a high-level African American delegation from the AFL-CIO, representatives of the A. Philip Randolph Foundation, and U.S...
...Brazil's dilemma may, however, not be as unique as it first appears...
...3. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) demonstrate that conditions for preto and pardo groups are analogous for a range of socioeconomic indicators, to the degree that they effectively form a single racial group when contrasted with indicators for white Brazilians...
...3 Among Brazil's poor, those who identify themselves in the national census as black (preto) or brown (pardo)-who make up at least 45% of the population-can expect to lose more children to disease and malnutrition, die at an earlier age, and earn significantly less than Brazilians of primarily European descent with the same levels of education, job experience and housing conditions...
...But in spite of the longstanding official discourse, African Brazilians continue to endure discrimination in the workplace, schools, the public-health system and politics...
...Brazil was one of the last countries in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888...
...It's not easy, it's a tremendous battle culturally...
...She is currently editing an anthology on racial inequality in Brazil and writing a book on identity politics in Brazilian workers' parties and trade unions...
...George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sio Paulo, Brazil 1888-1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991...
...context: For blacks, then, the battle is not deconstructing rights, in a world of no rights...
...5 He found that the national literacy rate in 1987 was 9.8% for white children, compared with 4.5% for black children...
...See Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker, 1964...
...In Peter R. Eccles, "Presumed Guilty...
...While necessary, equal-opportunity strategies everywhere may not be sufficient where prejudice is intractable or not readily acknowledged...
...Ana Lucia Souza Carvalho, a telephone worker on the state Executive Board of CUT in Minas Gerais, explained: As long as whites don't accept that racism exists, it's impossible for blacks to come out competing for their jobs...
...Such mechanisms are viewed as creating or augmenting social tensions, especially in countries like the United States, and are considered plausible only as short-term, transitional instruments...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 6
