Simmering racism holds back half Brazil's people
July 6, 2008
By Telma Marotto
Brazil - It wasn't his behaviour, it wasn't his gray hair and it certainly wasn't his pinstriped suits. It was the colour of his skin: Ferreira is black.
Women reacted as though he were a purse snatcher, he says. "It's something you can never get used to."
Ferreira stepped down in December as economic planning manager at Brasileira de Distribuicao Grupo Pao de Acucar, Brazil's largest food retailer. He is now developing fundraising techniques for a nonprofit group that supports health services.
Ferreira's experiences are the dark side of working in Brazil, whose economy is in a celebratory mood. Fed by a commodities boom, the São Paulo stock market is the best performer among the world's 10 largest, surging 18.75 percent in the past year, and the real has gained 22 percent to the dollar in the same period, more than any other major currency.
Beneath the surface
But behind the gloss, there's another view. Increased consumer demand and higher food prices are boosting inflation and crime is rampant.
And, while people don't like to talk about it, racism is pervasive.
Yet Brazil is home to the largest black population outside Africa. Its diverse food, music and dance are a legacy of more than 200 indigenous peoples, Portuguese colonists and about 4.5 million Africans who were brought to the country during more than 350 years of slavery.
Brazilians pride themselves on their multicultural society, but, says Workers' Party legislator Carlos Santana, "in Brazil we can talk about anything but race. The myth of racial democracy created a taboo."
People outside the government use harsher terms. "We have the strongest apartheid ever because people deny racism exists," says Humberto Adami, the head of the Institute for Racial and Environmental Laws. "It's hard to combat what is taken as non-existent."
Almost half of Brazil's 187 million people are black, defined by the government as people who describe themselves as either "preta" (black) or mixed-race "parda" (brown). On average, they earn little more than half as much as white people, 578.20 reais (R2 850 at current rates) a month compared with 1 087.10 reais, according to a report by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), a government group in Brasilia, based on 2006 data.
Black women are particularly disadvantaged. According to a study by IPEA and the UN Development Fund for Women using 2003 data, black women earned 70 percent less than white men, 35 percent less than black men and almost 18 percent less, on average, than white women.
Few black people make it into management. They account for an estimated 3.5 percent of the executives and 17 percent of the managers at 500 major companies, according to the Ethos Institute, a business group promoting social responsibility.
Executives reject suggestions that such disparities result from racism.
The chief executive of Brazil's second largest non-government bank, Roberto Setubalm, thinks the problem is related to education.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says the problem is cultural. "Instead of complaining that business people don't hire blacks, we need to improve education, the background of everyone, so that people can take all the possible positions. We are advancing in this direction."
There is a long way to go. Of the 513 senators and deputies in Brazil's national congress, just 43 men and three women are of African descent.
Jose Vicente, the rector of the Universidade da Cidadania Zumbi dos Palmares (Unipalmares), estimates that economic growth might be 2 percentage points higher if black people were fully integrated. Vicente, who is black and has degrees in sociology and law, says he faces discrimination daily.
Some scholars say the pervasive denial that racial bias causes the gap is proof that discrimination exists.
"Racial prejudice in Brazil lies in the insistence that there is no racial prejudice," Georgetown law professor Joseph Page wrote in The Brazilians, a 1995 book based on three decades of research.
For black people who achieve corporate success, life in Brazil can be disorienting. Professional success does not prevent racial affronts.
Edison Dias, the commercial director at the Brazilian unit of UK-based HSBC Holdings, is the son of a washerwoman and a stonemason. His finance career has meant recognition, security and a chance to rise above his origins, but he still remembers the shock he got when a fellow director at a previous employer screamed at him using a racial epithet during a heated debate.
Education minister Fernando Haddad says that, 120 years after Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, "the descendants of slaves haven't yet received appropriate attention from the central government.
"The education issue is one of the elements that explain this phenomenon. But I have no doubt that there is racial discrimination as well."
Stop this silliness
President Lula, a founder of the Workers' Party, has expanded educational opportunities for black people since taking office in January 2003, building on work by his predecessor, Fernando Cardoso.
Lula initiated a scholarship programme to help the poor attend private universities and supported affirmative action to ensure blacks could enter federal universities.
"It's necessary that we stop this silliness of being scared to confront racism," Lula said in November 2006, a month after his re-election.
Black people stress the importance of schooling.
"Education is the only way to exit poverty," says Walkiria Moreira Marinho, who retired as a general manager at Telefonica in 2001.
"But the truth is you can never get rid of racism."
She was one of five black students at her college. When her son was six years old, he was rejected by a school in one of São Paulo's most exclusive neighbourhoods, Marinho says. When she sought for his name among those accepted, another mother asked: "Do you see any other black child here?" Marinho registered her son at another school, and today, at age 27, he is a diplomat.
Joao Batista Ribeiro, the administrative and financial director at Hewlett-Packard's Brazilian unit, says education is the key for black success stories such as himself.
Gustavo Marin, the president of Banco Citibank, the Brazilian unit of US-based Citigroup, says universities don't reflect the composition of the population. At Universidade de São Paulo, 13.4 percent of students registered last yearwere black, up from 12.5 percent in 2006.
"Every company should take affirmative action, concrete action, to create room so that these black people will have the same opportunities," says Ribeiro.
Citibank is among eight companies offering trainee programmes at Unipalmares, which says it is the first university in Latin America to dedicate at least half of its seats to black applicants. Currently, 87 percent of its students are black.
Still, education goes only so far. Luiz Claudio Polycarpo has degrees in engineering, marketing and education. He is supervisor of customer training and electronic tools distribution at Cummins Brasil, the Brazilian subsidiary of US engine maker Cummins. Neither his education nor his job shield him from racist affronts.
A few years ago, when he and his white boss visited a client company, a security guard mistook Polycarpo for a chauffeur and refused to talk to him, he says. Instead, the guard went straight to Polycarpo's foreign boss, who didn't speak Portuguese. Discrimination like that isn't about education or social status, he says: it's about colour.
Brazil's confusion and denial over race are manifest in the way the lines can blur in defining who is black and who is white. Take the case of the Da Cunha brothers.
Alan Teixeira da Cunha, 19, and his identical twin bother, Alex, registered last year to enter Universidade de Brasilia, the public university in the country's capital that sets aside 20 percent of its seats for black students. Their father is black and their mother is white. The twins are what might be called light-skinned.
In selecting students who might benefit from the quota system, the university assessed applications with pictures attached. Alan was considered black; Alex, white.
"The quota system is also an example of racism," Alan da Cunha says. The university says it has since changed its selection process, replacing photographs with face-to-face interviews.
Legal redress
Legal efforts to ensure civil rights for black people have been slow in coming.
While the constitution of 1988, adopted three years after the end of 21 years of military rule, made racism a crime, prosecutions have been limited, says Sinvaldo Firmo, a lawyer at the Father Batista Institute for Blacks, a nonprofit advocacy group based in São Paulo. When there are convictions, penalties are usually fines or orders to perform community service, he says.
"We have made great progress, but there's still a lot of resistance from the judiciary in enforcing the law and punishing the aggressors."
A racial equality statute, approved by the senate in 2005, has not been voted on in the lower house. The measure would, among other things, give tax incentives to companies hiring black workers and impose a quota system in universities.
"Our priority is to have the statute approved this year," says Edson Santos, the minister in charge of the Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality. The ministerial agency was created by Lula in January 2003.
Edna Roland, who co-ordinates policies that affect black people and women in the city of Guarulhos, gives Lula good marks.
"We are light years from the point we should reach," says Roland. "But some progress is being made."
There is wide agreement among those who acknowledge Brazil's racism that it is the product of centuries of prejudice.
"It's almost something hereditary," Lula said in February. "People still have a lot of difficulty recognising that we are all the same."
Overcoming biases and ensuring civil rights for all will require that more Brazilians open their eyes to the chasm between their country's happy, multiracial image and the reality lived by many of the nation's black citizens.
"Racism is clearly an issue in Brazil," Ferreira says. "As a black person, you notice it all the time."
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