Brazilian television slowly confronts country's deeply entrenched race issues

In the middle of the night, a young black couple pull up at the entrance to an elegant mansion in an upper-class neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro.

Excitedly, they walk through the empty building into the garden and jump into the swimming pool. Their laughter wakes a white woman living next door.

Immediately, she grabs her binoculars. “Thieves,” she cries, and orders her sleepy husband to call security.

But it turns out that – as far the twitchy neighbour is concerned – the couple are much worse than trespassers: they are the new owners.

So begins Mister Brau, a new musical sitcom on Globo, Brazil’s dominant television network, whose central conceit is the culture clash between a black nouveau-riche pop star duo and their snobbish white neighbours.

For Brazil, a television show featuring a wealthy black couple in a lead role is unprecedented. Despite a majority black or mixed-race population, Brazilian television is overwhelmingly dominated by whites, both on and off screen. In a country where 81% of the population describes TV as their main source of leisure, this absence is coming under increased scrutiny.

“This show portrays a middle-class black couple who are economically successful,” Joel Zito Araújo, an award-winning Brazilian film-maker, said. “For Brazil, sadly, this is revolutionary.”

Actors Lázaro Ramos and Taís Araújo, a real-life husband and wife couple frequently touted as Brazil’s Jay Z and Beyoncé, play the eponymous pop star Mister Brau and his wife Michele, a dancer-turned-impresario.

So far the programme has been a hit with both critics and the public, scoring high ratings and positive reviews.

The two actors have starred opposite each other on screen before, but never as the lead couple. In the 2006 soap opera Cobras & Lagartos (Snakes and Lizards), Araújo played Ellen, a sexy gold-digger who only succumbs to the charms of Ramos’s wily Foguinho when she mistakenly believes he has suddenly become rich.

Joel Zito Araújo argues the actors’ relationship as a couple is also significant.

“There are very few examples of love between two black people. The expectation of Brazilian society is that the black person does not have pride in being black and looks to escape blackness with a white partner.”

During the research for his 2000 documentary on black characters in Brazilian soap operas, A Negação do Brasil, Araújo found that 75% of the roles for black actors were in positions of subservience.

“The roles represent the way in which Brazilian society likes to see black people: as slum-dwellers, domestic servants, criminals. This is still happening today.”

For Lilian Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of São Paulo, the broadcast of Mister Brau is part of a “new moment” in Brazilian history, in which the racial question is finally coming up for discussion after decades of being ignored.

“For a long time the question of slavery and the legacy of discrimination that continues to this day were topics that no one wanted to talk about. I think the fact this programme is on now is very significant.”

Professor Schwartz referred to a survey her department conducted in 1988, to mark the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, which found that 96% of Brazilians did not believe there was any racism in the country. When asked the follow-up question of whether they knew anyone racist, however, 99% said yes.

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“Brazilians tended to think of themselves as little islands of racial democracy inside a sea of racism,” she said. “If we did the survey again, I think the results would be very different. Brazilians are much more aware of discrimination now.”

Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country – over four million – and was the last state in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery. But with no segregationist laws, and widespread miscegenation, the country has long thought of itself as a racial democracy, free from the conflicts that characterise race-relations elsewhere, particularly the US.

“Every nation has its contradictions and its myths. The myth here is that Brazilians have always said we are all mixed so we cannot be racist,” said Marques Travae, the editor-in-chief of the blog Black Women of Brazil.

“In the US the representation of black people in the media is minuscule but it’s much greater than in Brazil. When you turn on the TV here it’s just whiteness from sun up to sun down, so how are black people supposed to develop a sense of self-esteem?”

Last year, Globo’s attempt at reaching a black middle-class audience ended in failure. Sexo e as Negas (Sex and the Black Women) ended after one season, following widespread criticism that its working-class characters perpetuated black stereotypes.

Most of the television programmes with majority black casts currently broadcast in Brazil are US imports. Earlier this year, Windeck, an Angolan soap opera with an all-black cast set in the offices of a fashion magazine proved a hit in Brazil.

But for Tony Goes, a screenwriter and TV columnist, Mister Brau is symptomatic of the fact the Brazilian media is starting to change.

“We are seeing the rise of a black middle class which we didn’t have 10 years ago. Now they have enough money to dictate the rules, and they want to see themselves in advertising, and on TV at every level.”

As an example, Goes cited Maria Julia Coutinho, a black weather presenter on the main evening news, Jornal Nacional. “She is what modern Brazil would like to look like. Her rise has been meteoric and her future within Globo is very bright.”

For Joel Zito Araújo, however, little is changing. “Brazilian TV has no interest in looking for diversity. It is content with promoting white superiority.”

Bruce Douglas in Rio de Janeiro