If you want to get a sense of how complex racial identity
is in Brazil, you should meet sisters Francine and Fernanda Gravina. Both have
the same mother and father. Francine, 28, is blond with green eyes and white
skin. She wouldn't look out of place in Iceland. But Fernanda, 23, has milk
chocolate skin with coffee colored eyes and hair. Francine describes herself as
white, whereas Fernanda says she's morena, or brown-skinned.
"We'd always get
questions like, 'How can you be so dark skinned and she's so fair?'"
Fernanda says. In fact, the sisters have German, Italian, African and
indigenous ancestry. But in Brazil, Fernanda explains, people describe
themselves by color, not race, since nearly everyone here is mixed.
All of that is to say,
collecting demographic information in Brazil has been really tricky. The latest
census, taken in 2010, found for the first time that Brazil has the most people
of African descent outside Africa. No, this doesn't mean that Afro-Brazilian
population suddenly, dramatically increased. Rather, the new figures reflect
changing attitudes about race and skin color in Brazil.
Racial mixing came
about early in Brazil's history. Brazil imported more enslaved people than
anywhere else in the Americas — some four million — and slavery lasted longer
there than anywhere else in the region. The white Portuguese colonizers were
encouraged to "mingle" with the locals. Plainly speaking, this meant
that they raped many African and indigenous women.
The result is a vast
mixed-race population, which has been added to over the years with successive
migrations from Japan and Europe.
We should see the
history of Brazil as a history of racial inequality
Rosana Heringer,
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Unlike the U.S., where
slavery was followed by legal segregation, Brazil never had a formal system of
apartheid, says Rosana Heringer, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro who studies race and the African diaspora. Still, there is a color
hierarchy in Brazil, Heringer says. Consistent data shows that darker Brazilians
are poorer, and they're more likely to be killed and live in slums, called
favelas .
"We should see the
history of Brazil as a history of racial inequality," Heringer says — and
that's a fairly new idea. For a long time, Brazilians have believed in what's
been called "the myth of racial democracy," she explains. Part of
that myth-building was a controversial survey that the government conducted the
1970's. It asked people to describe their skin color, and the answers varied a
lot. All together, respondents used at least 134 different terms.
The descriptions ran
the gamut from the fanciful to the almost forensically descriptive:
"sunburned white," "white with brown spots" and "white
like a meringue." Some characterized their skin tone as cinnamon or
burnished rose, toffee or cashew tan. Someone even used the phrase "burro
(donkey) running away."
"It created a
fable, every time more exaggerated, that supported the idea that you couldn't
take a serious look at race in Brazil," says Jose Luis Petruccelli, a
former lead researcher for 20 years at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics, which carried out the survey.
The institute also
organizes the national census every decade. These days there are five formal
color categories in the census: indigenous, yellow, white, pardo (or brown) and
preto, or dark-skinned, Petruccelli says. The word black doesn't appear
anywhere in the list.
"There is a
totally different system here than in the U.S., where one drop of black blood
makes you black independent of appearance," Petruccelli says. In Brazil,
it's about how you'd like to classify yourself, and how others see you. The
problem, he says, is that Afro-Brazilians have no sense of collective identity,
which makes it difficult to address the very real problem of racism and racial
inequality in the country.
But lately, that's
starting to change, and the black pride movement in Brazil is growing. On a
recent morning at the beach in Rio de Janeiro, a march celebrating black women
in Brazil started with with dancing and singing. One of the demonstrators,
Jurema Werneck, who works at Criolla, an advocacy group for black women, says
the goal of the march is to show that Brazil is a black nation, largely
populated black and African Brazilians. "We need to fight racism and not
to hide it," Werneck says.
She's been
participating in the black pride movement for over 15 years. And it seems to be
working, she says, because the number of people self identifying as pardo or
preto surged in the latest census.
And more importantly,
lawmakers are beginning to pay more attention to issues of inequality. Brazil now
has an affirmative action program for higher education. Before the program
launched, only seven percent of Afro-Brazilians went to college. Now it's about
15 percent, and the numbers are growing.
Werneck says the black
pride movement is also lobbying to change the next census in 2020 to include
the word black. Pardo and preto, she says, are euphemisms. Afro-Brazilians
should take a cue from African-Americans, she says, and broadcast to society
that they're black and proud.
Lourdes-garcia-navarro
No comments:
Post a Comment