Brazil in the news again: this week the Economist has an interesting article on race and racism in Brazil, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the variability with which the phenomenon of racism manifests itself in different places. (It illustrates well some of the points I was trying to make here, in the post and in comments.) An excerpt:
Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.
Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It’s clear that racism exists in the US. It’s clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.
The article then goes on to discuss whether the North-American model of affirmative action is the appropriate response to the still abysmal social and economic gap between the descendants of African slaves and other racial/ethnic groups. So far, affirmative action in Brazil has mostly taken the form of quotas for black/brown students in the best (public) universities. Many argue that this model is not adequate for the ‘spectrum of skin colour’ situation, creating an artificial dichotomy, but in practice the results so far appear to be encouraging:
These measures are starting to make a difference. Although only 6.3% of black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education in 2006, that was double the proportion in 2001, according to IPEA. (The figures for whites were 19.2% in 2006, compared with 14.1% in 2001).
In practice, many of the fears surrounding university quotas have not been borne out. Though still preliminary, studies tend to show that cotistas, as they are known, have performed academically as well as or better than their peers.
That's clearly good news, and though there is still a lot to be done on the racial inequality front in Brazil, it's a start.
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