Four years ago the "New York Times" wrote that of the more than 100 photographs in an edition of "Veja", Brazil's major news weekly, there was not one black face. And that in a country with more than twice as many black people as the United States.
Since then, Brazil's gotten a new magazine, "Raça" or "Race" that is full of black faces. Altho some critics at the Congress described it as a shallow magazine designed to grab the black consumer's money, "Raça" has filled a void and touched a nerve in Brazil.
In examining the issue of Race in Brazil, I did not limit myself to the Congress. I formed opinions based on numerous discussions and incidents I observed as a visitor to Brazil.
There's the television in Salvador an 80% black city. On the news, I saw no black anchor people, seldom a black reporter. In the network entertainment programs seldom a black face and then usually as a maid. American television is much blacker that TV in Brazil. The only channel on which blacks seemed to play a prominent role is the Christian network, Rede Record(Record Network), where black TV preachers, a la Pat Robertson of CBN in the US, were trying to gain converts and financial support.
Even though in Brazil, black and white people generally
get along better socially than they do in the United States, complaints
of black Brazilians mirror those of African Americans :
Nilze Viera of Belém and Nelson Moreira of Salvador at
5th Afro-Brasilian Congress
Nilze Viera: "There are many black people who are being discriminated against here in Brazil through jokes and other means, and the person doesn't even realize it's happened. To be able to detect discrimination is difficult. It is very subtle....when the jokes involve our racial or social condition, I don't like that."
Nelson Moreira: "A person who discriminates against you, he will never come right out and say he's racist, he will hide it. There is never an oppressor saying, 'I am a racist.' You never know whether the person is or is not racists. So, it's a very complicated question.
There's the black capoerista who had to leave his passport at the front desk of a hotel before he could visit a guest's room.
There's the black student who speaks four langugages fluently, yet believes he cannot get a job in the tourist industry because he's not of "good appearance" the code phrase for too dark.
There's the young white man who believes that Brazil is a "racial democracy", and that if there's racism in Brazil, it's black racism. And he cites as evidence, an issue raised at the Congress. Some blacks in Salvador have argued that blacks should only have to pay half the price of whites to get tickets to a concert because blacks are generally poorer than are whites. The government declared such a scheme illegal.
Nilsson Oliveira, black Brazilian, supports the this two-tier pricing system:
Nilsson Oliveira, University Student
