"What strikes you, your racism or me?" one of the female demonstrators wrote on her chest during the protest timed to coincide with Rio Fashion Week. "If we are buying clothes, why can't we parade in the (fashion) shows," asked a 15-year-old model taking part in the protest. "Does that mean that only white women can sell and the rest of us can only buy?" "Claiming to showcase Brazilian fashion without the real Brazilians amounts to showing Brazilian fashion (only) with white models," said Jose Flores, a 25-yearold former model who now works in advertising.
In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be "high yellow" (i.e., of very light skin); one can be "red" (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was "Detroit Red"); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, "Smokey." In fact, the famous (and "high yellow") Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends - sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny. The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes "pass," i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country "passing is a national institution." So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on "passing," she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be." "It was a rough time," she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color."
Blacks comprise almost half of the country's population, but only 2.2 percent of its college community is Black. Blacks hold none of Brazil's top ministerial positions in government. More than two-thirds of Brazil's poor are Black and whites earn double what Blacks earn.
History shows close to two million enslaved Africans were taken to South America. A great number of them were taken to Bahia, Brazil, to work on the sugar cane plantations. [Dionisio] has hope for the future of Brazilian Blacks. "If America can elect a Black president, I know that our time will one day come when a Black Brazilian will look after the wellbeing of his or her people. But at the way things are in Brazil, it is only through education that we will one day be equal to the whites, if you know what I mean." At this point, it sounded as if Dionisio was engaged in a monologue. "But many children dream of one day being like Pele, our greatest football star," he continued as he gazed in the distance, his eyes resting on the humming bird doing battle with the sweet nectar. The mention of Pele changed the contour of his face and I could see the veins in his face clearly showing. "Most of our people have let us down. Most, like Pele, can be considered Black, but we have a saying here that 'You are a Black person with a white soul. We say that of Black leaders and football celebrities who do not support any Black agenda."
The carnival image of racial harmony When Brazil became a democracy in 1988, the new constitution specified that they should be given land. But in practice, only a handful have. The local priest in Camburi, Father [Alexander Coelho], urges villagers to unite to demand land. He says that Brazil has a race problem which it is only starting to face up to. "Three hundred years of slavery, 300 hundred years of submission - it's hard to teach people to change that mindset," he says. "In Brazil, there was no discussion about race ... there was a pseudo-equality. When we started to talk about it, we were accused of bringing racism to Brazil," he argues.
The issue at hand was brought to our attention by Brazilian activist Ivanir dos Santos - the executive secretary of an organization called CEAP (Center for the Articulation of Outcast Populations) who came to our attention recently to protest a song released by Sony Music/Brazil artist Tiririca called "Look at Her Hair." "It was something for the children ... a carnival song, kind of a joke," a spokesperson for Sony Music/Brazil, Michele Rumchinsky, said of the record. The average White man or woman in Brazil, a nation of 80 million people of African descent that has the world's second-largest population of people of African descent outside of Nigeria - makes three times what the average Afro-Brazilian earns, although Afro-Brazilians make up 44 percent of the nation's population.
