Brazil Grappling With Racism

Saturday September 1 3:46 PM ET




By PETER MUELLO, Associated Press Writer


RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - In the 1994 presidential campaign, candidate Fernando Henrique Cardoso used a popular phrase to refer to his African ancestry. ``I have one foot in the kitchen,'' he said with a laugh. Brazilians knew what he meant - menial workers are overwhelmingly black - but despite some scattered complaints that the remark smacked of racism, few saw anything wrong with it. Cardoso, who is light-skinned and considered part of the white elite, won the election.



The idea that it's a ``racial democracy'' has long been one of Brazil's most cherished myths. But as it participates in the U.N. conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, the government is having to deal with a problem back home. Although Afro-Brazilians make up nearly half the population of 170 million, they make up 63 percent of the nation's poor and less than 16 percent of graduating university students last year, according to government figures.



The illiteracy rate for Afro-Brazilians is 26 percent, compared to 10 percent for whites. In the job market, things aren't much better. A black man earns on average 48 percent less than his white counterpart in the same job, according to the Sao Paulo State Socio-Economic Research Foundation, which monitors labor statistics.



Although racial discrimination is a crime, help-wanted ads often require ``good appearance'' - which is widely taken as code for white. ``Poverty in Brazil has a color,'' read an opinion article this week in the financial daily Gazeta Mercantil, considered Brazil's Wall Street Journal. ``From the racial viewpoint, Brazil and the USA are different - there, whites and blacks are equal but live separately; here, they are together but unequal.''



While soccer player Pele and pop star Gilberto Gil may be Brazil's multiracial face to the world, outside of sports and entertainment Afro-Brazilians find few opportunities. In Congress, only 12 of the 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies and two of the 81 senators are of African ancestry. None of Cardoso's cabinet ministers is black, and Afro-Brazilians are rare in top corporate or financial posts. In the Brazilian delegation to the Durban conference, members of human rights groups are pushing for a commitment to concrete affirmative action policies.



One idea is to set quotas for Afro-Brazilians in public universities. A recent survey revealed that only 12 of the University of Brasilia's 1,400 professors and 80 of its 18,216 undergraduate students are Afro-Brazilians, political science professor David Fleischer said. The university plans to reserve one-fifth of its entrance slots - 800 a year- for black and mixed-race students in 2002, he said.



However, Education Minister Paulo Renato Souza opposes quotas for all universities. He says Brazil will seek $10 million from the Inter-American Development Bank to fund groups that offer special courses to train Afro-Brazilians for Brazil's college entrance examination.



Not good enough, some critics say. ``A policy of racial quotas for blacks isn't ideal, but it becomes necessary as nothing else now exists to put blacks and whites on equal footing,'' said Ivanir dos Santos, a leading rights activist and head of the Outcast Coordination Center. ``It's time to create mechanisms for compensation.''



But black pride has not taken root in Brazil outside of African-culture centers like Salvador, the nation's colonial-era capital. Many Afro-Brazilians simply deny they are black - a 1998 census found more than 300 descriptions for skin color, including ``cinnamon,'' ``coffee-with-milk,'' ``blue,'' even ``encardido,'' the Portuguese word for ``filthy.''



Still, some see progress in the simple recognition that racism exists in Brazil. ``We always refused to discuss this question because we said we didn't have this problem,'' said Roberto Martins, head of the government-run Applied Economic Research Institute. ``Now the debate has begun.''