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and I suspect few took the time to read the entire article. It was a bit lengthy, so I understand.
But there was a significant difference between this post and the ones we normally read about Brazil's race issues. The writer pointed out specific steps Brazil had taken to finally deal with the effects of racism. Some were more successful than others, but it was good to see that things were changing, and that the government realised that they had a problem and needed to deal with it. In some ways, they are ahead of the USA in dealing with the slavery issue.
I have pointed out some of the changes that have taken place recently in Brazil as they confront the problem:
1. And then, in 2010, came a change that startled demographers. For the first time since the slavery era, there were more black and mixed-race Brazilians than white ones.
It’s a shift in self-identification. “You could say that what’s happening is not that Brazil is becoming a nation of blacks, but that it is admitting it is one,” says Mr. Soares, who is white.
2. The constitution adopted in 1988 awarded some descendants of former slaves title to the land they lived on. By 1996, there was a national human-rights action plan, and it included a directive on the need to compensate black people for slavery, although no plan for how to do it. Slowly, there began to be a public conversation about the legacy of slavery as more than just a range of skin tones and their corresponding adjectives.
3. But in 2004, UFBA introduced a new policy: 36 per cent of seats would now be reserved for black and mixed-race students. For years, black activists had been targeting the universities, as the ultimate symbols (and purveyors) of the elite, for a first effort at affirmative action. In 2002, university administrations began to adopt ad hoc strategies, reserving spots for non-white students. The quotas, as they are baldly called here, applied to every faculty, but they had an outsized impact on the prestigious schools of law, medicine and engineering, which, even in majority-black Bahia, had long graduated all-white classes, year after year.
4. Research at UFBA and other Brazilian universities has found that affirmative-action students do as well as or, in many cases, outperform their classmates. Dr. Vidal graduated at the top of his class and promptly began a residency in the family-health program in his old neighbourhood. The older women soon made peace with his hair. All the pregnant ladies began to seek him out, for his patience and that 1,000-watt smile.
“When he started, people were dubious – you heard it in the community – because he was black and young: Black patients had even more skepticism than white ones – they think white people have more capacity to study or learn,” Mônica Nascimento França, a 39-year-old teacher jittery with anxiety over an imminent first baby, confides one afternoon in the stuffy waiting room. “But you can see it in the kind of doctor he is, that he’s Afro-Brazilian and from this community – you know how much prejudice there is here. And he faced it.”
5. Brazil’s Black Bar Association had gathered about 100 people (all but two of them black) in a conference hall looking out over the harbour, and announced the launch of a “truth commission” to explore the history and repercussions of slavery in Brazil, and what redress might be made for the descendants of slavery.
At the meeting, Marcelo Dias was named to head the commission’s work in Rio; he called the initiative “the most important moment for Afro-Brazilians since the end of slavery.” From their seats on the dais, the new commissioners vowed to probe precisely which companies got rich on forced labour, and to dig deeply into the atrocities visited on the Africans who were brought here – details that have received little public airing. They said they would push the federal government to make their initiative a national effort, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concluded last year, that investigated decades of human-rights abuses during military rule in Brazil.
6. And yet broad-based reparations cannot be made in the form of straightforward monetary compensation. So his commission proposes they take the form a fund that invests in majority-black communities – new spending on hospitals, transport, schools, social services and job creation. And museums, more ambitious and official than that of Ms. Guimarães, with her living-room-based exposé of the slave graveyard: Brazil needs a genuine effort at telling an accurate story of slavery, Mr. Dias says, of making it public instead of paving it over.
7. In 2003, the federal government created the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality; it oversees the implementation of affirmative action and of anti-discrimination laws covering everything from hate speech (most frequently applied to racist fans at football games) to bias in hiring, housing and school enrolment. After universities began to adopt affirmative-action policies, the federal government moved to implement them for other institutions as well. Roughly 20 per cent of jobs in state governments, plus some federal institutions such as the diplomatic corps, are reserved for applicants who identify as black and mixed race.
In late June, the National Council of Justice, which manages judicial appointments, announced that, from now on, 20 per cent of seats on the bench would be reserved for black applicants – an apparently straightforward plan that crystallizes the challenges of trying to build diversity in the centres of power. But it is doubtful that there are enough black lawyers in the country to fill that many spots, even if they were all to apply. And, as with the university-entrance tests, the exam given to potential new judges is so difficult that, by the council’s own admission, the only people who pass it are those who can take years off to prepare.
8. In Brazil’s federal election last year, for example, one of the three candidates for president was a black woman, Marina Silva. She came close to winning.
But there was a significant difference between this post and the ones we normally read about Brazil's race issues. The writer pointed out specific steps Brazil had taken to finally deal with the effects of racism. Some were more successful than others, but it was good to see that things were changing, and that the government realised that they had a problem and needed to deal with it. In some ways, they are ahead of the USA in dealing with the slavery issue.
I have pointed out some of the changes that have taken place recently in Brazil as they confront the problem:
1. And then, in 2010, came a change that startled demographers. For the first time since the slavery era, there were more black and mixed-race Brazilians than white ones.
It’s a shift in self-identification. “You could say that what’s happening is not that Brazil is becoming a nation of blacks, but that it is admitting it is one,” says Mr. Soares, who is white.
2. The constitution adopted in 1988 awarded some descendants of former slaves title to the land they lived on. By 1996, there was a national human-rights action plan, and it included a directive on the need to compensate black people for slavery, although no plan for how to do it. Slowly, there began to be a public conversation about the legacy of slavery as more than just a range of skin tones and their corresponding adjectives.
3. But in 2004, UFBA introduced a new policy: 36 per cent of seats would now be reserved for black and mixed-race students. For years, black activists had been targeting the universities, as the ultimate symbols (and purveyors) of the elite, for a first effort at affirmative action. In 2002, university administrations began to adopt ad hoc strategies, reserving spots for non-white students. The quotas, as they are baldly called here, applied to every faculty, but they had an outsized impact on the prestigious schools of law, medicine and engineering, which, even in majority-black Bahia, had long graduated all-white classes, year after year.
4. Research at UFBA and other Brazilian universities has found that affirmative-action students do as well as or, in many cases, outperform their classmates. Dr. Vidal graduated at the top of his class and promptly began a residency in the family-health program in his old neighbourhood. The older women soon made peace with his hair. All the pregnant ladies began to seek him out, for his patience and that 1,000-watt smile.
“When he started, people were dubious – you heard it in the community – because he was black and young: Black patients had even more skepticism than white ones – they think white people have more capacity to study or learn,” Mônica Nascimento França, a 39-year-old teacher jittery with anxiety over an imminent first baby, confides one afternoon in the stuffy waiting room. “But you can see it in the kind of doctor he is, that he’s Afro-Brazilian and from this community – you know how much prejudice there is here. And he faced it.”
5. Brazil’s Black Bar Association had gathered about 100 people (all but two of them black) in a conference hall looking out over the harbour, and announced the launch of a “truth commission” to explore the history and repercussions of slavery in Brazil, and what redress might be made for the descendants of slavery.
At the meeting, Marcelo Dias was named to head the commission’s work in Rio; he called the initiative “the most important moment for Afro-Brazilians since the end of slavery.” From their seats on the dais, the new commissioners vowed to probe precisely which companies got rich on forced labour, and to dig deeply into the atrocities visited on the Africans who were brought here – details that have received little public airing. They said they would push the federal government to make their initiative a national effort, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concluded last year, that investigated decades of human-rights abuses during military rule in Brazil.
6. And yet broad-based reparations cannot be made in the form of straightforward monetary compensation. So his commission proposes they take the form a fund that invests in majority-black communities – new spending on hospitals, transport, schools, social services and job creation. And museums, more ambitious and official than that of Ms. Guimarães, with her living-room-based exposé of the slave graveyard: Brazil needs a genuine effort at telling an accurate story of slavery, Mr. Dias says, of making it public instead of paving it over.
7. In 2003, the federal government created the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality; it oversees the implementation of affirmative action and of anti-discrimination laws covering everything from hate speech (most frequently applied to racist fans at football games) to bias in hiring, housing and school enrolment. After universities began to adopt affirmative-action policies, the federal government moved to implement them for other institutions as well. Roughly 20 per cent of jobs in state governments, plus some federal institutions such as the diplomatic corps, are reserved for applicants who identify as black and mixed race.
In late June, the National Council of Justice, which manages judicial appointments, announced that, from now on, 20 per cent of seats on the bench would be reserved for black applicants – an apparently straightforward plan that crystallizes the challenges of trying to build diversity in the centres of power. But it is doubtful that there are enough black lawyers in the country to fill that many spots, even if they were all to apply. And, as with the university-entrance tests, the exam given to potential new judges is so difficult that, by the council’s own admission, the only people who pass it are those who can take years off to prepare.
8. In Brazil’s federal election last year, for example, one of the three candidates for president was a black woman, Marina Silva. She came close to winning.
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