Racial divide still wide in Brazil

A man in a wheelchair gets a ride from a caregiver in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)

A flurry of new data released over the past week depict a Brazil that is still marred by gaping racial divides, 180 years after the end of slavery here. The findings will surely add more fuel to a growing race debate that has put the issue on the front burner and challenged long-held notions that insist racial mixing long ago eliminated racism in Brazil. Read my in-depth piece about the issue here.  It was part of a larger Miami Herald series on blacks in Latin America. CNN en Español is also running a series about the issue over the coming week.

First, the country's Applied Economics Research Institute found blacks, meaning pretos and pardos, or blacks and mixed-race Brazilians, will numerically surpass whites this year. In 1976, the proportion was 57.2 percent white and 40.1 percent black. Three decades later, that balance had grown to a near-even split at about 49 percent each.

Some speculate the growing black numbers have more to do with people feeling more comfortable identifying themselves to census takers as black rather than with an actual increase in the number of black Brazilians. A growing black consciousness movement is a big factor in the trend, proponents of this reading say.

The applied economics institute then looked at incomes across the racial spectrum and found Brazilian blacks earned on average 53 percent of what whites earned, $350 a month compared to $659 a month.

Blacks also took up a bigger share of the poorest-paying jobs, comprising 60 percent of agricultural workers, 58 percent of construction workers and 59 percent of domestic servants. They only made up 36 percent of better-paid financial services employees and 43 percent of industrial workers.

The institute's report, which you can read here in Portuguese, estimates Brazil won't reach racial parity  in incomes at least 32 years.

Another study by the polling firm Ibope backed up something I've noticed during my nearly three years here. In all my travels, I've practically never met or heard of any black Brazilian executives. The only exception was a seat mate on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Santiago, Chile, who worked for the local branch of Michelin, the French tire company.

Well, no wonder. The Ibope study found blacks comprise only 3.5 percent of executives in Brazil's 500 biggest companies, with black women making up less than .5 percent of executives. The same study found blacks make up 17 percent of managers and a quarter of other workers in those companies.

Brazilian sociologists say the problem is racial and social hierarchies hardly changed after the end of slavery in 1888 and that the same race-based social structures are still largely in place. By the way, Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

The applied economics institute backed up that reading this week with data showing Brazilian blacks were still concentrated in port areas where millions of slaves were brought into the country, cities such as São Luis, Salvador and Recife in the country's poor northeast and the old capital of Rio de Janeiro.

In other words, this 185 million-person country never experienced a migration of blacks to other regions like what happened in the United States in the early-20th century, when millions of African-Americans moved from southern to northern states after mechanized farming transformed southern U.S. agriculture.

African Americans achieved many of their social gains only after moving far away from the old plantations. That never happened in Brazil.

Brazilian blacks are fighting back, however, and have launched a black movement seeking to call attention to the problems. They've largely focused on two affirmative action laws that would guarantee spots for blacks in universities, public contracts and even in television shows and movies.

Although Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva supports the bills, they've been stuck in the Brazilian Congress for nearly four years now, and there's no telling when they'll be voted on. Even with the impasse, however, the bills have triggered intense debate, a rare occurrence in a country where race issues have historically been ignored, despite the damning numbers.

Comments

[Andrew Green]

Actually, Brazilian blacks were spread more widely across the country as slavery was pretty comprehensive. The drive to 'civilise' the country through European immigration displaced many however, resulting in 'white areas' of Brazil that did not exist before.