Berkley Center

In the United States, we are told that a “melting pot” society protects us, because in diversity we find acceptance. The logic is that people fear what they don’t know, so being exposed to a multitude of different cultures, languages, and religions would turn us all into more accepting human beings. There’s a lot of truth in that—for example, parts of the United States that are more diverse tend to be more liberal, especially about issues of gender, religious freedom, and race.

In Brazil, though, the reality is completely different. The “melting pot” quality of Brazilian society can’t even be put into question—walking around Rio de Janeiro, you can’t help noticing that not one Brazilian looks the same as the other. As I mentioned in my earlier article, there are significant minorities of second or third-generation Japanese immigrants, Arabs, Jews, people of African descent, Germans, Dutch, and the list goes on. A city like Salvador, the former capital of Brazil in the state of Bahia, perfectly illustrates this diversity: its population is 49 percent of African descent, 36 percent European, and 14 percent Native American. According to the “melting pot” theory, Brazil should be the single most tolerant and inclusive society on earth.

But, it’s not. The country’s self-identified Afro-Brazilian population is 106 million individuals strong, which makes it the world’s largest black population outside of Africa and the second largest after Nigeria. The power that such a large group of people should yield is immeasurable. And yet, when I arrived in the private Catholic university of Rio where I take my Portuguese classes, I had a grand total of one black professor, and she was what most people would term pardo, or light brown skin. The students were overwhelmingly white, and the waiting staff at the cafeteria overwhelmingly black. I saw this time and time again; the people flying on planes from Rio to Sao Paulo were mostly white, while those taking the 40 dollar buses a lot more diverse. Clearly, the country’s reputation for diversity doesn’t hold up to the real-life test of societal racism. Perhaps people aren’t scared of each other because of skin color, but they most certainly aren’t equal to one another. And if a white person doesn’t have the traditional prejudices we find in the United States in regards to their black co-citizens, I have talked to more than a few black Brazilians who will tell you that when they see a white police officer on the street, they instinctively change sidewalks.

I was drawn to the subject of race relations when I got to Brazil because I felt that it was one of their society’s great unanswered questions. It doesn’t take long for someone living here to understand that the default position, that of touting the multiethnic, multi-religious quality of Brazilian society and therefore its tolerance, does not reflect the reality of a complex, systemic racism that finds its roots in Portuguese colonization and slavery.

The not-often-publicized reality is that, from the start of the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, five million slaves were shipped here from Africa, which is 11 times more than to North America. The real statistics, those that you get to know once you become aware of the problem, are not the ones I cited earlier about Brazilian cities’ diverse racial makeup—the statistics that matter are the ones that tell us that black Brazilians account for 68 percent of all homicide victims, 62 percent of all people incarcerated nationwide, and that those ages 12 to 18 are almost three times more likely to get killed than their white counterparts.

I leave Brazil with a huge amount of love, affection, and admiration for a country that I knew nothing about six months ago. I have learned their cultural ways, learned their songs, their dances, their language even. But one thing I will never be able to do is go home and tell my family and friends that one of the most diverse countries in the world is devoid of racism. In fact, I will tell them that I have never been exposed to the kind of racism that made it so that, when I was robbed in the streets of Copacabana at the beginning of my semester program, the first assumption that every single one of my Brazilian friends made was that he was a preto or negro, a term that does not carry the negative connotations that it does in the United States (he was, in fact, white). Brazil needs to accept its race problem in order to begin correcting the huge injustice that has been done to a part of its population that built this country from the ground up and now deserves to be given the same chance at success as everyone else.