America And Brazil: A Cultural Comparison in Three Parts
Featured Guest Blogger Clare Bakota!
Part One:
Third World Country: How America Fits the Bill
When one enters São Paulo, Brazil from the international airport, they are first struck by how technologically advanced the country is—the nice cars, flashy billboards, and innovative energy technologies are all impressive. Then, in one jarring moment, the airport bus turns into the middle of a slum. Houses made of cardboard, children playing barefoot at the edge of the highway, and an open sewer running through the haphazard jumble of make-shift houses all serve to remind you that, yes, Brazil is still a Third World country. The bizarre juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty is something that is sadly characteristic of Brazil.
In countries like Brazil, corruption and racial inequality run so deep that doing social work can feel a bit like jumping into quicksand. Each problem solved brings up a whole new set of problems, and it can be overwhelming.
During the years I did social work in South America I asked myself again and again why is it that a country like Uruguay, with shared borders and a similar ethnic population to Brazil, somehow managed to get by without the horrific violence and desperation that plague many Brazilian cities.
The best explanation I can come up with is that it all boils down to social inclusion: a sense of shared identity, social responsibility, and a sense that the government is working for the people, and not against them. A society with a strong sense of collective identity and social inclusion tends to be more stable and peaceful than one that lacks these characteristics. Of the countries I know that have experienced social unrest, there is a divide in the population—racial, ethnic, economic, or political. If someone is seen as being “poor” before being Brazilian, or “Black” before being American, it creates a fractured and volatile society.
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was in Buenos Aires. I stood in a crowded cafe and watched as the images unfolded on the TV. People kept shaking their heads in disbelief: “How could this be happening in the United States? It looks like a Third World country!”
A few weeks later, I was on the street speaking to a refugee from Sierra Leone about why he had come to Buenos Aires. I asked if he ever thought about going to the United States, to which he quickly and adamantly replied: “Never! It is much too dangerous!” Coming from someone who escaped one of the most violence-ridden places on earth, it did not say much about our image abroad.
What was it about the images of Katrina that struck a chord with people in the Third World? What was it about Katrina that made the United States suddenly go from being viewed as a First World to a Third World country?
Images of starving children in Africa, gun-pocked favelas (shanty towns) in Brazil, sprawling slums in Central America—all of these have one thing in common: They are images of people who have been left behind. They are images of extreme social exclusion.
Many upper-class Brazilians do not even view the lower classes as being completely human, much less equal. “They don’t think like us” or “they don’t feel like us” being the rationale for blatant inequalities. The dehumanizing of poor and marginalized communities is what defines a country as being Third World. It is not a lack of wealth that creates Third World situations, but rather a lack of wealth distribution. And this lack of distribution goes hand in hand with dehumanization and social exclusion. It is much easier to live with suffering and poverty if you see the sufferers as less human and, therefore, less deserving than you.
This brings me back to Katrina. As I watched the news, I grimaced every time I heard the word “refugees” being used to refer to U.S. citizens. The media was depicting the victims, who were mostly Black, as being outsiders and not American. The victims were not being treated, referred to, or respected as citizens. They had become “unrequited masses.” They had become foreigners in their own country.
However, since I saw the coverage from abroad, everything that was meant to further the victims of Katrina from the general American populous, had the opposite effect. Everything that was so ugly about that time: the racism, the exclusion, the neglect and systematic violence, was all lumped together into one thing: The United States. Unlike the U.S. media, for those watching overseas, it was not people of color that had been criminalized; it was the U.S. government’s response and gaping lack of social services that were seen as being the “criminals.”
It is hard for us as Americans to fully understand just how detrimental the mismanagement of the Katrina relief effort has been to our image abroad. If I had been in the United States when Katrina hit, it would have been shocking, frustrating, and deeply saddening, but it would have been different. The distance I had, and the insight I gleaned from the Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan take on Katrina, made me realize just how much our country has slipped.
