Brasil ad the US pt 2
Feature by Clare Bakota republished with permission from her blog
Part Two:
Brazil and the United States: A World Apart?
I have lived Brazil for ten years and in the United States for ten years. The two countries, and the similarities and contrasts between them, constitute the majority of my childhood and young adulthood. The differences between the two countries are not to be understated. The smell of red iron-rich earth, the swollen bellies, the taste of freshly ground sugar cane, and the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo have no correlation to my years in the United States. But scratch a layer deeper and there are similarities that run through these countries from the times of post-colonial genocide and slave plantations to contemporary racial divides.
Brazil and the United States are both former slave-owning countries whose first economies were built upon plantations and cash crops. The key difference between the two being that Brazilian plantation owners did not separate slave families, and they allowed capoeira (a Brazilian fight-dance, game, and martial art created by enslaved Africans during the 19th Century), Candomblé (an African religion), and other gems of Afro-Brazilian culture to survive. In the United States, slave families were separated and traditional African languages and cultures were effectively extinguished.
As former slave-owning, plantation-based economies, Brazil and the United States are faced with many of the same hurdles. Structural and institutional racism dating back to pre-emancipation times plague both countries and hinder the advancement of racial equality.
Brazil has an extremely poor human and civil rights record, with entire sections of its population, mostly poor and Black, being unaccounted for. The structural racism in Brazil manifests itself on every level. Medical care, food, housing and education are just a few of the basic needs that many Black Brazilian citizens live without. Despite of this, racism in Brazil is, for many, a null subject. If you ask a Brazilian if they are racist, they will cluck and wave their finger at you, saying: “We are Brazilian, It is you Americans who are racist.” But if you look at the statistics, poor Blacks are dying in disproportionate numbers, and the infant mortality rates among Black Brazilians are staggering. Life for poor Blacks in Northern Brazil is dismally similar to living under slave rule, the plantation owners having been replaced by powerful landowners.
The denial of racism also occurs, in a very different way, in the United States. The movement of political correctness gave us guidelines as to how to speak about race, as though speaking about race in a certain way would nullify its detrimental affects. I view the “color-blind” argument coming from both Brazilians and Americans as dangerous because it closes the door on discussions and denies the very real affect that racism has on people of color.
Katrina and its aftermath exposed the underbelly of structural and institutional racism in the United States. For the first time in Modern History, the United States was seen as being incapable of caring for its own population. The international community offered aid, usually reserved for Third World countries, that was ultimately not accepted, despite the overwhelming need.
Katrina lay bare what many living in the United States already recognized—we lived in a racially divided country. If a society extends social support and civil rights to one group and not to another, it is setting itself up for violence and upheaval. History has proved this to be true again and again, from the French Revolution, to the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The increasing levels of violence in the United States and Brazil are no exception.
Further, in both Brazil and the United States, racism, exclusion, and neglect are equivalent to a cocktail for violence. Brazil is an extremely volatile country. I visited Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the last bout of police and gang violence. The country was on the verge of mass civil disorder. Buses were being blown up in broad daylight and gunfights were breaking out on main highways during rush hour. It seemed that all the years of mismanagement, structural and institutional racism, and societal neglect were coming to a head.
The images I saw on TV during my time in Brazil were unnervingly similar to the images of violence that followed Katrina. Social exclusion creates desperation, and desperation in turn creates violence. As poignantly stated by Marcus Camacho, the Brazilian inmate and organizer of the prison riots and gang violence that plunged Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo into chaos, “if [needs of the people] been heard and addressed within the boundaries of the constitution and the law, then none of this [violence] would have happened.”
The similarities between Brazilian and American society have existed since their formation. But the abysmal fall into bureaucratic inaction and neglect that occurred in the wake of Katrina is deeply unsettling. As someone who has lived almost half my life in Brazil, I am deeply concerned. Resembling Brazil in terms of music, culture, and food would be fine. Resembling its disastrously ineffective bureaucracy, its racial exclusion, its militarization, criminalization of the poor and social neglect is not.
