Slavery Ended in 1888 : Brazil: No Equality for Blacks Yet

The doorman intercepted Geusa Maria Cardoso, 21, as she returned to her apartment building one day in March. Use the service entrance, he ordered.

Cardoso is mulata, as a woman of mixed-race is called in Brazil. Her complexion reflects her African ancestry, and it caught the doorman’s eye that day. He explained later that he thought she was a servant.

“She is not a servant,” protested Celia Luz, Cardoso’s white foster mother, “and even if she were, this discrimination is unacceptable.”

The incident was one of several involving racial discrimination that have been reported lately in the Brazilian press. Race relations are under the spotlight this year as Brazil looks back on a century since the abolition of slavery here in 1888.

Rich in African Heritage

From the rhythm of its famous samba music to the rites of its widespread Umbanda religion, Brazilian culture is rich in African heritage. By most estimates, at least half of Brazil’s 140 million people are of African ancestors, and the country prides itself on its so-called “racial democracy.” Interracial marriages are common, and race riots are unheard of.

Yet racism and racial discrimination are widespread. Blacks and mulatos, in comparison to Brazilian whites, are stuck with lower paying jobs, educational disadvantages and inferior social status.

All well-appointed apartment buildings have two sets of doors and elevators, one for “service,” the other “social.” No sign says so, but “social” often means “whites only.”

That unspoken code is typical of the kind of subtle but ingrained racial inequity that pervades Brazilian society, social scientists say.

Geusa Cardoso and her foster family have lived in their middle-class condominium building for five years, and the doorman knows her by sight. When he barred her from the “social” entrance last month, he said, he was following the orders of the condominium association’s new president.

‘I Came Home Crying’

Cardoso said she insisted on entering the main door until the doorman threatened to hit her.

“I went in the service entrance,” she said in an interview. “I came home crying.”

A growing but still largely powerless movement of black activists is searching for ways to attack racial bias in Brazil and push for greater black equality. Caetana Damasceno, an anthropologist of mixed race who has studied the movement, said there are about 600 black rights organizations in the country.

Damasceno said that most of the groups are local, and the movement lacks strong national direction and goals. Part of its problem is the absence of a clearly identifiable target, she said: “It doesn’t have an apartheid to confront.”

Brazil is full of examples of racial tolerance and mixing. Whites and blacks live together in working-class neighborhoods, cheer together in soccer stadiums, and dance together in carnival parades.

Most Brazilians of mixed race do not consider themselves black; many consider themselves white, and the society tends to overlook subtle forms of discrimination.

Awareness of racial problems has increased in the past decade, however, and this year is turning into an occasion for “racial mobilization,” Damasceno said.

“Nineteen eighty-eight is a peak period in the process of raising consciousness,” she said. “It is a privileged moment.”

Black Institute

Perhaps the leading organization in the black movement is the Rio-based Institute for Research on Black Cultures, which claims to have 1,400 members. The institute’s president is Januario Garcia, 44, a tall and angular man with expressive brown eyes and a gray goatee.

The great-grandson of slaves, Garcia grew up as a street urchin and became a successful photographer. Sitting at his small desk in the institute’s shabby downtown offices, he said he regards Brazilian racism as a tool used by the country’s white ruling class to dominate the poor majority.

“In this country, we have racism as an ideology of domination,” he said. “We have a whole process for keeping the black under a regime of constant domination.”

Blatant racism is rare in Brazilian public life, but Garcia and others say that subtle racial discrimination is rampant.

Policemen who see blacks in upper-class neighborhoods often demand to see a work document showing current employment.

‘Detained on Suspicion’

“If the police ask for mine and I don’t have it, I am detained on suspicion,” Garcia said. “There is no difference between that and the pass system of South Africa.”

Blacks driving cars also are often stopped.

“Normally at night, I get stopped by the police to identify the car, to see if the car is mine,” Garcia said. “The black does not yet have the status to own a car, and since he doesn’t have the status, he is under suspicion until he proves he didn’t steal it.”

Better restaurants often set a small quota of tables available for black customers. If a black couple arrives after the quota has been filled, it is told that all empty tables are reserved, Garcia said.

“If that couple complains of racial discrimination, they show the couple that there are blacks eating in the restaurant,” he said.

Help-wanted advertisements often ask for candidates with “good appearance.” Blacks are able to decode that as “whites only.”

Garcia said most organizations in the Brazilian black movement are less than 5 years old. For 21 years, from 1964 to 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military government that took a dim view of social activism.

Arrest of Militants

“During the dictatorship, to talk of racism meant breaking an article of the state security law,” he said.

Many black militants were arrested. Garcia spent six months in jail in 1968 and 1969.

S.O.S. Racism, a project within Garcia’s institute, has been increasingly active during the past four years in investigating and publicizing cases of racial discrimination.

Wilson Prudente, an S.O.S. worker, said the unit receives an average of two or three complaints a day, many against private schools for excluding black students, against employers for paying blacks less or passing them over for promotions, and against apartment buildings for barring blacks from main entrances and elevators.

Racial discrimination in Brazil has been prohibited as a misdemeanor since 1951. But Prudente said cases are difficult to prove because Brazilian society rarely admits that racism exists, “and even when it admits it, the law against racial discrimination is very fragile.”

In an extremely rare exception, a Copacabana discotheque named Help was ordered to close for two days in 1986 after a doorman refused entry to a black woman.

Often, Prudente said, those who complain of racial discrimination end up being punished themselves. Six black policewomen who publicly complained about being transferred from their jobs at Rio’s international airport last December have since been persecuted by their superiors, according to Prudente.

Attention of Press

The policewomen and S.O.S. said that the six were transferred because authorities wanted officers at the airport who would present the image of a white country to foreign visitors. Manoel dos Santos Filho, the state police chief, said in a written statement that the transfers were “based on need to have police at the airport who dominate other languages.” One of the black policewomen who was transferred, however, spoke three languages, S.O.S. said. After the Brazilian press publicized the case, the six black officers were returned to the airport, but later they were quietly transferred out again.

“They are being watched carefully, persecuted, in the police stations,” Prudente said. “They are really being encouraged to leave the police force because of the complaints they made.”

Prudente and other black activists say job discrimination against blacks is widespread. They cite figures from a study published in 1985 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics:

-- The best-paid 10% of black Brazilians earn only 24% of what the best-paid whites make. In factory and farm jobs, the average salary for black laborers is only 60% of what white workers are paid.

-- Nearly one-fourth of all whites work at jobs not requiring manual labor, compared to less than 5% of black workers. Only 1.2% of blacks are high-level professionals or executives, while 9% of whites are.

Evidence of Discrimination

Newer evidence of racial discrimination in Brazil has come from an opinion survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis. Of more than 800 persons interviewed in 408 households, 89% said racial discrimination exists in Brazil.

Nevertheless, only one-third of the blacks and mulatos interviewed said they had suffered discrimination. Carla Teixeira, who helped coordinate the survey, said that low percentage may be explained in part by hurt feelings and embarrassment.

“I think it is a mechanism to not acknowledge one’s own painful experience,” Teixeira said.

Of those who said they had suffered discrimination, 17% said they had been insulted or offended because of their race, 15% said they had been refused entry somewhere, 11% said they had been turned down for jobs, promotions or better pay, and 9% said they their race had become an obstacle to dating or marriage.

The survey also confirmed what social scientists say is a typical Brazilian attitude: Many blacks and persons of mixed race do not acknowledge their own color. More than 30% “whitened” their classification from black to mulato or mulato to white.

“There is a desire to whiten,” said Teixeira. “The image of blackness is so devaluated here that the desire exists.”

Slaves Once a Majority

The first African slaves came to Brazil in the early 1500s with Portuguese colonizers. By the middle of the 1600s, slaves were the majority of the Brazilian population. And by the middle of the 1800s, when the slave trade ended, an estimated total of more than 3.5 million slaves had arrived, six times the number that entered the United States.

Abolition came in 1888 after many plantation owners found that it was more economical to employ free laborers at low wages than to maintain slaves. By then, several Brazilian provinces had abolished slavery within their borders, and the army refused to pursue runaway slaves.

Times were changing rapidly. The imperial government was overthrown by coup in 1889. Leading Brazilians visualized their country’s future as a modern republic, democratic and white.

According to a widely accepted theory at the time, allegedly stronger white characteristics would predominate over black traits as the races mixed. Partly to speed this “whitening” process, Brazil opened its ports to a wave of European immigrants, who competed with the freed slaves for jobs.

Unlike the biracial system of the United States, where anyone of African descent was classified as black, Brazilian blackness was a matter of degree. As a result, discrimination and segregation were less rigid than in the United States.

Notion of Democracy

Professional or economic success could even give a black person the status of a mixed-race person or a mixed-race person the status of a white person. “Money whitens,” a popular adage said.

That kind of tolerance and mobility, though limited, has bolstered the notion of racial democracy in Brazil.

“That ideology of ‘whitening’ even keeps people from seeing discrimination,” said sociologist Yvonne Alves Velho. Carlos Hasenbalg, an Argentine-born sociologist, agreed.

“For a long time, Brazil always looked at itself in the mirror of the United States and said, ‘We are better,’ ” Hasenbalg said. Until the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, he said, the favorable comparison was valid, but it no longer is.

“Change in the United States was rapid,” he said. “Here, change has been very slow.”

One barrier to change has been widespread acceptance by Brazilian blacks of the notion of white superiority.

“The black himself is racist toward the black,” said Muniz Sodre, a mulato who heads the School of Communications at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

In Brazilian schools, blacks still learn little of their race’s contribution to national history. School texts and curriculum show the black people in history as passive or lazy, according to Celma Vieira, a black historian.

‘Don’t Do That’

Vieira said that teachers who try to raise racial consciousness and instill students with black pride are often told by their superiors, “Don’t do that, we don’t want that.”

Some blacks and mulatos have attained positions of prominence in Brazilian society: Pele, the soccer king; Gilberto Gil and other popular singers, and Roman Catholic Archbishop Lucas Moreira Neves of Salvador.

But their almost total absence in the upper echelons of government is notable. The navy officer corps and the diplomatic service are notoriously lily-white. Brazil’s congress has seven blacks among its 559 members.

The congress is writing a new constitution for Brazil that will make racial discrimination a crime, rather than a misdemeanor, for the first time.

Black militants know that constitutional provisions will not by themselves eliminate racial discrimination in Brazil. They put more stock in their own growing campaign.

Current efforts are focused on the May 13 centennial of abolition. Interest in the centennial has opened increased space in Brazilian news media for the discussion of racial problems and the appreciation of black contributions to Brazilian society and culture.

Controversy Revived

It has also revived a controversy over the abolition law itself, which was signed by Emperor Pedro II’s daughter, Princess Isabel. Many black leaders charge that abolition came only because slavery was no longer economically viable and that little progress has been made in race relations during the 100 years since 1888.

The pre-Lenten carnival, one of Brazil’s greatest cultural traditions, throbs to the beat of African drums. But impoverished blacks and mulatos, who form the core of many carnival clubs, often go hungry to pay for the elaborate costumes they wear in the parade.

Rarely in the past did the lyrical themes of carnival samba songs touch on the problems of race. This year, however, several clubs used the centennial of abolition as a vehicle for samba songs of protest.

Mangueira, a leading club in Rio, set the new tone with its theme song, “100 Years of Freedom--Reality or Illusion?”:

Today, facing reality,

Where is freedom?

Where is the freedom that no one

has seen.

My son,

Do not forget that the black man

also built

The riches of our Brazil.

Ask the Creator

Who painted this watercolor

Free of the slaver’s whip

But imprisoned in the misery of a

shantytown.