Brasil: The Color Of Pride

 

BRAZIL

The Color of Pride

Brazilians of African descent became the majority racial group in their country almost a decade ago.

Today, many refer to Brazil as a “post-racial” society. There is a tradition of elites encouraging folks of different skin tones to intermarry, for example. Officials in the administration of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro have denied that racism exists in Brazil.

But it would be wrong to think that Brazil has somehow surmounted all the challenges that racial differences can help engender, noted Cherwell, the student newspaper at Oxford University.

Less than a quarter of the lower house of the Brazilian Congress is Black, for example, according to Reuters. Last year, the country adopted rules to funnel more funding and airtime to Black candidates for office in 2022 to change the situation.

In response, Black resistance to racism and prejudice in Brazil is on the rise. Communities called “quilombo,” for instance, an African term referring to fugitive slave groups formed before slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, are springing up throughout the country, Time wrote.

A host of recent municipal elections won by candidates of color suggest that Black and mixed-race politicians were also taking advantage of the demographic shifts and are seeking to capitalize on the new rules at the ballot box, added the Wall Street Journal.

Ironically, the new rules might have led more than 42,000 incumbent Brazilian politicians who ran for office last year to change their racial identification to Black from another identity, usually white, in 2016, said University of Florida Political Scientist Andrew Janusz in the Conversation.

The statistics raise questions about whether these now-Black politicians understand the group whose identity they now claim to share, Janusz argued. Today, Black Brazilians are more likely to be killed in police encounters than their white compatriots. They are more likely to die from the coronavirus. The shutdown of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival due to the pandemic has been a blow to the Afro-Brazilian community, too, both financially and emotionally, Conde Nast Traveler wrote.

But some Brazilians, after viewing themselves as mixed race, realized only recently that they, in fact, were Black after watching the racial tensions escalate in the US over the past year. “I didn’t think I was Black,” local politician José Antônio Gomes told the Washington Post. “But now we have more courage to see ourselves that way.”

Next year’s presidential election will give voters a chance to decide whose views on race they prefer – those of Bolsonaro’s view or his critics. The number of votes, not the color of those who cast ballots, will decide who wins.