Why the US and Brazil Should Talk About Race
June 25, 2015
The Shared Historical Legacies of Slavery and Institutionalized Racism
Why the US and Brazil Should Talk About Race
by EDWARD F. SHORE
On June 30, 2015, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will make her first trip to Washington D.C. She will meet with President Barack Obama at the White House almost two years after canceling a State Visit when reports surfaced that the N.S.A. had spied on the leftist leader’s phone calls. The two heads of state will discuss a range of topics, including climate change, energy, educational exchanges, science, and technology. Yet missing from the agenda is a disturbing issue that has confounded the two largest economies in the Americas: racial discrimination. Although the BRICS nation has advanced a number of public policies to redress racial inequality in recent years, the Obama administration has done little to stem the tide of a decades-long campaign waged by the right against the signature achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
Historical legacies of slavery and institutionalized racism have long tied Brazil and the United States together. Both were major players in the Atlantic slave trade. Whereas the U.S. imported an estimated 400,000 slaves, an astonishing five million African-born men, women, and children were imported to toil as slaves in Brazil between roughly 1600 and 1888. Activists in the United States and Brazil mobilized to demand civil rights and racial equality during the 1960s and 1970s. Although observers are quick to highlight their differences, namely that Jim Crow style segregation never materialized in Brazil where half of the nation’s 200 million people are afro-descendants, observers acknowledge a shared experience of discrimination on the basis of race.
For instance, a 2012 Latin American Bureau report disclosed that 70 percent of those living below the poverty line in Brazil were black. Afro-Brazilians earned roughly half of what their white counterparts earned whereas blacks in the U.S. earned 75 percent of what whites earned. Meanwhile, 18 percent of African Americans attended a four-year university in 2009 compared to only 6.6 percent of Afro-Brazilians. High school graduation rates diverged dramatically: 62 percent of black students in the United States graduated compared to less than 33 percent of black students in Brazil. At the same time, the criminalization of black bodies has plagued both countries. African Americans account for 40 percent of the nation’s 2.1 million male inmates. In Brazil, statistics regarding the nation’s 564,000 inmates are notoriously difficult to obtain, but observers maintain that the vast majority of its prison population are young, black, and poor.
Although racial disparities are similar, the two global powers have trended in opposite directions in one major area: the law. In recent years the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and criticized affirmative action in its 2013 ruling in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. On the other hand, three consecutive Brazilian presidents- Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002), a conservative, Lula da Silva (2002-2010), a progressive, and his Workers’ Party successor, Dilma Rousseff (2010-present), have enacted a range of affirmative action policies that have eclipsed both the scope and scale of their U.S. antecedents.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/25/why-the-us-and-brazil-should-talk-about-race/
