Festival Latinidades: racism still alive in Brazil and US

Even after civil rights were passed, racism can still be found at several levels of Brazilian and American societies, according to US activist, professor and philosopher Angela Davis. “Even though Brazil has been proclaimed a racial democracy, there are serious [racism] problems, which are connected with economy, society and politics,” she said during a press conference at the 2014 Festival Latinidades: Griots of the Black Diaspora, which is scheduled to end on July 28, in Brasília.

In Davis’s opinion, the same phenomenon happens in the US. “The kind of racism you have after [the passage of civil rights] is harder to fight than it was before.” She mentions the jail system and the police, which, in both countries, perpetuate discrimination. “In the US, as in Brazil, race really matters when it comes to determining who gets to get an education and who gets to spend their life behind bars.”

In Brazil, the 2014 Violence Map shows that the main victims are male black youths. They account for 53.4 percent of the homicides in the country. In the university, the picture is different, reports the 2012 Higher Education Census. The survey reveals that, out of the 7 million students, 187 thousand are black and 746 thousand mulatto, which represents 13.3 percent of the total amount.

“There has to be a change in all the racist institutions we have, which, in the case of the genocide of the black population, is political,” Ana Maria Gonçalves, a black writer from Minas Gerais, author of the awarded novel “Um Defeito de Cor” (A Color Defect) “The government must create more humanitarian policies and courses on how to deal with racism inside the institutions,” the novelist added.

Racism is also found among children, at school. Costa Rican writer Shirley Campbell lives in a prestigious neighborhood in the South Lake region in Brasília. When she moved to Brazil’s capital city, she enrolled her 4-year-old daughter in a school near her home. “She asked what it meant to be black. I felt scared. But I answered that it meant to be like us. She answered me: ‘I don’t want to be black, I want to be like the girls from my class.’”

The writer went on to say that she was impressed because she knew that, in Brazil, the majority of the population is black (50.7 percent). “Where are all the black people?” Campbell asks. She answers her own question: “I know where the blacks from the South Lake are. They’re at the bus stops, they’re the swimming pool cleaners, they’re the ones working in homes.”

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira