The mythology of racial democracy in Brazil

June 22, 2015Brazil Institute Leave a comment

Ana Lucia Araujo – Open Democracy, 6/22/2015

Brazil’s government has taken important steps to combat racial inequalities over the past two decades. Afro-Brazilian populations nevertheless remain socially and economically excluded, continuing patterns that began with legal slavery.

Brazil has been in the news a great deal of late, especially in association with the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The most popular images involve football, carnival, samba, sunny beaches, and tanned women in bikinis. Less well known is the history of slavery and racism, which continues to have a profound impact upon Brazilian society.

Brazil has the dubious distinction of having imported the largest number of enslaved Africans—more than five million—of all countries of the Americas. The slave trade from Africa to Brazil was outlawed in 1831, but an illegal trade continued until 1851 before being outlawed for a second time. In contrast, legal slavery persisted until 1888, making Brazil the last country to abolish slavery in the western hemisphere. Today, 53 percent of the Brazilian population self-identify as black or pardo (brown, or mixed race). These terms as established by the Census refer to colour and not ancestry.

Brazil’s ‘Quilombo’ Movement May Be The World’s Largest Slavery Reparations Program

July 11, 2014Brazil Institute Leave a comment

Roque Planas – Huffington Post, 7/10/2014

When Luiz Pinto was growing up, his parents wouldn’t let the family talk about slavery. The issue raised ugly memories.

Pinto’s grandmother was born into slavery. She threw herself into a river before Pinto was born, taking her own life after the son of a wealthy, white landowner raped her. The subjects of slavery and racism became taboo in the Pinto household, a sprawling set of orange brick homes perched on a hilltop where Rio de Janeiro’s famed statue of Christ the Redeemer is visible in the distance through the trees.

“I only knew her from photographs,” says Pinto, a 72-year-old samba musician.

Rio’s race to future intersects slave past

March 10, 2014Brazil Institute Leave a comment

Simon Romero – The New York Times, 3/8/2014

Sailing from the Angolan coast across the Atlantic, the slave ships docked here in the 19th century at the huge stone wharf, delivering their human cargo to the “fattening houses” on Valongo Street. Foreign chroniclers described the depravity in the teeming slave market, including so-called boutiques selling emaciated and diseased African children.

The newly arrived slaves who died before they even started toiling in Brazil’s mines were hauled to a mass grave nearby, their corpses left to decay amid piles of garbage. As imperial plantations flourished, diggers at the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos — Cemetery of New Blacks — crushed the bones of the dead, making way for thousands of new cadavers.

Now, with construction crews tearing apart areas of Rio de Janeiro in the building spree ahead of this year’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, stunning archaeological discoveries around the work sites are providing new insight into the city’s brutal distinction as a nerve center for the Atlantic slave trade.

Brazil’s slaves are being freed, but owners go largely unpunished

January 30, 2014Brazil Institute Leave a comment

Tim Padgett – NPR, 1/29/2014

I bought Francisco Lima his first taste of freedom in decades.

A cheeseburger.

It was 2004, and Brazil was starting to confront one of its most distressing problems: slavery. I was in northern Pará state, in the Amazon, observing a special police unit that raided slaveholding farms and firms and liberated workers like the 74-year-old Lima.

We found Lima in a squalid, dirt-floor shack with bees buzzing over his pot of days-old rice and beans. The cops brought him to a nearby town, and a colleague and I invited him to lunch. Lima seemed lost in the diner and said he’d have whatever we were having. When his cheeseburger arrived, he furrowed his brow and asked, “Como a gente come isto?“

Brazil accuses 251 employers of slave-like labor

August 1, 2011Brazil Institute Leave a comment

Associated Press/Bloomberg, 07/31/2011

Brazil’s labor ministry says 251 employers are being charged with keeping workers in slave-like conditions.

The list of employers facing charges of slavery is released twice a year. The latest version was released Friday, and included two mayors. The number is up from 220 cases in December 2010.

The state of Para had the greatest number of cases: 62.