It’s Recognition Time: The Similar Lives of Afro-Brazilians and African-Americans
Posted on VidaAfroLatina.com on November 4, 2008

Ever since I learned of Brazil’s huge population of African descent, I have made it my business to inform others of our brothers and sisters in Latin America’s largest, most populous nation. When I first discovered Brazil’s Black population on Christmas Eve of 1999, I thought, “If I didn’t know about the country’s 75 to 100 million Black folks, it was quite possible that most other African-Americans don’t know either.”

Africa’s contribution to the country’s culture, history and population was conveniently excluded from our textbooks. To this day, most of us don’t know that Brazil was the largest importer of African slaves into the New World. Some 38 percent of all Africans shipped to the Americas were taken to Brazil. In comparison, 4 percent were shipped to 0the United States.

Why are Americans in general and African Americans in particular so ignorant about Black Brazilians? Number one, Americans have a very “U.S.-centric” view of the world. For the majority of us, if events don’t happen in the U.S., they don’t matter. Number two, Latin American countries have promoted their societies as being more racially fluid than the stringent United States. While this may be true in some superficial ways, in general, Whiteness represents power, wealth and beauty in every country south of Texas.

Latin American countries have promoted themselves as racial democracies, countries of vast racial mixture. Under this ideology, countries proclaimed that racism could not exist where there was such widespread racial mixture.

Brazil, like Argentina, Mexico and other Latin American nations, implemented policies that would eventually Whiten its population through significant European immigration. Many Brazilian politicians and social scientists made predictions as to how long it would take for Afro-Brazilians to disappear so that Brazil’s population would be as beautiful as that in Europe, thus allowing the country to take its rightful place among White nations.

At the end of the 18th century, news of the Haitian revolution petrified Brazil’s elites of the possibility that the country’s Blacks would revolt against the established order. Early in the 20th century, elites viewed African Americans as hateful subversives that would inspire a new brand of militancy in Brazil’s Black population that they saw as docile, submissive and subservient.

In the 1920s, Robert Abbott, editor of the Black newspaper Chicago Defender, sought to lead groups of Black Americans to Brazil to settle and cultivate lands in the state of Mato Grosso. Impressed with what he saw during a visit, he enticed other Black Americans to relocate. But it was not to be. After learning that the prospective immigrants to the country were Black, the government of Mato Grosso immediately rejected visa requests.

In the ’40s, President Getulio Vargas would issue Decree #7967 that would establish conditions to be met by immigrants wishing to come to Brazil. This decree declared the necessity of restricting immigration to the country to those who had more “desirable” characteristics of the White race.

In the 1970s, Black Brazilians increasingly drew inspiration from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S., and decolonization movements occurring throughout the African continent. Frustrated with White appropriation of Afro-Brazilian Samba music, Black Brazilians began celebrating Black American soul and funk music. Afro-Brazilian activists participated in panels and conferences with other Blacks of the Diaspora to discuss racism and inequality.

Throughout the period, Brazil’s military dictatorship harassed, infiltrated and kept tabs on militant groups of the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) which advocated the acceptance of a Black identity, promoted social equality and urged an end to racist practices. Intellectuals of the time vehemently attacked what they saw as an imitation of Black American racial antagonism, culture and identity politics that would threaten the nation’s supposedly harmonious racial coexistence.

The problem with this view is that Brazilians of visible African ancestry have lived at the bottom of Brazilian society in terms of standard of living indicators for five centuries. Afro-Brazilians attain less education, earn on average half the salary of Whites, die younger, have less access to health care and are killed and incarcerated at alarmingly higher rates than White Brazilians. Brazil’s business community, media representation and political offices are overwhelmingly White.

The same problems affecting African Americans affect Afro-Brazilians and other populations of African descent in the Americas.

In 2002, President George W. Bush asked Brazil’s president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, if his country had Blacks too. According to 2008 predictions, this year, Afro-Brazilians will officially become the country’s majority. With this in mind, the time is now for African Americans to begin connecting our struggle with our extended family throughout the world, particularly in Latin America.

As one professor entitled his study on Afro-Brazilians, it is “time for recognition.” Brazil’s recognition of its African-descendent population and African-American recognition of our long lost brothers and sisters in the República Federativa do Brasil are long overdue.

Mark Wells is a labor union organizer based in Detroit. He has written various articles about Brazil and visited the country eight times. He can be reached at MrMarques72@yahoo.com.