El Alcalde De Zalamea

Joana Palma
7/24/2011
English 106
Essay #3
Prof. Lauren Riccelli

Black in the Slums, White in the Classrooms and Tabloids: A Look into Brazil’s Social and Economic Inequalities

In the documentary Black in Latin America: Brazil, narrated by Henry Louis Gates, several truths are unveiled regarding the aftermath of the South American country’s long history of slavery. Gates beginsby explaining that due to its convenient geographic location, as well as its strong commercial ties to Portuguese seaports, it boasted the largest and most successful slave trade, larger than any other colony in the New World. After having imported more than five million slaves, it grew to have the second largest African population in the entire world, closely trailing behind Nigeria. As such, theslave tradition was much more barbaric here than in its North American and Caribbean counterparts, and unsurprisingly took a much longer time to be abolished. The effects of the institution can thus still be felt, and seen, much to the disadvantage of the African-Brazilians that live there now and must deal with the repercussions of succeeding a long line of brutalized slaves.
Theirhardships stem from the fact that racism and its adverse effects were never addressed or challenged post-abolition. Instead, Brazilian scholars claimed that the country had already been “civilized” by the Africans, and the South American country hid behind a stance of “racial democracy”. This only led to a faux social and economic equality that exists on paper but not in practice, and perpetuates thelarge gap between the upper and lower classes, which are white and black respectively. Differences in educational and structural opportunities that favor whites and grant overall better economic mobility to them, as well as the unequal representation of beauty standards among the races, lead many to think that perhaps a civil rights movement might have been more beneficial to Afro-Brazilians than theimplementation of a theoretical doctrine that serves no practical use.
Gates argues that better equality could be achieved in Brazil so long as they adopt America’s Affirmative Action campaign, in which a certain number of minority group members must be accepted into educational institutions. Despite this being a contentious issue due to the heavily mixed-raced nature of Brazil’s population(they categorize themselves into more than 100 different “races”), his argument makes sense; complete Afro-Brazilian integration cannot take place without the establishment of social programs designed to help them climb the steep class ladder that was left in place for them since the late abolition of slavery in 1888. If things are left as-is, the social and economic inequality gap felt sopredominantly in Brazilian cities will surely never narrow.
Economically, the stark differences between the upper-class white elites and the lower-class blacks are heavily pronounced. Even though Brazil offered more chances of “escaping slavery” through monetary means than America did, most slaves were not able to. This created a trickle-down effect on their race that set most of them up to live indisadvantaged conditions. Such conditions inhibit their likelihood of upward mobility by diminishing their chances of receiving proper education, becoming financially independent, and gaining any kind of respected social status. To make matters even worse, Brazil is also more segregated than America, with blacks and whites living in separate cities that display polar opposite conditions.Only the poorest areas of the country house citizens of African descent, i.e. “The City of God”. The lucrative, tourist-prone cities are mainly inhabited by rich or at least professional white citizens. Even those who experience relative commercial or financial success are likely to remain in these “slums” because they often do not make as much as a white person would, so they lack the means...