Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [69]
Patricia has a very difficult year ahead of her: the studies will be much more difficult than she is used to, and she will have to make a dramatic adjustment from living in a shantytown to going each day to a middle-class school. This is a lot for any eleven-year-old to handle. But Patricia understands that she has an almost unheard of opportunity and the responsibility that goes with it. She also understands that she has the support of a number of people in a country far from her own.
Patricia’s chance is a very small step in terms of world inequality, but it is a move toward change nonetheless. I realize when I hear from Rita that if we are proud of nothing else we have done in these weeks, we can be proud that we are part of this change.
Do get in touch with any ideas or thoughts.
All the best,
Margaret
sixteen
of race and remembering
I was asked to give a talk in Seattle sponsored by the World Affairs Council as well as to write a paper for a conference in San Francisco. This time I decided to talk about Bahia Street. This meant I had to justify the organization, not in terms of what the people in the favelas told Rita and me, but in terms of statistical and academic writings. In order to be “credible,” the local situation had to be couched in the knowledge and phrases of outsiders.
Cecilia had once shown me an article from Veja, a Brazilian newsmagazine, published in 1988, the same year the new Brazilian Constitution prohibited racial discrimination. The article claimed that slaves in Brazil had been better off than African-Brazilians were then, in the late eighties. As I started to read about racial inequality, I found that the raw and impersonal statistics put in blunt terms what I had seen on the streets.
At the time I wrote these papers, the late 1990s, the mortality rate among African-Brazilians was 30 percent higher than whites. Their illiteracy rate was double. African-Brazilians stayed in school an average of two and a half years. Only 13.6 percent finished elementary school and only; 2.1 percent completed high school. No wonder, even learning Portuguese on the streets as I had, my friends in the favelas had long ago begun asking me to read things to them. I was white, so it was assumed that I could read, regardless the language. In addition, African-Brazilians earned less than half (44.1 percent) of what whites earned.
And Brazilians claimed they had no racism.
Rita told me about an experience she and a black baiana friend had had in a middle-class area in Rio. Every restaurant they entered was closing—for them in particular, it seemed. This was prejudice against them for being from the Northeast as well as for their color. And Rita often said that she thought prejudice among poorer people was worse than among the middle class.
I remembered a conversation my friend Herns and I had had a few years before. Herns was a black Haitian anthropologist. He went to the Sorbonne for his first degree and won an incredible scholarship that funded him to do a Ph.D. at any university he desired in the world. With great idealism, he chose the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I met him through Cecilia when he was doing his thesis research on “the black family in Bahia.”
“I thought I would escape racism by coming to Brazil,” he told me. “I believed all those things I’d read about Brazil being a divine center for racial harmony and hope.” We were sitting at a roadside café in Salvador after an intense night of dancing pagode, a form of samba that was infectious and took exhausting muscle control.
“So, what do you think now?” I asked him.
Herns mused in silence for a few moments. “When I first moved to Rio—I have a good scholarship, you know—I rented an apartment in an upper middle-class neighborhood.”
“At least they let you rent it.”
“Well, actually a white friend set it up, so I don’t know that. But the place had a swimming pool. Rio was hot, so a few days after my arrival, I decided to take a swim. When I got to the pool, it was fairly crowded with swimmers