Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Social Science on 2015-08-05 02:08Z by Steven

Three personal stories that show Brazil is not completely beyond racism

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2015-07-31

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Correspondent

Brazil’s national mythology is built on the idea of a democracia racial – a country whose population is uniquely mixed and has moved beyond racism.

The lived experience of its citizens, especially the majority who are black or mixed-race, tells a different story. Three residents of Bahia, known as the country’s “blackest” state, share their personal stories with The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.

‘It’s not easy to start working when you’re 12’

Cleusa de Jesus Santos was one of eight children whose father left when she was small. Her mother, illiterate and living in a slum, had no way to feed them all. “A friend of my mum’s said, ‘There is a person who needs a girl, just to watch her son, to keep him company.’”

So Ms. Santos was sent. “But when I got there, the reality was completely different: They said they were going to put me in school and so on, and they didn’t. I didn’t have vacation. I couldn’t see my family.”…

Read the entire article here.

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“Não passou por branco é preto,” she often says, often tells their teenagers: If you’re not white, you’re black.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2015-08-05 01:30Z by Steven

When she fills out the census, Ms. de Lucena ticks the box for “negra.” Her husband, Joacinei Araújo de Lucena, 48, has a black parent and a white one, just like she does, but identifies himself as “pardo,” or brown. He insists that he, Ms. de Lucena and their two children are mixed – not one, not the other – and that mixed is a race of its own. Ms. de Lucena doesn’t buy it. “Não passou por branco é preto,” she often says, often tells their teenagers: If you’re not white, you’re black.

Stephanie Nolen, “Brazil’s colour bind,” The Globe and Mail, July 31, 2015. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/brazils-colour-bind/article25779474/.

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I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2015-08-05 01:15Z by Steven

“A lot of people when they look at me and when I reveal to them that I’m half Korean, they say that they don’t see it at all and think that I’m black. I get a lot of people that say that and they try to impose their own classification of my identity and I embrace both sides.” —Moogega (무지개) Cooper

David Lee Sanders, “Interview with Moogega Cooper,” HalfKorean.com: An online community for mixed-race Koreans, April 10, 2013. http://www.halfkorean.com/?page_id=8947.

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