Back

No Black and White Matter
Source: The Economist

A new attempt to distinguish among Brazil's many colours - Think of Brazilians, and a dizzying palette comes to mind. Half a millennium of mingling by Africans, Europeans and indigenous Indians gave this New World nation a hundred faces and more colours than Crayola.

One national household survey turned up no fewer than 136 terms by which Brazilians classified their complexions, from “snow white” to “cinnamon”. The record-keepers, hoping to tidy things up, reduced the official racial types to just five: white, oriental, indigenous, black and pardo (brown). But to this day most Brazilians simply shrug and say they are a mixed-blooded people.

In many ways, this fluid self-image has been at the centre of the country's identity. But if the advocates of new racial politics have their way, this whole concept could change. Brazilian lawmakers are now weighing two bills that would shake things up, making four decades of American job-preferment policies pale by comparison.

The Racial Quota Law and the Racial Equality Statute would create a sweeping system of racial preferences in universities, the civil service and the private sector. An initial quota of 20% (rising later to nearly 50%) of senior civil-service jobs and vacancies at federal universities are to be set aside for those of “African” ancestry. The doors would also be opened to the poor, to Indians and, under a separate statute, to the physically handicapped. If all this became law, Brazil's complex collage could become a portrait in black and white.

Nobody disputes the arguments for such legislation, only its effect. Even 118 years after slavery, the racial divide still runs deep. Except on the football pitch and in music, or during the fleeting days of carnival, precious few of the 80m black and brown Brazilians ever rise to commanding heights in business or public life. Negros and pardos spend a third less time in the classroom than whites, earn half the wages and are far more likely to be out of work. “Anyone who looks at the numbers honestly can see where blacks are in society—at the bottom,” argues David Raimundo dos Santos, a Franciscan friar and champion of racial quotas. “We need quotas to create social unity.”

Others are not so sure. More than 500 Brazilian scholars, artists and other worthies, among them Caetano Veloso, a pop music idol, are calling on Congress to reject quotas. Imposing on a multi-hued society rigid quotas of white and non-white, they say, is not only artificial but risky. Ominously, a few of the universities that already use quotas have created evaluation committees to police student applications for possible “race fraud”.

“If you have a society that is based on sameness, you shouldn't throw that away,” says Peter Fry, an anthropologist who has studied race and racial politics in Africa and Brazil. “One defect Brazil doesn't have is outright racial strife, and a battle over who is black or white could create that.”

Far better and fairer than quotas, the contras argue, would be to create a broad system of universal incentives—study grants and tutorials for the poor, for instance—that would reach all Brazilians, whatever their complexion. But if centuries of colour-blindness have failed to better the lot of the black and the brown, it is unlikely that the same society will improve the plight of an even greater number of multi-coloured Brazilians.”