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Thursday, March 29, 2012

RACE IN BRAZIL


Race in Brazil

Affirming a divide

Black Brazilians are much worse off than they should be. But what is the best way to remedy that?

The shadow of the past
IN APRIL 2010, as part of a scheme to beautify the rundown port near the centre of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic games, workers were replacing the drainage system in a shabby square when they found some old cans. The city called in archaeologists, whose excavations unearthed the ruins of Valongo, once Brazil’s main landing stage for African slaves.
From 1811 to 1843 around 500,000 slaves arrived there, according to Tânia Andrade Lima, the head archaeologist. Valongo was a complex, including warehouses where slaves were sold and a cemetery. Hundreds of plastic bags, stored in shipping containers parked on a corner of the site, hold personal objects lost or hidden by the slaves, or taken from them. They include delicate bracelets and rings woven from vegetable fibre; lumps of amethyst and stones used in African worship; and cowrie shells, a common currency in Africa.
It is a poignant reminder of the scale and duration of the slave trade to Brazil. Of the 10.7m African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, 4.9m landed there. Fewer than 400,000 went to the United States. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Brazil has long seemed to want to forget this history. In 1843 Valongo was paved over by a grander dock to welcome a Bourbon princess who came to marry Pedro II, the country’s 19th-century emperor. The stone column rising from the square commemorates the empress, not the slaves. Now the city plans to make Valongo an open-air museum of slavery and the African diaspora. “Our work is to give greater visibility to the black community and its ancestors,” says Ms Andrade Lima.
This project is a small example of a much broader re-evaluation of race in Brazil. The pervasiveness of slavery, the lateness of its abolition, and the fact that nothing was done to turn former slaves into citizens all combined to have a profound impact on Brazilian society. They are reasons for the extreme socioeconomic inequality that still scars the country today.
Neither separate nor equal
In the 2010 census some 51% of Brazilians defined themselves as black or brown. On average, the income of whites is slightly more than double that of black or brown Brazilians, according to IPEA, a government-linked think-tank. It finds that blacks are relatively disadvantaged in their level of education and in their access to health and other services. For example, more than half the people in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums) are black. The comparable figure in the city’s richer districts is just 7%.
Brazilians have long argued that blacks are poor only because they are at the bottom of the social pyramid—in other words, that society is stratified by class, not race. But a growing number disagree. These “clamorous” differences can only be explained by racism, according to Mário Theodoro of the federal government’s secretariat for racial equality. In a passionate and sometimes angry debate, black Brazilian activists insist that slavery’s legacy of injustice and inequality can only be reversed by affirmative-action policies, of the kind found in the United States.
Their opponents argue that the history of race relations in Brazil is very different, and that such policies risk creating new racial problems. Unlike in the United States, slavery in Brazil never meant segregation. Mixing was the norm, and Brazil had many more free blacks. The result is a spectrum of skin colour rather than a dichotomy.
Few these days still call Brazil a “racial democracy”. As Antonio Riserio, a sociologist from Bahia, put it in a recent book: “It’s clear that racism exists in the US. It’s clear that racism exists in Brazil. But they are different kinds of racism.” In Brazil, he argues, racism is veiled and shamefaced, not open or institutional. Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.
Importing American-style affirmative action risks forcing Brazilians to place themselves in strict racial categories rather than somewhere along a spectrum, says Peter Fry, a British-born, naturalised-Brazilian anthropologist. Having worked in southern Africa, he says that Brazil’s avoidance of “the crystallising of race as a marker of identity” is a big advantage in creating a democratic society.
But for the proponents of affirmative action, the veiled quality of Brazilian racism explains why racial stratification has been ignored for so long. “In Brazil you have an invisible enemy. Nobody’s racist. But when your daughter goes out with a black, things change,” says Ivanir dos Santos, a black activist in Rio de Janeiro. If black and white youths with equal qualifications apply to be a shop assistant in a Rio mall, the white will get the job, he adds.
The debate over affirmative action splits both left and right. The governments of Dilma Rousseff, the president, and of her two predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, have all supported such policies. But they have moved cautiously. So far the main battleground has been in universities. Since 2001 more than 70 public universities have introduced racial admissions quotas. In Rio de Janeiro’s state universities, 20% of places are set aside for black students who pass the entrance exam. Another 25% are reserved for a “social quota” of pupils from state schools whose parents’ income is less than twice the minimum wage—who are often black. A big federal programme awards grants to black and brown students at private universities.
These measures are starting to make a difference. Although only 6.3% of black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education in 2006, that was double the proportion in 2001, according to IPEA. (The figures for whites were 19.2% in 2006, compared with 14.1% in 2001). “We’re very happy, because in the past five years we’ve placed more blacks in universities than in the previous 500 years,” says Frei David Raimundo dos Santos, a Franciscan friar who runs Educafro, a charity that holds university-entrance classes in poor areas. “Today there’s a revolution in Brazil.”
One of its beneficiaries is Carolina Bras da Silva, a young black woman whose mother was a cleaner. As a teenager she lived for a while on the streets of São Paulo. But she is now in her first year of social sciences at Rio’s Catholic University, on a full grant. “Some of the other students said ‘What are you doing here?’ But it’s getting better,” she says. She wants to study law and become a public prosecutor.
Academics from some of Brazil’s best universities have led a campaign against quotas. They argue firstly that affirmative action starts with an act of racism: the division of a rainbow nation into arbitrary colour categories. Assigning races in Brazil is not always as easy as the activists claim. In 2007 one of two identical twins who both applied to enter the University of Brasília was classified as black, the other as white. All this risks creating racial resentment. Secondly, opponents say affirmative action undermines equality of opportunity and meritocracy—fragile concepts in Brazil, where privilege, nepotism and contacts have long been routes to advancement.
Proponents of affirmative action say these arguments sanctify an unjust status quo. And formally meritocratic university entrance exams have not guaranteed equality of opportunity. A study by Carlos Antonio Costa Ribeiro, a sociologist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, found that the factors most closely correlated to attending university are having rich parents and studying in private school.
In practice, many of the fears surrounding university quotas have not been borne out. Though still preliminary, studies tend to show that cotistas, as they are known, have performed academically as well as or better than their peers. That may be because they have replaced weaker “white” students who got in merely because they had the money to prepare for the exam.
Nelson do Valle Silva, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says that the backlash against quotas would have been even stronger if access to universities were not growing so fast. For now, almost everyone who passes the exam gets in somewhere. It also helps, he says, that many universities have adopted less controversial “social quotas”. Mr Fry agrees that affirmative action has “become a fait accompli”. He attributes the declining resistance to guilt, indifference and the fear of being accused of racism.
The battle for jobs
For black activists, the next target is the labour market. “As a black man, when I go for a job I start from a disadvantage,” says Mr Theodoro. He notes that the United States, which is only 12% black, has a black president and numerous black politicians and millionaires. In Brazil, in contrast, “we have nobody”. That is not quite true: apart from footballers and singers, Brazil has a black supreme-court justice (appointed by Lula) and senior military and police officers. But they are exceptional. Only one of the 38 members of Ms Rousseff’s cabinet is black (though ten are women). Stand outside the adjacent headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil company, and the National Development Bank in Rio at lunchtime, and “all the managers are white and the cleaners are black,” says Frei David.
The shadow of the past
Some private-sector bodies are starting to espouse racial diversity in recruitment. The state and city of Rio de Janeiro have both passed laws reserving 20% of posts in civil-service exams for blacks, though they are yet to be implemented. If unemployment rises from today’s record low, job quotas are likely to create even more controversy than university entrance has.
What stands out from a decade of debate about affirmative action is that it is being implemented in a very Brazilian way. Each university has taken its own decisions. The federal government has tried to promote the policy, but not impose it. The supreme court is sitting on three cases addressing racial quotas. Some lawyers suspect it is deliberately dragging its heels in the hope that society can sort the issue out.
Society itself is indeed changing fast. Many of the 30m Brazilians who have left poverty over the past decade are black. Businesses are taking note: many more cosmetics are aimed at blacks, for example. The mix of passengers on internal flights now bears some resemblance to Brazil, rather than Scandinavia. Until recently, the only black actors in television soap operas played maids; now one Globo soap has a black male lead. Much of this might have happened without affirmative action.
The question facing Brazil is whether the best way to repair the legacy of slavery is to give extra rights to darker-skinned Brazilians. Yes, say the government and the black movement. Given the persistence of racial disadvantage that is understandable.
But the approach carries clear risks. Until the invasion of American academic ideas, most Brazilians thought that their country’s racial rainbow was among its main assets. They were not wholly wrong. Mr do Valle Silva, a specialist in social mobility, finds that race affects life chances in Brazil but does not determine them. And if positive discrimination becomes permanent, a publicly funded industry of entitlement may grow up to entrench it and to promote divisive racial politics.
There may be better ways to establish genuine equality of opportunity and rights. Brazil has had anti-discrimination legislation since the 1950s. The 1988 constitution made both racial abuse and racism crimes. But there have been relatively few prosecutions. That is partly because of racism in the judiciary. But it is also because judges and prosecutors think the penalties are too harsh: anyone accused of racism must be held in jail both before and after conviction. And in Rio de Janeiro the black movement’s preference for affirmative action led the state government to lose interest in measures aimed at attacking racial prejudice, according to a study by Fabiano Dias Monteiro, who ran the state’s anti-racist helpline before it was scrapped in 2007.
The hardest task is to change attitudes. Many Brazilians simply assume blacks belong at the bottom of the pile. Supporters of affirmative action are right to say that the country turned its back on the problem. But American-style policies might not be the way to combat Brazil’s specific forms of racism. A combination of stronger legal action against discrimination and quotas for social class in higher education to compensate for weak public schools may work better.

BRAZIL'S ECONOMIC TIME BOMB


Tick, tock

The Senate debates a small measure to help disarm an economic time bomb

AFTER spending much of her political capital fighting corruption, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, has had to pick her battles. Seven senators from her resentful coalition have already quit, and more warn they may follow. Ms Rousseff has put most of her legislative plans on hold until relations improve. But she is training her remaining firepower on what may be Brazil’s biggest public-policy problem: a voracious pension system that threatens to bust the budget and damage the economy.

 On February 29th the lower house of Congress approved a reform of civil servants’ pensions. It would cap the defined-benefit plans of future federal-government employees at 3,916 reais ($2,150) a month, the same level as private-sector workers. Those who want more would have to contribute to a separate fund. That would make the system less unfair and, in the long term, a bit cheaper.
The bill still must pass the Senate and Ms Rousseff’s powers of persuasion may not prove sufficient. Even if it is approved, however, it would only be a first step towards fixing a system that Fabio Giambiagi, an economist at the National Development Bank, calls “absolutely the most generous in the world. The economy of Brazil is very different from Greece’s. But in terms of retirement rules, we are worse.”
Uniquely among large economies, Brazil is a young country with the pensions bill of an old one (see chart). It has just ten over-65s for every hundred 15- to 64-year-olds, fewer than anywhere in the G7. And yet it spends 13% of GDP on pensions, more than any G7 member except Italy, where the share of old people is three times higher than in Brazil. In fact, so few Brazilians pay for pensions, and so many get them, that the country has 35 pensioners for every 100 contributing workers, a higher ratio than in the United States.
Brazil’s pensions are among the world’s most generous, too, replacing 75% of average income. Some of this is welfare spending intended to cut poverty. Rural workers aged over 60, and anyone poor and over 65, can get a pension of 622 reais—the minimum wage—without ever having paid into the system. But this only costs around 2% of GDP a year. The real culprits are rules that let contributing workers retire earlier, on bigger pensions, than anywhere else.
To retire on full pay most Brazilians need only contribute for 15 years and keep going until 65 for men and 60 for women. But after 35 years paying in, a man of any age can retire on a smaller, though still generous, pension. A woman must pay in for just 30 years. All pensions must exceed the minimum wage, which has trebled in real terms since 1995. As a result, most Brazilians retire startlingly early: at 54 on average for a man in the private sector, and just 52 for a woman. Survivors’ benefits have no age limits. Families inherit pensions in their entirety, meaning young, childless widows never need work. A tenth of all 45-year-olds are already receiving a pension.
In a young country, a pay-as-you-go system should yield surpluses, which can be invested in infrastructure and education. But Brazil’s is already in deficit. Investment is only about 20% of GDP, and just 2.9% of GDP comes from the government.
Children get particularly slim pickings after pensions are paid. Taking income levels and differing demographies into account, Brazil spent twice as lavishly on each pensioner as the OECD average, but only two-thirds as generously on the education of each child. The only handout a poor child can hope for is the Bolsa Família, a grant averaging 115 reais per family per month. If he were over 65 his family would receive over five times as much. As a result, very few old people are below the poverty line, but a third of children are.
The price for such distorted priorities is already high. But soon it will be unpayable. Payroll taxes for pensions are already greater in Brazil, at 32% of gross salary, than in all G7 countries except Italy. According to Bernardo Queiroz of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, without reforms, by 2050 they would have to reach a crushing 86% to keep the system going.
Averting such a disaster will take big changes: more people contributing, less generous pensions and a ban on early retirement. Rerunning his calculations, Mr Queiroz found that, together, these would cause the pensions payroll tax in 2050 to rise to 40% (still a daunting figure). But such reforms are not even being discussed. “It’s a puzzle,” he says. “The unions are against changes. But without them, the workers they represent are paying for other people to get much more generous pensions than they will ever get themselves.”
Brazil will have to face reality sooner or later. But the risk is that it will take an economic crisis to goad the government into action. Big reforms were pushed through in 1999, when the country was struggling to pay its foreign debts. (Incredibly, pensions used to be even more generous, with no cap in the private sector and retirement on full pay at any age after 35 years in work.)
Mr Queiroz says the lesson from abroad is that once those in or near retirement are very numerous, reform becomes so urgent that it will have to hit them too. At that point, they will mobilise and block all changes, even to the brink of collapse. An unaffordable system can only be fixed while the share of old people is small. Brazil’s chance to change is brief, he says—perhaps ten years.
 
Mark Alan Taylor

Friday, March 9, 2012

Mass dolphin rescue witnessed off Rio coast


Mass dolphin rescue witnessed off Rio coast


RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A dramatic video showing 30 beached dolphins being rescued by beachgoers in Brazil has become an internet sensation.
The video shows dolphins appearing out of nowhere and suddenly beaching en masse on the Rio de Janeiro state coastline. They were apparently caught in a strong ocean current.
Stunned beachgoers in swimming trunks at first look on as the dolphins' high-pitched squeals are heard. But within seconds, people quickly race into the surf to help the dolphins.
Dozens of people are seen swimming into the ocean and dragging the mammals by their tails in an effort to them back into deeper waters.
And the effort this past Monday was apparently successful. After all the dolphins were rescued, the crowd of dolphin-savers and onlookers broke into cheers.