|
 Since late 1999, the people and culture of the Federal Republic of Brazil have not failed to sustain my fascination. There are probably countless reasons that Latin America's largest and most populous country has seduced millions of tourists over the years and I will admit that as an African-American male with a background in the social sciences, the issue of race, race relations, racism and racial identity was my principal attraction when I first began visiting the country back in September of 2000.
While the music, food, language and futebol have also been of interest, it is the people of Brazil that continue to hold my fascination after my eighteen weeks of travel experience in South America's only Portuguese-speaking nation. While analyzing the ways in which Brazilians and Americans seem different, as a student of the social sciences, I maintain respect, but am often perplexed by the seemingly contradictory ways that Brazilians, as well as Americans, view their social realities. As I will frequently surf through this website for the latest news and views of my beloved Brazil, every now and then I will take a look at the latest postings in the Brazzil forum section. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, race-related subjects are dominant amongst the topics that people most like to debate. Three of my past articles for this website have dealt with the complexities of race in Brazil, and to those who may be familiar with my work, I would like to explain a few things in order to clear up a few misunderstandings that people may have about my views and ideas (as the countless e-mails have led me to believe). Allow me to say that in expressing my opinions about the ways that the issue of race factor into Brazilian society, I am in no way endorsing the idea that the conditions of race, racism and racial identity are in any way better or worse in the United States than they are in Brazil. My main focus is to study these ideals and come to reasonable conclusions based on the facts as well as opinions. Social issues are not like Mathematics in that they will not lead to one provable, infallible conclusion. In fact, as social issues are often as complex as Mathematics, some answers to questions and problems could lead to diverse combinations of hypotheses and recommendations that could relieve of us all of societies' ills. In terms of race and race-related issues, there are no doubt differences and variances between Brazil and the US (as well as amongst other countries), but I would like readers, Brazilians as well as non-Brazilians to realize that there also countless similarities that at times make the issue of race and racialized discrimination the same within the global community. In studying both societies (US and Brazil), I believe that it would be fair to say that the peoples of both countries have a lot to learn about our respective diverse societies, how to acknowledge the problems and come to terms with how to deal with them. I enjoy debating issues because often times these debates stimulate ideas that I or someone else may never have thought of in the first place. The only problem I have with these debates is when someone sends me an e-mail expressing an opinion along the lines of "the US is far more racist than Brazil" but then not offering any concise reasoning or evidence as to why they believe this to be true. Let me say this for the record: the United States of America is a highly racist, sexist, homophobic, class-based society. I have NEVER claimed that it wasn't. In many ways it has economically, militarily and politically enforced its culture, way of life and will upon the global masses in complicity with the global elite. The average American citizen may not realize this, but a careful reading of the history of US foreign policy will conclusively prove this point. In reality, there are millions of American citizens who have no idea of how our leaders shamelessly dominate the world at the expense of the global community with no regard for how our policies affect the lives of billions of people around the world. Even worse, there are those who know the facts and are in full agreement without ever even thinking of how it could eventually affect their own lives both as American citizens or if they were citizens of other countries. But this is not the place where I will voice my concerns about the US policing of the world. Without going into details, I acknowledge the existing problems in American society, but in writing for a website devoted to Brazilian society, I would also like to alert Brazilians, as well as foreigners who adore Brazil, of the multiple ways that Brazil itself plays a role in the oppression of millions of people in line with the hegemonic Westernized hierarchy. The facts found within this work will confirm what any social scientist already knows: Racism is the principal characteristic of Brazil's historic and social formation (1). In this essay, I would like to respond to my critics and pose a challenge to those who will disagree no matter what the evidence suggests. One of my main concerns in addressing these issues is challenging the idea that it is American social scientists that are imposing their Americanized views upon Brazilian society. Again, I acknowledge the fact that American dominance often times imposes its will on others with total disregard for any voices of dissidence. But it is also true that as human beings with similar desires in life, we are more similar than we think we are. This is to say that while societies may be separated by distance, language and culture, there are certain attributes within the definition of being human within given societies that appear to be universal. Many of these similarities would exist regardless of whether a global empire such as Ancient Rome, Great Britain or the United States ever existed. To prove my point, throughout much of this and the following essays, I will cite freely from an overwhelming majority of studies conducted by Brazilian social scientists. One may not like criticism emanating from outside of one's family, but when one of your own states the facts, it may be time to take a closer look. Since the political opening and return to official democracy in Brazil, there has been an amazing output of theses, dissertations and books published by Brazilians about the racial situation. These studies have helped to broaden my understanding of Brazilian racial politics and are now becoming the center of race-oriented studies within the global world of the social sciences (2). A Critical Response To start this essay, I would like to respond to a few of the e-mails, past Brazzil essays and postings at the Brazzil forum that have piqued my interest or demanded a response. One reader from Argentina posted a response (entitled "A response to Mr. Mark Wells")(3) to one of my past essays in the forum column in December of 2004. I will briefly cite a few of his arguments and then offer my responses. "Although there is racism and stereotypes of the blacks as lazy or criminals, there is undoubtedly less racism in Brazil or Latin America in its totality than in the U.S., and yourself know why: there never in Latin America, as far as I remind, something like the Ku Klux Klan, nor Skinhead neo-nazis. There are not here mass beatings of blacks as there were in the U.S. time ago." This is a common opinion that I find posted all over Brazilian-based Internet and magazine "letters to the editor" columns as well as right here in the Brazzil forum column. Brazilians, as well as non-Brazilians often point to America's violent racist past to justify the belief that Brazil is a more harmonious society. First of all, no one can deny the violence of past and present American society, but my comparisons are based on Brazil and America of the present with intent of further analysis and interpretation of the facts from a Brazilian historical context. I would argue two things. While (acknowledged) racial violence and mass Civil Rights movements existed in the US and on a (seemingly) smaller scale in Brazil, I would argue that people of African descent in the United States and Brazil today in many ways still occupy the same positions in their respective countries. I say acknowledged because while no one can deny that racist violence is a part of American history, there seems to be a denial of its very existence in the history of Brazil. Brazilian historians have written extensively about racial violence in Brazil but Brazilians continue to believe that slavery and the post-abolition lives of Brazilians of African descent were much better than in the US. Donna Goldstein points out that while Brazilian social scientists have written extensively about racial imbalances in Brazilian homicide rates, "they have been extremely cautious about proposing race as a determining or causal factor" (4) using the example of an essay by Luis Eduardo Soares, Cláudia Milito and Hélio R.S. Silva entitled "Homicídios Dolosos Praticados Contra Crianças e Adolescentes no Estado do Rio de Janeiro-1991 a Julho de 1993." Anthropologists such Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães have in fact highlighted the fact that racial violence is not as rare as one might think in Brazil (5). The point that I am making is that Americans have been far more exposed to issues dealing with race and racism because the elites, leaders and forefathers of this country didn't attempt to hide their racist ideals. In Brazil, on the contrary, everything was done to hide racist tendencies and policies even when the state actively supported them. Actual video and photos of lynchings, murders, police brutality and such has left an indelible imprint in the American psyche for at least the last half century. If a photo is worth a thousand words, imagine how these images have affected the minds of not only American citizens, but also people beyond North American shores. The question of race has never been hidden in American society. On the other hand, let us ask ourselves: if every time a Rede Globo news program reported the murder of six kids in a morro in Rio and the word raça (race) was never mentioned, how would people interpret this data? Is it possible that people would imagine that these people were killed because they were possible thieves, drug dealers or just poor? Anything beyond the fact that they were non-white? Some people, while understanding that favelas are overwhelmingly non-white, will also revert to the argument that white people also live in the favelas. There are a few problems with these arguments. Brazil Vs. the US: Heaven and Hell or Hell and Heaven? Anthropologist Athayde Motta once wrote that Brazilians must constantly point to the United States as a racial hell in order to make the image of Brazil appear to be heaven (6). I would have to agree. First of all, let's analyze the argument of, "it can't be racist because poor whites were killed/live there". The color of the global image of the United States is white. Though people may know that minorities make up a large proportion of the US population, middle-class lifestyles, luxury and power is associated with whiteness. What people may or may not know is that there are millions of poor, working poor, and homeless people in the US that are white. According to statistics on poverty in the US in 2001, 46.4% of people living in poverty were non-Hispanic whites, a total of 15.3 million people. Non-Hispanic whites also represented 7.8% of the total population of people living in poverty (7). One might argue that because non-Hispanic whites represent about 73% of the US population, it should be expected that they have the largest number of people living in poverty. The difference here is the proportion and chances of living in poor conditions while considering the subject of race. The poverty rate for African-Americans in that same year was 22.7% or almost three times the rate of poverty among non-Hispanic whites. In comparison, in Brazil, 8% of whites and 24% of blacks live in poverty (8). Thus in Brazil, as in the US, about three times as many blacks live in poverty than whites. Of course these figures cannot be taken as absolutely precise and in reality, both estimates are lower than what many believe them to be. Experts have argued that in US poverty stats, if a family of four's highest monthly bill, housing rent or mortgage, is taken into account, the number of Americans living in poverty could increase more than twice the reported rate of 11.7%. Let me also stress that the standard for absolute poverty in Brazil must be measured on a different index than that of the US. One could argue that many Americans living in slums, inner city tenements and poverty ridden areas would be considered middle-class by Brazilian standards. Police: Serve, Protect and Break an African Descendant's Neck "The struggle against racism is a struggle against corrupt and violent police"(9)
Luis Eduardo Soares, anthropologist and former sub-secretary of public security in Rio Another way of measuring discrimination is through the analysis of police brutality statistics. African-Americans have long been victims of overt displays of excessive force at the hands of American police officers. The November 25th (2006) murder of Sean Bell by the New York Police Department was just another incident in a long line of injustices experienced by the black community in cases involving the police. Bell was to be married only hours after he was killed in a hail of 50 bullets fired at him by police officers who believed he and his two friends were armed. The weapons they were supposedly carrying have yet to be produced by police. Bell's friends Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield were also wounded during the assault. This case reminds many of the violent murder of Amadou Diallo, the West African immigrant who was killed after being shot at 41 times by the NYPD in 1999. The police officers in that case were all acquitted (10). African-Americans continue to be over represented in statistical reports of homicide committed by American police officers. I will include some of those stats later on in this report, but at this time I would like to highlight the fact that blacks are not the only people that experience violent and often times fatal encounters with the police. In 1998, 62% of felons killed by American police officers were white. As a matter of fact, between the years 1978 and 1998, the rate per million killed by the police actually increased by 20% for whites while almost decreasing by half for blacks (11). In comparison, according to a report by Flavia Piovesan et al.(12), of the cases in 1999 in which data for race or color was available, 85% of the victims of murders committed by the police or death squads in Brazil were black. 82% of these murders were committed by the police and another 17% by death squads. While it may not receive as much press coverage as the war in Iraq, police in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have appeared to be on a mission of genocide for the past several years. And as in the United States, afrodescendentes are an overrepresentation of the casualties. For anyone who wants to point the finger at the United States for its brutal treatment of black people, when compared to the stats coming out of Brazil, blacks in the US could be seen as being relatively safe. The shocking statistics prove my point. Before considering the numbers referring to Brazil's afrodescedentes, I will consider the facts that affect the entire population. - In 2003, police in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo killed 4 times more people than police in the entire United States (13). - In 2003, police in Rio killed 1,195 people. By comparison, police in the entire United States killed 1,080 people within a three year period (2002-2004)(14). - In 2003, police in São Paulo killed 868 people (15). - In 1992, São Paulo police killed 61 times more people than New York City police killed in that same year (15 times more per capita) (16). - In 2003, police in three Brazilian states (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais), killed nearly 5 times more people than American police killed in the entire United States (1749 - 370) (17) - Between 1990 and 2001, São Paulo police killed 7,942 people (18). Between those same years, police in the entire United States killed 4,558 people. - To put these numbers in perspective, the combined total police murders in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in one year (2003) was 2,063. That is two-thirds the total number of US casualties (2,947) in nearly a three year period (March 2003 to December 2006) in the war in Iraq (19). When comparing these alarming statistics to that of other countries in the Western world, Brazil clearly has some very serious human rights issues that need to be addressed. The United States is also a violent society, but when compared with Brazilian statistics, there is no comparison. So how does this violence specifically affect the black communities of each respective country? Again, let us analyze the facts: - Between the years 1995 and 1998, 517 African-Americans were killed by American police. That represents 35% of the 1,478 justifiable homicides committed by the police (20). African-Americans represent 13% of the US population. - After evaluating more than 1,000 police homicides committed by police in Rio de Janeiro between the years 1993 and 1996, reports show that 70% of the murder victims were afrodescendentes. By the year 1999, 85% of the victims of murders committed by the police or death squads in Brazil were afrodescendentes (21). Brazil's afrodescendentes represent about 45% of the Brazilian population. - African-American men have an overall death rate nearly 50% higher than white men (22). - The risk of death for Afro-Brazilians is 87% higher than that of white Brazilians (23). It is because of statistics like these and the fact that the majority of the victims have a location (poor neighborhoods), gender (male), age (15-24) and color (black) that anthropologist Luiz Eduardo Soares labeled these acts of violent extermination what they are: genocide (24). In sheer numbers, the current situation in Brazil today is far worst than any period of human rights violations in US history. The Image of Blacks in the White Mind While these statistics show that blacks are not the only people victimized by police forces in each country, they do show that they are over represented according to their population representation. No doubt the actions of the Brazilian police are the result of the stigma of crime that is associated with lower income, primarily negro-mestiço neighborhoods. But is the stigma always justifiable? In his research, journalist Caco Barcellos discovered that Brazilian whites were 65% of thieves and murderers and 68% of the rapists (25). Add this to the fact that the majority of the victims of police murder have no previous police record (26), are young and afrodescendente, and we begin to understand that, in Brazil, someone with light to dark brown skin is guilty even if he is innocent. Considering poorer neighborhoods and its inhabitants, it is important to realize that while favelas are thought to be a major location of drug trafficking, in actuality, favela-based drug dealers represent a miniscule proportion of the favela population. For instance, in the Rio favela Jacarezinho, it is estimated that only 100 people are actually involved in drug trafficking. As the population of Jacarezinho is more than 150,000 people, that represents about 0.07% of its inhabitants (27). On the other hand, in 2005, police in São Paulo arrested 180 university students connected to the traffic of the drug ecstasy (28). 60 were arrested in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, while police continue to mercilessly attack and kill inhabitants of poorer, darker neighborhoods, it is the middle class that commands 90% of the traffic of synthetic drugs (29). To put this into a racial perspective, we must consider that 84.2% (30) of Afro-Brazilians are situated in economic classes C, D and E (31) while there are 6.25 times more whites that earn more than 10 minimum salaries (32) per month (33). To paint a clearer portrait of income in Brazil, the class A (upper-middle class) economic tier would not be the best representation. Consider this: In 1998, the PNAD (34) released a study that reported family income of Brazilian families according to the race/color of heads of households. This report showed that 14.8% of whites earned more than five minimum salaries per month while 12% of them earned up to half of one minimum salary. By comparison, only 3.3% of pretos and pardos earned more than five minimum salaries while pretos and pardos earning up to half of one minimum salary were 24.5% and 30.4% respectively (35). In other words, while whites living in abject poverty or middle-class lifestyles were nearly even, there were eight times more pretos and ten times more pardos living in abject poverty than those living middle class lifestyles. Considering these stats, three points must be observed. One, whites are just as likely to live comfortably as in extreme poverty. Two, afrodescendentes are the poorest of the poor. And three, pardos, who are thought to have clear social advantages over pretos, often times experience even worse conditions. From this perspective, one can clearly see the correlation between race/color and class in Brazil. Footnotes 1. Francisco, Dalmir. Negro, Etnia, Cultura e Democracia. In.: Revista do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional. No. 25. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: 1997 cited in Vaz, Paulo Bernardo Ferreira and Frederico de Mello Brandão Tavares. "O Negro-Mestiço e a Narrativa Fotojornalística: Um Outro Nos Cadernos "Cidade"". Anais do 26. Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Informação, Belo Horizonte-MG, September 2003. São Paulo: Intercom, 2003. Available online. December 15, 2006.
reposcom.portcom.intercom.org.br/dspace/bitstream/1904/5008/1/NP13VAZ.pdf 2. Sérgio da Silva Martins, Carlos Alberto Medeiros, and Elisa Larkin Nascimento. "Paving Paradise: The Road From "Racial Democracy" to Affirmative Action in Brazil". Journal of Black Studies 2004 34: 787-816. 3. Diaz, Pablo. "A Response to Mark Wells". Brazzil Forum. http://brazzilrace.com/viewtopic.php?t=6 4. Goldstein, Donna. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. University of California Press. November 2003. 5. Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo. "O insulto racial: as ofensas verbais registradas em queixas de discriminação". http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?
script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101- 546X2000000200002&lng=en&nrm=iso 6. Motta, Athayde."Genética e realidade: Contra a genética, o conhecimento." http://www.afirma.inf.br/textos/destaque_janeiro.rtf 7. Poverty in the United States: 2001. http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-219.pdf 8. Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Cultural Anthopology (EIGHTH EDITION). McGraw Hill 2000 9. Equipe de Trainees. "Cassetete de policiais faz discriminação." Folha de S. Paulo. October 13, 2001. Available online August 22, 2005.
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/treinamento/menosiguais/xx1310200122.htm 10. Democracy Now. "50 Bullets: Rev. Al Sharpton & Amadou Diallo's Mother Condemn NYPD Killing of Groom Sean Bell Hours Before His Wedding". Available online December 1, 2006.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/28/1454244 11. Brown, Jodi M. and and Patrick A. Langan. "Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide of Felons by Police and Murder of Police by Felons". Available online April 24, 2006. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf 12. Flavia Piovesan, James Louis Cavallaro, Jamie Benvenuto Lima, Jr., Jose Fernando da Silva, Lucioano Oliveira and Valdenia Brito. 2001. Execuções Sumárias, Arbitrárias ou Extrajudiciais, Uma Aproximação da Realidade Brasileira. Recife: Companhia Editora de Pernambuco. 2001 as quoted in Edward Telles Racismo à brasileira: uma nova perspectiva sociológica. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará: Fundação Ford, 2003. 13. Cotes, Paloma and Solange Azevedo. "Polícia que não funciona". Época magazine, #311. May 3, 2004. 14. Ibid. Statistics on US police taken from US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs' Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available online August 13, 2006.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/justifytab.htm 15. Ibid. 16. Human Rights Watch. Police Brutality in Urban Brazil. Human Rights Watch, 1997. 17. Ramos, Silvia. "Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro: from Beatings to the Use of Lethal Force". Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos. Available online August 16, 2006. http://www.social.org.br/relatorioingles2005/relatorio010.htm 18. Gomes, Américo. "As verdadeiras vítimas da banalização da violência". Jornal Opinião Socialista. Issue no. 164. December 3, 2003 - January 28, 2004. Available online September 17, 2005.
http://www.pstu.org.br/jornal_materia.asp?id=1512&ida=0 19. US Casualties in Iraq. GlobalSecurity.org. Available online at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm 20. "Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide of Felons by Police and Murder of Police by Felons". Available online April 24, 2006. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf and US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs' Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available online August 13, 2006. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/justifytab.htm 21. Cavallaro, James Louis; Andressa Caldas, Flavia Helena de Lima. Justiça Global Brasil. Available online July 31, 2006. http://www.global.org.br/english/arquivos/wallace.html. Flavia Piovesan, James Louis Cavallaro, Jamie Benvenuto Lima, Jr., Jose Fernando da Silva, Lucioano Oliveira and Valdenia Brito. 2001. Execuções Sumarias, Arbitrarias ou Extrajudiciais, Uma Aproximacao da Realidade Brasileira. Recife: Companhia Editora de Pernambuco. 2001 as quoted in Edward Telles Racismo à brasileira: uma nova perspectiva sociológica.. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará: Fundação Ford, 2003 22. Reuters Limited. Study: Racism kills black men. March 26, 1998. Available online December 10, 2004. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/03/26/health/main5894.shtml 23. Instituto Observatório Social. "Sem ter o que comemorar, negros protestaram nesta segunda". Available online August 13, 2006.
http://www.observatoriosocial.org.br/portal/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1096&Itemid=89 24. Gomes, Américo. "As verdadeiras vítimas da banalização da violência". Jornal Opinião Socialista. Issue no. 164. December 3, 2003 - January 28, 2004. Available online September 17, 2005.
http://www.pstu.org.br/jornal_materia.asp?id=1512&ida=0 . Soares, Luiz Eduardo. Inclusão Social e as Perspectivas Pós-Estruturalistas de Análise Social. Seminário Internacional. Available online August 16, 2005. http://fundaj.gov.br/geral/inclusao/luizeduardo.pdf 25. Barcellos, Caco. Rota 66. Record 2003. 26. Caldeira, Teresa P.R. "The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil". Ethnography, Volume. 3, No. 3, 2002. 27. Vargas, João H. Costa. "Apartheid brasileiro: raça e segregação residencial no Rio de Janeiro". Revista Antropologia. Volume 48, #1. São Paulo. June 2005. 28.Fernandes, Nelito; Solange Azevedo and Paloma Cotes. "O crime mora na classe média". Época magazine. Issue 384. September 25, 2005. Available online July 13, 2006.
http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0,6993,EPT1040892-1664-1,00.html 29. Ibid. 30. Cotta, Elaine and Ariana Nicacio. "Negros na elite-Participação de afrodescendentes nas classes A e B sob". Isto É magazine, #455, June 7, 2006. 31. Antrax Comércio e Serviços de Informática Ltda. "Classes Sociais do Brasil". Available online http://www.ai.com.br/pessoal/indices/CLASSES.HTM Economic class in Brazil is divided into five main categories (A, B, C, D and E) and the salaries are computed monthly according to how many minimum salaries one earns per month. In 2006, households earning from to 0 to 478 reais per month were considered a part of class E. Households earning from R$ 479 to R$ 1,035 per month were considered class D. C is R$ 1,036 to R$ 2.149 per month. B is from $R 2,150 to R$ 6,209 per month and families of class A earned R$ 6,210 or more per month. Less than 1% of all Brazilian families earn more than 10 minimum salaries per month. 32. Brazilian salaries are calculated monthly. The salário mínimo is the minimum salary that a worker is to be paid in a month's time. According to Law 11.321, starting in April of 2006, the Brazilian minimum salary was to be increased from R$ 300 to R$ 350 per month. As of December 23, 2006, the American Dollar was worth 2.15 Brazilian Reais (1 dollar = 2.15 reais). Thus, as of this date, the Brazilian minimum salary per month was worth about 163 American Dollars. Portal Brasil website. "Lei nº 11.321, de 7 de Julho de 2006". Available online. November 17, 2006.
http://www.portalbrasil.net/salariominimo_2006.htm 33. Petrucelli, José Luis and Moema Teixeira. "O que não se diz". O Globo. December 4, 2006. Available online
www.unicamp.br/unicamp/canal_aberto/clipping/dezembro2004/clipping041206_oglobo.html 34. Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra de Domicílios (National Research Sample of Households) 35. Teixeira, Moema de Poli; Maria Lúcia Rodrigues Muller, Iolanda de Oliveira and André Augusto P. Brandão. Projeto Políticas de Ação Afirmativa nas Universidades Federal Fluminense e Federal do Mato Grosso. Brasil, ABEP 2002. Available online September 23, 2004. http://www.lpp- uerj.net/olped/documentos/ppcor/0134.pdf This is part one of a multi-piece article. Mark Wells holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and is currently working on a Master's Degree in Social Justice at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan. He can be reached at quilombhoje72@yahoo.com 2007 Mark Wells
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Now, asking him about Rio's famous "body culture" he said yes you see women on the beaches in small bikinis and so forth, but he made certain to state that it was important to understand it was their culture. He said that when you first go their your eye are big and you have that culture shock mixed with lust. He said however that it was normal for the Brazilians in Rio and they did not look upon the lesser clothed human body as wide eyed as I would coming from my culture. 
. And the holiday is on January 15, not 16. Maybe you should get such a simple fact straight. 
Mark, any comments on how you think affirmative action will work in Brazil?