Activist or not, many Canadians base their understanding of racism on the African-American struggle for racial equality, especially in light of recent movements such as Black Lives Matter. However, few conversations about racism towards Black people in other parts of the world, such as in Brazil, factor into activism discourses in Canada.
Rosana Barbosa, an associate professor of Latin American studies at Saint Mary’s University, was born and raised in Brazil.
“I recall growing up in Brazil and watching soap operas with only lighter complexion, mixed-race actors,” Barbosa said. “It never reflected my friend group and my community of dark-skinned friends, and that confused me.”
Although anti-Black racism continues to affect the lives of 60 million Afro-Brazilians, Barbosa said these experiences rarely receive coverage in the media outside of Brazil. According to Naira Fragoso da Costa, a Carleton student of Afro-Lusophone heritage, initiatives such as Black History Month tend to focus on the idea of racism as originating in the United States.
A question of race
Barbosa said much of the racism she faced growing up stems from Brazil’s colonial history.
“[Racial mixing] has been so common for such a large amount of time that intermarriage is more accepted in Brazil than it is in the United States,” Barbosa said.
Brazil is a diverse country home to native Brazilians, as well as non-native peoples of Portuguese, African, and more recently, Middle Eastern and Japanese descent. Today, Brazil’s population is roughly 53 per cent Black or mixed and 47 per cent white.
“In Brazil, racism is mostly based on appearance,” Barbosa said. “Brazilians with darker complexions are categorized and often identify as Black, while those of lighter complexion are identified as mixed or white.”
What many don’t know is that Brazil’s celebrated history of intermarriage and multiculturalism was the result of a historical attempt by Portuguese colonizers to eliminate African and Indigenous populations.
“The Portuguese allowed and were in favour of assimilation,” Fragoso da Costa said. “They wanted to purify the Black race and their strategic way of meeting that goal was by enforcing [intermarriage].”
This colonial ideology refused to fade away. During the 1930s, Brazil continued their attempts to assimilate Black communities by accepting a wave of European immigrants to support their labour market. Many Brazilian government officials believed the intermarriage that would result due to an influx of immigration would ‘whiten’ the Black population, Barbosa said.
“There’s a proverb by a famous Portuguese priest that goes ‘God created Black and white but the Portuguese created the mulatto,’ ” Fragoso da Costa said. “I think it shows the way in which a lot of the Brazilian population took pride in ‘creating the mulatto’ but didn’t realize that it was a notion that perpetuated racism.”
A different fight with similar goals
Fragoso da Costa said intermarriage is still a common practice in Brazil to fit the construction of beauty, which continues to be a fair mixed-race woman.
“In my family, the majority of Afro-Brazilian women that I know are with white men,” she said. “Some of my cousins are with white partners, and I think part of it has to do with the fact that my great aunt would consistently tell them not to bring home a Black guy.”
She said she agrees Brazil’s status as a racial melting pot results in ignorance towards the persistence of racism in her country, unlike in North America where the clear lines of ethnicity play a role in racism.
“Racism in Brazil isn’t as aggressive and the façade of racial democracy makes it easier for people to push the oppression of dark skinned Brazilians under the rug,” Fragoso da Costa said.
Barbosa said Brazil has only recently begun to recognize the contributions of its Afro-Brazilian community.
“Brazilian culture has been infused with Black contributions. African heritage began to be seen as national heritage and something that could encourage Brazilian nationalism in the 1930s,” Barbosa said. “Where people are starting to move to now is . . . that accepting African heritage is also a matter of listening to their stories of oppression.”
Brazil’s history of racism is one of many within the greater African diaspora.
“The first definition of diaspora refers to large-scale involuntary displacement and an inability to return home coupled with a great yearning to do so,” said Daniel McNeil, a history professor at Carleton University. “The second would refer more closely to the period of colonization immediately following World War II in which Israel and many nations in Africa and the Caribbean declared their independence.”
Communities in the African diaspora are unique in their identity but share some common experiences, including their fight against anti-Black racism.
More than one story
McNeil said the global recognition of America as one of the best countries in the world is what perpetuates a single story of racism. He said it’s a conversation that is complex because it is not an accusation of the space African Americans are taking in defining racism, but rather a discussion of how the United States has controlled what information we consume.
“The African-American community challenges the idea that the only way to be human is to be white—the same way that people in the African Diaspora have to challenge the idea that the only way to be human is to be American . . . particularly when the majority of people of African descent aren’t in the United States but are in Brazil,” he said.
Barbosa said the country has faced a very different history than the United States and said she believes Afro-Brazilians cannot copy American strategies to combat racism.
“Why are we constantly looking to the United States to find a solution when our history is not and will never be the same as theirs?” Barbosa said. “Jim Crow and segregation laws would have never worked in Brazil because of how difficult and unrealistic it is to separate Black people from white people.”
Barbosa said Afro-Brazilian activists fight is not against segregation but against invisibility.
Fragoso da Costa said she agrees.
“There are steps to racial equality being made in Brazil and in other African communities,” she said. “It’s time we start allowing them to define racism as well.”
Having lived in New York as a child, Fragoso da Costa said she recognized the monopoly America has over Canadian understandings of racism.
“I would get questions about my experiences of racism and people would assume that I was African-American,” Fragoso da Costa said. “Moving to Canada made me understand that it’s not just Americans that discuss their stories of racism—Canada talks about racism as something external from them as well. . . They discuss it as if it doesn’t exist here but only in the United States.”
Fragoso da Costa said Black History Month, while expanding its definition, is still a month focused on one story of Blackness: an African-American one.
“I remember being asked to present for a Black History Month event but being told that it had to be in the context of North America,” she said.
Fragoso da Costa said she hopes awareness about her experiences as an Afro-Brazilian woman will change how Canadians view Black history.
“It’s frustrating because I get that Black History Month is an American concept,” she said, “but for it to be true to the history of Black people, it has to adopt a global understanding of what being Black means.”
