In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be "high yellow" (i.e.
, of very light skin); one can be "red" (i.e., with a reddish tint); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark.
Like, for instance, "Smokey." In fact, the famous (and "high yellow") Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends - sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny. But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question.
Smokey Robinson is black. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.
The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes "pass," i.e.
, pretend to be white, well, in this country "passing is a national institution." So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon.
And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on "passing," she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil ..
. there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be." But Simon Schwartzman, a white social scientist, thinks that allowing Brazilians to self-identify beats the alternative.
"I think it's very wrong for the government to start labeling people and saying, 'You are officially black or you are officially white, or you are officially something.' You have all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I don't think it's the business of government to classify and label people." So the question of "Who is black?
" is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D.
Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face? Maybe your instinct is the latter.
In the U.S. of A.
, after all, we know what black is. One morning, my translator and I ride out to the favela made infamous in "City of God," the Oscar-nominated 2002 film about the drug wars that suck in children and spit out bones. We wait outside a community center for the Brazilian hip-hop star I have come to interview.
Inside, a funeral has just come to an end. A casket is borne out to a van, followed by a handful of young people. All have sad eyes.
After a while, the man I'm waiting for appears. His given name is Alex Pereira Barbosa, known professionally as MV Bill. The MV stands for Mensageiro da Verdade, Messenger of Truth, and he is famous for rapping about conditions in the When I mention the funeral, he explains that the dead boy worked for one of the drug lords and met a violent end.
When I mention that the boy was mourned by young people both black and white, MV Bill gives me a look. He considers all of them black. "One of the characteristics of Brazilian racism," he says, "is that the person can choose to be what she wants.
'Oh, I'm white, I'm not black.' Here, the darker you are, the more discrimination you suffer. And that makes it difficult for the blacks, from light to dark, to understand each other.
The lighter-skinned blacks avoid the darker-skinned blacks because they don't want to suffer the same discrimination. It's hard for them to work together because of the degree of discrimination according to your color." The cruelest racism, says MV Bill, is actually intraracial, perpetuated by light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned blacks.
Fair skin, he says, represents power, even in the After being in this country a while, I find myself doing something I'd never feel the need to do at home. I ask people I'm interviewing "what" they are. When dark- skinned people identify themselves as "black," there is an unmistakable little thrill of victory, a notch for "our" side, as in someone who was brave enough and tough enough to accept the designation this society despises.
Someone who understands that the problem isn't color and never was; rather, it is what some people have arbitrarily decided color means. Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that's a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation's most controversial journalists in the process.
When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she's crazy. "I don't know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious," she says. And there it is again, that sense of race as a glimpse in a fun-house mirror.
Indeed, as Leitao relates the responses she receives, I find myself laughing in recognition. One reader, for example, accused her of "creating a problem because I talk about it." "Because of you," the reader wrote, "one day, we will be racist.
" I've gotten that exact same e-mail. And it's funny, Lord knows it is, but it's also maddening. You wonder how intelligent people can turn logic so thoroughly inside out.
How smart people can say such stupid things. Over the years, I have come to understand that it's not about the strength of the argument. Leitao has a computer full of statistics documenting "a very strong and permanent gap between black and white in Brazil.
" Over the years, I must have quoted a hundred government and university studies illustrating a similar gap between black and white in the U.S. Yet at the end of the day, sometimes, it's like you wrote it in sand.
You begin to realize that denial is stronger than logic. And that while it is, your country - whatever country it is - will always fall short of its self-image. America, the land of the free?
Not always, not quite. Brazil, the land where race matters not? "We have a carnaval song," says Leitao.
"For 40 years, the people, every year, sang this song. And this song is terrible. Whites never think about what they are singing.
The song is: 'Because your color won't contaminate me, I would like your love.' "And the people never realize. Why we don't never realize that we have a problem here?
" Her frustration makes me chuckle in recognition. She is a newspaper columnist who writes about race in a nation 4,100 miles away. But she is also a reflection in a fun-house mirror.
is a columnist for the Miami Herald In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone.
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