RIO DE JANEIRO - An adage comes to mind: "If you're white, you're all right. If you're black, get back." It was a folk saying - property of no one, property of everyone - that we African-Americans used to encompass defining realities of our lives.
Meaning not just the fact that some white men would think themselves better than you because they were white, but the fact that some black men would, too, because they were light. This was a legacy of slavery, when light skin often meant less brutal treatment. So to be here in Brazil, to wander through this culture where a man the color of Bishop T.
D. Jakes or Don Cheadle might, with a straight face, deny the Africa in him and people earnestly debate "who is black," well ..
. it feels like you've stumbled into a fun-house mirror of race in which everything is exactly the same as it is back home, except where it is completely different. As this month's Miami Herald reports on black life in Latin America vividly attest, that sense of falling through the fun-house mirror fits much of the black experience in this hemisphere.
That black woman in Guatemala who made history by winning a beauty title could be Vanessa Williams. That Argentine kid who got called Kunta because he went to a white school could be a kid bused to school in Boston 30 years ago. That black man in Cuba getting harassed by police could be my son or, indeed, any young black man in America.
In much the same way, race in Brazil has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange. Some here will tell you that this nation's triumph is that it never encoded race into its laws as did the United States. While that sounds like, and in some ways is, a laudable thing, the punchline is that those same people will also tell you this did not save Brazil from the sin of racism.
Indeed, they will haul out anecdotes and statistics illustrating the fact that Brazilians the color of T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle tend to find it harder to get work, education or health care, but damnably easy to get followed around the department store by security guards who equate darkness with dishonesty.
This country is engaged in a debate over how to best address those issues. They are fighting over an affirmative-action program that would offer educational and health-care advantages to Brazilians who are black. Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?
The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown).
Anything but "afrodescendente" (Africa-descended) or negro (black). 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; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was "Detroit Red"); 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. Detroit Red was black. 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? RIO DE JANEIRO - An adage comes to mind: "If you're white, you're all right.
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