America And Brazil: A Cultural Comparison in Three Parts

Part One:
Third World Country: How America Fits the Bill

When one enters São Paulo, Brazil from the international airport, they are first struck by how technologically advanced the country is—the nice cars, flashy billboards, and innovative energy technologies are all impressive. Then, in one jarring moment, the airport bus turns into the middle of a slum. Houses made of cardboard, children playing barefoot at the edge of the highway, and an open sewer running through the haphazard jumble of make-shift houses all serve to remind you that, yes, Brazil is still a Third World country. The bizarre juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty is something that is sadly characteristic of Brazil.

In countries like Brazil, corruption and racial inequality run so deep that doing social work can feel a bit like jumping into quicksand. Each problem solved brings up a whole new set of problems, and it can be overwhelming.

During the years I did social work in South America I asked myself again and again why is it that a country like Uruguay, with shared borders and a similar ethnic population to Brazil, somehow managed to get by without the horrific violence and desperation that plague many Brazilian cities.

The best explanation I can come up with is that it all boils down to social inclusion: a sense of shared identity, social responsibility, and a sense that the government is working for the people, and not against them. A society with a strong sense of collective identity and social inclusion tends to be more stable and peaceful than one that lacks these characteristics. Of the countries I know that have experienced social unrest, there is a divide in the population—racial, ethnic, economic, or political. If someone is seen as being “poor” before being Brazilian, or “Black” before being American, it creates a fractured and volatile society.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was in Buenos Aires. I stood in a crowded cafe and watched as the images unfolded on the TV. People kept shaking their heads in disbelief: “How could this be happening in the United States? It looks like a Third World country!”

A few weeks later, I was on the street speaking to a refugee from Sierra Leone about why he had come to Buenos Aires. I asked if he ever thought about going to the United States, to which he quickly and adamantly replied: “Never! It is much too dangerous!” Coming from someone who escaped one of the most violence-ridden places on earth, it did not say much about our image abroad.

What was it about the images of Katrina that struck a chord with people in the Third World? What was it about Katrina that made the United States suddenly go from being viewed as a First World to a Third World country?

Images of starving children in Africa, gun-pocked favelas (shanty towns) in Brazil, sprawling slums in Central America—all of these have one thing in common: They are images of people who have been left behind. They are images of extreme social exclusion.

Many upper-class Brazilians do not even view the lower classes as being completely human, much less equal. “They don’t think like us” or “they don’t feel like us” being the rationale for blatant inequalities. The dehumanizing of poor and marginalized communities is what defines a country as being Third World. It is not a lack of wealth that creates Third World situations, but rather a lack of wealth distribution. And this lack of distribution goes hand in hand with dehumanization and social exclusion. It is much easier to live with suffering and poverty if you see the sufferers as less human and, therefore, less deserving than you.

This brings me back to Katrina. As I watched the news, I grimaced every time I heard the word “refugees” being used to refer to U.S. citizens. The media was depicting the victims, who were mostly Black, as being outsiders and not American. The victims were not being treated, referred to, or respected as citizens. They had become “unrequited masses.” They had become foreigners in their own country.

However, since I saw the coverage from abroad, everything that was meant to further the victims of Katrina from the general American populous, had the opposite effect. Everything that was so ugly about that time: the racism, the exclusion, the neglect and systematic violence, was all lumped together into one thing: The United States. Unlike the U.S. media, for those watching overseas, it was not people of color that had been criminalized; it was the U.S. government’s response and gaping lack of social services that were seen as being the “criminals.”

It is hard for us as Americans to fully understand just how detrimental the mismanagement of the Katrina relief effort has been to our image abroad. If I had been in the United States when Katrina hit, it would have been shocking, frustrating, and deeply saddening, but it would have been different. The distance I had, and the insight I gleaned from the Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan take on Katrina, made me realize just how much our country has slipped.

Part Two:
Brazil and the United States: A World Apart?

I have lived Brazil for ten years and in the United States for ten years. The two countries, and the similarities and contrasts between them, constitute the majority of my childhood and young adulthood. The differences between the two countries are not to be understated. The smell of red iron-rich earth, the swollen bellies, the taste of freshly ground sugar cane, and the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo have no correlation to my years in the United States. But scratch a layer deeper and there are similarities that run through these countries from the times of post-colonial genocide and slave plantations to contemporary racial divides.

Brazil and the United States are both former slave-owning countries whose first economies were built upon plantations and cash crops. The key difference between the two being that Brazilian plantation owners did not separate slave families, and they allowed capoeira (a Brazilian fight-dance, game, and martial art created by enslaved Africans during the 19th Century), Candomblé (an African religion), and other gems of Afro-Brazilian culture to survive. In the United States, slave families were separated and traditional African languages and cultures were effectively extinguished.

As former slave-owning, plantation-based economies, Brazil and the United States are faced with many of the same hurdles. Structural and institutional racism dating back to pre-emancipation times plague both countries and hinder the advancement of racial equality.

Brazil has an extremely poor human and civil rights record, with entire sections of its population, mostly poor and Black, being unaccounted for. The structural racism in Brazil manifests itself on every level. Medical care, food, housing and education are just a few of the basic needs that many Black Brazilian citizens live without. Despite of this, racism in Brazil is, for many, a null subject. If you ask a Brazilian if they are racist, they will cluck and wave their finger at you, saying: “We are Brazilian, It is you Americans who are racist.” But if you look at the statistics, poor Blacks are dying in disproportionate numbers, and the infant mortality rates among Black Brazilians are staggering. Life for poor Blacks in Northern Brazil is dismally similar to living under slave rule, the plantation owners having been replaced by powerful landowners.

The denial of racism also occurs, in a very different way, in the United States. The movement of political correctness gave us guidelines as to how to speak about race, as though speaking about race in a certain way would nullify its detrimental affects. I view the “color-blind” argument coming from both Brazilians and Americans as dangerous because it closes the door on discussions and denies the very real affect that racism has on people of color.

Katrina and its aftermath exposed the underbelly of structural and institutional racism in the United States. For the first time in Modern History, the United States was seen as being incapable of caring for its own population. The international community offered aid, usually reserved for Third World countries, that was ultimately not accepted, despite the overwhelming need.

Katrina lay bare what many living in the United States already recognized—we lived in a racially divided country. If a society extends social support and civil rights to one group and not to another, it is setting itself up for violence and upheaval. History has proved this to be true again and again, from the French Revolution, to the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The increasing levels of violence in the United States and Brazil are no exception.

Further, in both Brazil and the United States, racism, exclusion, and neglect are equivalent to a cocktail for violence. Brazil is an extremely volatile country. I visited Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the last bout of police and gang violence. The country was on the verge of mass civil disorder. Buses were being blown up in broad daylight and gunfights were breaking out on main highways during rush hour. It seemed that all the years of mismanagement, structural and institutional racism, and societal neglect were coming to a head.

The images I saw on TV during my time in Brazil were unnervingly similar to the images of violence that followed Katrina. Social exclusion creates desperation, and desperation in turn creates violence. As poignantly stated by Marcus Camacho, the Brazilian inmate and organizer of the prison riots and gang violence that plunged Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo into chaos, “if [needs of the people] been heard and addressed within the boundaries of the constitution and the law, then none of this [violence] would have happened.”

The similarities between Brazilian and American society have existed since their formation. But the abysmal fall into bureaucratic inaction and neglect that occurred in the wake of Katrina is deeply unsettling. As someone who has lived almost half my life in Brazil, I am deeply concerned. Resembling Brazil in terms of music, culture, and food would be fine. Resembling its disastrously ineffective bureaucracy, its racial exclusion, its militarization, criminalization of the poor and social neglect is not.

Part Three:
Scars of Slavery: Racial Inequalities in Brazil and the United States (Part 3 of 3)

Perhaps the most noticeable similarity between Brazilian and American society is the pervasiveness of fear that characterizes both countries. Brazil and America both fear their poor and disenfranchised citizens of color. Structural and institutional racism, as well as structural violence, acted out through disproportionate levels of incarceration and capital punishment for people of color, reflect this fear and permeate all levels of Brazilian and American life. The fear in both countries is embodied by their strong and strikingly similar gun-culture. The pro-gun argument is the same in Brazil as in the United States: “We need guns to protect ourselves” and “Guns make us safer.” I think the crime levels in both countries, and especially in Brazil, have proved this is not the case.

The farther you delve into the history of the U.S. and Brazil the more disturbing the similarities become. In many ways, the United States and Brazilian governments have worked together in implicating brutally oppressive policies and treatment of marginalized and poor communities of color.

When I was a young girl growing up in Brazil, I remember vividly the little children, about my age at the time, who would, from one day to the next, “disappear.” I was in Brazil in time to see the ending of a U.S. foreign policy that helped fund and train both the Dirty War in Argentina and the Military Regime in Brazil, among others. In Argentina, the military focused on kidnapping and murdering “subversive thinkers,” which were mainly college students. In Brazil, the violence was directed toward not only progressive thinkers but also upon the poor, mostly Black, population. Brazilian police rounded up and murdered scores of homeless children, while having complete economic, military, and ideological support from the United States. The Brazilian solution to child homelessness? A police squad, machine guns, and several rounds of ammunition.

When I worked in Honduras with street children, many years later, I encountered the same problem: Young, homeless children being murdered by a police and military force with close ties to the United States.

This horrible and devastating “solution” to gross social exclusion and poverty was something I had never seen within the United States borders until Katrina. The images of Black evacuees being driven away by armed police from the bridge to Gretna while trying to escape the crisis in New Orleans reminded me of Brazil. The government, instead of assisting those in need, instead had turned its guns upon them.

The police did not cross that line. Innocents were not gunned down in complete immunity as they are in Brazil. But as someone who has lived in countries where that line is crossed every day, I was shocked, saddened, and deeply frightened to see it come close to happening in my own country and to my own people.

I don’t think that a society is born inherently prone to violence. Brazilians are not more violent than Americans for any other reason than the social framework they grow up in. The one thing that stopped those police in New Orleans from doing what Brazilian police would not have thought twice about was the television cameras present and the accountability they had for their actions. Unlike in the United States, there are no repercussions to horrendous acts committed by the Brazilian police—the media, government, international committee, and general public turn a blind eye to such events.

This brings me what I see as the biggest difference between the United States and Brazil: Our strong civil and human rights institutions and watchdogs. The sense that we, as a nation, must invoke a system of checks and balances on the actions of the government is of invaluable importance. We must never forget the lessons of countries like Brazil. Our government is not inherently good. What keeps our country in check within our own borders is not our inherent and superior moral standing as a nation and government. Indeed, as someone who has lived in countries affected by U.S.-backed regimes, I would adamantly beg to differ. What I witnessed in Brazil were acts of gross inhumanity and wickedness committed with the guidance and support of our government. What makes this nation special is its strong sense of civil duty, and the ideals instilled in our citizens that we have a right and duty to organize and protect those whose rights and safety have been put into peril.

With that said, I would like to add that had we, as a nation, kept a better “checks and balances” on what the United States government was doing in its foreign policy for many, many years, perhaps the atrocities of Katrina, Abu Grab, and Guantanamo would never have happened. For many of those who live overseas, the latest prison and torture scandals are just one in a long string of human rights infringements by the U.S. government. We have let those policies go unchecked for so many years that the tidewater has finally breached our levees—our disastrous human rights record has flooded into our nation. What we have been slow to realize is that the structural and institutional framework for committing human rights abuses is already in place; we have been effectively using it abroad for years.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

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