(Week of July 10)
Last week, I took advanced Portuguese classes, meaning that I adopted more vocabulary to speak with Brazilians about social issues and movements (which was one of my goals from the beginning). Reading the literature on Brazilian social history was helpful to conceptually understanding its social dynamics across race, class, and religion, but nothing is as helpful as speaking to Brazilians themselves. This week during my immersion classes — where I spoke one-on-one with a professor all day and went into Rio to explore the different neighborhoods — I made it a point to speak more proficiently on these questions of race, class, and religion to hear them from Brazilians’ perspectives. I tried my best (but obviously, never entirely successfully) to leave behind the subjective mental schemas I bring as an American student who goes to Notre Dame.
One fascinating topic is race. I learned in class a few months back about the myth of Brazil’s “multiracial democracy,” the idea that Brazil was so “mixed” between Portuguese, African, and Indigenous peoples — as well as waves of immigrants — that the concept of “race” was not as strong or potentially discriminatory as it is in the United States. Based on both what I read and what I heard, though the category of race functions differently for everyone, some patterns were more prominent. For instance, most people I spoke with — some of whom identified as Black or “pardo” (a category that is akin to “mixed-race”) — acknowledged that race still plays a prominent role in many Brazilians’ socioeconomic standing, even if it was not always consciously acknowledged, pointing out that favelas were mostly populated by the descendants of formerly enslaved (Black) persons while wealthier neighborhoods tended to have a higher concentration of white people. Some saw Brazil as a majority-Black country based on data that showed that up to 54% of the population has African ancestry, while others repudiated American notions of race as too — quite literally — black and white. Some insisted that while race and racism is an issue, it is not the same as in the US, and that racial categories are far more fluid and difficult to neatly draw lines. For instance, in the US, a legacy of the one-drop rule relied on blood quantum to decide if a person was white or Black “enough,” while in Brazil, different categories existed that relied both on a person’s ancestry but also on their phenotype. When I paid attention to street art and graffiti, I noticed that many tended to be forms of resistance that in some way or another referenced race. Sometimes they honored the victims of police brutality and murder, and sometimes they even used the Portuguese translation of “Black Lives Matter.” When I asked if the BLM movement had been strong in Brazil as it expanded outside of the US, one person told me yes, but Brazil had already had a strong history of resistance to racism. Another person mentioned that Brazil had made some legal progress with regards to racism. When we passed by a wealthy shopping mall, they told me that if someone at the mall, for whatever reason, used racist language against them because they were Black, and they caught it on film, they could sue the person or potentially press charges. This was extremely interesting to me because to them, the notion that there should be limits on “free” speech did not seem that controversial; it was a way to protect them. They were actually shocked that in the US you were “allowed” to be racist verbally (which prompted some reflection on my part as to what free speech really protects).
Another interesting dynamic was the religious one. Brazil is currently a very religiously and spiritually diverse country. While the majority of Brazilians identity as Catholic, the concentration of Catholics varies by region. In recent years, as in much of Latin America, there has been a growth of Evangelical and Pentecostal practitioners. I spoke with many people about this phenomenon, and most tied it back to some political question. Most people I spoke with had negative attitudes towards Evangelicals. Some cited their religious beliefs themselves (such as opposition to LGBTQ rights or intolerance for African-descending religions like Umbanda or Candomblé), and almost all were concerned about Evangelicals’ growing political presence. Like in the United States, a coalition of conservative Evangelical voters is credited with fueling far-right political candidates, which has been one of the greatest comparisons between Trump’s right and Bolsonaro’s right. One person was outraged that the Evangelicals had a caucus in Congress, which they insisted should be completely secular. Another said to me that Evangelical pastors emotionally manipulated people in poverty with a “health and wealth” Gospel (the idea that if you give money to the church, worship God, and fully believe, then you will be rewarded with material gains. The people who made these points to me tended to be Catholic or nonreligiously aligned, though some still had Evangelical friends. I did still meet Evangelicals who identified with LGBT-affirming churches or centrist political opinions. Sometimes when they revealed themselves as Evangelicals to me, they immediately said something along the lines of “but a chill one” or “but not for Bolsonaro” to separate themselves from this seemingly-popular notion. I found Catholic voters to be fascinating too. While in the US, Catholic politics is often marked by discourse on social issues like abortion (which places the church in a far more conservative camp), the Catholic voters I spoke with in Brazil usually supported the left-leaning PT and strongly identified with the Church and the PT’s materialist politics and economically-left politics, focused on poverty, material redistribution, etc.
It is fascinating to me how much I was able to understand and take away from these conversations. I want to emphasize that none of the above views are necessarily my own nor “general” from Brazilians; they simply reflect individual conversations I had in Portuguese that could be indicative of larger trends. They reflect how some Brazilians see themselves through a specific social group. These types of conversations made me more appreciative of Brazil’s rich culture and diversity, and they especially fueled my interest in how social identities influence politics.