Brazil latest to try racial preferences

With no fanfare, the Brazilian government is quietly introducing affirmative action programs for blacks here.

• Last month, the Ministry of Social Security said that 40 percent of those hired to work on a poverty program would be black.

• The Labor Ministry this year will set aside 20 percent of its job- training budget - for courses in everything from hairdressing to software design - for blacks.

• Lawmakers here are moving to pass a bill giving black actors 25 percent of all television, movie, and theater roles.

The changes come on the heels of the most comprehensive study ever done on racial inequality in Brazil, where 43 percent of the population is considered black or dark-skinned. The ongoing government study says other social and economic programs haven't worked, and it advocates a racial preference system.

At a time when the United States is generally backing away from affirmative action, Brazil joins a handful of nations, including India, South Africa, and Malaysia, that are adopting affirmative action as a means of dealing with racial discrimination. Similarly, Eastern European nations are beginning to deal with the education segregation policies directed at Roma (gypsies). Some experts see the codification of civil rights as part of the natural maturation of emerging democracies. Throughout Latin America, for example, new laws have been adopted in the 1990s that include minimum quotas for women in the national legislatures.

In Brazil, there has been almost no political debate so far on affirmative action policies for blacks, because the initial government programs are not well-known. But officials say these are the first of what will likely be a more wide-ranging package of projects intended to make jobs and education opportunities more readily available to blacks.

"To reduce discrimination, you have to have some sort of preference (system)," says Ricardo Henriques, coordinator of the study on racial inequality, jointly funded by the Brazilian government and the United Nations Development Program. "In this century at least, the differences between black and white, independently of all the structural and economic changes that have taken place, have remained the same. The study suggests that if you don't introduce policies of racial preferencing, you won't be able to move the tendencies. It seems to me to be unquestionable that political action concerning affirmative action is necessary."

Government officials and black leaders say blacks are justified in demanding affirmative action because the government already sponsors similar programs to benefit the handicapped, indigenous people, and women. Companies with more than 100 employees are legally bound to give 2 percent of their jobs to handicapped people. Universities in the states of Mato Grosso, Para, and Amazonas already have or are about to implement special entrance rules to ensure indigenous peoples are better represented in the student body, says Ivair dos Santos, the Ministry of Justice's special assistant on race affairs.

Under a 1997 law, at least 30 percent of each political party's electoral candidates must be female.

Blacks, however, have never benefitted from any such legislation and remain woefully underrepresented in many of Brazil's decisionmaking bodies, Mr. dos Santos says. Of the country's 21 cabinet ministers and 11 Supreme Court judges, not one is black.

Blacks are angered by such statistics and that anger is increasingly being translated into action. Last month, black activists protested what they say is the refusal of store owners to hire black shop assistants. They went into a busy mall and slapped stickers saying "Don't buy from shops that discriminate against blacks" on the windows of several shops, forcing many to pull down the shutters.

Another sign that blacks are deeply dissatisfied with the politicians elected to represent them: Popular rap artist MV Bill and other black musicians and intellectuals recently formed a political party exclusively to fight for black causes.

Claudia Calmon has nothing but sympathy for the protesters. The 30-year old teacher has repeatedly suffered discrimination. When she applied for a job as a secretary a few years ago, she was told all the positions had been filled, only to see the same jobs advertised a week later. Waiters and shop assistants ignore her, and, when she visits offices or schools, people often assume that because she is black she is a lowly office worker seeking employment.

"As a black in this country, you are invisible," she says.

Until recently, Ms. Calmon worked at the Rio de Janeiro State University, where one of her functions was to enforce a law prohibiting state employees from holding two jobs at one time. However, some people see the law as an unfair restraint, and Calmon has received abuse for enforcing it. On one occasion she received a letter insulting her and calling her an "uppity black."

"I was surprised and offended," she said. "They weren't questioning my work, they were questioning the color of my skin."

It is precisely because such stories remain common in Brazil that the government has tentatively begun introducing the first affirmative-action programs.

In February, Education Minister Paulo Renato Souza reaffirmed that blacks will receive a representative proportion of Bolsa Escola grants, an innovative scheme that pays poor families to keep their children in school.

The government is reluctant to publicize the moves. Neither the Ministry of Social Security nor the Labor Ministry issued a press release detailing their projects - and officials say they are not part of a coordinated government policy, but rather a series of discreet pilot programs aimed at measuring the efficiency of affirmative action and the public response to it. The country's senior spokesman on race affairs, Gilberto Saboia, called the programs "a kind of experiment that could be the seed for more wide-ranging policies."

Black leaders lauded the moves and called on the government to expand the experiment. Hedio Silva, a black lawyer who recently resigned from a government race-relations committee in protest at the executive's lack of action on race issues, says the government must stimulate companies to employ more blacks. Mr. Silva suggests authorities ban or restrict credit to firms that do not hire blacks and give preference in government tenders to companies that practice representative hiring methods.

Putting such ideas into practice is the key to not only ending discrimination, but also to reducing poverty in Brazil, Silva and Henriques say.

"The elite say that the principal way to do away with poverty is economic growth," says the researcher. "But in reality, the only way to reduce poverty is to reduce inequality. Poverty in Brazil has a color. Poverty in Brazil is black."

Studies show that the gap between black and whites isn't closing. Henriques cites education as the clearest example. His research shows that the average 25-year-old white has slightly more than two years more schooling than the average 25-year-old black, exactly the same difference as in his parents' and grandparents' generations.

In other social indicators such as housing, patterns of consumer goods purchased, child labor, and employment, the gap has remained the same, he says.

Affirmative action is the only approach not yet tried to address the problem, says Henriques. "Obviously, it depends on the government taking the initiative, but I think it is a two-way street, and our priority is to get this onto the political agenda. This is a problem for the government, but it is more a problem for society," he says.