Walking to and from work was humiliating, Jose Mario da Silva Ferreira says.
For 26 years as a Sao Paulo executive, he worked in the financial heart of South America's biggest city. And every day on Avenida Paulista, women tightened the grip on their handbags as he passed.
It wasn't his behavior, it wasn't his gray hair and it certainly wasn't his pinstriped suits. It was the color of his skin. Ferreira, 43, is black. The women reacted as though he were a purse snatcher, he says.
``You were born in Brazil; your origins are in Brazil,'' says Ferreira, who stepped down in December as economic planning manager at Cia. Brasileira de Distribuicao Grupo Pao de Acucar, Brazil's largest food retailer. He's now helping develop fundraising techniques as a volunteer for a Sao Paulo-based nonprofit group that supports health services.
``It's something you can never get used to,'' he says.
Ferreira's experiences -- and those of other black Brazilians -- come as the continent's biggest economy is in a celebratory mood.
A commodities-led boom is fueling growth; the real beat the Swiss franc as the best-performing major currency during the 12 months through yesterday, gaining 22 percent against the dollar to the franc's 20 percent; Brazil's stock market was No. 1 among the 10 largest over the same period, surging 18.75 percent; and Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings have raised the country's debt rating to investment grade for the first time.
Inflation, Crime, Deforestation
Behind the gloss, there's another side of Brazil. Increased consumer demand and higher food prices are boosting inflation, crime is rampant, deforestation is accelerating and something many people don't like to talk about -- racism -- is pervasive.
Brazilians pride themselves on their multicultural society, home to the largest black population outside of Africa. Their food, music and dance -- their feijoada, the national dish of black beans stewed with pork and beef, and their rhythmic samba and bossa nova -- are a mishmash, the legacy of more than 200 indigenous peoples, Portuguese colonists and about 4.5 million Africans who were brought to the country during more than 350 years of slavery. Interracial marriages are common.
``Brazil has this characteristic of being a country that embraces all the people, all the races,'' Paulo Skaf, president of the Federation of Industries of the State of Sao Paulo, says. ``In Brazil, what's important is the person.''
`Anything But Race'
So pervasive is the perception that Brazil is a paragon of racial harmony and equality that it makes the discussion of discrimination all but impossible, says Carlos Santana, a Workers' Party legislator who represents Rio de Janeiro and heads the National Congress's Parliamentary Group to Promote Racial Equality.
``In Brazil, we can talk about anything but race,'' Santana says. ``The myth of racial democracy created a taboo.''
Some people outside of government use harsher terms.
``We have the strongest apartheid ever because people deny racism exists,'' says Humberto Adami, head of the nonprofit Institute for Racial and Environmental Laws in Rio de Janeiro. ``It's very hard to combat what is taken as nonexistent.''
Statistics paint a picture of a nation tainted by the legacy of unequal opportunities. One hundred twenty years after becoming the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, Brazil remains divided by color. People of African descent are ``a large, impoverished and discriminated-against population,'' the Brazilian embassy in Washington said in a press release posted on its Web site in April.
'Preta' and 'Parda'
Blacks -- defined by the government and nongovernmental organizations as people who describe themselves as either ``preta'' (black) or mixed-race ``parda'' (brown) -- make up almost half of the population. Of the nation's more than 187 million people, 92.7 million are black and 93.1 million are white; Asians, Indians and those who haven't declared a race make up the rest. On average, they earn little more than half as much as whites, 578.2 reais ($361) a month compared with 1,087.1 reais, according to a report based on 2006 data by IPEA Institute for Applied Economic Research, a government group in Brasilia.
Black women are particularly disadvantaged. According to a study by IPEA and the United Nations Development Fund for Women using 2003 data, black women earned 70 percent less than white men, 35 percent less than black men and almost 18 percent less, on average, than white women.
Few blacks make it into management. They account for an estimated 3.5 percent of the executives, 17 percent of the managers and 17.4 percent of the supervisors at 500 major companies, according to the Ethos Institute, a Sao Paulo-based business group that seeks to promote social responsibility. In the U.S., blacks make up about 13.5 percent of the population and hold about 6.3 percent of the management jobs, according to U.S. government data.
6 Percent at Petrobras
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company known as Petrobras, estimates that last year about 6 percent of its workers -- 3,004 out of 50,207 -- were black, the company said in an e-mailed response to questions. Just over 5 percent of 30-year-old blacks graduated from college compared with 18 percent of whites, according to IPEA.
It's a similar story in government. Of the 513 senators and deputies in Brazil's National Congress, 43 men and 3 women are of African descent, according to Marcelo Paixao, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's 23-member cabinet includes two blacks.
Executives routinely reject any suggestion that such disparities result from racism.
'Linked to Education'
``No,'' says Roberto Setubal, chief executive officer of Sao Paulo-based Banco Itau Holding Financeira SA, Brazil's second- largest nongovernment bank. ``I think this situation is closely linked to education,'' he says. ``It's a problem that can only be solved in the long term as the level of education in Brazil improves.''
The country is moving in that direction, Lula said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg News.
``It's a cultural problem,'' Lula said. ``Instead of complaining that business people don't hire blacks, we need to improve education, the background of everyone, so that people can take all the possible positions. We are advancing in this direction.''
A Petrobras official says the company hires only through an exam that's open to everyone.
``There's no discrimination by race, age or religion,'' the official says in an e-mailed response to questions. Respect for people of different races ``is explicit in the company's ethics code,'' says the official, who refused to be identified by name.
Beyond the human toll, racism is sapping the Brazilian economy of a significant source of strength.
`Spending Power'
``If you consider the spending power of the black community in the U.S., you can have an idea of the consumers we are leaving behind because they are at the margin of social inclusion,'' says Luana Moraes, 35, director at Differential, a Sao Paulo-based consulting firm specializing in corporate diversity. ``It's an economic issue as well as a social one.''
Jose Vicente, rector of Universidade da Cidadania Zumbi dos Palmares, known as Unipalmares, estimates that gross domestic product growth might be 2 percentage points greater if blacks were fully integrated into the economy.
``We are simply giving our back to half of the population,'' he says.
Vicente, who is black and has degrees in sociology and law, says he faces discrimination daily. Visiting Brasilia, the country's capital and political hub, in March 2007 to attend his friend Miguel Jorge's swearing in as trade minister, Vicente, 48, says he was asked to fetch a chair for another invitee.
`Spirit of the Senzala'
``If there's a black in such a ceremony, he can't be a guest,'' Vicente says. ``The spirit of the senzala is still reproduced in the daily life,'' he says, referring to the slave quarters on Brazilian plantations generations ago.
Some students of Brazilian society say the pervasive denial that racial bias is behind the gap between blacks and whites is itself proof that discrimination exists.
``Racial prejudice in Brazil lies in the insistence that there is no racial prejudice,'' Joseph A. Page, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, wrote in ``The Brazilians,'' a 1995 book based on research conducted during 16 visits to Brazil over three decades.
Thirteen years later, the problem remains.
``There is repeated racial prejudice in Brazil,'' Page, 74, says in an interview. Take the predominance of whites in senior positions.
`Perpetuates Itself'
``People tend to hire other people who are like themselves,'' he says. ``It perpetuates itself.''
For blacks who do achieve corporate success, the experience can be disorienting.
``You look around and can only think there's something wrong about it,'' says Freddy Lacerda, 55, a black general manager at Banco Itau.
Professional success doesn't insulate blacks from racial affronts. Edison Dias is commercial director at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc's Brazilian unit and a graduate of Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo, one of the country's top- rated universities.
The son of a washerwoman and a stonemason, he says his finance career has meant recognition, security and the opportunity to rise above his origins. So he says it was a special shock the day a management discussion at a previous employer grew heated and a fellow director, the same position he held at that company, screamed at him using a racial epithet.
``This episode still weighs a lot on my memory,'' he says.
The Only Blacks
Dias, who lives with his wife and two sons in a 170-square- meter (1,830-square-foot) high-rise apartment in Sao Paulo, says the four of them are the only blacks among 1,000 individuals in the condominium complex. Another resident once confronted his son at the condo's swimming pool and admonished him that the facility was for residents only, not for the children of workers, Dias says.
``How can I possibly get used to this?'' Dias asks during an interview in a third-floor conference room at HSBC's Sao Paulo headquarters.
Nelson Santos, an economics professor at Universidade Federal de Pelotas and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, says that ``things that should be trivial become an embarrassment.'' He recalls once in his 20s being trailed by security staff at Iguatemi, a high-end mall in Sao Paulo.
Mother's Advice
``They were like my personal bodyguards,'' he says. While he laughs about the incident, others have been hard to take, he says. As a student seeking a trainee position, he was rejected by at least 150 companies, he says. At one foreign bank, a vice president who would have become his boss asked Santos how, as a black man, he expected to enter the company and move up the ranks, he says.
``My mother always told me I needed to be better in order to be equal,'' Santos, 37, says. ``That day, I realized that not even being better would make me equal.''
Expatriate executives working in Brazil are also victims of racism. Douglas Taylor, a 46-year-old black U.S. citizen, says that when he first came to Brazil in 1990 to work for Citigroup Inc. in Rio de Janeiro, he was expecting a country where people were treated the same regardless of their skin color, he says.
``If it's a racial democracy, why can't blacks feel more comfortable anywhere they go?'' asks Taylor, who is now an analyst for Daniel Advogados, a Rio de Janeiro-based intellectual property law firm. ``I don't call it a racial democracy.''
`Dollar Denominated'
During his early days in Brazil, Taylor says, he had a white colleague with blond hair and blue eyes.
``People would think that he was the executive and I was his driver,'' he says. Even today, store clerks sometimes ignore him until he starts speaking in English. ``Everything becomes different because then I'm a foreigner,'' he says. ``I become dollar denominated.''
Brazil's blacks might hold better jobs if they had better access to quality education.
``One hundred years after the abolition of slavery, the former slaves haven't yet received the appropriate attention from the central government,'' says Fernando Haddad, Lula's education minister since 2005. ``The education issue is one of the elements that explain this phenomenon,'' Haddad, 45, says. ``But I have no doubt that there is racial discrimination as well.''
`Stop This Silliness'
President Lula, 62, a founder of the Workers' Party, has expanded educational opportunities for blacks since taking office in January 2003, building on work started by his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula initiated a scholarship program to help the poor attend private universities and supported affirmative action to ensure the entry of blacks into federal universities.
``It's necessary that we stop this silliness of being scared to confront racism,'' Lula said in a speech in November 2006, a month after his re-election for a second four-year term. ``We have to confront it with claws out and teeth bared,'' he said.
Blacks repeatedly stress the importance of schooling.
``Education is the only way to exit poverty,'' Walkiria Moreira Marinho says. Marinho, 59, who retired as a general manager at Telefonica SA in Sao Paulo in 2001, says she was one of five blacks at the college she attended and one of two women among 70 students in her class. ``But the truth is that you can never get rid of racism.''
When her son was 6 years old, he was rejected by a school in one of Sao Paulo's most-exclusive neighborhoods, Marinho says. As she looked in vain for his name on a posting of those accepted, she remembers being interrupted by another mother who asked, ``Do you see any other black child here?'' Marinho says she ultimately succeeded in registering her son at another school, and today, at age 27, he is a diplomat.
`Gave My Best'
Joao Batista Ribeiro, administrative and financial director at Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Brazilian unit, says education has been the key for blacks such as himself.
``If I have succeeded professionally, it's been because I always was dedicated and gave my best,'' Ribeiro, 43, says.
The universities from which companies recruit trainees don't reflect the composition of the population, says Gustavo Marin, president of Banco Citibank SA, the Brazilian unit of New York- based Citigroup. At the Universidade de Sao Paulo, for example, 13.4 percent of the students registered in 2007 were black, up from 12.5 percent in 2006.
``Every company should take affirmative action, concrete action, to create room so that these black people will have the same opportunities,'' he says.
Citibank is among eight companies offering trainee programs for students at Unipalmares, which says it's the first in Latin America to dedicate at least 50 percent of its seats to blacks. Currently, 87 percent of its students are black.
No Shield
Still, education goes only so far. Luiz Claudio Polycarpo, 47, has degrees in engineering, marketing and education. He also has an important job: supervisor of customer training and electronic tools distribution at Guarulhos-based Cummins Brasil Ltda., the Brazilian subsidiary of U.S. engine maker Cummins Inc. Neither his education nor his job shield him from racist affronts.
A few years ago, when he and his white boss visited a client company, a security guard mistook Polycarpo for a chauffeur and refused to talk to him, he says. Instead, the guard went straight to Polycarpo's foreign boss, who was sitting in the passenger seat and didn't speak Portuguese. Discrimination like that isn't about education or social status, he says; it's about color.
Brazil's confusion and denial over race are manifest in the way the lines sometimes blur in defining who is black and who is white. Take the case of the Teixeira da Cunha brothers.
Black and White
Alan Teixeira da Cunha, 19, and his identical twin bother, Alex, registered last year to enter Universidade de Brasilia, the public university in the country's capital that sets aside 20 percent of its seats for blacks. Their father is black; their mother is white. The twins are what might be called light- skinned.
In selecting students who might benefit from the quota system, the university assessed applications with pictures attached. Alan was considered black; Alex, white.
``There's racism, and the quota system is also an example of racism,'' Alan says. The university has since changed its selection process, replacing the photos with face-to-face interviews, according to the university's Web site.
Legal efforts to ensure civil rights for blacks have been slow in coming.
Limited Prosecutions
While the constitution of 1988, adopted three years after the end of 21 years of military rule, made racism a crime, prosecutions have been limited, says Sinvaldo Firmo, a lawyer at the Father Batista Institute for Blacks, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Sao Paulo. When there are convictions, penalties are usually fines or orders to perform community service, he says.
``We have made great progress, but there's still a lot of resistance from the judiciary in enforcing the law and punishing the aggressors,'' Firmo, 45, says.
A so-called Racial Equality Statute, which was approved by the Senate in 2005, hasn't been voted on in the lower house. The measure would, among other things, give tax incentives to companies hiring black workers and impose a quota system in universities.
``Our priority is to have the statute approved this year,'' says Edson Santos, 51, the minister in charge of the Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality. The ministerial agency, known by its Brazilian acronym Seppir, was created by Lula in January 2003.
`Light Years'
Edna Roland, who coordinates policies that affect blacks and women for the city of Guarulhos, in Sao Paulo's metropolitan area, gives Lula good marks.
``We are light years from the point we should reach,'' Roland, 57, says. ``But some progress is being made.''
There's wide agreement among those who acknowledge Brazil's racism that it's the product of centuries of prejudice.
``It's almost something hereditary, from generation to generation,'' Lula said in a Feb. 20 speech. ``People still have a lot of difficulty recognizing that we are all the same.''
Overcoming the biases and ensuring civil rights for all will require more Brazilians to open their eyes to the chasm between their country's happy, multiracial image and the reality lived by many of the nation's blacks.
"Racism is clearly an issue in Brazil," Ferreira says. "As a black person, you notice it all the time."
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