As politics shift, African Diaspora profes Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, an associate professor in UWM’s African and African Diaspora Studies Department, always expects a full inbox these days. Every day, she is inundated with emails about news from Brazil – a new anti-crime proposal, another report of police violence, or the latest remark by right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro. It’s part and parcel with her role as the president of the Brazil Studies Association, an international organization of scholars and activists, and as the leader of the AfroBrazilian committee of the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil. As an expert on race and politics in Brazil, MitchellWalthour has been supporting the activism of black Brazilians as political tensions heighten in the South American country. Can you give us an overview of demographics in Brazil? Many people think of it as primarily a Latino country, but it’s much more racially diverse than that. Officially, today, Brazil is 54 percent Afro-Brazilian. Of course, that is an undercount because of the racial politics in the country. If you go by census numbers, most Afro-Brazilians identify as pardo, which is designated as racially-mixed people. There’s also the census category preto (black). Blackness is very stigmatized in Brazil, so some of those Afro-Brazilians will not identify as preto in the census. The category pardo is somewhat different than the category that we have in the United States. In general, when we talk about racially-mixed people, we’re talking about people who might have a black parent and a white parent, or a Latino parent and white parent. But in Brazil, people can identify in this category and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have two parents of different racial backgrounds; it could mean that they have a great-greatgrandmother who was white. Why are people so reluctant to identify themselves as Afro-Brazilian? “History” is really the answer to this question. At the outset, when the Portuguese came to Brazil, there were indigenous people already there, and then the Portuguese brought enslaved people from Africa. There was a lot of 10 • IN FOCUS • July, 2019
sexual violence by European men against indigenous and African women. That’s the first step to racial mixture in Brazil. This is a violent history, but it’s often not discussed. Later, there were so many African descendants that they were beginning to outnumber Europeans. (Europeans) were concerned about the national image. They encouraged European immigrants to intermarry with African descendants. They even subsidized Italians and Germans to come to Brazil to work and encouraged this racial mixture. The reason they were encouraging this is because their ideal was that black people would disappear. Today, blackness is stigmatized, and there’s also stigma against racially-mixed people who may have black characteristics. People consider things like, how is your nose shaped? How big are your lips? What hair type do you have, in order to identify people. For those of us who haven’t been following international news, what is the current political situation in Brazil? [President Jair Bolsonaro] began his term at the beginning of this year. Before he was elected, people were already organizing because they knew his reputation. During his entire political career, he has been homophobic, racist, classist, sexist, and misogynist. Both activists and scholars can talk about all of the horrible things that he has verbalized over time but that’s just part of it. The other part is, what is he doing in practice? And who has he appointed in his administration who can enact and enforce those policies? The president campaigned as being tough on crime, which is attractive in a country that has problems with drugs and gangs. I just got an email today about an anti-crime proposal that they are trying to pass in Brazil that would loosen gun control and have stricter criminalization of gang members and drug dealers. But the other thing about Brazil is that many innocent people have been killed by police because they are suspected criminals, and who are those people? They’re Afro-Brazilian.
