“We need a cook for a small family, preferably white,” said a 1912 job advertisement in São Paulo in one of Brazil’s largest newspapers.
In 2019, a message in a WhatsApp group for caregivers in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state, advertised 10 job openings for the agency. ”
The 100 years separating the two job ads is a clear example of how over 350 years of slavery continues to impact Brazilian society. Black people were, and often still are, ignored, even in the lowest paying jobs.
Despite making up more than half (55%) of the population, Afro-Brazilians form the basis of all socio-economic indicators, and are more likely to suffer from hunger, poverty, gender-based violence, and murders by criminals and police. It has an overwhelming advantage in statistics regarding victims.
In Brazil, brutal murders of black people by police occur frequently. Of the 6,393 people killed by police in 2023, 82.7% were black. Wrongful convictions of black people also occur with alarming frequency.
Residents of the Quilombo community in Cabo Frio. Such settlements were traditionally founded by fugitive enslaved people. Photo: Silvia Izquierdo/AP
It is impossible to understand the history of Latin America’s largest country without understanding it, especially from an Afrocentric perspective.
No other country in the world imported more enslaved Africans. 4.864 billion people disembarked in the transatlantic slave trade. This is 12 times the number of enslaved Africans sent to the United States and three times the number of Spanish Americans overall.
Even in Brazil, most people don’t know about this history, so I decided to write a book about it and published it this month (only in Portuguese for now).
Projeto Querino is based on a journalism project that took a team of over 40 people two years and seven months to work on.
Inspired by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, it launched in 2022 as a podcast and series of magazine articles produced by Rádio Novelo. I spent a further year doing further research and writing the book before joining the Guardian in April.
Although the central idea was to understand and explain how black people participated in key moments in Brazil’s history, such as independence in 1822 and the much-delayed abolition of slavery in 1888. , some school curricula and some media outlets refuse to acknowledge it.
Its name pays homage to Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851-1923), a groundbreaking Brazilian intellectual who was born free in Bahia. He is considered the first person to positively portray Africans and African descendants in this country’s historiography.
Tiago Rogero interviews quilombola activist Vania Guerra. Photo: see caption
But we also highlight how choices made by white people, especially wealthy people, continue to prevent descendants of enslaved people from accessing the wealth they created and are still creating. I thought I would like to.
“Racism is not a gas in the atmosphere; it is a human creation, just like slavery,” historian and author Inae López dos Santos said in an interview for the book. He spoke at “The reason slavery lasted so long was because Brazil’s political elite was made up of slave laborers.”
Until slavery was abolished in 1888 (the last country in the Americas to do so), state and federal laws denied blacks, even free ones, access to school. The result was a disproportionate rate of illiteracy, even decades after abolition.
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One of the most important vestiges of the slave-owning mentality that still prevails in this country is the fact that nearly every middle- or upper-class household employs at least one domestic worker. Domestic workers are primarily women and black people and typically work long hours for low wages.
In the 19th century, enslaved domestic women endured 12- to 15-hour days, often longer than the notoriously grueling plantation labor, and were exposed to sexual harassment by enslaved workers. There was also a lot of physical abuse. This reality continues today. Some employers today.
It took Brazil 70 years to enact a law that equated domestic work with other occupations, and 70 years after its repeal, but it was finally passed in 2013. At the time, only two lawmakers voted against the law – one who said it was a mistake and the other Jair Bolsonaro, the former president who still proudly calls his I support the decision.
An 1800 image depicts a Brazilian slave trader inspecting a group of Africans being transported to Brazil for sale. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Instances of racial discrimination, such as carer job advertisements, rarely have serious repercussions, even though they are against the law.
In a 2019 case, an agency responsible for an ad that excluded “black and overweight” women was spared a 5,000 reais (£675) fine.
Despite centuries of slavery and decades of persecution and neglect following the abolition of slavery, black people were pivotal in turning Brazil into a democracy. The struggles of the black women’s movement contributed, for example, to the creation of Brazil’s public health system. Although this system is now available to all citizens, it did not exist before 1988, when the country fell short of providing equal citizenship conditions for all.
Thanks to the Black Movement’s fight for education, affirmative action laws, implemented from the early 2000s, applied to everyone, so not only people of African descent, but also poor white youth, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, People can now also enroll in universities. I can’t afford private education.
“We built Brazil,” Julema Vernec, a prominent public health rights activist and Amnesty International’s executive director in the country, told me. “Once we realized that we had to stay here, we decided to make this country our own and leave a new footprint. And that’s exactly what happened.”
