Welcome to my blog! As an introduction I thought I'd say a little bit about why I am in Brazil. I am taking a class at NYU called "Race and Higher Education in the U.S. and Brazil." As most people know, race in the United States is a pretty heated topic of discussion, and many American's believe that racial issues are the same throughout the world. Brazil also had slavery during it's early history, and in fact had 7 times as many African slaves than the United States. But when slavery was abolished in Brazil in the late 1800's, they did not have segregation laws the way we did in America. In fact, they encouraged the mixing of races...
...today, many Brazilian's feel their country is a "Racial Democracy", or a color blind society. But if you look at the structure of their socio-economic status, you will find that many of the black or mixed race people are in the lower rungs. To keep this short, in an effort to bring more blacks into the middle class, many of Brazil's universities have started an affirmative action program - similar to the United States.
My travels throughout Brazil will bring me to the cities of Sao Paulo, Salvador de Bahia, and Rio de Jeneiro. I will also be extending my travels to Manaus in the north west part of the country in the Amazonas region. While in all of these places, my class mates and I will be visiting different universities and NGOs (non-government organizations) to discuss and learn about race and universities throughout the country. Some of these universities will have affirmative action programs in place, some will even have a quota system, but they all run things differently...
And now a snippet of my first encounter with race while here. It was actually while some classmates and I stopped at a local outdoor cafe. We were chatting and a Brazilian man interupted us (in English) and asked where we were from. When we said New York, he pulled back - a little surprised. He had said that if he were to guess, he would have only picked out one of us as being American - the one who was very pale white. Of the other three girls, one was of Asian Indian descent, and the other two were white, but had a nice summer tan, making us look darker than we would be if it were not summer. When I told Wendi, our teaching assistant this story, she said that apparently Brazilians only think of American's as being very white, or like the black rappers you see in music videos...
Keep a look out for my next posting - about our trip to UNICAMP - Brazil's second most prestigous school and one of the 3 public universities (Free!) in Sao Paulo.
How interesting that you encountered a stereotype that was not entirely negative. I look forward to reading more about your experiences in Brazil.
ReplyDeleteI remember when we had a French exchange student come to Lynbrook. He came to my French class and we all asked him questions about the American perception. He told us that the standing perception about Americans is "a fat man eating potato chips, sitting on the couch, wearing a baseball hat, and watching television."
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