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Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Racism takes many hues
Achievers 
Women and men dance in a circle during a ceremony of Candomble, a religion of African origin that is practiced in Brazil. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Racism takes many hues
Visiting Brazil, where race has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange, the experience is like looking into a fun-house mirror.
RIO DE JANEIRO -- An old adage comes to mind: ''If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back."
It was a folk saying -- property of no one, property of everyone -- that we African Americans used to encompass defining realities of our lives. Meaning not just the fact that some white men would think themselves better than you because they were white, but the fact that some black men would, too, because they were light. This was a legacy of slavery, when light skin often meant less brutal treatment.
Correction: Speaker -- Jack Chang, not Leonard Pitts
So to be here in Brazil, to wander through this culture where a man the color of Bishop T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle might, with a straight face, deny the Africa in him and people earnestly debate "who is black," well . . . it feels like you've stumbled into a fun-house mirror of race in which everything is exactly the same as it is back home, except where it is completely different.
As this month's Miami Herald reports on black life in Latin America vividly attest, that sense of falling through the fun-house mirror fits much of the black experience in this hemisphere. That black woman in Guatemala who made history by winning a beauty title could be Vanessa Williams. That Argentine kid who got called Kunta because he went to a white school could be a kid bused to school in Boston 30 years ago. That black man in Cuba getting harassed by police could be my son or, indeed, any young black man in America.
In much the same way, race in Brazil has a way of seeming both hauntingly familiar and exotically strange. Some here will tell you that this nation's triumph is that it never encoded race into its laws as did the United States. While that sounds like, and in some ways is, a laudable thing, the punchline is that those same people will also tell you this did not save Brazil from the sin of racism.
Indeed, they will haul out anecdotes and statistics illustrating the fact that Brazilians the color of T.D. Jakes or Don Cheadle tend to find it harder to get work, education or healthcare, but damnably easy to get followed around the department store by security guards who equate darkness with dishonesty.
This country is engaged in a debate over how to best address those issues. They are fighting over an affirmative-action program that would offer educational and healthcare advantages to Brazilians who are black.
Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?
A COMPLEX MATTER
The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but "afrodescendente'' (Africa-descended) or negro (black).
In this, he's not unlike his counterparts in the United States, where black people also have an extensive vocabulary to describe variations in skin tone. In the United States, one can be ''high yellow'' (i.e., of very light skin); one can be "red'' (i.e., with a reddish tint; one of Malcolm X's early nicknames was "Detroit Red''); or one can be any of a number of synonyms for dark. Like, for instance, "Smokey." In fact, the famous (and "high yellow'') Motown singer William Robinson was given that nickname in affectionate irony by one of his father's friends -- sort of like calling a fat guy Tiny.
THERE IS NO DOUBT
But here's the thing: In the States, no matter your skin tone, your race is never in question. Detroit Red was black. Smokey Robinson is black. T.D. Jakes is black. Don Cheadle is black.
The same is not true in Brazil. And if the United States is a country where black people with light skin used to sometimes ''pass," i.e., pretend to be white, well, in this country "passing is a national institution." So says Elisa Nascimento with a laugh. She is white, American-born and the wife of Abdias do Nascimento, a 90-year-old black Brazilian artist and political icon. And the insistence of some Brazilian blacks on "passing," she says, has political consequences in that it tends to distort statistics on black life. "The way racism works in Brazil . . . there is a hierarchy, and so people tend to identify themselves lighter than they necessarily would be."
But Simon Schwartzman, a white social scientist, thinks that allowing Brazilians to self-identify beats the alternative. "I think it's very wrong for the government to start labeling people and saying, 'You are officially black or you are officially white, or you are officially something.' You have all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I don't think it's the business of government to classify and label people."
So the question of "Who is black?" is tricky, to say the least. If a man the color of T.D. Jakes or even Smokey Robinson says he is not black, do you take him seriously? Do you laugh in his face?
BLACK IN THE U.S. OF A.
Maybe your instinct is the latter. In the U.S. of A., after all, we know what black is.
Of course, the U.S. of A. is also the country where, in 1896, an ''octoroon'' (i.e., one-eighth black) man named Homer Plessy, white to all physical intents and purposes, lost a Supreme Court case that started when he was ordered to move to a "colored'' train car. And it's also the country where educator Gregory Howard Williams, a man who would disappear in a room of middle-age white men, saw his life change in 1954 from middle-class comfort to ostracism and racial slurs when it was revealed that his father was half-black.
As Williams, the author of the 1995 memoir Life On The Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black once told me in an interview, "The issue in America has never been color. It's always been race."
So in deriding the silliness of another nation's racial mores, an American finds himself in the unenviable position of the pot calling the kettle, well . . . black.
THE ROLE OF LAW
Indeed, it is America's history of encoding its racial biases in law -- everything from the Constitution designating blacks as three-fifths of a human being in 1787 to the restrictive housing covenants and segregation statutes that persisted into the 1960s -- that Yvonne Maggie points to in explaining why she objects to Brazil's flirtation with affirmative action.
"We don't need to say that race exists," says Maggie, an anthropologist and university professor. "We have to say that race is not important to define people in social terms, that black and white are the same kind of people."
It is worth noting that Maggie is white, her ex-husband is black, and they lived for a while in the United States. In 1971. In Texas.
"It was a rough time," she says in her imperfect English. "For me, was impossible to live there. We could not be married. Why I married with a black guy, you know? So when I say to you that Brazil was different . . . even my first husband didn't think of himself as black. In Brazil, he was a Brazilian, even though he was black. He never thought of himself as someone different from me because he was another color."
Which brings you to the heart of the matter, the reason any discussion of race and racial terminology that goes on long enough eventually comes to seem silly and overly complicated. African American? Afro-Brazilian? Negro? Colored? Moreno? Afro-descendente? Red? Pardo? Smokey?
NO SUCH THING
The reason the language struggles so hard for precision is that it seeks to describe that which does not exist. As a scientific matter, there is no such thing as race. We are all of the human race, something we probably will not fully understand until it is explained to us by green people with eyes waving on stalks.
Whereas U.S. history flies in the face of that fact with its centuries of pretense to hard and fast racial boundaries, it's a point of pride for Maggie that her country never -- officially -- bought into that lie.
I respect the principle she argues -- race does not exist and therefore should not be acknowledged in law. But that raises a question: How can you have racism without race?
Maggie insists that you can. She says that what Brazil has is a kind of "social racism'' supported not by law, but by custom. One suspects that those who suffer under it would be hard-pressed to tell the difference -- or find reason to care. Which is why, given the choice, many dark-skinned Brazilians choose to be other than "black." It is a means of escape, if only linguistically.
One morning, my translator and I ride out to the favela made infamous in City of God, the Oscar-nominated 2002 film about the drug wars that suck in children and spit out bones. We wait outside a community center for the Brazilian hip-hop star I have come to interview. Inside, a funeral has just come to an end. A casket is borne out to a van, followed by a handful of young people. Some have light skin, some have dark. All have sad eyes.
After a while, the man I'm waiting for appears. His given name is Alex Pereira Barbosa, known professionally as MV Bill. The MV stands for Mensageiro da Verdade, Messenger of Truth, and he is famous for rapping about conditions in the favelas.
CHOOSING ONE'S RACE
When I mention the funeral, he explains that the dead boy worked for one of the drug lords and met a violent end. When I mention that the boy was mourned by young people both black and white, MV Bill gives me a look. He considers all of them black.
"One of the characteristics of Brazilian racism," he says, "is that the person can choose to be what she wants. 'Oh, I'm white, I'm not black.' Here, the darker you are, the more discrimination you suffer. And that makes it difficult for the blacks, from light to dark, to understand each other. The lighter-skinned blacks avoid the darker-skinned blacks because they don't want to suffer the same discrimination. It's hard for them to work together because of the degree of discrimination according to your color."
The cruelest racism, says MV Bill, is actually intraracial, perpetuated by light-skinned blacks against dark-skinned blacks. Fair skin, he says, represents power, even in the favela.
SELF-IDENTITY
After being in this country a while, I find myself doing something I'd never feel the need to do at home. I ask people I'm interviewing "what'' they are. When dark-skinned people identify themselves as "black," there is an unmistakable little thrill of victory, a notch for "our'' side, as in someone who was brave enough and tough enough to accept the designation this society despises. Someone who understands that the problem isn't color and never was; rather, it is what some people have arbitrarily decided color means.
Lucia Maria Xavier de Castro, coordinator of Criola, an activist group representing black women, says she has known many people who were unable to accept their own blackness. "The
person does everything to get rid of black traces. Straightens her hair, dresses like white people -- not colorful. People do everything to eliminate traces. It's as if this person had a birth defect and was trying to correct it by taking those attitudes."
Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that's a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation's most controversial journalists in the process.
When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she's crazy. "I don't know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious," she says.
And there it is again, that sense of race as a glimpse in a fun-house mirror. Indeed, as Leitao relates the responses she receives, I find myself laughing in recognition. One reader, for example, accused her of "creating a problem because I talk about it."
"Because of you," the reader wrote, "one day, we will be racist."
I've gotten that exact same e-mail. Many times. And it's funny, Lord knows it is, but it's also maddening. You wonder how intelligent people can turn logic so thoroughly inside out. How smart people can say such stupid things.
Over the years, I have come to understand that it's not about the strength of the argument. Leitao has a computer full of statistics documenting "a very strong and permanent gap between black and white in Brazil." Over the years, I must have quoted a hundred government and university studies illustrating a similar gap between black and white in the United States. Yet at the end of the day, sometimes, it's like you wrote it in sand.
You begin to realize that denial is stronger than logic. And that while it is, your country -- whatever country it is -- will always fall short of its self-image.
America, the land of the free? Not always, not quite.
Brazil, the land where race matters not?
"We have a carnaval song," says Leitao. "For 40 years, the people, every year, sang this song. And this song is terrible. [Whites] never think about what they are singing. The song is: ''Because your color won't contaminate me, I would like your love."
"It's offensive," says Leitao. ''And the people never realize. Why we don't never realize that we have a problem here?"
Her frustration makes me chuckle in recognition.
She is a newspaper columnist who writes about race in a nation 4,100 miles away.
But she is also a reflection in a fun-house mirror.
A barrier for Cuba's blacks
Cuba 
A group of Rastafarians gathers at a park in Old Havana. The movement has gained a foothold, especially among younger Afro-Cubans. (Miami Herald staff)
A barrier for Cuba's blacks
New attitudes on once-taboo race questions emerge with a fledgling black movement
Miami Herald Staff Report
HAVANA -- Six-foot-two, brown skinned and with semi-curly hair, Denny walked confidently into a government warehouse for a recent job interview. Sitting across from the white manager, he rattled off his qualifications: high school diploma, courses in tourism, hard worker.
They weren't good enough: He needed his white brother-in-law to vouch for him, Denny recalled.
"Black people tend to do everything bad here," the manager said.
After Fidel Castro's revolution triumphed in 1959, he declared that Cuba would be a raceless society, banned separate facilities for blacks and whites and launched a string of free education and health programs for the poor -- most of them blacks.
Many blacks people still support Castro, saying that without him they would still be peons in the sugar cane fields. One black Cuban diplomat said he had no hope of an education, and his grandmother no medical care for her glaucoma, until the revolution came along.
A young girl peeks as Cuban schoolchildren practice marching in the Prado, a historic plaza in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
But listen to some blacks, particularly those born after 1959, and the failures of the revolution also become clear.
"Everyone is not equal here," said Ernesto, 37, as he dodged traffic on a Havana street. Tall and athletically built, he once hoped to be a star soccer player. He now gets by selling used clothing, and said he's continually hassled by police just because he's black.
In recent years, a new attitude has been emerging quietly, almost secretly, among Afro-Cubans on what it means to be black in a communist system that maintains ''No hay racismo aquí'' -- there's no racism here -- and tends to brand those who raise the issue of race as enemies of the revolution.
"The absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens . . . the revolution's social project," wrote Esteban Morales Domínguez, a University of Havana professor who is black, in one of his several little-known papers on race since 2005.
In another paper, he noted that "much of the research that has been done on the subject in general has been put away in drawers, endlessly waiting to be published." Black filmmaker Rigoberto López also broached the sensitive topic in a TV appearance in December, saying that while the revolution had brought about structural changes toward racial equality, "its results do not allow us to affirm that its goals have been achieved in all their dimensions."
A mural declares 'Somos Uno' -- We Are One.(Miami Herald staff)
'A NEW MOMENTUM'
Afro-Cubans familiar with the situation say black and white Cubans also have been establishing a small but growing number of civil rights-type groups. The government has not cracked down on such usually illegal activities, but neither has it officially recognized them.
"There is a new momentum, which the government is surely frightened by," said Carlos Moore, a Cuban-born expert on race issues now living in Brazil.
In recent years, the Castro government has been on the defensive on the race question. In last year's book 100 Hours With Fidel by French-Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Castro admitted that while the revolution had brought progress for women and blacks, discrimination endures.
"Blacks do not live in the best homes; they're still . . . performing hard jobs, sometimes less-remunerated jobs, and fewer blacks receive family remittances in foreign currency than their white compatriots," he said.
Still, Castro added: "I am satisfied by what we're doing to discover causes that, if we don't fight them vigorously, tend to prolong alienation in successive generations."
But Castro's own Communist Party and government fall short on the race front. Only four recognizably black faces sit on the party's 21- member Political Bureau, and only two sit on the government's top body, the 39- member Council of Minis- ters.
The highest-ranking black in Cuba is Esteban Lazo, a former party chief in the provinces of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Lazo was tapped by Castro when he took ill last summer, along with brother Raúl Castro and four others, to help rule Cuba in his absence.
And yet, black faces populate Cuba's political prisons. Some of the nation's best known dissidents are black. They include independent librarian Omar Pernét Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physician Oscar Elias Biscét. The latter was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King's non--violent forms of protest.
"Race is the biggest social issue facing Cuba," said Enrique Patterson, a Cuban-born Miami author who writes extensively about race, and calls this nation's race problem a "social bomb."
"If this problem isn't addressed, Cuba will not be governable in the future."
The work of a German graffiti artist in the Muralendo area depicts two Afro-Cubans dancing. (Miami Herald staff)
RACE STILL DIVIDES
Patterson said he believes that while Castro has kept the lid on the race issue by squashing past attempts by blacks to organize or speak out, a post-Castro Cuba won't be able to contain the frustrations.
"If the Cuban government were to permit black Cubans to organize and raise their problems before [authorities] . . . totalitarianism would fall," he said.
Look beyond the white, brown and black faces in government propaganda murals plastered throughout this island under the slogan Somos Uno -- We Are One -- and race still divides. Today's Cuba is more racially and socially integrated than the United States, but it is far from color-blind.
Whites are clearly preferred in the government controlled and highly profitable tourism industry, from taxi drivers to waitresses and hotel maids. Meanwhile, blacks in Old Havana are continually stopped by police for I.D. checks on suspicion of black market activities.
Television programs overwhelmingly show most blacks in menial jobs, and Cubans, like other Latin Americans, still use a cutting expression for a black they admire: El es negro, pero . . . '' -- He is black, but . . .
"Just look at the cab drivers lined up in Old Havana," Cito, 52, an Afro-Cuban doctor whispered so his neighbors would not overhear his complaint. "You rarely see someone who looks like me."
A tourist poses with a woman dressed in a costume in Havana. Whites are preferred for jobs in the government-controlled tourism industry. (Miami Herald staff)
Nearly three years ago, Cito, fed up with his paltry government salary and what he described as the racist attitude of his white supervisor, left his post. He now makes his living on the black market, buying meat from farmers in the countryside and selling it in Havana.
"This country has taken away all of my will to live in it," said Cito, 52, whose tiny and sparsely furnished apartment seems like a luxury compared with the rest of his crumbling building. Cito, 52, who is dark-skinned and has the body of a linebacker, recalled his early days in medical school when he dated his now ex-wife, who is white.
He recalled a running conversation his future mother-in-law would have with her daughter: "He's not a bad guy. I know his family. But there are a lot of other young men in the school you can date. Why him?"
He knew exactly what she meant; she did not want a black son-in-law.
A woman sways to the sounds of DJ 'El Fruta' as others enjoy the reggae music at a small park in Old Havana. (Miami Herald staff)
DISPARITY IN NUMBERS
Cuba's official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island's 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.
And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.
The disparity between the census' 11 percent and UM's 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.
"You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba," said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso.
For Denny, one of six children, the color quagmire astonishes even him sometimes. One sister is married to a light-skinned Cuban who considers himself white, and another is married to a Spaniard. And even though his complexion would allow him to claim something other than black, he says, adamantly and without any reservation, "Me, I am black. I choose to be black."
Rapper Mario Delgado Sotomayor, aka Soto, idolizes American rappers such as Tupac and 50 Cent. Cuban hip-hop sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism. (Miami Herald staff)
This identification, he says, was reinforced by his experiences in schools where teachers often favored his lighter-skinned classmates.
"Even though he knew they didn't have the answer," he recalled of one teacher, ''he would rather call on them than ask me."
And while Cubans of his mother's and grandmother's generations readily accept endearing uses of negro or negrito, his peers are treating it as their "N'' word.
"It's unacceptable," said Denny, whose access to the outside world via illegal Internet and satellite TV hook-ups have given him a perspective on race that Cubans in general lack.
He pays for those with U.S. dollars he earns, a relative rarity for blacks. Since whites make up the overwhelming majority of the Cuban exile (population), whites get the bulk of the cash remittances sent to relatives on the island. A study in 2000 by UM's Cuba studies institute found that the average white Cuban received $81 a year in remittances, compared to $31 for non-white Cubans.
Denny, the would-be hip hop performer, said he also sees racial changes coming through his kind of music, which sometimes defies the government and peppers its rhymes with references to racism.
He remembers one man in particular who landed in jail. ''He was rapping, 'If you are black, and feel that you are treated equal,' raise your hand. . . . He was arrested by the police."
A man reads the newspaper as two boys practice drumming in Havana. Racial categories can be complicated in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.(Miami Herald staff)
MOVEMENT
On a recent Sunday at a Havana park, a group of mostly black Cubans in their 20s and 30s, including some dreadlocked Rastafarians, carried on an intense discussion on reggae icon Bob Marley, whose songs depicted the black struggle.
"He understands what we are going through," said Omar, 31, proudly showing off a life-size portrait of Marley tattooed on his back.
Such talk can be scary to Cubans who know their history. While blacks made up a good portion of the mambises who fought against Spanish colonial rule, they remained poor and ill-treated after Cuba won its independence. A black revolt in 1912 was brutally crushed, leaving behind hundreds of dead and a deeply ingrained fear.
"Their rights and protection from potential genocide and violence depended on them never trying to organize politically as blacks," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA professor who spent 11 months in Cuba researching his recently published book, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.
That kind of talk also likely scares the Castro government.
A young couple watches a play about Cuban unity by children at a Havana artists colony. (Miami Herald staff)
"There is an unstated threat," Moore said. "Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead."
Yet something of a black movement is indeed growing, he added.
"It's subterranean, and taking place among intellectuals and people in general," said Moore. "The government is frightened to the extent to which it does not understand black Cubans today. You have a new generation of black Cubans who are looking at politics in another way."
But the government still has a hold over black Cubans -- the fear that the collapse of the communist system would make their lives even worse.
"Black Cubans are afraid of a return of the people in Miami," Moore said. "They are afraid of a restoration of the U.S. influence. The last link Castro has to the black population is based on those two fears. The third is: They are afraid that the social advantages the revolution brought in terms of health, education and even political participation will be abolished if American influence and white influence are reestablished."
Denny says he shares those concerns, but is willing to take the risk.
"We are never going to be slaves again," he said. "We are not stupid. We know the development of the world . . . We intend to have a better life."
More information about the Cuba:
› AfroCubaWeb.com
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this dispatch, and the last name of most of the people interviewed, because the reporter lacked the Cuban journalist's visa required to work on the island. Miami Herald Translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.
A great divide
Brazil 
In Brazil's northeastern coastal city of Slavador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black, condominium residents sunbathe and swim behind high walls, with a backdrop of slums. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A great divide
Brazil's public self-image of a 'racial democracy' is being challenged as black Brazilians struggle to overturn centuries of racism
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Aleixo Joaquim da Silva was working in this city's famed seaside Copacabana neighborhood, far from the slum where he lives, when he was reminded that racism is alive and well.
While refurbishing the service elevator of a high-rise apartment building, da Silva had to ride the elevator reserved for residents to fetch supplies. A white woman entered and, taken aback, ordered him out.
" 'I'm not riding with a black!' she told me. 'The place of blacks is in the service elevator!'" da Silva recalled.
Although black Brazilians have long endured such insults, many are deciding that they have had enough. The 50-year-old reported the woman to state authorities and had her convicted for breaking laws prohibiting discrimination.
It was a small victory for da Silva, but he's part of a growing movement in this country of 190 million people -- it has the world's second-largest black population, behind Nigeria's -- to turn back centuries of pervasive and largely unchallenged racism.
A multiracial crowd of commuters leaves the subway in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the central train station. Brazil claims more than 90 million people of African descent out of a population of 190 million. It has more blacks than any country except Nigeria. In Rio's slums, blacks make up the majority of residents. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
From university classrooms to television airwaves, black Brazilians are fighting for what they say is long-denied space in a society that has kept them on the margins.
They are pushing for two affirmative-action bills in Brazil's Congress that would open up college enrollment and government payrolls to more Brazilians of African descent. Already, many state universities have implemented their own affirmative-action programs.
In 2005, black entertainer José de Paula Neto launched the country's first television station aimed at black audiences, TV da Gente. Meanwhile, hundreds of communities founded more than a century ago by escaped slaves and known as quilombos are winning recognition and federal protections.
And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.
"The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you'll see exclusion is endemic," he said. "We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve."
Da Silva said outrage over his treatment in the elevator pushed him to fight back.
"I couldn't let it go, especially since it was done in such a flagrant manner," he said. "It just hurt too much. It hurt my soul. We can't go backward. We can't stay quiet anymore."
A game of dominoes provides a diversion for men in a 'favela,' or slum, in Salvador, a northeastern Brazilian city where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream. Despite racial disparities in the country, debate about race is rare. But now, black Brazilians have become more assertive about their rights. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
TURNING POINT
The changes mark a dramatic shift in a country that claims more than 90 million people of African descent but looks almost completely white on its TV screens and in its halls of power.
Starting in the 16th century, Portuguese slave traders sent about 5.5 million Africans to Brazil, with more than 3.3 million surviving the journey, according to historians. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
That African legacy is clear in census numbers. About half of Brazilians identified themselves in a 2005 survey as black or pardo, meaning a mix of races but predominantly white and black. Another half identified themselves as white, and less than 1 percent were Asian or indigenous.
Offenders occupy a jail cell in Salvador. Crime among the poor has jammed the penal system. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
DISPARITY ENTRENCHED
Despite their numbers, black Brazilians have long been poorer, less educated, less healthy and less powerful than white Brazilians.
And although Brazilians regularly eat foods and use words that originated in Africa, their history books talk almost exclusively about the deeds of white heroes, said Emanoel Araujo, a renowned black sculptor and the curator of the Afro Brasil Museum in Sao Paulo.
"We need to redo the history of this country," Araujo said, "and work around the premise and the perspective of the African not only as a slave but as the one who changed Brazilian society, the one who constructed Brazilian society, who constructed the wealth of Brazil."
That day of acknowledgment is still far off, and Brazil, a country with one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor in the world, is sharply divided between its whites and non-whites.
Census figures show that pardos and blacks earned about half of what white Brazilians made last year, with the gap actually widening among more educated Brazilians. In comparison, African-Americans (U.S. blacks) earned 62 percent of white American wages in 2004., and more schooling helped blacks approach white incomes.
A man begs for change outside the Salvador church Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos.(Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
The U.N. Human Development Index, which measures countries based on health, income and other factors, paints an even worse picture. If measured separately, Brazilian whites would be ranked 44th in the world, on par with oil-rich Kuwait, while its blacks and pardos would be ranked 105th, about the same level as El Salvador.
"I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there's widespread racism in Brazil," said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil. "Racial and social inequality are strongly linked."
Jailson de Souza e Silva, who runs a Rio de Janeiro anti-violence advocacy group, said the split is stark in his city's violence-torn slums, where blacks make up the majority of residents. Two-thirds of the country's homicide victims in 2004 were black.
"The objective here is not to preserve life, and hundreds of black men are dying every year," de Souza e Silva said. "Meanwhile, in the rich, white parts of the city, every single death is big news. Our lives clearly don't have equal value."
Da Silva's slum has been paralyzed in recent years by gang-related violence, and its middle-class neighbors have erected gated checkpoints around the slum to stop the killing from spilling into their streets.
"It's another sign of the inequality here," da Silva said while gesturing to the rutted dirt road running by his house. "The government doesn't bother to pave the streets here. We're just totally forgotten."
A squatter named Beatriz, hanging laundry under the glare of a bare bulb, is one of many who occupy abandoned buildings in Salvador. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
GAP IN NORTHEAST
The divisions are felt even in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador, where more than three-quarters of the population is black and where African-based culture and religion are the mainstream.
Ivete Sacramento, who became the country's first black president of a major university in 1998, said she is saddened every day when she looks out the balcony of her upper-middle-class apartment at the sprawling slum that sits just a few dozen yards away.
Except for her family and two other households, every resident in her 64-unit apartment tower is white. In the nearby slum, the racial equation is inverted, and white faces are rare. ''No one has any idea that blacks can be anything more than maids," said Sacramento, 54.
''The place of blacks in Brazil is still the place of slaves."
Alberto Borges, a 31-yearold aspiring boxer from the slum, said that just being from his neighborhood is a strike against him.
"If you live in one of these houses, the people outside will call you preto," Borges said, using a word for black Brazilians that many consider derogatory. "If you try to find a job and tell them where you come from, they won't call back."
Despite the disparities, debate about race is rare in Brazil., and problems are more felt than spoken about.
Black Brazilians have never launched a civil-rights movement like that in the United States nor developed national black leaders in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. or South Africa's Nelson Mandela.
Also non-existent are black civic groups with the power of U.S. institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or financial networks that could spur black entrepreneurship.
A couple embrace in a Salvador doorway, in a neighborhood popular with squatters. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
A BACKLASH
Those who do speak out about racial disparities, such as TV da Gente, are accused -- even by some prominent blacks -- of fomenting racial divisions or of outright racism.
''Every time we try to put together a project like this, we're criticized by the government and everyone else who says there is no racism in Brazil," said Hasani Damazio, TV da Gente's director of international programs. "It's clear that race is treated very differently here than in the U.S."
A key difference is that Brazil never imposed legal racial segregation like the United States and South Africa, which meant that black Brazilians didn't have an institutional injustice to rally around.
Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the "racial democracy'' vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.
Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races.
Roberte Santana, 14, works out in a boxing gym, where Salvador slum youths find an outlet. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
Opponents of the pending affirmative-action bills have echoed key points of Freyre's argument, especially those about miscegenation. Census statistics show that about 30 percent of Brazilian households in 2000 were headed by couples from different racial backgrounds -- six times the U.S. ratio.
Ali Kamel, executive director of news for the country's biggest television network, Globo, said Brazilians don't think in terms of white and black, and argued that poverty affects all Brazilians. He blamed a collapse in public education and not racism for social disparities.
"Our big problem in Brazil is poverty, not racial discrimination," Kamel said. "The racism here is at a degree infinitesimally less than in other countries."
Opposition to the affirmative-action bills also has come from some black leaders such as José Carlos Miranda, coordinator of Brazil's Black Socialist Movement, who fear that racebased policies could aggravate racism.
"The worst thing we could do is pass laws that deepen divisions that already exist," Miranda said. "What wounds us the most is class, and the only way to fight racism is to promote more equality."
Other black activists, however, argue that race is the dividing factor and that racial mixing didn't eliminate discrimination against nonwhites.
A man in a wheelchair gets a ride from a caregiver in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald)
'PREJUDICE ISSUE'
"The problem of Brazil always was this issue of thinking the mulatto and the pardo are outside of the prejudice issue," Araujo said. ''Yet, when you want to hit the soul of someone, you call him black."
More Brazilians are coming around to Araujo's view, polls show, and the timeworn idea of a multi-hued racial democracy is losing its sway, even as the race debate heats up.
In its place has risen the begrudging admittance of a racially segregated country. A 2003 poll showed that more than 90 percent of Brazilians said racism existed here.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former leftist activist and union leader, is credited with helping to spur the changes in attitudes.
Soon after taking office in 2003, he made race a key issue and appointed Brazil's first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa. Lula da Silva also created a special secretariat for racial equality and launched initiatives such as requiring that Afro-Brazilian history be taught in all primary schools.
Many black leaders are skeptical that the latest changes will have any lasting impact. They point out that although the country's 1988 constitution criminalized racism, few people have served jail time for breaking the law. The woman who insulted da Silva in the elevator was sentenced to community service but has appealed the ruling.
"Things have gotten worse," said Antônio Carlos dos Santos, president of Ilê Aiyê, a community group in Salvador known for both its African-influenced Carnaval parades and its consciousness-raising social projects.
"Sure, we have people who are more conscious about the situation, but this is a land that's stepping backward," he said. "We are almost 80 percent of this state, but we're still controlled by the white minority."
It's a cynicism shared by ordinary Brazilians such as da Silva, who live every day with the country's crushing inequalities. But in his case, and for many black Brazilians, cynicism is giving way to action.
Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice
Nicaragua and Honduras 
Dancers Scharllette Allen, 15, and Jennifer Fredricks, 15, will preform in a local Afro cultural festival in the town of Pearl Lagoon. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Afro-Latin Americans:
A rising voice
A rising voice
Black populations in Latin America are undergoing a cultural and civil-rights awakening
PEARL LAGOON, Nicaragua -- In hidden fishing villages straddling the wide, muddy Kukra River along the Atlantic Coast, a quiet cultural and civil-rights movement flickers:
Almost six feet and dark-skinned, a 17-year-old whirls in her kitchen, enchanted by the intricate African beading on the gown she will wear in the village's first black beauty pageant.
A 47-year-old reggae artist who chronicles the pain and hope of his people in song makes history as the first black to win his country's highest cultural award.
A 30-year-old activist finally liberates her hair, lets it grow naturally, an act that screams race more than complexion ever could.
These stories are part of a slow but dramatic shift in consciousness among blacks here and throughout Latin America. In something akin to the civil-rights movement in the United States -- without the lynchings, bombings and mass arrests -- blacks are pushing for more rights and reclaiming their cultural identity.
"For years, it was just so much easier to not 'be' black, to call yourself something else," says Michael Campbell, who grew up 18 miles downriver in Bluefields. "But the key to our future is to strengthen our identity, to say we are black, and we are proud."
Carmen Joseph, a caterer and mother of eight children in Bluefields, Nicaragua, prepares potato salad as her granddaughter Britney Cash, 5, stands by. 'Some folks don't say they are what they are,' she said. 'You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black.' (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
BELATED ATTENTION
Latin American governments are listening and have finally begun to address racial inequities that have simmered since slavery.
Just four years ago, Brazil created a Cabinet-level position to deal with race. In Colombia, activists have won legislation legally recognizing blacks and their history. In Cuba, increasing numbers of non-political groups are forming to tackle race issues, including the Martin Luther King Movement for Civil Rights. And in the nearby Dominican Republic, some blacks are fighting state authorities for the right to be categorized as "black'' on their passports.
Statistics show that blacks in the region are more likely to be born into poverty, to die young, to read poorly and to live in substandard housing.
Authorities are only now starting to count the black population, but the World Bank estimates that it numbers anywhere from 80 million to 150 million, compared with 40.2 million in the United States.
The new push for change is fueled by support from African-American politicians and civil rights groups through globalization -- the technological ability to share common human experiences. Indeed, once isolated Latin American countries now have access to pop-cultural channels such as MTV and BET, which broadcast social messages worldwide.
Students share a bench -- and some candy -- during a break in classes at Moravian High School in Bluefields. A black-history curriculum for public schools is on the agenda of black leaders and activists. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
Just last week, U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., led members of the Congressional Black Caucus in a nationally televised townhall discussion in Colombia with President Alvaro Uribe about the living conditions of Afro-Colombians.
"[Afro-descendants] can see what the outside world is doing. That's caused a consciousness where they say, 'We can do it, too,' '' says Meeks, who is also working with blacks in Peru and Bolivia. "They can see what the civil-rights movement did in the United States and know that they have the ability to benefit also."
The movement challenges a widely held belief that Latin America comfortably witnessed the civil-rights movement in the United States from afar because the region was not racist, and blacks were already integrated.
"The black movements have been able to get people to question that notion, and to acknowledge that racial democracy is a great idea and kind of wonderful dream, but it really doesn't exist on the ground yet," says George Reid Andrews, author of Afro-Latin Americans and a professor of comparative race at the University of Pittsburgh. "That, I think, is a real achievement."
Elizabeth Forbes, 85, known as 'Ms. Lizzie' -- on the porch with grandchildren Sean, on her lap, and Brandy, and with Jayson MacField, 8, peering from the window -- is helping to revive the ties of Bluefield's blacks to their heritage. Nine percent of Nicaragua's population is black. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
DISADVANTAGED GROUP
Nicaragua's black population is the largest in Central America, but there is only one black member in its National Assembly, Raquel Dixon Brautigam, who was elected last year.
Only about one in five residents in Nicaragua's predominantly black neighborhoods have access to clean water, versus the national average of three in five. Between 4 percent and 17 percent have electricity, compared with the national average of 49 percent.
Twenty years ago, the country recognized blacks and indigenous people through autonomy laws, making it possible for them to claim natural resources, demarcate communal lands, govern themselves and reclaim their ancestral identity.
For years, the struggle has been framed largely in regional terms -- the Atlantic Coast, led by towns such as Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas, versus the Pacific Coast -- English versus Spanish, Creole versus Spanish-indigenous mestizo. Creoles, descendents of English masters and their Caribbean slaves, often identify themselves as black.
"Race and region are inextricably linked," says Juliet Hooker, a native of Bluefields and assistant professor of government at the University of Texas. "We have never really been acknowledged in the national narrative about identity. Much of the discrimination has been through the lens of the coast we live on."
Now, for blacks -- about 477,000, or 9 percent of the 5.3 million Nicaraguans -- the movement is largely about visibility.
A Garífuna boy, kicking a soccer ball, is part of a dwindling group descended from shipwrecked Africans exiled to Honduras in 1797. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald)
Black leaders and activists say they are collectively defining, and redefining, what it means to be black here. They are working on an ambitious agenda that includes redistricting for better political representation, bilingual education and a black-history curriculum for public schools. And in March, the National Assembly passed a reform measure to include race issues in the new penal code.
Before now, there were no anti-discrimination or affirmative-action laws. Still, a bill that would outlaw institutional racism has languished in the assembly for more than two years, with not enough backers to push it through.
This isn't the first time blacks have mobilized.
A black-power movement started along the coast as early as the 1920s through the nationalist message of Marcus Garvey.
In the 1960s, as the civil-rights movement was unfolding in the United States, blacks formed a coalition to negotiate better living conditions. That effort fell apart with the start of the Sandinista revolution in 1979. After the war, the Sandinistas promised to end racial discrimination and to promote regional cultures. At the same time, they were accused of precisely the opposite -- oppressing groups already disenfranchised.
It would be almost three decades before meaningful steps were taken under the Sandinista regimes. Now, there is cautious hope with the return of that government.
A horse is ferried across the Kukra River, where black awareness is rising in villages. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
RACE CONSCIOUSNESS
Although the Atlantic Coast has been settled since the 17th century, the first road connecting the coast to the rest of the country opened only 50 years ago. It is still impassable during the rainy season and still doesn't go all the way.
The last leg to Bluefields from Managua is by boat, along the Escondido River. Despite the remoteness, it has not been closed entirely to the outside world. Some residents talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch foreign programs on television and a few have access to the Internet. Much of the contemporary movement along the coast came from men who died long ago -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Marley. King's unyielding message of equality and Marley's social lyrics were delivered here starting in the 1970s by kids who got jobs on cruise ships and brought back books and music.
Pearl Lagoon's unofficial leader, William Wesley, a warm guy with an easy smile, lives on the main road with a view of the village. Just inside his living room, a picture of King hangs near the phone.
"The kids came home, and they kept talking about these people," says Wesley, a retired teacher. "I knew a little bit already. But I wanted to know more. I found myself in the teachings of King and Malcolm X. I discovered my Afro heritage. We have to take what they said to help us create a direction that we can all follow."
U.S. sports are popular in Pearl Lagoon, on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
In Bluefields, Carmen Joseph, more comfortably ''Miss Carmen," a caterer who is said to make the best potato salad in town, quickly steps outside a neighbor's house. She sits on the front porch, this racial business too touchy for inside talk.
"Yes," she whispers, never making eye contact. "Some folks don't say they are what they are. You see, I am black, and I raised my family up knowing they were black."
With eight children, Joseph has spent a lifetime trudging up and down the hills of Bluefields, establishing her place as one of the town's matriarchs. "I am not ashamed. I never turned on my color, but some people do."
To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.
This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.
The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.
Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, "passing'' for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.
"It's hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black," says Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman.
A year ago, Shirlene Green Newball, who grew up in Puerto Cabezas, allowed her perm to grow out. "I really wanted to show and know who I am," says Newball, who works for a women's organization.
Newball had thought for a while about what it meant to be black here. She considered all the terms morena, coolie, afro, chocolate, la negra. Then she decided that natural hair -- an enduring barometer of ethnicity was the purest expression of blackness.
"You are seeing an authentic black movement along the coast, but things are moving slowly," says Kwame Dixon, an assistant professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Koreth Reid McCoy, 17, gets her hair combed by 'Ms. Vilma' in preparation for a black beauty pageant in Pearl Lagoon. 'I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry,' she said.(Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
SYMBOL OF CULTURE
In Pearl Lagoon, population 3,000, the dogs sleep on the dock, the main drag is more dusty path than street, the country-western music drifts from open windows and doors, and Koreth Reid McCoy rushes home from school.
She floats the whole way, more than a mile, to behold the lovely lavender gown with beads she is to wear at the beauty pageant. In the last decade, the coast has held annual black beauty pageants, but this is the first one -- along with an African cultural festival -- in Pearl Lagoon.
"I love the way it falls. I love the colors. I love the style," Koreth says, her voice falling into a lullaby. "It reminds me of Africa. I'm so proud of my heritage and my ancestry."
Leaving her house, Koreth steps into the road, and, carried by the giggles of barefoot little girls, makes her way toward the river and back, as poised and glamorous as she would be on anybody's runway. All of a sudden, and maybe not so suddenly, she is more than a pretty girl in a pretty dress. Koreth is a symbol of cultural possibilities.
"I want people to know where we are from."
Philip Montalban Ellis sings about his hometown, Bluefields. 'I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people,' he said. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
MESSAGE IN MUSIC
For as long as he can remember, and certainly when times were bad, Philip Montalban Ellis -- beautiful dreadlocks to his waist and a guitar that rarely leaves his side -- has been singing about the black experience.
. . . We gotta fight or we will die. . . . Lord knows we need liberation, Lord knows it's the only solution. . . .
Today, Montalban sits on an old, rusted chair under a lime tree in his backyard, strumming away.
"I been trying to sing songs that say something and that uplift my people. We have struggled so long," he says. "I have been charged with carrying the message of my people."
Earlier this year, the Nicaraguan government recognized Montalban's art, awarding him its highest cultural honor. Before now, the idea of an unapologetically black man even being considered was unthinkable.
"I feel like I am accepting the award for a whole race of people," Montalban says. "I hope this means something."
Miami Herald staff writer Pablo Bachelet and special correspondent Tim Rogers contributed to this report.
Black denial
Dominican Republic 
Yara Matos holds her hair extensions as a stylist in the Herrera neighborhood prepares to give her the look of long, straight hair. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
Black denial
Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black
SANTO DOMINGO -- Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.
Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair.
But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. "If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said. "It's not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty."
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.
Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.
Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the "whiter." And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.
"I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. "With time passing, I see I'm not black. I'm Latina.
"At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it's not about skin color. It's culture."
The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule -- neighboring Haiti -- the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.
Here, as in much of Latin America -- the "one drop rule'' works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.
Capellan Dominquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
LACK OF INTEREST
As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. "There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background. "But then I think: Well if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"
A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.
The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted."
"The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. "I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, 'You are not black.' If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."
Manuel Núñez (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
THE HISTORY
Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.
Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.
To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.
"The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. "Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."
Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."
The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening'' the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.
Dominican girls Luz Freiney Paulina, from left, Esther Celeste Santana, Mayelin Eloisa Valdez and Melisa Valdez, comprise the dance troupe Las Nizas. Below, Dominican author Manuel Nunez writes about the issues of 'black' and 'Dominican' as they relate to the history in his country. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be," said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. "Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that."
Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him "Indian." He protested to the director of the agency.
"I remember the man saying, 'If he wants to be black, let him be black!' '' Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.
When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.
"There's tremendous resistance to blackness -- black is something bad," said black feminist Sergia Galván. ''Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited."
Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests -- but they never win.
Mariana Ramirez smiles as she sits in Daisy Gran Salon in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
CULTURE PULL
Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.
"I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. "They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don't want that image to be seen."
The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.
"It's not self-hate," Candelario said. "Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That's someone saying, 'I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."
Money, education, class -- and of course straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black -- until they visited the United States.
"During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. "When you ask, 'What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want . . . saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."
Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never'' go to a university meeting with her natural curls.
Product promoter Margarita Munoz, right, tidies up the shelf displaying her company's hair-straightening products in a Santo Domingo market. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
"That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.
Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.
"You should see how they come in here with their big asses!'' she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. "They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, 'doesn't she know she's not really pretty?' "
Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.
She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.
"Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says 'curly.' It's bad," she said. "You can't go out like that. People will say, 'Look at that nest! Someone light a match!' ''
Angela Martinez, 12, left, entertains friend Estefany Diaz, 10, as Estefany's sister Ariela does her hair in the Paraiso de Dios neighborhood west of Santo Domingo, a scene that plays out on the streets throughout much of the Dominican Republic. (Candace Barbot/Miami Herald)
'IT WAS HURTFUL'
Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti.
"I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough," she said. "It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.
"I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things. But when it's people who look just like me?"
Friday, October 17, 2008
Dealing with an Unorganized Boss II
Sent to you by Gigi via Google Reader:
via Productivity501 by Mark Shead on 10/16/08
Bosses who contradict themselves.
This can be a really annoying type of person to work for. In mild forms, it just seems like they are slightly confused. In really bad situations, these bosses seem totally deranged and malicious. If you have a boss who will tell you to drop everything and work on X and then come back and ask why you aren't working on Y, you are dealing with one of these bosses.
In most cases, these types of people aren't outright malicious; they just have a very short memory, no clear goals, and are very unorganized. You can usually improve the situation by putting their statements in writing. For example, if your boss comes in and asks you to drop everything and work on X, write it on your whiteboard while they are there watching. For bigger items, you might follow up with a memo or email.
In some cases, you might want to draft their instructions and get
them to sign off on it. Obviously, this is only worth while if it is
something substantial, but having a plan or procedure that your boss
has signed off on can be a powerful tool for you. Keep in mind that
this doesn't mean your boss can't ever change something. You just
want to make sure that when they make a change, they realize they are
making a change.
Generally, you don't want to be heavy handed
about pointing out that your boss is contradicting him/herself. Don't
beat them over the head with what they said previously, but just
casually mention their previous position or directions as part of
clarifying what that are saying currently. For example, if your boss
gives you one procedure on Monday and comes in Tuesday with a different
procedure, saying something like "OK, so does this replace the process
(pulling out your notes or summary email you wrote) you gave me
yesterday or is this a one time process?" This isn't confrontational
and asks a legitimate question that will help gently point out to your
boss that they are contradicting themselves.
In some cases you may
need a little more leverage to help encourage your boss to stick with
their decisions. You can do this by making your bosse's decisions
public. This only works on decisions that impact more than just
yourself. It isn't going to help you to broadcast every task your boss
asks you to do. However, things that impact more than just one or two
people are perfect for this treatment. You follow the same type of
procedure as above to write a summary of your bosse's directions. Once
your boss has agreed with them, distribute them to other people that
they impact. Better yet ask your boss to distribute them. You might
email your boss with your summary and say something like "This is the
new policy as I understand it. It might be helpful if you sent it out
to the whole team so we are all on the same page. Please edit or
modify anything that I may not have gotten right."
Your boss
gets to look organized (for once) by actually putting something in
writing and it makes it much more difficult to change their mind
because "everyone" knows what they said. If nothing else, it makes it
much more difficult for them to forget.
If your boss is truly
deranged and malicious, none of these techniques will work, but you may
be able to use them as a litmus test to see if there is hope or if you
should consider moving on to a less erratic work environment.
Other posts on dealing with an unorganized boss:
Originally published on December 14, 2005.
---
Related Articles at Productivity501:
- Dealing with an Unorganized Boss
- Dealing with an Unorganized Boss III
- Working From Home
- Reader Questions - Being Absent
- Reader Question - Emailing Your Boss
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Dealing with an Unorganized Boss III
Sent to you by Gigi via Google Reader:
via Productivity501 by Mark Shead on 10/17/08
Bosses who don't communicate
Many managers with no previous leadership experience are poor communicators. This isn't surprising, because the communication skills required to be a good manager are generally only learned through experience.
One common situation you'll find yourself encountering under this type of person is working on a team of people who are out of sync. For example, your boss may tell you about an important upcoming project, but no one else hears about it until the last minute. On the other hand, you may also find yourself in a position where everyone else knows some crucial piece of information except you.
The best solution is for your boss to learn how to communicate as a
leader. You can try to encourage them to communicate better by
suggesting weekly meetings, memos to the whole team, etc. However, if
you can't change your boss, here are some things that might help
improve the situation.
- Create a group email address for the whole team. Sometimes, giving
your boss a mechanism to communicate with everyone just as simply as
communicating with an individual, will help improve the communication. - Notify everyone on your team of critical information. Don't assume
that your boss will tell people what they need to know. This can be a
simple matter of summarizing what your boss has told you and emailing
it to the entire team, including your boss. Your boss then has an
opportunity to clarify themselves if you misunderstood something or
they changed their mind. - Create informal weekly meetings with your coworkers to go over anything
important. Obviously, it is better if your boss is driving these, but
even if it is just you and a few co-workers, a few minutes spent
communicating can save you hours of work later on.
Other posts on dealing with an unorganized boss:
Originally published on December 18, 2005.
---
Related Articles at Productivity501:
- Dealing with an Unorganized Boss
- Dealing with an Unorganized Boss II
- Working From Home
- Reader Questions - Being Absent
- Reader Question - Emailing Your Boss
Visit the Productivity501 Webstore. Free Tool for RSS Subscribers: Click here to download the Brook Ambient Sound file.
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Productivity501 using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
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