The Lost Constituency of Brazil's Black Movements

Abstract

past 20 years have witnessed important changes in Brazil's landscape of attitudes about color/race identity and relations. To an unprecedented extent, institutions throughout Brazilian society, from the mass media to the university, from political parties to popular social movements, from the Catholic church to the state, have begun to question the myth that Brazil is a racial paradise and to valorize negritude aesthetically, morally, and intellectually (Guimaraes, 1995; 1996).' Indications of this shift are abundant. new constitution makes racism unconstitutional, and the 1989 Cao Law makes it a crime (Da Silva, 1995).2 President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has stated that Brazil is a racist country and asked Congress to implement some form of affirmative action based on race (Alves, 1996; Skidmore, 1996). TV Globo recently aired the first Brazilian soap opera (A proxima vitima, The Next Victim) with a middle-class black family as central protagonist, and Fantastico, the most-watched television show in Brazil, now periodically features black hosts. Beauty salons specializing in cabelo crespo (natty hair) are proliferating in large urban areas, and on city streets one can see black women sporting an impressive variety of nontraditional hairstyles, including rasta dreads, braids, and Afro permanents (Figueiredo, 1994). On newsstands throughout the major cities of Brazil one can find glossy magazines that target a self-identified black audience, such as Black People, RaCa Brasil, and Azzeviche. Such things would have been hard to imagine in the 1970s. Yet while the trends are promising, numerous observers, including many activists in Brazil's black movement organizations, feel that their promise is far from fulfilled. They regard recent changes as fragile and contingent, in many ways more an expression of fashion than a fundamental turnabout in attitudes, behavior, and institutional power. They point out that all too often