Martin Luther King Day
Posted by jonathanfryer on Saturday, 5th April, 2008
The Brazilian press gave a lot of coverage to the 40th anniversary of the asassination of the US black civil rights activist Martin Luther King (4/4), not just because people here are interested in what Uncle Sam gets up to, but also because issues of ethnicity are of concern here too. For once I agree totally with Angela Davis when she said that 40 years on, there is still a lot to be achieved regarding racial equality in the United States. I remember being in Atlanta a few years ago, and visiting two bars, almost next door to each other. In one, there wasn’t a single black face, while in the other, I was the only white one. Spooky. There is nothing like the same degree of racial mixing in the US that there is in Brazil or Britain. Nonetheless, there have been real advances, and one sign of that is the way that Barack Obama has a chance of becoming the first black US President — though why someone with a black father and a white mother should be considered ‘black’ is a mystery to me; in Brazil, he would be called mulatto, like millions of people here.
The late Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freire wrote a lot about what he called ‘racial democracy’, one element of which was his claim that Brazil is a rainbow nation that has overcome the bitter racial divides that still exist north of the Rio Grande. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. It’s true that there is every shade of skin colour here in Brazil, and miscegenation was rife from the moment the first Portuguese arrived 500 years ago. And yet if you look at the social pages in the two daily newspapers in Fortaleza (where most of the population is brown), everyone featured is white. So are most senior politicians and CEOs of big companies.
I made the same point in Havana once to the (now deceased) wife of Cuban President Raul Castro, Vilma Espin. She was not at all pleased, and protested that X who was black was a Minister, and Y who was black was a champion boxer. But my observation was nonetheless true. Even in Brazil and Cuba, the legacy of Martin Luther King still leaves much to be achieved.
