In Rio de Janeiro, a day at the public beaches can be a relaxing escape from daily life — unless you’re black and poor. A story in a Brazilian newspaper details how Brazilian police monitored buses heading to Rio’s beaches and removed 15 young men — all but one black — and detained them despite not finding any drugs or weapons on them.
“The policemen entered the bus and demanded that some get out,” an anonymous 17-year-old who went by X, told a Brazilian paper called Extra. “It was the five of us and another two. We thought we would be frisked and let go, but that didn’t happen. An officer said that that’s the law ‘down here’ now because of too many thefts at the beach.”
Overall, 160 kids were detained over the course of a weekend in late August. Police say they are protecting vulnerable youth but rights groups are more than a little bit skeptical.
“They only detain those who are going to the South Zone beaches,” a social worker told Extra. “Some minors, even with ID, are collected. This is segregation.”
Racism permeates Brazilian society, though for a long time it was not even addressed directly. Solange Cavalcante-Ferri is a Brazilian journalist of mixed heritage. Her upbringing is a testament to how deeply imbedded racism is in the country. She told ThinkProgress in an email:
I was born from a white prejudiced mother and a father from black origins. As most of the mothers in Brazil, worried about their children social acceptance, mine used to tell me I should grow and marry a white man to “whiten” myself and my own children’s blood. She used to say that I would never become a good person, and that was related to my father’s “bad” origins. Until I was an adult, I was led to believe that I was white. I did not know — as most of our people do not know — the difference between colour and race.
This idea of whiteness as good and blackness as bad is supported everywhere within Brazilian society. Despite the nation’s diverse population, Cavalcante-Ferri says that actors, television journalists, and other public figures are primarily white — leaving the question of race by the wayside. “Hair style, skin, and clothes are thought to belong to an all-white world,” she said.
Things are slowly improving, according to Cavalacante-Ferri. Jobs can no longer publish ads looking for “good looking” girls — a roundabout way of rejecting black women. Women of color also can keep their hair natural now, something that would have been taboo a few years ago. “Nevertheless, and although black people are much more conscious than before, black women still get the worst wages and police continue to kill black guys indiscriminately,” she said.
Concerning the issue of young, black men at the beach being detained by the police, Cavalacante-Ferri said it was unquestionably racism at play.
“It is classism indeed. But if you are black, it is worse,” she said.