IS NEYMAR BLACK? Paradoxes of race and racism in Brazil
Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, center, known universally simply as Neymar, is now the world’s highest paid soccer player. In 2010, when Neymar was 18 and coming off a great soccer season, an interviewer for a São Paulo newspaper asked if he’d ever experienced racism. “Never. Not in the field, nor outside of it,” he replied.“It’s not like I’m black, you know?”
Neymar’s response struck a nerve in Brazil, the country with the largest population of black descendants outside of Africa. Long known as a “racial democracy” for its supposed lack of prejudice and harmonious race relations, contemporary debates point to a more complex reality. In fact, Neymar’s father is black, while his mother is white, and in Brazil a mulatto is not considered to be black. The country has long been known for its racial fluidity, reflected in a high rate of racial inter-marriage. But does the country’s recognition of a color continuum suggest a lack of racism?
Census data for 2017 indicated that 47 percent of Brazilians identify as mixed-race, while another 8 percent identify as black. One third of marriages happen across racial boundaries. Yet elites and high-status professions are overwhelmingly white in what some have called a “pigmentocracy.” The top one-percent is about 80 percent white, while three-quarters of the bottom 10 percent are black or mixed-race. These disparities are played out in the educational system and other arenas of Brazilian life. An excellent article by Ceiuci de Oliveira (The New York Times, 30 June 2018) noted:
America’s politics of racial purity, which culminated in the notion that even one-drop of African blood made a person legally black, fostered solidarity among those targeted by discriminatory laws. In Brazil, however, the often admirable blurring of racial boundaries is a modern reality that — rather than stemming from colorblindness — is tainted with the sinister origins of state-sanctioned attempts to dilute, even dissolve, blackness.
It is important to note that today Brazil has vibrant anti-racist and black pride movements, which advocate social mobility for people of color. The country has instituted robust affirmative action policies, and now half the places in federal universities are reserved for nonwhite students and those at the poverty level. In every department of the federal government, 20 percent of jobs go to black and mixed-race candidates.
But with progress comes new dilemmas. How to determine racial identity in a largely mixed-race country, when jobs and university positions are at stake? In fact, affirmative action fraud has plagued some of the most prestigious university programs, fostering widespread unease on campuses. Brazilians sometimes refer to the current “Americanization” of races as separate, while in the U.S. there is now increasing recognition of mix-race identities.
So as we watch the World Cup we should, as Oliveira concludes, “resist any urge to romanticize the country as a living illustration of racial harmony. What they’re seeing, rather than a post-racial society, is a different country with distinct racial quagmires of its own.”
See the full story: Ceuci de Oliveira, “Is Neymar Black? Brazil and the Painful Relativity of Race,” The New York Times, 30 June 2018.
