Class?

The head of Olodum, an Afro-Brazilian association, highlighting heritage and Black pride through music, dance theater and art, made some interesting points about Brazil last night. He said that within one country, there is an elite class with access to the same resources and luxuries as the elite in the US or Europe and there is a poor class that is comparable to any in the 3rd world, lacking basic necessities and constitutional rights. The country develops space shuttles – yet within its borders an enormous proportion of the population does not have access to basic healthcare, immunizations and food.

As I reflected about our meeting last night, I thought about the profound irony that not only are these two worlds juxtaposed with each other, they sit one on top of the other; living side by side. The elite in Brazil complain about crime, there is constant fear of being robbed, yet they vigorously defend the idea that the problem is not race, but class. The wealthy young claim fears of riding the public bus because of the likelihood of being robbed, Julia has recounted stories of her sister being robbed at knife point by children as young as 5 and family friends being kidnapped for ransom, young children stand outside of ATM’s or run up to unsuspecting tourists getting out of taxi’s in the hopes that a stranger will toss them a few coins. Even on the uber-elite streets of Ipanema or Leblon, one is not immune to the poverty.

In the United States, many live in conditions akin to the poor in Brazil, the numbers of people living in these conditions are not nearly as high – more importantly though, in the US it seems much easier to hide from the poor. Living in Beverly Hills, Malibu or Newport Beach, rich, white America can easily forget – or at least ignore – what goes on in the rest of the world. Get on the 10, the 105 or the 101 and bypass those neighborhoods that you don’t want your kids walking in at night.

I’m writing this blog and I find that I am having difficulty articulating the questions I have. It seems so simple to want your children to grow up in a safe place, or to create a home where you can live without fear – I wanted to ask this question and I realized that the answer is not as simple as my mind wanted it to be. We have been here for one week and as we sit in our nightly meetings I realize that understanding these questions are further from me than I believed them to be from my classroom at UCLA.