You Can’t Fix What Ain’t Broke

            Today we met with the organization CEERT, or The Center on Labor Relations & Inequalities, which works to promote racial inequality in Brazil.  The organization has over 17 years of experience specializing in racial justice and participating actively in the fight for rights of Afro-Brazilians.  The myth of racial democracy came up, as it usually does, and in our discussion we shared how in our interactions with people they would admit to there being racial discrimination, but nothing more.  Another way of framing this issue (by way of my mother) is in terms of codependency.  Although codependency is usually defined in terms of an unhealthy dependence on a person with a physical or psychological addiction, the system of codependency can be applied to the Brazilian myth of racial democracy as the system of racial inequality exists as a result of the unhealthy dependence on the idea of “we are all just Brazilian.”  Codependency usually develops through living in systems with rules that hinder development, and such system has been developed in response to some problem.  The problem in Brazil has been the failure to unravel the discourse of racial democracy, and instead depending on it as an ideal, and defining discrimination in other ways. 

            How do we stop the dependency on this ideal as a way to excuse away the fact of racism?  The dependency on the “ideal” comes from both Afro-Brazilian who resist the idea of being deemed as oppressed, and from white Brazilians who don’t want to see themselves as oppressors.  This is not to say that there has not been considerable movement away from the myth of racial democracy, even in just the past week we have witnessed strong resistance to the idea of a non-racial culture.  In a previous blog I introduced the idea of implementing a dream, but I find it difficult for this implementation to manifest into a reality unless there is less of a dependency on a false idea of racial democracy, an understanding of the ways in which racial discrimination works systematically, and a true effort on the part of all towards change.