A day with Adami

Today we met with Dr. Humberto Adami Santos Jr. (Adami) who is the president of Instituto De Advcocia Racial e Ambiental. The purpose of our trip was twofold. First we wanted to ask substantive questions about our various research topics. I, in particular, wanted to inquire about the criminal and civil procedures affiliated with racial discrimination cases. Second we wanted to be of service to him in his evaluation of African education in Brazilian public schools. However, the conversation soon developed into something even more dynamic the we planned. Adami began to give us his reflections as one of the few racial discrimination attorneys in Brazil. He is working on a variety of different cases. The first case he mentioned focuses on labor market discrimination in all 27 states in Brazil. He is essentially gathering research and evidence from media sources and academia to make the case that racial discrimination is widespread and that the Public Prosecutor of each state has a duty to act. Another case he is working on focuses on racial discrimination in the arena of Public Health as in the previous case he is amassing evidence to show the Afro Brazilian women are discriminated against with regard to prenatal care. Yet another case he is working on is a suit against Sony for a song they produced using racial epithets against Afro Brazilian women. Adami garnered the support of 11 different Afro Brazilian women´s rights organizations to denounce the song. Adami is also working on a case against Petro Brasil for its lack of Afro Brazialin representation in its managemen ranks. Also he is trying to bring suit in attemptng to address why there are almost no Afro Brazilian generals in the Army, executives in major companies and Bishops. Finally he is working on th case of public school compliance with the mandate to teach African history.


With all of these cases he also gave us insight into the difficult task of fighting racial discrimination in courts with limited space, fiscal resources and manpower. Essentially, Adami is a factfinder. His hope is that by getting the information, presenting it to the ministries and asking them to answer for all the obvious disparities that it will bring change to Brazil´s civil society. He also discussed how many of the international organizations are helpful in gathering data but lack either the capacity or will to combat street level litigation to affect change. One of the more interesting comments that Adami made was that there is not enough research done on racial discrimination in Rio De Janiero. Although the population of Afro Brazilians is smaller than Bahia, the Afro Brazilians who live in Rio are no less discriminated against but under studied.

After our meeting we got to talk to the next generation of racial discrimination attorneys Lucine and Aline. They are both interns at Adami´s institute and do much of the leg work on his projects. They were mostly interested in our experiences with Affirmative Action as students in the US. In Brazil affirmative action is basically quotas and is based on phenotype. We had to explain the basic difference and to give them some advice on potential counterarguments to affirmative action. We ended by inviting them to our conference on racial discrimination and by attempting to set a tentative meeting time to continue our dialogue.