Notes on Brazil

Reader Mark Spahn alerted me to this interesting discussion on race and affirmative action in and associated with Brazil. I have a few comments to make:

• As I learned it ages ago, Brazil is more dominated by discrimination in terms of class and culture rather than race. The great Brazilian soccer star Pelé talked about racism in Brazil in his autobiography (here) and said he hardly ever experienced any. Blacks were integrated onto their soccer teams a few decades before blacks were integrated onto our baseball teams, for example. On the other hand, Indians can find themselves discriminated against simply because their cultures are so different from the dominant Brazilian culture.

• The question on the link was whether Brazilians counted as Latinos or not. In the comments are a bunch of people pointing out various oddities in the way that some people can end up being counted as Latino, even though they not as Latino as others. I had a roommate once of this sort. His last name was Perez and he looked very Hispanic. But he admitted that he was more Irish than Hispanic. He was applying for grad school at the time and used his Hispanic background to get lots of goodies. On the other hand, he was very bright and probably deserved them on that basis alone.

• One person asked whether people from Guyana could count themselves as Latinos and therefore avail themselves of affirmative action. Since Guyanese culture is basically British – the main sport is cricket – and not Latino, this would be another irregularity in affirmative action if they could. On the other hand, I’ve met two people from Guyana, and both had skin color much darker than mine, one from a south Asian background and one from an African background. Both could qualify for affirmative action by claiming that they were black, even though this was designed to help American blacks and not foreign blacks.

• The biggest problem with affirmative action is that it ignores class. I filled out a bunch of affirmative-action forms when applying for academic jobs, and never once was I asked about my class background. Shouldn’t I have gotten an advantage by coming from a lower-middle-class background? Why is it that egalitarian principles are always being used against me and never for me?

• One commenter pointed out that Brazil’s economy is going great guns these days and that Brazilians have no need to come to the U.S. anymore to get a job. This is certainly true. The big joke among Brazilians has always been, “We are the country of the future, and we always will be.” But apparently the future has arrived. In the past few weeks I’ve read about a bus driver in Brazil who was able to buy a house recently. He said he thought he’d never be able to do it, but now he could, not due to any frugality on his part, but simply because the whole economy is raising up everyone. I also read about a couple in Spain who had given up trying to get jobs in Spain, but managed to get jobs fairly quickly after moving to Brazil.

I knew that something big had happened in Brazil a few years ago when I read in the Wall Street Journal that engineers there had figured out a way to allow their cars to run on any mixture of gas and ethanol. Since they produce a lot of sugar, and since they very sensibly make their ethanol from sugar rather than corn – which produces a bigger bang for the buck – drivers in Brazil now have a choice of which fuel to use and in what ratio if they mix the two. Plus, the discovery of oil in the ocean nearby is I assume what is driving their economy.

Will this last? A century ago, Argentina had a fairly wealthy economy, but they made some dumb mistakes and went downhill. I hope that Brazil’s economy keeps improving and that they don’t make dumb mistakes. I would much rather that Brazil be dominant in the world than countries of the Middle East.