Hip hop has a vagina. - Brown University

28
A Post
Yaa Sarpong
Brazil
For most people of my generation, November 4, 2008 is one of our most memorable days, but not
in the same way that 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq is memorable. We have seen something that our
parents and grandparents had never envisioned. One hundred forty-three years after the end of
slavery and forty years after the peak of the Civil Rights movement, the United States elected a
black president. I had the pleasure of witnessing the election as an outsider on the inside. What
I mean when I say that is I watched the intense final days of the 2008 Election as a student and
foreigner in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I first visited Rio in March 2008 during the height of the primary
battle between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. In Brazil, the support was overwhelmingly in
Obama’s favor because, as one man proclaimed to me, the US did not need “any more blue
eyes.” As the battle raged on between Obama and John McCain, Brazil was no different from the
rest of the world and majority of the US citizens hurt by the economic crisis and the selfish policies
of the Bush era, desperately wanting to end the Republican reign.
Most of the world sees the U.S. as an empire on its last breath, but with this omnipresent global
era on our hands, the decline of the United States means the economic collapse of most the
industrialized and, subsequently, unindustrialized world. On the morning of November 5, 2008, my
black housekeeper told me the results of the election as I rushed out of the house. I could see
that there was genuine joy in her eyes to see the realization of a black man in charge of the most
powerful country in the world. In Brazil, being a housekeeper carries more baggage than most
occupations. She is next to nothing, on her feet more than twelve ours out of the day, and held
behind the strict line of worker—not family member. And she works for a kind boss. I can distinctly
remember her telling me, and a little bit after I thought, “She probably never held the same hope
for her own country.”
Since his election, there wasn’t a day in the month of November when Barack Obama was not on
the cover of some magazine or newspaper or a headline on the evening news. Brazilians, especially
of the American baby boom generation, never hoped that this day would come because they
witnessed first hand the atrocities of the 1960s and mass killings of black male public figures, and
for them there is no difference between Martin, Malcolm, and Barack. What struck me during
the aftermath of the election was when everyone was congratulating me on the US living up the
promise of its democracy. But Brazil is accountable to that same democracy; yet, it has a larger
and more subjugated black population than the United States. No one—not even my educated
professors—holds any hope for a black president in Brazil. But as I am constantly reminded, there
is no racism in Brazil. The persistent idea is of the other in Brazil. The other country can have these
great leaps and bounds, but these things are impossible in Brazil. My exchanges with black people
can fill a book with their reactions when they find out that I am from Africa or when I tell them I live
in the US. They are filled with varying reactions from envy to blind questioning of my upbringing. I still
have not figured out the reasons for any of these reactions and might have to move a mountain
of research if I am to do so.