Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

54 Language Diversity in the Classroominspected. Their job was to decide if the applicant was really black, andmore than 200 people were rejected. Some three dozen of these lodgedcomplaints and were interviewed (by another committee). Did they havelinks to ‘black culture’? Were they members of the movimento? Did theyhave any mulatta girlfriends?This might all seem very odd, in a ‘mestizo republic where racialidentity was, in the formal sense, immaterial’, according to Fry (2005: 26),who should, of course, have used the Portuguese word mestiço here.Indeed, precisely because there is so much mixing and, consequently,such wide variation in skin color, Brazil is often thought of as a society inwhich the racism still prevalent elsewhere is much reduced. Many yearsago, however, a colleague of mine from São Paulo told me that the finegradations of color simply translated into fine gradations of prejudice.Recent visitors may be seduced by the immediacy of the favelas of Rio deJaneiro that contribute to its ‘reputation as a socially liberated Mecca’(Greenberg, 2005); and the ‘constant, thrilling collision of the differentsocial classes’ on Rio’s streets may reinforce the Brazilian ‘myth of racialdemocracy’, but the extreme disparity between haves and have-nots‘runs along racial lines’. In his review of a Brazilian study by Telles(2004), Fry confirms the point: ‘Telles’s data’, he says, show that ‘thelighter you are the better’. Daniel’s (2006) comparison of race and colormatters in Brazil and the USA is also relevant here.These rather more accurate perceptions of Brazilian society wereconfirmed, in late 2005, when a dramatic discovery was made in Rio deJaneiro. A residential renovation project uncovered a long-lost burialground for African slaves: the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos (the Cemetery ofNew Blacks). Containing about 20,000 bodies interred between 1770 and1830, this cemetery is much larger than the now well-known AfricanBurial Ground that was revealed during construction in Manhattan in1991, a site containing the remains of some 500 American slaves and freeBlacks. The Brazilian discovery was widely publicized, and severalimportant facts emerged. Brazil was the single biggest new-world marketfor slaves, taking about half of the ten million people who suffered theinfamous ‘middle passage’. The cemitério grew on the site of the mainslave market that had been moved from the town center to the unhealthycoastal marshlands of the Gamboa district. The shameful treatment ofslaves both the living and the dead has been described as Brazil’sholocaust, and it would appear that the treatment of their descendantsstill leaves much to be desired. In Brazil today, where almost half of the190 million citizens are black or of mixed racial background, a recentUnited Nations Development Program report has provided yet further