Another Story About Brazil That Just Breaks My Heart

This article captures the dilemma and hopelessness in its essence:

Here in Latin America's most populous country, the wealthiest 10 percent own nearly half the nation's wealth, according to World Bank statistics. Just as crippling is the sheer stubbornness of its poverty and the inability of Brazilians such as the Roberto family to get a leg up.

Economists, sociologists and anthropologists refer to these twin flaws as high inequality and low mobility, meaning that, with scant exceptions, Brazilians who are born poor die poor.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has trumpeted mobility as his government's principal goal, implementing affirmative action programs and promising to redistribute land and provide food and housing to poor Brazilians. But people are waiting for results.

A study by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics shows that Brazilians are nearly four times less likely to improve their economic standing from one generation to the next than Canadians or Swedes, a level comparable to South Africa. Americans are somewhere in between. Immobility, academics agree, is a conspiracy of bad schools and bad homes, inadequate health care, a loan or patch of land that is too often out of reach. So poor is the quality of Brazilian public elementary and high schools that, until rigid quota systems were implemented this year, nearly 90 percent of all admissions to competitive and lauded public universities were graduates of costly, superior private high schools.

"Quite simply," said David Lam, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, "neither the state nor any of its public institutions work very well for the poor."

The experience of the family profiled in the article clearly shows that the idea that Brazil is a racial paradise:

But as is true in the United States, race plays a role in the lack of mobility here, though it is often difficult to calibrate. More abducted African slaves were delivered to this former Portuguese colony's shores than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil's crayon-coded racial categories, such as preto and pardo -- the terms for black and mixed-race -- account for more than half of the country's population.

Poor Brazilian blacks have nearly half the mobility of whites when measured either by the level of educational attainment or income. Moreover, blacks born to well-off parents here and in the United States replicate their father's success only half as often as whites.

When Aline lost her job as an emergency operator here nearly two years ago, it took her a year of poring over the classified ads every Sunday to find a job. Black Brazilians say that the term "Good Appearance Required" is a subtle code that they need not apply, but Aline, desperate for work, applied anyway, unsuccessfully.

Once, she showed up for an interview and was met with a line of more than two dozen women. After a while, she had to use the bathroom, she said, and asked the only other black woman in line to hold her place.

When she returned, the black woman was waiting alone. "They came out and took all the blondes," Aline recalled. "They told the rest of us to go home."

While I agree with this statement mentioned in the previous post: "If North America assists in funding education, infrastructure and technology for poorer neighbors, it will help create the consumers and innovators who will drive our common growth," and although I have expressed my concern with reckless populism here and here, I really wish those among the elite in Latin American society would realize that the best defense against communism and reckless populism would be a capitalist society devoted to equality of opportunity, justice and the enlightened self-interest that comes to those who realize that marginalizing people because of race or poverty makes the world a dangerous place.